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Category: Environment

Life in Fukushima offers a glimpse into our contaminated future

Life in Fukushima offers a glimpse into our contaminated future

Maxime Polleri writes: As a farmer, Atsuo Tanizaki did not care much for the state’s maps of radioactive contamination. Colour-coded zoning restrictions might make sense for government workers, he told me, but ‘real’ people did not experience their environment through shades of red, orange and green. Instead, they navigated the landscape one field, one tree, one measurement at a time. ‘Case by case,’ he said, grimly, as he guided me along the narrow paths that separated his rice fields, on…

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Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Jason Hickel et al, write: The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates. Yet many industrialized countries are now struggling to grow their economies, given economic convulsions caused…

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British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

Michael J Warren writes: In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is the ‘swan’s song’, men’s laughter is now ‘the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry’, and the warming tonic of mead is echoed in the…

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Preventing the collapse of biodiversity, demands the development of a new planetary politics

Preventing the collapse of biodiversity, demands the development of a new planetary politics

Stewart Patrick writes: The planet is in the midst of an environmental emergency, and the world is only tinkering at the margins. Humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels and voracious appetite for natural resources are accelerating climate change and degrading ecosystems on land and sea, threatening the integrity of the biosphere and thus the survival of our own species. Given these risks, it is shocking that the multilateral system has failed to respond more forcefully. Belatedly, the United States, the EU,…

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If we are entering the sixth mass extinction, we are facing our own demise

If we are entering the sixth mass extinction, we are facing our own demise

Patrick Hughes writes: Five times in our planet’s history, adverse conditions have extinguished most of life. Now, scientists say, life on Earth could be in trouble again, with some even saying we could be entering a sixth mass extinction. No credible scientist disputes that we are in a crisis regarding the speed at which nature is being destroyed. But could we really be on track to lose most life on Earth? Human-caused climate change, changes in land use and pollution…

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State, local governments increasingly turn to zoning reforms

State, local governments increasingly turn to zoning reforms

Sarah Wesseler writes: Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and passenger vehicles — the cars most Americans rely on to meet their daily needs — account for more than half of transportation emissions. Conversations about reducing these emissions typically focus on electric vehicles. But increasingly, government officials across the country are aiming not just to get Americans into different kinds of cars, but to radically reduce the need to drive in the first place….

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UK coalmine approval shows PM doesn’t care if he is seen as green

UK coalmine approval shows PM doesn’t care if he is seen as green

Fiona Harvey writes: Opening a new coalmine when the world stands on the brink of climate catastrophe is “absolutely indefensible”, in the words of the UK government’s independent climate adviser, the chair of the Climate Change Committee and the former Conservative minister Lord Deben. The £165m mine in Cumbria will produce coking coal for steelmaking, which the government has said will still be needed, even though steelmakers must move to low-carbon production in the next 13 years. Two of the UK’s existing steel…

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The 30 percent goal: Is bigger always better for biodiversity?

The 30 percent goal: Is bigger always better for biodiversity?

Fred Pearce writes: In 2009, the U.S. government turned more than 190,000 square miles of pristine ocean centered on the Mariana Trench in the remote Pacific into one of the world’s largest protected areas. The same year, Mexico completed a management plan for the Cabo Pulmo coral reef in the Gulf of California, covering just 27 square miles. Which action achieved the most? As the biggest United Nations conference on biodiversity in a decade gathers in Montreal this week, it…

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World’s oldest DNA discovered, revealing ancient Arctic forest full of mastodons

World’s oldest DNA discovered, revealing ancient Arctic forest full of mastodons

Scientific American reports: The oldest DNA ever recovered has revealed a remarkable two-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland, including the presence of an unlikely explorer: the mastodon. The DNA, found locked in sediments in a region called Peary Land at the farthest northern reaches of Greenland, shows what life was like in a much warmer period in Earth’s history. The landscape, which is now a harsh polar desert, once hosted trees, caribou and mastodons. Some of the plants and animals that thrived…

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Small lakes keep growing across the planet, and it’s a serious problem

Small lakes keep growing across the planet, and it’s a serious problem

Science Alert reports: A new study has revealed that small lakes on Earth have expanded considerably over the last four decades – a worrying development, considering the amount of greenhouse gases freshwater reservoirs emit. Between 1984 and 2019, global lake surfaces increased in size by more than 46,000 square kilometers (17,761 square miles), researchers say. That’s slightly more than the area covered by Denmark. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gasses are constantly produced from lakes, because of the…

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Protecting 30% of Earth’s surface for nature means thinking about connections near and far

Protecting 30% of Earth’s surface for nature means thinking about connections near and far

Red knots stop to feed along the Delaware shore as they migrate from the high Arctic to South America. Gregory Breese, USFWS/Flickr By Veronica Frans, Michigan State University and Jianguo “Jack” Liu, Michigan State University A biodiversity crisis is reducing the variety of life on Earth. Under pressure from land and water pollution, development, overhunting, poaching, climate change and species invasions, approximately 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction. One ambitious proposal for stemming these losses…

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‘Forever chemicals’ may pose a bigger risk to our health than scientists thought

‘Forever chemicals’ may pose a bigger risk to our health than scientists thought

Science News reports: For decades, chemicals that make life easier — your eggs slide out of the frying pan, stains don’t stick to your sofa, rain bounces off your jackets and boots — have been touted as game changers for our busy modern lives. “Better things for better living … through chemistry,” was the optimistic slogan coined by DuPont, the company that invented the widely used chemical coating Teflon. But this better living has come at a cost that is getting…

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Honeybees are living half as long as they were 50 years ago

Honeybees are living half as long as they were 50 years ago

New Scientist reports: Honeybees kept under laboratory conditions in the US only live half as long as they did in the 1970s, suggesting that genetics could be contributing to colony losses, and not just environmental factors such as pesticides and sources of food. Five decades ago, the median lifespan for a worker western honeybee (Apis mellifera) that spent its adult life in a controlled environment was 34.3 days. Now, the median is 17.7 days, according to research by Anthony Nearman…

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How West Africa’s emerging megalopolis will shape the coming century

How West Africa’s emerging megalopolis will shape the coming century

Howard W French writes: It has long been said that no one knows with any certainty the population of Lagos, Nigeria. When I spent time there a decade ago, the United Nations conservatively put the number at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The one thing everyone agreed was that Lagos was growing very fast. The population was already 40 times bigger than it had been in 1960, when Nigeria gained independence. One local demographer…

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The chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses

The chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses

The New Yorker: In 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible,” Arbugaeva recalled. Arbugaeva was working on a photography project about an Indigenous Chukchi community that practices subsistence hunting (whales, walruses, and seals, following the international quotas), and the siblings were on a hunt, at sea, when they landed on the beach. “In…

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How the global rise of border walls is stifling wildlife

How the global rise of border walls is stifling wildlife

Fred Pierce writes: Pity the tiny band of lynx in the Polish half of Europe’s most ancient forest. In June, their home, the Białowieża Forest, was cut in half when the Polish government completed construction of a wall on its border with Belarus. The aim was to repel refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere being channeled to the border by the Belarus government. But the 115-mile wall — which towers 18 feet above the forest floor, stretching almost into…

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