Environment
Environment
Scientists convert used plastic bottles into vanilla flavouring
Damian Carrington: Production of chemical could help make recycling more attractive and tackle global plastic pollution ... Researchers have already developed mutant enzymes to break down the polyethylene terephthalate polymer used for drinks bottles into its basic units, terephthalic acid (TA). Scientists have now used bugs to convert TA into vanillin. ... (which) is used widely in the food and cosmetics industries ... 85% of vanillin is currently synthesised from chemicals derived from fossil fuels...
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Jun 19, 2021, 1:27pm
Environment
How Giving Native Americans Their Land Back Helps Protect Nature
Jim Robbins: Across the nation, territory is being returned to tribes in return for their stewardship. ... In 1908 the U.S. government seized some 18,000 acres of land from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to create the National Bison Range ... Now the tribes are managing the range’s bison ... Their Native American management approach is steeped in the close, almost familial, relationship with the animal that once provided food, clothes, shelter—virtually everything their people needed. ... "We treat the buffalo with less stress, and handle them with more respect”...
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Jun 13, 2021, 2:46pm
Environment
Can California Avoid Another Toxic Waste Disaster?
Dan Ross: For decades, large red-hot furnaces cooked the lead from smashed batteries at the Exide plant, just seven miles from Downtown Los Angeles, spouting plumes of toxic air that settled on and contaminated thousands of homes. ... Exide’s residue remains with us in other ways. It isn’t just that the hazardous waste facility in the city of Vernon has been blamed for causing unexplained illnesses among nearby residents, or that the bankruptcy agreement inked last year allowed the owners to leave the enormous bill for cleaning up one of the largest industrial messes in state history with California taxpayers...
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Jun 10, 2021, 12:34pm
Environment
What is Forest Health?
George Wuerthner: The (Forest Service) agency defines forest health as a lack of tree mortality, mainly from wildfire, bark beetles, root rot, mistletoe, drought, and a host of other natural agents. To the Forest Service, such biological agents are “destructive,” but this demonstrates a complete failure to understand how forest ecosystems work. ... wildfire, bark beetles, and other natural sources of mortality enhance the long-term resilience of the forest ecosystem ... Large, high severity fires promote more birds, bees, butterflies, wildflowers, bats, fungi, small rodents, trout, grizzly bears, deer, elk, and moose...
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Jun 8, 2021, 2:42pm
Environment
Not just another drought: The American West moves from dry to bone dry
Kurt Cobb: In the face of continued climate change, some scientists and others have suggested that using the word "drought" for what’s happening now might no longer be appropriate, because it implies that the water shortages may end. ... Instead, we might be seeing a fundamental, long-term shift in water availability all over the West. .... That leaves society with two paths: Bring ever greater amounts of water to arid regions which continue to grow in population and water-intensive activities such as farming OR conserve dramatically in order to live within the available water supply...
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Jun 7, 2021, 3:41pm
Environment
The Net Zero Mirage
Robert Hunziker: “Net Zero by 2050” is the rallying cry of scientists and policymakers throughout the world. However, that epithet echoes past decades of climate change/global warming mitigation plans, one after another, all failures. ... The world’s continuing failure to come to grips with the dilemma led three notable climate scientists, deeply involved at the highest levels, to publicly ridicule past and future attempts to fix climate change in a blockbuster article...
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May 28, 2021, 5:01pm
Environment
Logging is Not the Cure: More Misguided Wildfire Legislation in Congress
George Wuerthner: The continued emphasis on “fuels reduction” as the cure for large blazes reminds me of Medieval doctors who practiced bloodletting to cure illness. ... Bloodletting typically failed because it did not address the real medical issues causing illness. Similarly, thinning does not address the real cause of large fires. ... “extreme fire weather conditions,” including drought, high temps, low humidity, and most importantly, high winds. Under extreme conditions, none of the logging “solutions” work. ... Thinning/logging can exacerbate fire spread because it opens the forest to greater drying of the soils and ultimately vegetation and allows penetration by winds which drive all large blazes...
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May 26, 2021, 12:01pm
Environment
Lithium, Cobalt, and Rare Earths
Michael Klare: It’s tempting to conclude that the days when competition over finite supplies of energy was a recurring source of conflict will soon draw to a close. ... think again: while the sun and wind are indeed infinitely renewable, the materials needed to convert those resources into electricity — ... — are anything but. ... wind turbines, for instance, require manganese, molybdenum, nickel, zinc, and rare-earth elements for their electrical generators, while electric vehicles (EVs) need cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese, and rare earths for their engines and batteries. ... there is no way the United States or other countries can undertake a massive transition from fossil fuels to a renewables-based economy without engaging economically with China...
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May 21, 2021, 3:58pm
Environment
Reconciliation Means Rethinking Parks Governance
David Suzuki: Protection and restoration are two sides of the conservation coin — protection for spaces that haven’t yet been damaged or destroyed by large-scale human impacts and restoration for ecologically critical places that have. ... Indigenous Peoples are already leading on many fronts, including championing land repatriation and Indigenous land governance, and by asserting rights and responsibilities that provincial and federal governments have long denied. ... “For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend — and protect and preserve — these favored gardens again.” ...
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May 19, 2021, 3:51pm
Environment
Climate emissions shrinking the stratosphere, scientists reveal
Damian Carrington: The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 metres since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometre by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications. ... The discovery is the latest to show the profound impact of humans on the planet. In April, scientists showed that the climate crisis had shifted the Earth’s axis as the massive melting of glaciers redistributes weight around the globe...
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May 17, 2021, 2:21pm
Environment
Should customers be able to repair their devices? This federal agency says yes. (FTC)
Maddie Stone: Last week, the federal consumer protection agency released a long-anticipated report to Congress examining the repair restrictions facing consumers, along with a summary of arguments for and against those restrictions. Its conclusion was stark: There’s “scant evidence” to support manufacturers’ justifications for restricting repair ... while the solutions repair advocates have proposed are “well supported” by their testimonials .... Those findings amount to nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the anti-repair arguments advanced by lobbyists not just for cell phone and car companies, but home appliance industries, medical device makers, and more... increasing access to repair will have environmental benefits ...
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May 16, 2021, 3:25pm
Environment
To End Fossil Fuels, End Settler Colonialism
The Red Nation: Much environmental framing misses the point about capitalism and Indigenous sovereignty. ... The geopolitical relationship countries like the United States have with the rest of the world is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism. ... Indigenous peoples pose a radical threat—and pay a disproportionate price—to the fossil fuel industry at the site of extraction and transportation, yet their demands are marginalized within mainstream environmentalism ... It makes sense to expect an Indigenous plan for movement-building like the Red Deal that explicitly names climate change as its impetus to advocate for an environmental justice framework...
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May 14, 2021, 3:09pm
Environment
Poisoning the Planet’s Web of Life
Robert Hunziker: The Web of Life is under attack but almost nobody is aware because it’s happening mostly below surface. ... The victim is soil ... “Study after study indicates the unchecked use of pesticides across hundreds of millions of acres each year is poisoning the organisms critical to maintaining healthy soils,” ... Soils contain an abundance of biologically diverse organisms that perform many important functions such as nutrient cycling, soil structure maintenance, carbon transformation, and the regulation of pests and diseases...
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May 13, 2021, 12:14pm
Environment
Streams and lakes have rights, a US county decided. Now they’re suing Florida
Isabella Kaminski: A network of streams, lakes and marshes in Florida is suing a developer and the state to try to stop a housing development from destroying them. ... The novel lawsuit was filed on Monday in Orange county on behalf of the waterways under a “rights of nature” law passed in November. It is the largest US municipality to adopt such a law to date. ... Laws protecting the rights of nature are growing throughout the world, from Ecuador to Uganda, and have been upheld in courts in India, Colombia and Bangladesh. But this is the first time anyone has tried to enforce them in the US...
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May 10, 2021, 2:14pm
Environment
The Good, Bad and the Ugly of Roughshod Chemistry
Paul Haeder: It’s paramount to talk about all the untested, all the never-experimented-on synergistic affects of all those “compounds/ingredients/chemicals” the chemical industry has forced upon the public and nature through “better living/eating/drinking through chemistry.” ... "How did it ever become normal to use poisons on our food? Poisons that have a direct vector not just to your gut and mine. But to the developing guts and brains of fetuses?" ... The potato is a great example of an industrial system gone crazy. ... Potatoes – had more pesticides by weight than any other food...
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May 7, 2021, 1:47pm
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