Environment
Environment
EPA: Two Most Widely Used Pesticides Likely Harm Majority of Endangered Species
Center for Biological Diversity: WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the endocrine-disrupting pesticide atrazine and cancer-linked pesticide glyphosate are each likely to harm more than 1,000 of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals. ... The finalized evaluations found that use of the herbicide glyphosate is likely causing harm to 1,676 of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Atrazine is likely harming 1,013 protected species. ... “It’s no surprise that these chemical poisons are causing severe harm to imperiled wildlife since U.S. use exceeds 70 million pounds of atrazine and 300 million pounds of glyphosate every year”...
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Nov 24, 2021, 3:43pm
Environment
An environmental sociologist explains how permaculture offers a path to climate justice
Christina Ergas: Big farming is both a victim of climate change and a contributor. Droughts, floods and soil degradation threaten crop yields. But agriculture produces nearly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. ... A potential antidote to harmful monocultures is a form of community farming invented back in the 1970s: permaculture. Permaculture is not just about farming; it incorporates economic and social principles. ... Permaculture’s three main tenets – caring for the Earth, caring for the people and sharing the surplus – offer a potential path toward climate justice..
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Nov 20, 2021, 11:42am
Environment
Court convenes historic hearing in Indigenous territory on land consent issue
Kimberley Brown: Ecuador’s Constitutional Court held a hearing in the Indigenous Cofan territory of Sinangoe in the northern Amazon rainforest on Nov. 15, the first time the highest court in the country agreed to travel to Indigenous territory for a court hearing. ... The hearing itself was part of the court’s process to review Ecuador’s free, prior and informed consultation process, or FPIC, using as a basis of analysis Sinangoe’s 2018 lawsuit, when the community sued the government for selling mining concessions on their territory without consulting with the community first, and won...
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Nov 19, 2021, 3:14pm
Environment
Organized crime is a top driver of global deforestation – along with beef, soy, palm oil and wood products
Jennifer Devine: Every year the world loses an estimated 25 million acres (10 million hectares) of forest, an area larger than the state of Indiana. Nearly all of it is in the tropics. ... beef, soy, palm oil, and wood pulp and paper products ... Together these commodities are responsible for the loss of nearly 12 million acres (5 million hectares) annually. There’s also a fifth, less publicized key driver: organized crime, including illegal drug trafficking. ... In South America and Central America, drug trafficking organizations are the vanguard of deforestation. Drug traffickers are illegally logging forests in the Amazon and hiding cocaine in timber shipments to Europe...
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Nov 17, 2021, 12:35pm
Environment
The Woody Biomass Blunder
Robert Hunziker: One of the most controversial fixes for global warming is the use of woody biomass, cutting trees, burning trees to achieve “carbon neutral” status in the worldwide battle to conquer climate change/global warming. ... this could be one of the biggest cons of all time ... “Burning wood puts out more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced then coal does.” ... The latest news (Nov. 12) out of COP26 is that the EU is committed to forest biomass burning to achieve “carbon neutral” status. ... It’s only gotten worse ever since they started meeting. Twenty-five years of failure...
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Nov 15, 2021, 3:36pm
Environment
The Buffalo Treaty: We Must Return Buffalo to the American West:
Shelly Fyant, Andy Werk Jr – Lauren Monroe Jr.: Since time immemorial, the Tribes of the Western United States and Canada have had a unique and powerful relationship with buffalo. For generations, buffalo have been our relatives: buffalo are part of us and we are part of buffalo, culturally, materially and spiritually. ... In 2014, our Tribes began joining together under a Buffalo Treaty that calls for restoring buffalo as wildlife that is an important part of ecological systems of the West. ... Let us be clear that while there are millions of acres of public land, we ask for buffalo restoration only on those landscapes where there is a confluence of both Tribal and public interests...
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Nov 14, 2021, 3:50pm
Environment
What If Every American's Home Was a Power Plant?
Thom Hartmann: If we’re committed to reaching zero emissions, we must return to that goal of local self-sufficiency, this time with free power from the sun & wind instead of clear-cutting forests or burning fossils ... And there’s a way to get there, as the technology is already mature and in use in other countries like Germany: we simply shift from a central-power-plant system to a locally-generated-rooftop-system where the utilities, rather than just supplying power, are instead using “smart grids” to keep the entire community up and running even when individual homes have system failures...
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Nov 9, 2021, 2:59pm
Environment
Military pollution is the skeleton in the West’s climate closet
Jonathan Cook: The very nations proclaiming moral leadership in tackling the climate crisis are also the ones doing most to sabotage a meaningful agreement to reduce humanity’s global carbon footprint. ... The US military alone is estimated to have a larger carbon footprint than most countries ... And new technology, rather than turning the military green, is often making things much worse. ... The latest fighter jet developed by the US, the F-35, is reported to burn 5,600 litres of fuel an hour. ... It is precisely this full-spectrum power competition – economic, ideologic and military – that propelled us into the current climate disaster...
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Nov 9, 2021, 2:40pm
Environment
Can the Wolf Unite Us? Environmental Leadership in Polarized Times
Joseph Scalia III: "What is our fate if we do not learn to speak with one another over our cultural divides, with an indifferent natural world bearing down on us?" ... The grey wolf, North America’s iconic wolf, has just begun to be subjected to a proliferation of hunting and trapping practices and quotas that are both brutal and genocidal. ... Missing entirely from broad public conversation is whether any trapping of any sort and any hunting of the wolf should be happening at all ... we would also explicitly or implicitly be considering just what kind of human we are, and what kind of human we want to become ... Do we want to control wildlife populations by lethal means to force wildlife to exist only within our comfort zones of a global capitalist system?..
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Nov 3, 2021, 11:27am
Environment
As fossil fuel use surges, will COP26 protect forests to slow climate change?
Justin Catanoso: Six years on, the global community has failed to advance significantly on every one of those Paris goals. In fact, in many ways it has regressed, especially regarding the conservation of forests as “sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases” under Article 5. ... what the world has witnessed since 2015 is the breathtaking absence of collective political will to implement aggressive climate action ... According to the U.N., 15 major fossil fuel-producing countries, including the United States, plan to produce more oil, natural gas and coal by 2030, not less. ... “Twenty conservation, restoration, and/or improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands and agricultural lands … can provide one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation between now and 2030...
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Nov 1, 2021, 4:27pm
Environment
Indigenous leaders to push for land tenure rights as climate solution at COP26
Sandra Cuffe: Research demonstrating that granting Indigenous peoples and forest communities formal titles to their lands as a cost-effective approach to tacking climate change has been piling up for years. ... research illustrating how securing land and forest rights of Indigenous peoples and other local communities (IPLCs) prevents deforestation and destruction contributing to climate change. ... “When we lose forest, we also lose traditional knowledge and medicine” ... financing mechanisms have been largely top-down when they need to be bottom-up ...
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Oct 28, 2021, 3:21pm
Environment
Wildlife releases have a mixed record, and climate change complicates things
Natasha Gilbert: Translocation is a conservation technique that returns lost species to their previous habitats or moves then to new, safer areas in a bid to boost their wild populations. ... But research shows that it only works about half the time ... Climate change is also a factor, rendering former habitats unsuitable for a species’ return, and necessitating finding a new home for the animals. ... But introducing species into areas where they didn’t historically occur can be dangerous too, as it’s difficult to predict whether they will survive, and whether they pose a threat to the native species already living there...
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Oct 26, 2021, 4:54pm
Environment
Forest biomass-burning supply chain is producing major carbon emissions: Studies
Justin Catanoso: U.S., U.K., and E.U. policymakers are failing to count the carbon emissions cost of the forest biomass industry, according to two new first-of-their-kind studies. Though biomass burning is legally classified as carbon neutral, the research found that none of the parties involved is counting emissions generated along the supply chain. ... One study estimated that wood pellets made in the U.S. and burned in the U.K. led to 13-16 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2019 alone, equal to the emissions of up to 7 million cars. ... Should biomass burning be instituted by other nations in the near future, a process already underway, the result could be climatically catastrophic...
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Oct 21, 2021, 12:11pm
Environment
PG&E’s Tree Cutting Frenzy: Blaming Forests for Climate Change (and Its Own Negligence)
Ellen Taylor: I got my first shock of this last April, driving by Redwood Acres, in Eureka, where, without any permit, they’d (PG&E ) sawed down a stately grove of giant redwoods. ... It was the act of a marauder, a defacer, right in the public eye, almost vengeful, executed, preposterously, as making “defensible space” around its substation (!) ... By no stretch of the imagination were these trees a fire hazard. ... Indeed, as well as being active fire fighters, through their critical role in carbon sequestration, these trees were an elegant reminder of Eureka’s noble antecedent as a mighty forest, of which only fragments remain. ... The rampage is occurring all over the County...
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Oct 21, 2021, 11:55am
Environment
To Save the Corn Belt, Plant Trees
Tom Philpott: America’s corn belt—a broad swath of land stretching from Nebraska to Ohio ... also an ecological basket case. ... Fertilizer-laden farm runoff pollutes rivers, lakes, and wells. ... under assault from increasingly fierce storms, the Corn Belt’s fields are hemorrhaging its most precious resource, topsoil. ... There’s a deceptively simple trick that could help counteract this ecological unraveling ... Incentivize farmers to plant a bunch of trees ... The intermixing of food-bearing trees and annual crops—an ancient practice known as agroforestry—could ultimately be more profitable for farmers than the current corn-soybean rotation...
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Oct 19, 2021, 3:08pm
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