Indigenous People on Climate Change
A fresh and very interesting Q & A discussion of climate change in relationship to indigenous worldviews. Via Science Magazine:
The Arctic has become the frontline for observing the effects of anthropogenic climate change, from rising ocean temperatures to shrinking sea ice cover. These changes have greatly impacted the traditional practices of indigenous Arctic communities, which rely on sea ice for hunting and travel. In recent years, climate scientists have sought the multigenerational and intimate knowledge that indigenous people have of their environment. How can scientists use this knowledge to improve climate projections and models while respecting indigenous culture?
Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, has studied the indigenous communities of Alaska and northern Russia for 40 years. Yesterday, he gave a talk at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW) on environmental observations that indigenous experts recorded from 2000 to 2010. I…
Is There Herbicide in Your Urine?
Via GMWatch:
According to an article in German in the Ithaka Journal, a German university study has found significant concentrations of glyphosate in the urine samples of city dwellers. The analysis of the urine samples apparently found that all had concentrations of glyphosate at 5 to 20-fold the limit for drinking water. As well as being used increasingly widely in food production, glyphosate-based weedkillers often also get sprayed onto railway lines, urban pavements and roadsides (www.ithaka-journal.net).
Disturbingly, the Ithaka Journal reports (in our translation), “The address of the university labs, which did the research, the data and the evaluation of the research method is known to the editors. Because of significant pressure by agrochemical representatives and the fear that the work of the lab could be influenced, the complete analytical data will only be published in the course of this year.” (www.ithaka-journal.net)
News of this study comes not long after the publication of a…
When the Earth Gets Sick: Most Mass Extinctions Happened Slowly
Earth in the Permian period. Illustration: Kieff (CC)
Via ScienceDaily:
In geology as in cancer research, the silver bullet theory always gets the headlines and nearly always turns out to be wrong. For geologists who study mass extinctions, the silver bullet is a giant asteroid plunging to earth.But an asteroid is the prime suspect only in the most recent of five mass extinctions, said USC earth scientist David Bottjer. The cataclysm 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs.
“The other four have not been resolvable to a rock falling out of the sky,” Bottjer said. For example, Bottjer and many others have published studies suggesting that the end-Permian extinction 250 million years ago happened in essence because “the earth got sick.”
The latest research from Bottjer’s group suggests a similar slow dying during the extinction 200 million years ago at the boundary of the Triassic and Jurassic eras. The latest research from Bottjer’s…
Mysterious White-Nose Syndrome Is Killing Bats Across The U.S.
Holy Fungus, Batman! Reports David Wrights and Jonann Brady of ABC NEWS:
A mysterious fungus is killing off thousands of bats around the country. Scientists are calling it white-nose syndrome, because of the distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of infected bats.
White-nose itself doesn’t kill bats, but it disturbs their sleep so that they end their hibernation early. During the winter there are no insects to eat, so the bats literally starve to death.
Bats may be one of Mother Nature’s least cuddly creatures, but they are ecologically important, keeping mosquitos and insects that attack crops in check.
Researchers say the syndrome has killed upward of half a million bats from New England to Virginia.
The Industry of Hunger
Photo: Tawheed Manzoor (CC)
Vandana Shiva on Al Jazeera English explains how, as mega-chains venture into industrial farming, they have created an epidemic of hunger- and generated billions in profit.
New Delhi, India – In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail would boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods.
But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session, after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.
The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with…
Is It Too Late? The Retreat of Arctic Sea Ice Is Releasing Huge Fountains of Methane
Keep in mind that methane affects the atmosphere in multiple ways, and that another major Ice Age might be what’s really in the works. Steve Connor reports in the Independent:
Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide — have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.
In an exclusive interview with the Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they…
Occupy Goes Rural
Lilac writes on the Earth First! Newswire:
Rural land use in the US has followed the pipeline of the American Dream. Since the Great Depression, farm ownership has fallen by two thirds. Today, half of farm sales come from 2% of farms. Meanwhile, timber companies increasingly exploit low wage labor, by-passing the unions at saw mills, and selling their product overseas. Mountaintop removal is yet another way corporations have found to destroy the environment while hiring fewer workers. The accumulation of land and etiolation of the work force has led to an economic and ecological tipping point that coincides with the crisis of capitalism. The product is a friction and energy that forms an unrecognized centrifuge of the Occupy movement.
Rural areas paint a picture of worsening economic conditions, shifts in climate, droughts and floods, farmer paralysis and ensuing chain reactions throughout the country. Their narratives unravel a context of rising prisons,…
How Did We Get to 7 Billion from 1 Billion People in Just 200 Years? (Video)
Via NPR:
It was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West. U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline. But exact numbers are hard to come by — just small variations in fertility rates could mean a population of 15 billion by the end of the century.
The (Unexplained) Death of Bats
Via New Times:
The abandoned iron mine at Mine Hill in Roxbury used to provide a winter home for 3,000 bats — the largest bat hibernaculum in the state. The last time Jennie Dickson, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, counted, there were about 100 bats there.
“That’s not good,” she said. For the past five years, the bats of the eastern United States have been dying in like numbers — one of the worst environmental catastrophes in recent years.
What biologists like Dickson knew was that the dying bats could be found with an off-white fungus on their nose and wings. What was causing the die-off was uncertain …
7 Billion People and Counting: Concerns From Around the World
Great roundup of opinion found in the Detroit Free Press:
What’s the biggest issue facing humanity as the global population reaches seven billion?
Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper asked for an answer from correspondents around the world. Here are the replies, including a link to that from the Free Press. Note the recurring theme of fresh water, not a problem here in the Great Lakes region, but a critical issue for millions of people in many regions.
Thousands of Dead Birds Wash Ashore in Ontario
Via CTV:
Thousands of dead birds will be collected from an Ontario shoreline on Monday as the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources tries to determine what killed the waterfowl. Officials estimate as many as 6,000 dead birds have washed up on the Georgian Bay’s shoreline.
The carcasses are scattered along a nearly three-kilometre stretch near Wasaga Beach. “You just want to cry,” resident Faye Ego told CTV Toronto on Saturday.
Authorities speculate that the birds may have been killed by a form of botulism after eating dead fish. Locals said they noticed some dead fish on the beach a few weeks ago and a few dead birds earlier in September. During Monday’s cleanup, crews will be trying to tally up the total number of dead birds on the shoreline …
5,000 Years of Sustainability
While we currently venerate technology as the panacea for our catastrophic environmental ills, what if we could contextually approach and learn from sustainable civilizations that thrived in the distant reaches of North America’s past? Jude Isabella writes on Archeology:
A re-evaluation of evidence along North America’s western coast shows how its earliest inhabitants managed the sea’s resources stone walls serve as evidence that early peoples cultivated the intertidal zones to build clam gardens and fish traps
When the tide is out, the table is set. —Tlingit proverb
The tide is going out at Gibsons Beach, in the Strait of Georgia on Canada’s west coast. When the tide is low, it’s easy to spot rock walls in the intertidal zone, the area of shore land that’s exposed during low tide and hidden when the tide is in. A person can look at this beach for years and never understand that apparently random scatterings…
India’s Illegal ‘Human Safari Park’
Andaman Islands. Photo: _e.t (CC)
Via Wanderlust:
The Andaman Trunk Road was ordered to be closed by India’s Supreme Court in 2002 but it still remains open and poses a high threat to the indigenous community who have a population of just 365.
‘Survival’, an organisation which campaigns for tribal people’s rights worldwide, has called for travellers to boycott the road which runs through the Andaman Islands, a destination growing in popularity among tourists.
Rules to protect the Jarawa reserve and its community are routinely broken and thousands of tourists — both Indian and international — travel along the road each month, making the reserve in effect, a human safari park.
The hunter-gatherer Jarawa, have only had friendly contact with outsiders since 1998 so there is a high risk of tourists passing on diseases to the community who have little immunity.
In 1999 and 2006, the Jarawa suffered an outbreak of measles, which historically has decimated…
Bolivia Grants Human Rights To Planet Earth
Laguna Suches Perú, Bolivia. Photo: Rojk (CC)
In a blur of where Governments begin and end, Mother Nature is granted rights just like humans. Sadly, she still can’t vote. Via Wired:
Bolivia is to pass a law — called la Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (The Law of Mother Earth) – which will grant nature equal rights to humans.
The law — the first of its kind — aims to encourage a major shift in attitudes towards conservation and to reduce pollution and exploitation of natural resources. It sees a range of new rights established for nature including the right to life; the right to water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities and the right to be free of pollution.
Bolivia is one of South America’s poorest countries and is seeing its rural communities suffer with failing crops due to climatic events such as floods and…
Radiation Detected In Drinking Water Across The U.S.
Jeff McMahon writes for Forbes:
Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the Environmental Protection Agency late Friday.
Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by EPA, the data shows. The Phoenix sample contained 3.2 picoCuries per liter of iodine-131. The Los Angeles sample contained 2.9. The EPA maximum contaminant level is 3.0, but this is a conservative standard designed to minimize exposure over a lifetime, so EPA does not consider these levels to pose a health threat.
The cesium-137 found in milk in Vermont is the first cesium detected in milk since the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear accident occurred last month. The sample contained 1.9 picoCuries per liter of cesium-137, which…
Artificial Trees Convert CO2 To O2
What would happen if there were no longer any trees? Well, we could just make our own. Via AOL News:
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. Or is it? If you’re not getting enough air, you might want to spend time sitting under a newly designed artificial tree that converts carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen.
In the modern world of urban pollution, we can’t seem to grow enough trees to naturally convert carbon dioxide into life-sustaining air — the process of photosynthesis — until now.
Researchers at New York’s Columbia University, working with Influx Studio in Paris, France, have designed a faux or artificial tree. It’s basically a machine fashioned to resemble a dragon blood tree, complete with wide branches and umbrellalike tops that are used as support for the large solar panels…
Biologists Say Giant-Penised Frog is ‘Good for the Forest’
Peter Fimrite writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Sheepish scientists refer to it as a tail, but the appendage dragging behind the male frog recently discovered in Mendocino County is no tail.
The little amphibian, known as a coastal tailed frog, is unique among frog and toad species for its comparatively magnificent, let’s call it, copulatory organ.
The unusual species was found recently for the first time in the 23,780-acre Garcia River Forest, farther south than it has ever been known to exist. Biologists say the 1- to 2-inch-long amphibian has a lot going for it, most notably its genitalia, which can get up to a quarter of the length of its body.
But it is less about size than it is motion, as they say. This stream-loving critter apparently wags his tail with admirable dexterity.
