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Category: Environment

Deforestation gets worse, five years after countries and companies pledged to stop it

Deforestation gets worse, five years after countries and companies pledged to stop it

Georgina Gustin writes: Five years after joining in a historic commitment to stop cutting the world’s forests, governments and companies are not only failing to slow deforestation, they are rapidly driving the disappearance of more trees. As fires consume Amazonian forests, stoking global concern about the loss of a vital ecosystem and climate regulator, a new report published Thursday finds that forests continue to be cleared at an alarming rate, driven mostly by agricultural expansion and demand for beef, palm…

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Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent

Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent

Jedediah Britton-Purdy writes: At a time when political conflict runs deep and erects high walls, the Kentucky essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry maintains an arresting mix of admirers. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. The following year, the socialist-feminist writer and editor Sarah Leonard published a friendly interview with him in Dissent. Yet he also gets respectful attention in the pages of The American Conservative and First Things, a right-leaning, traditionalist Christian journal. More recently,…

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Trump administration rolls back clean water protections

Trump administration rolls back clean water protections

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water. The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half years. Those…

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How giving legal rights to nature could help reduce toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie

How giving legal rights to nature could help reduce toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie

A severe blue-green algae bloom spreads across western Lake Erie on July 30, 2019. NASA Earth Observatory By Dana Zartner, University of San Francisco August and September are peak months for harmful blooms of algae in western Lake Erie. This year’s outbreak covered more than 620 square miles by mid-August. These blooms, which can kill fish and pets and threaten public health, are driven mainly by agricultural pollution and increasingly warm waters due to climate change. Advocates are looking for…

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Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

The Washington Post reports: The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory. It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a foot deep into the sand along a 13-mile stretch of beach near Barra del Chuy, just south of the Brazilian border. Agüero had been digging up these clams since childhood, a livelihood passed on for generations along…

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How birds nested in our language and art

How birds nested in our language and art

Jeremy Mynott writes: The Mediterranean world of 2,500 years ago would have looked and sounded very different. Nightingales sang in the suburbs of Athens and Rome; wrynecks, hoopoes, cuckoos and orioles lived within city limits, along with a teeming host of warblers, buntings and finches; kites and ravens scavenged the city streets; owls, swifts and swallows nested on public buildings. In the countryside beyond, eagles and vultures soared overhead, while people could observe the migrations of cranes, storks and wildfowl….

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In Brazil’s rainforests, the worst fires are likely still to come

In Brazil’s rainforests, the worst fires are likely still to come

By Robert T. Walker, University of Florida The number of fires this year in the Amazon is the highest since 2010, reaching more than 90,000 active fires. Farmers and ranchers routinely use fires to clear the forest. But this year’s number reflects a worrisome uptick in the rate of deforestation, which had started to drop around 2005 before rebounding earlier this decade. Many people blame the Brazilian government and its pro-agriculture policies for the current crisis. But as an environmental…

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The companies practicing ‘secret sustainability’

The companies practicing ‘secret sustainability’

The Observer reports: There’s a factory in Asia that uses only a single litre of water to make a pair of jeans. That’s 346 litres less than Levi-Strauss estimated it took to make a pair of its jeans in 2015. Wouldn’t you love to buy your jeans from this amazingly innovative factory? Me too, but I don’t even know what it’s called. The manufacturer in question does not want to tell anyone about its groundbreaking water-conserving techniques – not even…

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Amazon fires are a ‘true apocalypse’, says a Brazilian archbishop

Amazon fires are a ‘true apocalypse’, says a Brazilian archbishop

The Guardian reports: The fires in the Amazon are a “true apocalypse”, according to a Brazilian archbishop who expects next month’s papal synod at the Vatican to strongly denounce the destruction of the rainforest. The comments by Erwin Kräutler will put fresh pressure on Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, following criticism from G7 leaders last month over the surge of deforestation in the world’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink. The archbishop’s words also highlight a widening division between the Catholic church and…

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It’s not just fires — the tech industry’s voracious demand for gold is also destroying the Amazon

It’s not just fires — the tech industry’s voracious demand for gold is also destroying the Amazon

BuzzFeed reports: The wildfires ripping through the Amazon have drawn the world’s attention to the destruction of the “lungs of the planet.” Many scientists believe cattle ranchers clearing land caused the flames, spurring groups around the world — including the government of Finland — to call for a boycott of Brazilian beef. But to boycott all of the products damaging the Amazon, you’d have to do much more than give up steak. You’d have to toss out your phone, laptop,…

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Vegans are right about ethics and the environment

Vegans are right about ethics and the environment

Farhad Manjoo writes: Many of us, myself included, engage in painless, performative environmentalism. We’ll give up plastic straws and tweet passionately that someone should do something about the Amazon, yet few of us make space in our worldview to acknowledge the carcass in the room: the irrefutable evidence that our addiction to meat is killing the planet right before our eyes. After all, it takes only a few minutes of investigation to learn that there is one overwhelming reason the…

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‘I’m not sure that I’ve ever even heard of the Category 5,’ says Trump as Dorian becomes the 35th such hurricane

‘I’m not sure that I’ve ever even heard of the Category 5,’ says Trump as Dorian becomes the 35th such hurricane

President Trump: "I'm not sure that I've ever even heard of the Category 5. I knew it existed, and I've seen some category 4s — you don't even see them that much but the category 5 is something that I don't know that I've ever even heard the term other than I know it's there." pic.twitter.com/44rpbxv90D — The Hill (@thehill) September 1, 2019 The Category 5 hurricanes Trump never heard of: Michael (2018), Maria (2017), Irma (2017), Matthew (2016), Felix…

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Surveying archaeologists across the globe reveals deeper and more widespread roots of the human age, the Anthropocene

Surveying archaeologists across the globe reveals deeper and more widespread roots of the human age, the Anthropocene

People have been modifying Earth – as in these rice terraces near Pokhara, Nepal – for millennia. Erle C. Ellis, CC BY-ND By Ben Marwick, University of Washington; Erle C. Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Lucas Stephens, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and Nicole Boivin, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Examples of how human societies are changing the planet abound – from building roads and houses, clearing forests for agriculture and…

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Ancient farmers irreversibly altered Earth’s face by 3000 years ago

Ancient farmers irreversibly altered Earth’s face by 3000 years ago

Mohi Kumar writes: When we think of how humans have altered the planet, greenhouse gas warming, industrial pollution, and nuclear fallout usually spring to mind. But now, a new study invites us to think much further back in time. Humans have been altering landscapes planetwide for thousands of years: since at least 1000 B.C.E., by which time people in regions across the globe had abandoned foraging in favor of continually producing crops. “This is the first project of its kind…

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Amazon fires show world heading for point of no return, says UN

Amazon fires show world heading for point of no return, says UN

The Guardian reports: The fires in the Amazon are “extraordinarily concerning” for the planet’s natural life support systems, the head of the UN’s top biodiversity body has said in a call for countries, companies and consumers to build a new relationship with nature. Cristiana Paşca Palmer, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforest was a grim reminder that a fresh approach was needed to stabilise the climate and prevent…

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EPA to remove regulations on methane, a potent greenhouse gas

EPA to remove regulations on methane, a potent greenhouse gas

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration laid out on Thursday a far-reaching plan to cut back on the regulation of methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency, in its proposed rule, aims to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities. It will also reopen the question of whether the E.P.A. even has the legal authority to regulate methane…

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