By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

Bill Tabor, who owns and operates On The Lane Farm in Foster, is leasing property within the Scituate Reservoir watershed from Providence Water so he can take sap from the area’s sugar and red maple trees. (Joanna Detz/ecoRI staff)NORTH SCITUATE — A maze of blue tubing crisscrosses a parcel of land among the 25 square miles Providence Water owns within the Scituate Reservoir watershed. Luck, a perfect design, or perhaps a little of both, have kept the area’s many deer from flooring the manmade plastic web and creating a sticky, sugary mess.

This tangle of tubing has nothing to do with Providence Water’s job of supplying drinking water to about 600,000 Rhode Islanders. Farmer Bill Tabor, who owns and operates On The Lane Farm in Foster, leases the land from the city department. He uses this pipeline of tubing to pull sap from a throng of sugar and red maples.

A crew from Vermont helped Tabor set up the system, which features 1,425 taps, a 1,500-gallon pump house, a release tank and some other equipment.
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About Science Behind Climate Change

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

KINGSTON — Blame it on the sun and volcanoes, because there’s no proof billowing smokestacks have played a role in rising global temperatures.

Blame climate change on Mother Nature, because there’s no proof the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that have been spewed into the atmosphere by human activity for the past 150 years have had an impact on anything.

To borrow the title from Naomi Oreskes’ new book, the “Merchants of Doubt” will say anything to cast uncertainty on what doesn’t mesh with their ideology or doesn’t jibe with the agenda they are paid to promote.

The University of California professor spoke at The University of Rhode Island last week to promote her book and to discuss how a handful of scientists have obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. <<Read full story

By DAVID FISHER/ecoRI staff

Plastic bags not properly recycled create a nuisance at the state landfill. (David Fisher/ecoRI staff)JOHNSTON — The Central Landfill is one of the most misunderstood places in Rhode Island. It was operated by the state until 1974, when the General Assembly formed the quasi-public agency known then as the Rhode Island Solid Waste Management Corporation. The name was changed in 1996 to the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation.

Although not a department of Rhode Island government, the agency is a public corporation and a component of the state for financial reporting purposes. The Resource Recovery Corporation owns about 1,000 acres of land, and the landfill proper covers about 200 of those acres.

After transferring control of the landfill to Resource Recovery, many of the smaller dumps and transfer stations around the state were systematically dismantled, filled and zoned for reuse. The site of the former dump in Woonsocket is now a park with a three-hole pitch-and-putt golf course, and the Blackstone Valley Bike Path runs adjacent to it. <<Read full story

By DAVID FISHER/ecoRI staff

A bond proposal is being written for the 2010 statewide ballot that will focus on open-space preservation, namely the purchase by the state of the remaining 83-acre parcel at Rocky Point in Warwick.In 2008, Save The Bay, the Rhode Island Land Trust Council and other environmental advocates proposed a $50 million bond referendum to the state legislature for inclusion on that year’s ballot. The bond was broken down into $35 million for clean water and $15 million for open-space preservation.

If that bond had made the ballot, chances are it would have passed. After all, no environmental bond has been voted down by Rhode Islanders since the first clean water/open-space referendum made the state ballot in 1985. State environmental bonds are historically approved by greater than 60 percent, even in urban areas.

However, due to a seemingly arbitrary decision by the House Finance Committee, which approves inclusion of bond issues on the statewide ballot, that 2008 bond never made the ballot. <<Read full story