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Category: Environment

Why air pollution can trigger depression

Why air pollution can trigger depression

Inverse reports: You may be breathing dirty air right now. Nine out of ten people in the world live in areas with high levels of air pollutants, according to the World Health Organization. This is a problem for physical and mental health. In addition to its well-established relationships to cancer and respiratory and heart diseases, a growing trove of scientific evidence links air pollution with depression and other mental health disorders. A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the…

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What is deforestation – and is stopping it really possible?

What is deforestation – and is stopping it really possible?

Patrick Greenfield writes: Forests and nature are centre stage at Cop26. On the second day of the Glasgow summit, world leaders are announcing a commitment to halting and reversing deforestation. As the second largest source of greenhouse gases after energy, the land sector accounts for 25% of global emissions, with deforestation and forest degradation contributing to half of this. But why do forests matter to the climate, and how can we halt deforestation? What is a forest? There are an…

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Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

George Monbiot writes: There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter. When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise…

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Signs that we are nearing a point of no return in the Amazon rainforest

Signs that we are nearing a point of no return in the Amazon rainforest

Reuters reports: Gertrudes Freire and her family came to the great forest in search of land and rain. They found both in abundance on that day half a century ago, but the green wilds of the southwestern Amazon would prove tough to tame. When they reached the settlement of Ouro Preto do Oeste in 1971, it was little more than a lonely rubber-tapper outpost hugging the single main road that ran through the jungle like a red dust scar. Sitting…

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How chemical companies avoid paying for pollution

How chemical companies avoid paying for pollution

The New York Times reports: One humid day this summer, Brian Long, a senior executive at the chemical company Chemours, took a reporter on a tour of the Fayetteville Works factory. Mr. Long showed off the plant’s new antipollution technologies, designed to stop a chemical called GenX from pouring into the Cape Fear River, escaping into the air and seeping into the ground water. There was a new high-tech filtration system. And a new thermal oxidizer, which heats waste to…

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Halt destruction of nature or risk ‘dead planet’, leading businesses warn

Halt destruction of nature or risk ‘dead planet’, leading businesses warn

The Guardian reports: World leaders must do more to prevent the destruction of nature, business leaders have warned before a summit in China that aims to draw up a draft UN agreement for biodiversity. In an open letter, the chief executives of Unilever, H&M and nine other companies have called on governments to take meaningful action on mass extinctions of wildlife and the collapse of ecosystems or risk “a dead planet”. The warning comes as China prepares to assume the…

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Imminent Red Sea oil spill could leave 8 million people without water

Imminent Red Sea oil spill could leave 8 million people without water

The Guardian reports: The impact of an oil spill in the Red Sea from a tanker that is rotting in the water could be far wider than anticipated, with 8 million people losing access to running water and Yemen’s Red Sea fishing stock destroyed within three weeks. Negotiations are under way to offload the estimated 1.1m barrels of crude oil that remains onboard the FSO Safer, which has been deteriorating by the month since it was abandoned in 2017. The…

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Urban heat is getting more dangerous

Urban heat is getting more dangerous

Gizmodo reports: Urban heat is more dangerous—and even deadly—than ever. That’s true for two reasons: Globally, more people are flocking to cities, and cities themselves are getting hotter due to the climate crisis. Those are the findings of a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. In it, researchers examined heat exposure in 13,115 global cities from 1983 to 2016. The findings are a warning to cities as the climate crisis turns up…

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As California burns, much of America breathes toxic smoke

As California burns, much of America breathes toxic smoke

Inside Climate News reports: Western wildfires pose a much broader threat to human health than to just those forced to evacuate the path of the blazes. Smoke from these fires, which have burned millions of acres in California alone, is choking vast swaths of the country, an analysis of federal satellite imagery by NPR’s California Newsroom and Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab found. The months-long analysis, based on more than 10 years of data collected by the…

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The disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea

The disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea

Jonathan Watts writes: A short bureaucratic note from a brutally degraded microstate in the South Pacific to a little-known institution in the Caribbean is about to change the world. Few people are aware of its potential consequences, but the impacts are certain to be far-reaching. The only question is whether that change will be to the detriment of the global environment or the benefit of international governance. In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority…

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China is financing infrastructure projects around the world – many could harm nature and Indigenous communities

China is financing infrastructure projects around the world – many could harm nature and Indigenous communities

Chinese engineers pose after welding the first seamless rails for the China-Laos railway in Vientiane, Laos, June 18, 2020. Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua via Getty Images By Blake Alexander Simmons, Boston University; Kevin P. Gallagher, Boston University, and Rebecca Ray, Boston University China is shaping the future of economic development through its Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious multi-billion-dollar international push to better connect itself to the rest of the world through trade and infrastructure. Through this venture, China is providing over…

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Packaging generates a lot of waste — now Maine and Oregon want manufacturers to foot the bill for getting rid of it

Packaging generates a lot of waste — now Maine and Oregon want manufacturers to foot the bill for getting rid of it

Packaging for consumer products represents a large share of U.S. solid waste, and barely half of it is recycled. iStock via Getty Images By Jessica Heiges, University of California, Berkeley and Kate O’Neill, University of California, Berkeley Most consumers don’t pay much attention to the packaging that their purchases come in, unless it’s hard to open or the item is really over-wrapped. But packaging accounts for about 28% of U.S. municipal solid waste. Only some 53% of it ends up…

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California firefighters ‘stretched to limit’ as devastating blazes become the norm

California firefighters ‘stretched to limit’ as devastating blazes become the norm

The Guardian reports: Before the ravenous Caldor fire laid siege to South Lake Tahoe, California’s top firefighting priority lay just to the north, where the Dixie fire scorched more land than any other single fire in state history. Together, the two behemoths have already blackened more than 1m acres (4,000 sq km) along the Sierra Nevada range. And fire season in the American west is just heating up. The climate crisis has helped create extreme fire emergencies, with huge, rapid-moving…

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Up to half of world’s wild tree species could be at risk of extinction

Up to half of world’s wild tree species could be at risk of extinction

The Guardian reports: Between a third and half of the world’s wild tree species are threatened with extinction, posing a risk of wider ecosystem collapse, the most comprehensive global stocktake to date warns. Forest clearance for farming is by far the biggest cause of the die-off, according to the State of the World’s Trees report, which was released on Wednesday along with a call for urgent action to reverse the decline. The five-year, international study found 17,510 species of trees…

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Federal judge strikes down Trump rule that allowed water pollution

Federal judge strikes down Trump rule that allowed water pollution

The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Monday struck down a Trump-era environmental rule that drastically limited federal restrictions against pollution of millions of streams, wetlands and marshes across the country. The Biden administration had already begun the lengthy process of undoing the policy, which President Donald J. Trump established in 2020 after farmers, real estate developers and fossil fuel producers complained that Obama-era rules had saddled them with onerous regulatory burdens. Mr. Trump’s policy allowed the discharge…

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The lesson that California never learns

The lesson that California never learns

Mark Arax writes: As he guided me out to the almond orchard in the colony of Fairmead on the county’s northern fringe, Matt Angell, the well fixer, a big man with kind eyes, wasn’t sure what role he had assumed. Was he a whistleblower? Was he a communitarian? When I suggested that he had the tone and tilt of an agrarian Cassandra, he paused for a second and said, “I like that.” We pulled into the orchard, row after row…

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