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Category: Environment

America’s corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

America’s corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

Becca Dzombak reports: Seth Watkins has been farming his family’s land in southern Iowa for decades, growing pasture for his cows as well as corn and other row crops. His great-grandfather founded the farm in 1848. “He came in with one of John Deere’s steel plows and pierced the prairie,” Watkins recounted. With its rolling hills and neat lines of corn stretching to the horizon, broken by clumps of trees, it’s a picturesque scene. But centuries of farming those hills…

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First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

By Taylor White This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers…

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The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

Emma Marris writes: It’s late afternoon, late pandemic, and I’m watching a new nature documentary in bed, after taking the daintiest of hits from a weed pen. The show is called A Perfect Planet, and it is narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I am looking at the red eye of a flamingo, a molten lake surrounding a tiny black pupil. Now I am looking at drone footage of a massive colony of flamingos, the classic sweeping overhead shot, what my…

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The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

David Treuer writes: In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who…

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There’s another pandemic under our noses, and it kills 8.7m people a year

There’s another pandemic under our noses, and it kills 8.7m people a year

Rebecca Solnit writes: It is undeniably horrific that more than 2.8 million people have died of Covid-19 in the past 15 months. In roughly the same period, however, more than three times as many likely died of air pollution. This should disturb us for two reasons. One is the sheer number of air pollution deaths – 8.7 million a year, according to a recent study – and another is how invisible those deaths are, how accepted, how unquestioned. The coronavirus…

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The Amazon rainforest now emits more greenhouse gases than it absorbs

The Amazon rainforest now emits more greenhouse gases than it absorbs

Alex Fox writes: The Amazon rainforest may now emit more greenhouse gases than the famously lush ecosystem absorbs, according to new research. Long considered to be a bulwark against climate change because of its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, a new study suggests rising temperatures, increasing drought and rampant deforestation have likely overwhelmed the Amazon’s ability to absorb more greenhouse gases than it emits, reports Craig Welch for National Geographic. The sobering findings appear in a new study published earlier…

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Rich nation appetites driving tropical deforestation

Rich nation appetites driving tropical deforestation

AFP reports: Rising demand in wealthy countries for dozens of commodities ranging from coffee to soybeans has stepped up the pace of deforestation in the tropics, researchers said on Monday. Even as North America and Europe expand forest cover within their own borders, efforts to slow forest loss in the global south through offset schemes and direct payments have been overwhelmed by these appetites, they reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The first country-by-country quantification of how rich-nation…

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Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

The New York Times reports: While some African elephants parade across the savanna and thrill tourists on safari, others are more discreet. They stay hidden in the forests, eating fruit. “You feel pretty lucky when you catch sight of them,” said Kathleen Gobush, a Seattle-based conservation biologist and member of the African Elephant Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or I.U.C.N. The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants…

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How the salvation of New York City drinking water can be a model for saving the planet

How the salvation of New York City drinking water can be a model for saving the planet

Michael Heller and James Salzman write: [Al] Appleton is a bear of a man with a quick wit and disarming candor. In 1990, he became Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and Director of the City’s Water and Sewer system. He immediately faced a dilemma. Unlike most big American cities, New York did not have treatment plants for its tap water. Showing great foresight in the early 1900s, the City had laid huge pipes from the…

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The Amazon rainforest could die in your lifetime — here’s why

The Amazon rainforest could die in your lifetime — here’s why

Anna Funk writes: Deforestation in the Amazon has long been the poster child of man-made environmental destruction. But recent trends reveal that the changing climate will likely come for this beloved rainforest long before the last tree is cut down. One researcher has even put a date on his prediction for the Amazon’s impending death: 2064. That’s the year the Amazon rainforest will be completely wiped out. Dramatic? Yes. “I’m a doom-sayer,” admits Robert Walker, a quantitative geographer at the…

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A critically endangered bird is losing its song

A critically endangered bird is losing its song

Brisbane Times reports: When Michael Alfa was setting up to photograph wildlife at Woolgoolga’s sewage works near the northern NSW town of Coffs Harbour last year, the avid birdwatcher could hardly believe his senses. There, among the warbling wattlebirds hanging off a coastal banksia tree, was a lone, critically endangered regent honeyeater, distinctive in its yellow and black plumage. But not its birdsong. “It was making the exact same song [as the wattlebirds]. If you hadn’t seen it, you wouldn’t…

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We are hurtling toward global suicide

We are hurtling toward global suicide

Ben Ehrenreich writes: On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days after the storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it was easy enough to miss an article published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, despite its eye-catching title: “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words piling up in front…

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How bacteria and archaea influence one of Earth’s largest carbon stores as it begins to thaw

How bacteria and archaea influence one of Earth’s largest carbon stores as it begins to thaw

Monique Brouillette writes: For most of human history, permafrost has been Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon sink, trapping plant and animal material in its frozen layers for centuries. It currently stores about 1,600 billion tonnes of carbon — more than twice the amount in the atmosphere today. But thanks to rising temperatures, permafrost is fracturing and disappearing, leaving behind dramatic changes in the landscape. Scientists are becoming increasingly worried that the thaw will lead to an epic feast for bacteria and…

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Electric cars’ looming recycling problem

Electric cars’ looming recycling problem

By Perry Gottesfeld In September, Tesla announced that it would be phasing out the use of cobalt in its batteries, in an effort to produce a $25,000 electric vehicle within three years. If successful, this bold move will be an industry game changer, making electric vehicles competitive with conventional counterparts. But the announcement also underscores one of the fundamental challenges that will complicate the transition to electric vehicles. Without cobalt, there may be little financial incentive to recycle the massive…

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Brood X cicadas are about to put on one of the wildest shows in nature. And D.C. is the main stage

Brood X cicadas are about to put on one of the wildest shows in nature. And D.C. is the main stage

The Washington Post reports: They’ve been buried — alive — for 17 years. And now, Brood X, one of the world’s largest swarms of giant fly-like bugs called cicadas, is ready to rise. When the ground warms to 64 degrees, they’ll stop gnawing on tree roots and start scratching toward the surface by the hundreds of billions. Georgia and other Southern states will probably be where they first emerge around the end of March, experts say. But residents of the…

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We can’t plant or log our way out of climate change

We can’t plant or log our way out of climate change

Danna Smith writes: CNN published an opinion piece on Feb. 10 with the headline, “Plant trees, sure. But to save the climate, we should also cut them down.” This piece omitted some vital facts and science. While the piece did not call for a broad expansion of logging, I think it’s important for readers to understand these facts. Industrial logging and wood production are major drivers of climate disruption. The US is the world’s largest consumer and producer of wood…

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