Welcome to Hart Hagan’s Courses
On this website, you can register for any of my upcoming courses.
Trees & Forests
The purpose of this course is to train advocates for trees and forests. Knowledge is power. The more we know, the more we can do and the more easily we can do it.
It’s really not that hard to learn a few facts and phenomena related to trees and forests and how we benefit from them and therefore should seek to preserve them.
Trees and forests are storehouses for carbon. But even this is misunderstood and misrepresented. The timber industry falsely claims that young trees absorb more carbon than old trees, and therefore, it’s good to clearcut the forest, cut down the old trees and let the young ones grow. The timber industry, with the full-throated support of the US Forest Service, falsely claim that forest “thinning” (i.e., logging) reduces wildfire risk by reducing the fuel load. In this regard, we will study Chad Hanson’s brilliant book Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate.
Trees and forests are not just storehouses for carbon. They directly cool their surroundings, while providing habitat, flood control and drought prevention services. And they are habitat (a living area) for most life on land. According to the United Nations, over 80% of terrestrial species live in forests. And yet, we continue to lose our forests far faster than they can grow back.
Online via Zoom. 8 weeks.
Thursdays at 12:00-1:30 PM or 7:00-8:30 PM (Eastern Time, US)
December 5, 2024 - January 30, 2025, except Christmas week (8 weeks)
Recordings available to students.
Click here to register: https://www.harthagan.net/store/p/trees-forests
Climate Stories & Propaganda
We are storytelling creatures. The stories we tell have the power to determine how we feel and what we do. In the course, Climate Stories & Propaganda, we examine the stories we are told about climate change, especially the proposed “solutions,” such as solar power, wind power, hydro power, electric vehicles and biofuels. We are pouring trillions of dollars into these strategies. But how much good do they do? And how much harm do they do?
Your instructor takes the position that the prevailing strategies for decarbonization are at best a distraction from what we really need to be doing. At worst, they accelerate unfavorable trends.
We will draw from the documentary Planet of the Humans, available free on YouTube if you’d like to go ahead and view it. We will also draw from the book Bright Green Lies, a well-researched and readable critique of renewable energy, battery power, energy efficient light bulbs, and similar strategies that get a lot of praise and a lot of ink, but not a lot of scrutiny or criticism.
We pull back the curtain and see the truth behind the hype, separating fact from fiction and rhetoric from reality. This course is for you if you suspect that something may be wrong with the commercially available “solutions” to climate change
and would like to learn more. This course is indispensable to anyone who wishes to advocate for common-sense solutions to climate change and fend off the merry-go-round of “green” commercialism.
Tuesdays at 12:00 PM & 7:00 PM
February 4 - March 24, 2025 (8 weeks)
Online via Zoom. Recordings available to students.
Sign up at this link: https://www.harthagan.net/store/p/carbon-climate-the-stories-we-tell
Your Ecological Home Landscape
Just in time for spring, Your Ecological Home Landscape is a study in converting your lawn into habitat for bees, butterflies and birds. Millions of Americans are providing habitat for bees, butterflies and birds, right in their home landscapes. This is important because most land is privately owned. Our public parks are not big enough to do the job.
Insects and bird populations are in rapid decline. But we can make a difference in our homes and communities by giving them a place to eat, drink and make their nests.
We will examine the benefits of native plants for pollinators. We will learn the surprising importance of caterpillars to our ecosystems (think “bird food”) and how to provide habitat for them.
I will show you how to use free wood chips to minimize weeding and watering, while providing natural fertilizer.
This course is based on my eight years as a wildlife advocate, forest steward and gardener, and is perfect for both the beginner and the seasoned gardener.
Tuesdays at 12:00 PM or 7:00 PM (Eastern Time, US)
April 8 - May 20, 2025 (8 weeks)
Online via Zoom. Recordings available to students.
Click here to register: https://www.harthagan.net/store/p/your-ecological-home-landscape
Description.
When it comes to climate change, water tells the untold story. Water controls (possibly) 95% of the heat dynamics on earth. If it’s even half that, how can we ignore it? Can we address climate change without understanding how heat moves around?
It takes 590 calories of heat energy to evaporate every single gram of water. Evaporating water cools its surroundings. We experience this cooling effect when we step out of the shower or the pool. It feels cold because water is evaporating. After we towel off, we are warm, because the evaporating water is gone. When humans sweat, the evaporating water keeps us cool. It’s the same when we walk under a shade tree or into a forest. It feels cool, because of evaporating water, not merely because of shade.
When water condenses (as when it forms clouds), it radiates heat back out into space, diminishing the warming effects of the sun. Clouds themselves reflect sunlight back into space. Here is more evidence of water governing “heat dynamics.”
Water, as a substance, is very slow to warm up and cool down, so when it resides in plants and trees (which are about half water), this has a moderating effect, preventing extremes of hot and cold.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that is 100 times more prevalent in the atmosphere (by weight) than carbon dioxide. Here again, water is controlling heat dynamics. If we could lower the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, this would diminish the greenhouse effect.
Many of the worst climate related disasters such as flooding and drought represent broken water cycles. If we could fix these broken water cycles, we would thereby diminish the catastrophic effects of climate change.
Our oceans cover 71% of this blue planet. They absorb most of the heat from global warming, and most of the carbon dioxide. Here again, understanding climate change means understanding water.
The great news is that this gives us something to do. When we understand how water works in nature, we can have a positive impact in our homes and communities, usually by planting something or serving as a steward of our ecosystems.
If this is of interest to you, I invite you to register for the course.
Online via Zoom. 8 weeks
Dates To Be Announced
Defending Cows
Cows get a bad name because they produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But when they are properly managed, cows can store loads of carbon in the ground, and also restore our ecosystems and water cycles.
This course is based on the work of Allan Savory and others who discovered that livestock, properly managed, are an indispensable benefit to the land. We will also travel (virtually) to the ranches of Gabe Brown in North Dakota, Joel Salatin in Virginia and Will Harris in Georgia.
We will draw heavily from the book Defending Beef, by Nicolette Hahn Niman, an environmental attorney who married a rancher and started to understand good cattle management. Although Nicolette now eats meat, she was a vegetarian when she wrote the first edition of the book. Nicolette argues powerfully that beef can be good for you and that most of what we have heard about the relevant health issues have been rooted in outdated science.
All ecosystems have animals. Grasslands evolved with grazing animals. Grazing animals are vital to the health of our grasslands. Our land is rapidly desertifying. If we want to reverse desertification and land degradation, we must deploy livestock on a large scale. Allan Savory claims it’s the only way to restore land at scale. I agree. Let’s talk about this.
Online via Zoom. 8 weeks.
Dates and Times To Be Announced
Recordings are available to students.