Monthly Archives: February 2011

GWLT Presents Changes in Worcester County Flora

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The Annual Meeting of the Greater Worcester Land Trust was held this afternoon at 80 William Street, from 3:30 to 6:30.  President Allen Fletcher welcomed Trust members and friends; Treasurer George Dresser summarized the Trust’s financial situation with respect to 2010 revenues and expenses and current land holdings; and Secretary Debbie Carey presented the Nominating Committee report.  Then Executive Director Colin Novick gave a brief overview of the Trust’s activities in 2010, highlighting three important land acquisitions.  These included the Morgan property near Southwick Pond in Leicester, the Kent family 5-acre parcel in West Boylston, and the 50-acre Sandberg property abutting the Cascades on the Holden and Paxton borders with Worcester.  Colin also described work done at God’s Acre near the Worcester Airport and at Kinney Woods.  Watch for the next newsletter with more details on the Trust’s recent activities!

Next, AmeriCorps staffer Mike Sawyers spoke briefly about his recent work documenting the GWLT properties.  The  Trust was very lucky to have Mike’s services, insofar as a baseline assessment of current conditions is critical for creating appropriate property management plans.

The featured speaker this afternoon was Robert Bertin, Professor of Biology at Holy Cross, whose slide lecture was titled Changes in the Flora of Worcester County.  He discussed his efforts to collect and describe all the plant species in Worcester County, a project he has been involved with for almost two decades now.  His work took him into both natural undisturbed habitat and also into built environments, including such venues as the Conrail Yard, the Worcester Regional Airport, and elementary school playgrounds.  Professor Bertin intended to  document the current distribution of species in our County, the largest in Massachusetts in terms of square miles, a mostly tedious and physically challenging process, the monotony only occasionally relieved by startling discoveries, such as a rare sedge, or a type of goatgrass, or an unusual primrose.  As the talk’s title indicates, another important goal of the project was to quantify changes in species diversity and abundance and try to understand the causes of these changes, whether land use or climate change, or something else.

Professor Bertin acknowledged that he was fortunate in having detailed historical data for comparison purposes, because a group of plant enthusiasts at Clark University, who called themselves the Hadwen Botanical Club, surveyed the flora of Worcester County in the 30s, 40s, and 50s; their herbarium collections can still be accessed today by researchers interested in ecology and plant systematics.

So, how many different plants are growing in the 60 cities and towns of Worcester County?  Prior to 1980, there were 1124 natives plus 898 aliens, for a total of 2022.  Why would there be so many aliens?  Professor Bertin speculated that this abundance could be due to such factors as wool waste flora (the Industrial Revolution originated in Massachusetts and Rhode Island).  When he excluded aliens which never got established, the new totals are 1124 plus 568, for a total of 1692.

With his colleague Tom Rawinski, Professor Bertin collected specimens for a post-1980 baseline:  these totals are 1042 natives plus 528 aliens, for a total of 1570.  Perhaps more interesting than the total numbers are the analyses of category changes, either increases or deceases, the two most striking being the increases in certain types of alien species and the decreases in particular types of native species.

Aliens have increased in such habitats as aquatic (Eurasian Milfoil, Variable Water Milfoil, Fanwort), wetlands (Phragmites, Purple Loosestrife, Yellow Iris), uplands (Norway Maple, Garlic Mustard, Japanese Barberry), cultivated gardens (Autumn Olive, Burning Bush, Shining Buckthorn), and others.  Native species which have declined dramatically include ferns species such as Moonwort, Leathery Grapefern, and Rattlesnake Fern, as well as orchid species such as the Grass Pink, Green Adder’s Mouth, and the Large Purple-Fringed Orchid.  The reasons for these trends are not entirely clear, but certainly development and changes in land use and patterns of human settlement have had an effect on the number and diversity of our flora.

Jessica Jackley and Kiva

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I can’t remember when I first heard the term “microfinance.”  I may have read a feature story in the Vanderbilt University alumni magazine about fellow alumnus Muhammad Yunus (PhD, Economics, 1971), Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bangladeshi economist and founder of the Grameen Bank.  Dr. Yunus is widely credited with introducing the theory and practice of microlending starting in the 70s.

Certainly, Josh and Chuck of Stuff You Should Know podcast fame were the catalysts for my direct involvement in microlending, through their championing of the Kiva organization.  In fact, I joined the SYSK Team Kiva in mid-March of 2010, and I’m proud to report that our Team now has over 4,000 members who have made over 13,000 loans for a total of almost $400,000.  The average number of loans per member is 3.4, so with my five loans, I’m keeping up.  To date, I’ve loaned to women in Peru, Bolivia, Tadjikistan, and Ecuador (the first two loans, to two different Peruvian women’s collectives, have been completely re-paid).  But enough about me.

It was with great interest that I learned that Jessica Jackley herself would be speaking on Love, Money, and Work: Social Entrepreneurship as a Career at the UMass Student Union Ballroom tonight at 5:30.  In April 2004, Jessica and Matt Flannery started working on Kiva.  A year later, the first seven loans were funded, for a total of $3,500; in November 2009, Kiva reached $100 million in loans.  How did it all happen?

Ms. Jackley described her odyssey from a young girl troubled by traditional religious attitudes toward the poor to an influential entrepreneur dedicated to finding solutions to global poverty.  As an elementary and high school student, she tried hard to be a “good Christian” and give conscientiously to charity, but she felt distinctly uneasy by the thought that no matter what she did, she could not alleviate very much of the suffering in the world; the natural reaction to feeling ineffectual was simply to ignore the problem.  When she started her undergraduate education at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, she was faced with the choice of what to study and decided to go with “What do I love?”  She was interested in three questions and picked fields that would help her answer those questions.  First, Who is in charge?  That led her to study Political Science, with its emphasis on understanding structures and systems.  Second, What is true? which led her to Philosophy, and third, How can I find my voice? which led her to study poetry, with its emphasis on words and their meanings.

After graduation, on an impulse, Ms. Jackley moved herself across the continent to California, where by chance she landed a job at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.  There, in Fall of 2003, she heard a talk by the afore-mentioned Professor Yunus and was inspired to go out into the field herself, to try to understand who the poor are and what they themselves want and need.  In East Africa where she spent three months, she heard first-hand that the poor prefer loans and not hand-outs; they want to be partners in a relationship of equality.  Over the next year, working with Matt, a friend and computer geek, she figured out a way to share the stories she heard with her own family and friends, via the Internet.  Thus Kiva was born, an organization which allows ordinary people in the First World to connect with other people in developing countries, hear their stories, and help them out with micro-loans.  From my own experience, it’s gratifying to realize that an amount as small as $25 will really help someone, an individual with a name and a face.  Not only that, but my $25, when re-paid, can be easily be re-loaned to someone else.

Ms. Jackley emphasized that her trajectory from Liberal Arts major to businesswoman was not as unlikely as it might first appear.  In fact, it was her background in the humanities that helped her speak different languages — that is, understand different ways of seeing the world — and make connections between problems and solutions.  She concluded her talk by summarizing four lessons she learned about how to start and run a successful business.  These are

  • Lesson One: Know your mission by understanding who you are
  • Lesson Two: Co-create with others, which means trust others
  • Lesson Three: Iterate, and don’t be afraid to fail and start again
  • Lesson Four: Remember that (Love + Money) > Money

If you love your work, you will believe in it and see possibilities where others may not, and tomorrow will be better than today.

Ms. Jackley’s current project is the for-profit company ProFounder, a website dedicated to crowd-sourcing investment capital for small businesses in the United States.  I certainly wish Jessica much success in this venture!

I would be remiss if  I discussed  microfinance without mentioning that the practice has been heavily criticized recently, particularly with respect to high interest rates charged to borrowers.  On the Kiva site, you can click on the tab “About Microfinance” to get background information on the issue, but of course you can also Google the topic to get a variety of opinions.  Kiva does say quite clearly

Microfinance is also the idea that low-income individuals are capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if given access to financial services. While some studies indicate that microfinance can play a role in the battle against poverty, it is also recognized that is not always the appropriate method, and that it should never be seen as the only tool for ending poverty.

If I have a chance to learn more about economic development strategies and how to measure outcomes, I’ll write up my findings in another post later this year.