Given the higher median income and sense of community that characterizes Yellow Springs, it might be hard for some to imagine that there are residents who experience what is known as “food insecurity” — limited or uncertain access to food.

Insects are important to the decomposition of garbage because they eat a lot of trash and tunnel their way through it, which mixes and aerates it. Some insects find their way to the trash, while some are inadvertently brought to it. In interesting case of filth in reverse, cockroaches are often found in landfills, as they hitch a ride in the belongings humans have discarded.

Last Wednesday, Xenia Avenue was lined, as it sometimes is, with people holding signs with bold political slogans and rallying for social justice for women.

November 10, 2016 Bulldog sports round-up

About halfway through the school year, the district will say goodbye to one of its senior-most employees, longtime custodian, groundskeeper and bus driver Jerry Upton.

The smallest layer of life in a landfill — a “robust set” of microscopic bacteria, fungus, yeast, and protozoa — consumes and digests organic materials in garbage, breaking it down like an enormous compost pile and producing huge amounts of methane gas as a byproduct of their activities.

November 3, 2016 Bulldog sports round-up

Last week, at the end of a quiet residential street in Kettering, a recording studio was taken over by a film crew. Outside were box trucks full of equipment, miles of cables running to and from the buildings, and an impressive spread of catered food.

The concentration of man-made goods, harsh chemicals, and organic waste all rotting together makes for an environment that doesn’t — and can’t — exist anywhere in the natural world. And yet the landfill is teeming with life. Landfills, while ostensibly inhospitable, have become a biological niche, a biome based around humanity’s waste.

Bulldog Sport Round-up — October 27, 2016