Environment
Environment
Just Another Whitewash: the Federal Investigation of the Firestone Fracking Fire in Colorado
Philip Doe: After more than two and one half years of delays and excuses the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report this week on the Firestone gas explosion that killed Mark Martinez and Joey Irwin, seriously burned Erin Martinez, and traumatized their children. ... If the expectation was a detailed litany of all the terrible public policy decisions made leading up to this disaster, get over it. Money is king in this state, and the report pays homage to the king. ... we learned first and foremost that in Colorado living unknowingly on top of gas fields is ok. It is ok with the feds, it is ok with the state, and it is ok with local governments. ... The depth and breadth of the health and safety problems that urban oil and gas development represent probably can’t be overestimated...
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Nov 9, 2019, 3:37pm
Environment
Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal
Naomi Klein: As the community that housed the vast majority of people displaced by the Camp Fire, Chico shows that there is no way to cope with climate breakdown without a simultaneous shift to a very different kind of economy ... Like its national inspiration, the Chico Green New Deal framework marries rapid decarbonization targets with calls for more affordable housing; a safe and sustainable food system; investments in “clean, 21st century” public transit; green jobs creation, including projects earmarked for the poorest residents; and much more. ... If the responses to the climate crisis do not simultaneously begin to repair the wrenching injustices and inequalities that scar and strain our world, they have no hope of success. ... All around the world, our human societies, scorched under the stresses of late capitalism, are political tinderboxes...
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Nov 7, 2019, 2:40pm
Environment
Japanese Fisheries Collapsed Due to Pesticides, New Research Says
Jordan Davidson: Scientists announced today that pesticide use on rice fields led to the collapse of a nearby fishery in Lake Shinji, Japan, according to a new study published in the journal Science. ... The researchers looked at the degradation of the food chain around rice paddies after the introduction of the pesticide neonicotinoids in 1993 in Japan. The study showed an immediate decline in insect and plankton populations in Lake Shinji after the pesticide was sprayed in nearby rice fields ... The decline in insects and plankton then led to the collapse of eel and smelt populations, which rely on the tiny insects for food. ... "The annihilation of humble flies and the knock on effects on fish serve as further testament to the dreadful folly of neonicotinoids"...
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Nov 4, 2019, 1:49pm
Environment
The Capitalist War on the Last American Commons
Paul Street: The land in question in This Land is Christopher Ketcham’s brilliant first book is the last wild “American commons”: the federal public lands of the western United States. Comprising many millions of acres of grassland, forest, mountains, valleys, canyons, and steppe, this vast “public trust” is under the deeply compromised supervision ... The Western commons has evaded full capitalist enclosure into the 21st Century for reasons of geology and climate. ... The top driving villains are the growth-and commodity-mad livestock and energy interests. ... calls for the abolition of grazing rights on public lands, the de-commissioning of roads in national parks, and strict enforcement of the Endangered Species Act...
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Nov 2, 2019, 2:26pm
Environment
Agrochemical Apocalypse: Interview with Environmental Campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason
Colin Todhunter: For almost a decade, Rosemary Mason has been writing open letters and sending reports she has compiled to media outlets and prominent officials and agencies in the US, the UK and Europe to question their decisions and/or to inform them of the dangers of pesticides. ... She recently sent me a report ‘How glyphosate-based herbicides poisoned our nature reserve and the world‘. It focuses on how she had set up a nature reserve in South Wales. ... But thanks to the local council’s indiscriminate spraying of glyphosate-based herbicides, it was subsequently transformed from a piece of land teeming with flora and fauna into a barren wasteland...
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Oct 29, 2019, 11:32am
Environment
XR Co-Founder Discusses Climate Emergency
Robert Hunziker: Extinction Rebellion (“XR”) has hit the world stage like a flash of light with participants in more than 70 countries all within one year’s time ... The climate crisis is absolutely real. It’s a climate emergency! Temperatures continue setting new records. It was over 44°C (111F) in Karachi last year and many people died of heat stroke, but nobody cared because it is Karachi. Heat hit 47°C (116 F) in parts of India. (Body temps at 42.22°C (108C) can result in convulsions and death) ... Society has been trying to sort out the climate crisis for 30 years. Alas, it’s gotten nowhere. Meantime, since 1990 there’s been a 60% increase in carbon emissions. ... Civic disobedience works...
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Oct 24, 2019, 11:16am
Environment
Colonization, Fire Suppression, and Indigenous Resurgence in the Face of Climate Change
Kari Marie Norgaard: “Without fire, the landscape changes dramatically. And in that process, the traditional foods that we need for a sustainable lifestyle become unavailable after a certain point. ... One of the most powerful tools Karuk people have long used to enhance the Klamath region has been fire. Whereas the persistence of fire belies the myth that humans have control over nature, humans and fire have long co-evolved across North America. Fire suppression is a recent undertaking. ... As much of the Western world continues to debate appropriate responses to climate change, Indigenous people offer a multitude of sophisticated, time-tested, and pragmatic solutions...
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Oct 21, 2019, 4:12pm
Environment
Bayer Shareholders: Put Health and Nature First and Stop Funding This Company!
Colin Todhunter: Campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to Bayer Crop Science shareholders ... outlines how the gradual onset of the global extinction of many species is largely the result of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture ... For instance, she argues that Monsanto’s (now Bayer) glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and Bayer’s clothianidin are largely responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and that the use of glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides are wiping out wildlife species across the globe. ... Mason also argues that the science behind (chemical-dependent) GMOs is fraudulent...
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Oct 14, 2019, 2:33pm
Environment
Photos of the world's 25 most endangered primates
Melissa Breyer: Meet the primate species that are among the most endangered on the planet, and the most in need of conservation measures. ... In 2017, the Tapanuli orangutan was discovered in the rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia. The rust-colored beauties made headlines for becoming the eighth known species of great ape in the world (including us humans). Their discovery was also notable for being the first great ape species to be described to science since the bonobo was discovered in 1929... Now, just two years later, the Tapanuli orangutan has been bestowed with a much more grim distinction: A spot in the new report, "Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, 2018-2020."...
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Oct 10, 2019, 4:48pm
Environment
Sharks Swimming Farther North: Another Sign of Global Warming
Michael Freeman: Climate change is altering the migration patterns of sharks, and they are now turning up in greater numbers in places where they used to be rare — because the water is warmer. ... “What we found through watching these sharks is they are going way farther north than anyone expected,” he said. “They’re going all the way up to New York, which is a 50 percent farther migration than expected for this species. ... The waters off North Carolina and Georgia were becoming too warm to stay in, as had been the case in Florida, so they kept heading north....
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Oct 1, 2019, 4:59pm
Environment
Decimation of the Rainforests and the Money Men
Graham Peebles: The World’s rainforests are the lungs of the planet. They soak up greenhouse gas emissions, affect wind currents and rainfall patterns and produce the oxygen we need to survive. They provide habitat for hundreds of animals, thousands of birds and tens of thousands of plants ... There are various causes of deforestation; while logging is an issue, particularly in Indonesia where 80 percent of timber exports are illegal, the major cause is animal agriculture. ... Global commodity traders are the “key drivers of deforestation in the Amazon”; companies like Cargill, a US based agriculture corporation ... A completely new approach to so-called development as part of far reaching systemic change is urgently needed, together with a shift in public attitudes: away from self-centered activity, competition, and the aggrandizement of the individual and/or the nation state....
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Sep 27, 2019, 3:34pm
Environment
Indigenous People Are Already Working “Green Jobs” — but They’re Unrecognized and Unpaid
Nick Estes: Similar to how women and non-men have been historically tasked with doing the unpaid labor of housework and child-rearing, the relationship Indigenous caretakers have with the land, water, air, and nonhuman world is typically not viewed as productive. ... The financial, service, industrial, or technology sectors usually define what counts as a “job” — and it’s frequently bound up with polluting. ... Rarely is Indigenous caretaking defined as work. Yet, like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse...
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Sep 23, 2019, 3:15pm
Environment
2019 Equinox: 12 facts about the first day of fall
Melissa Breyer: This year, the autumnal equinox arrives precisely at 07:50 UTC (3:50 a.m. EDT) on Monday, September 23. Unlike an event such as New Year’s midnight that follows the clock around the time zones, equinoxes happen at the same moment everywhere. ... The autumnal equinox happens the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator, which is an imaginary line in the sky that corresponds to Earth’s equator. (Old Farmer's Almanac describes it as a plane of Earth’s equator projected out onto the sphere.) Every year this occurs on September 22, 23, or 24 in the northern hemisphere. ... For the astrology-minded, the morning of the autumnal equinox is when the sun departs Virgo and enters Libra; the scales, how appropriate! According to astrologists, this is a good time for balance and harmony...
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Sep 21, 2019, 4:04pm
Environment
More than a quarter of all birds have disappeared from North America since 1970
Brian Resnick: A team of scientists at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in collaboration with the US Geological Survey and several conservation groups, have estimated North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970. That’s an estimated decline of 30 percent in the total bird population. ... One of the most surprising findings in the report is that it’s not just rare or endangered birds that have been declining; it’s some of our most familiar species: sparrows, blackbirds, larks, starlings, and finches that visit our birth baths and fill the air with song. ... Birds play an important role in ecosystems: They eat insects, they disperse seeds, and they’re food for other animals as well. They’re also important for sustainable agriculture by controlling pests (i.e. eating them) and reducing the need for chemical insecticides...
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Sep 19, 2019, 3:16pm
Environment
Air pollution particles found on foetal side of placentas – study
Damian Carrington: Research finds black carbon breathed by mothers can cross into unborn children ... The link between exposure to dirty air and increased miscarriages, premature births and low birth weights is well established. The research suggests the particles themselves may be the cause, not solely the inflammatory response the pollution produces in mothers. ... Damage to foetuses has lifelong consequences and Prof Tim Nawrot at Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said: “This is the most vulnerable period of life. All the organ systems are in development. For the protection of future generations, we have to reduce exposure.” ... He said governments had the responsibility of cutting air pollution but that people should avoid busy roads when possible...
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Sep 17, 2019, 10:54am
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