Newsletter title

June 2010

In This Edition

Summer Doldrums

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

We appear to be heading into a long, hot summer, if the unseasonably warm temperatures are anything to go by, when June has been feeling more like August. We have less Docent News to report now than was available ten years ago — see Voices from the Past below. To fill the gap, we present some other voices from around the world that you may be interested in hearing.

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, V for Viability

—TomDispatch

This is one complicated planet. We’ve always known that. And call it what you will — climate change, global warming — it’s hard to put all the pieces together. Yes, Western forests are experiencing die-offs on an extraordinary scale as a single species of beetle thrives and kills, and warming weather seems to be a culprit. Yes, sea levels could, in this century, rise three to six feet or more — again that warming trend — but not the same three to six feet everywhere. According to Michael D. Lemonick, among the most powerful influences on regional sea level is a surprising force: the massive polar ice sheets and their gravitational pull, which will lessen as the ice caps melt and shrink, with profoundly different effects on sea level in various parts of the globe. (By the way, Miami tops the list of globally endangered major cities, as measured by the value of property that would be threatened by a three-foot rise.) And that’s just to scratch the surface of the climate-change puzzle at one interesting website, Environment 360, that spends time considering the matter....

Fortunately, TomDispatch can call on the irrepressible Rebecca Solnit, an expert on both disasters and hope — and how the two can mix in New York City as in Port-au-Prince....

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175236/

Docent Coverage of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

We are doing better, only closed three days thus far against ten last year.

Docent Coverage of Season Days

 

Voices from the Past

—Iris McPherson

This is the second in our series Voices from the Past. Read Marty Marina's Docent Newssssss Letter, July 1995.

Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor’s Center Latitude & Longitude

Here is the latitude and longitude of the Visitor’s Center that you can give to visitors for entry into their GPS navigation device.

Kiosk Maintenance

The manufacturer’s instructions for cleaning the touch-screen recommend use of a soft dry cloth only. This proved inadequate for smeared fingerprints. Soft-paper kitchen towels work well, slightly damp with a small drop of soft handsoap. Application of a dry kichen towel removes any residual moisture.

Over time, a matter of several weeks continuous operation, I have noticed that calibration of the touch-screen drifts away from the initial set-point. If you notice that the cursor isn’t under your finger when you touch the screen then restart the kiosk by unplugging it from the wall, waiting a few moments and then re-inserting the power plug. It will restart and recalibrate.

This link points to the complete Kiosk Maintenance Manual.

Back Issues

Some printed back issues of the Docent Newsletter, to February 2009, can be found in the two green and one blue-black zip-binders, stored in the Perspex rack by the file cabinet in the office of the Visitor’s Center.

All back issues are available electronically via the links shown below. All newsletters prior to December 2007 are available in Portable Document Format (PDF), which means that you will need Adobe Reader installed on your computer to read these files. All newsletters from December 2007 onwards are in HTML format that is easily read using your web-browser.

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Newsletter Publication

Deadline for submission of articles for inclusion in the newsletter is the 10th of each month. Publication date is on the 15th. All docents, Nature Conservancy staff, university scientists, philosophers, and historians are welcome to submit articles and pictures about the various preserves in Oklahoma, but of course the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in particular.