I rarely read comments from other readers on articles, but for some reason I did on this one; they are almost as interesting as the article itself:
For Migrating Birds, It’s the Flight of Their Lives
America’s birds are in trouble. Since 1970, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished from the skies over North America. Continue reading
Sapo National Park in Liberia. Under a deal now being negotiated, Blue Carbon would sell carbon credits from the park. EVAN BOWEN-JONES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
For the decade during which the market for carbon credits has been on our radar, concerns about credibility have been lurking. Now this:
In New Scramble for Africa, an Arab Sheikh Is Taking the Lead
A company established by a Dubai sheikh is finalizing agreements with African nations to manage vast tracts of their forests and sell the carbon credits. Critics are concerned the deals will not benefit Africans and will just help foreign governments perpetuate high emissions.
A forest in Mbire, Zimbabwe that is generating carbon credits. Blue Carbon has signed a memorandum of understanding with Zimbabwe to sell carbon credits from its woodlands. CYNTHIA R. MATONHODZE / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
A prominent sheikh in the oil-rich Gulf state hosting this year’s UN climate negotiations, COP28, is heading a new rush to capture and sell carbon credits by managing tens of millions of acres of forests across Africa. Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the royal family of Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), wants to sell those credits to rich governments in the Gulf and elsewhere, so they can offset their carbon emissions to help them meet their carbon pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Continue reading
Not all natural resource utilization problems are simply a matter of pricing the resource correctly. But clearly it matters. Water hogging is apparently more widespread than we thought, and the price is clearly not right on this resource. This first in a series on the causes and consequences of disappearing water, by Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi and Eli Murray, has excellent interactive features to help understand these challenges:
Center-pivot irrigation. Farming is a major groundwater user. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times data investigation revealed.
GLOBAL WARMING HAS FOCUSED concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view.
Most American communities also rely on wells for tap water. Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.
The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. Continue reading
My daily news scanning, reading and listening diet are fairly omnivorous, but I am constantly reminded of how much I miss. This sounds like a book I should have read in 2015 when it was first published, but instead I only heard about it this morning. Listening to the author talk about it, I learned that she lives where I lived when I was a boy, in a region where my family history is partly rooted; the same region where I spent seven years to get to an idea that has guided my work ever since; where both our sons and our grand daughter were born. Which is to say, as she talks about nature in that conversation, I know that particular nature. Which is to say, I will find this book.
The Economist’s explanation (subscription required) is clear:
Superbatteries will transform the performance of EVs
Provided manufacturers can find enough raw materials to make them
Asked what they most want from an electric car, many motorists would list three things: a long driving range, a short charging time and a price competitive with a similarly equipped vehicle that has an internal-combustion engine. Continue reading
From left, Jess Jones, Ed Rodriguez, Zach Herring and Joshua De-Anda, planting a crab apple tree at 10 Wolcott Street in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, Conn. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Ed Rodriguez has a few years on me, but we have comparable tree counts. The caption of the second photo below captures my my own preference of activity on any given day. Having grown up in Connecticut and moved to Costa Rica decades ago, I note our reverse patterns of migration.
Colbi Edmonds, a member of the 2023-24 New York Times Fellowship class, reports from Seth’s previous hometown New Haven on an initiative I love reading about as much as I enjoy my own versions of the same kind of activity:
“I love to dig and mess around in the soil,” said Ed Rodriguez, who grew up in Puerto Rico but moved to Connecticut in the 1960s. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
One Neighborhood, 90 Trees and an 82-Year-Old Crusader
Ed Rodriguez is on a mission to convince his neighbors that they need trees to help combat summer heat — and to make the world a better place. It’s not always so easy.
Maria Gonzalez, who lives in New Haven, Conn., was envious of the other side of her street. It was lined with trees, offering some beauty as well as a shield from this summer’s unusual heat. But the sidewalk directly in front of her residence was bare, with trash littering patches of grass. Continue reading
Rock dust applied to farmland in California. IRIS HOLZER
It is a concept we have heard about a couple of times previously and the science is catching up. Our thanks to Yale e360 for sharing news of it:
Spreading Rock Dust on Farmland Has Potential to Draw Down Huge Sums of Carbon Dioxide
Adding volcanic rock dust to cropland could help the world reach a key carbon removal goal, a new study finds. Continue reading
This book comes with a strong pitch by Bill McKibben. It came to my attention while reading this profile by Andrew Marantz. Full of ambiguity, about a balancing act between privilege inherited from fossil fuel wealth and sincere commitment to solidarity movements, what follows is entirely worth the read to get to the last paragraph (which only works if you have made it through the entire text):What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
“Leah was clearly preoccupied with how a person of extreme privilege can live responsibly in the world,” her Ph.D. adviser said. Photograph by Platon for The New Yorker
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures. Continue reading
Borage
The thoughts and images in this article inspire pre-dawn work on that soil I mentioned yesterday. We do not have the heat here that she does there, but the nudge to go out in the dark is welcome. My attention has been solely focused on regeneration below for the coffee that once thrived above ground. Time to start thinking of accent colors and other edibles:
Stokes asters
What You Discover When You Garden at Night
Daytime heat forced a writer with a green thumb to change her routine. She found unexpected pleasures.
When it’s too hot to garden during the day, what is there to do but garden at night? Neither floppy hat nor gobs of sunscreen will lure me into the glare of a hot and humid, possibly record-breaking, 90-plus-degree day. Or, as our local meteorologist reports: one with a heat index of 103. So instead, I venture out into the garden after dinner, dogs in tow, surveying the raised beds in the coolness of evening.
Poppies that have gone to seed, bringing to mind “the coming glory of red, white, and pink blooms” next season.
I carry a basket full of seeds, green string to tie the tomatoes higher, and wooden stakes and black markers to record once again what I have sown, some new crops and others a repeat of those planted earlier in the season. It is midsummer now and the lettuce, radishes, and shallots are fading, but the basil and tomatoes, beans and zucchini are finally coming into their own. A little more rain and warmth and I will be able to make my first tomato sandwich, one of the driving forces, no doubt, behind planting a vegetable garden. Continue reading
We first noticed this film contest three years ago, and have followed it since. The 3rd-place winner of this year’s film contest was made in the Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve, habitat of the endangered species pictured above. In 2009 I was in the middle of a two-year work engagement in southern Chile. During the middle of that year Amie, as well as Seth and Milo, were able to join me for a few months and we spent time in this reserve. I am happy to be reminded:
In a Chilean Forest Reserve, the Remarkable Darwin’s Frog Endures
Four emerging filmmakers from Latin America collaborated to film Darwin’s frog and the biologist who studies the endangered species in Chile’s Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve. “Hojarasca: The Hidden Hope” is the Third-Place Winner of the 2023 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest.
Worldwide, amphibians are going extinct — victims of habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and fungal diseases. Continue reading
L GORE SPEAKS AT TED COUNTDOWN SUMMIT. JULY 11-14, 2023, DETROIT, MI. PHOTO: GILBERTO TADDAY / TED
Air quotes, sometimes called scare quotes, are embracing two words in the title of this post because we remain ambivalent about optimism related to climate change. But this article, which we missed last month, points to a video that gives more context:
Uplifting Climate Change Good News — According To Al Gore
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has been a huge player in the fight against climate change for as long as most of us can remember. As the founder and current chair of the Climate Reality Project, he has dedicated his life to climate action. Continue reading
Junior Walk of Coal River Mountain Watch in Naoma, West Virginia, prepares his drone to fly near a reclaimed surface mine in Edwight. Roger May/The Guardian
Mother Jones shares a story we missed in its original publication:
One Man’s Aerial Crusade Against West Virginia’s Coal Industry
Citizen vigilante uses his drone to expose polluters—”I don’t have a lot of friends around here.”
Coal has stalked Junior Walk his entire life.
A moment of truth as absurd comedy:
Our cartoonist on capturing the environmental crisis
How to illustrate mankind’s environmental folly
Under the pen name KAL, Kevin Kallaugher has been drawing for The Economist for 45 years. Here, our cameras capture how his cartoons have become ever more strident in trying to illustrate the global environmental crisis that humanity faces…
Sheryll Durrant has managed the New Roots Garden, which sits between the Grand Concourse and the Metro North railroad tracks in the Bronx, with volunteers for eight years.
We have linked out to stories about urban farming plenty of times; it never gets old:
Vital Places of Refuge in the Bronx, Community Gardens Gain Recognition
Lawmakers in Albany voted to designate community gardens statewide as crucial to the urban environment, especially in the fight against climate change. The bill awaits the governor’s signature but the role of these gardens stretches back decades.
The Morning Glory garden in the West Farms section of the Bronx is among more than 500 community gardens in New York City.
Sheryll Durrant left her family farm in Jamaica in 1989 and embarked on a career in corporate marketing. But after the 2008 financial meltdown, she reconsidered her life.
She returned to her roots.
Now she runs a thriving urban farm wedged into a triangular plot in the Bronx, between the Grand Concourse and the Metro North railroad tracks. At her farm, New Roots Garden, membership consists of refugees and migrants, resettled by the International Rescue Committee, whose herbs and vegetables sustain their memories of home.
“Just putting your hands in soil is a form of healing,” Ms. Durrant, 63, said. Continue reading
We have referenced Françoise Mouly once before, but the art of Christoph Niemann many more times. This one is not fun, more of a gut punch; but at the source scroll down and see all the other covers on the same theme:
Christoph Niemann’s “Recipe for Disaster”
The artist expresses his sense of urgency about the emergency unfolding all around us.
News cycles, by nature, tend to document crises as discrete events. Suffusive emergencies—like the climate crisis—are captured mostly in the accelerating pace and frequency of such coverage. Continue reading
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
During my two years working in southern Chile I was close several times to going further south. In spite of my disappointment at the time, in hindsight I am fine with not having made the journey. Thank you, Sara Clemence, for getting that clear in my head:
Take Antarctica off your travel bucket list.
On the southernmost continent, you can see enormous stretches of wind-sculpted ice that seem carved from marble, and others that are smooth and green as emerald. You can see icebergs, whales, emperor penguins. Visitors have described the place as otherworldly, magical, and majestic. The light, Jon Krakauer has said, is so ravishing, “you get drugged by it.”
Travelers are drawn to Antarctica for what they can find there—the wildlife, the scenery, the sense of adventure—and for what they can’t: cars, buildings, cell towers. They talk about the overwhelming silence. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge called it “the quietest place I have ever been.” Continue reading
Paris’ iconic zinc roofs can heat up to 194 degrees F on a hot summer day. JAN WOITAS / PICTURE-ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES
We have celebrated the many greening efforts made in Paris over the last decade, and today is a small but important addition to our knowledge of those commitments. Our thanks to Jeff Goodell in Yale e360:
A rendering of a rooftop terrace installed by the Parisian startup Roofscapes. ROOFSCAPES
Paris When It Sizzles: The City of Light Aims to Get Smart on Heat
With its zinc roofs and minimal tree cover, Paris was not built to handle the new era of extreme heat. Now, like other cities worldwide, it is looking at ways to adapt to rising temperatures — planting rooftop terraces, rethinking its pavements, and greening its boulevards.
The tree-lined Boulevard des Italiens is much cooler than nearby streets that lack trees. MBZT VIA WIKIPEDIA
There’s a long tradition in France of taking August off for holiday. Paris virtually shuts down as the temperature drifts around in the seventies, and people go to the beach or the mountains to cool off and relax. Think of it as an old‑fashioned adaptation to heat. People who stick around during August are often older or have jobs that require them to stay and keep the city functioning. Continue reading
Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Bill McKibben’s occasional optimism notwithstanding, he and Al Gore are the two most visible alarmists on climate change. Even in the worst of circumstances both find reason to point out our remaining options for actually doing something.
Our thanks to David Gelles and the New York Times for rounding out the doom and gloom with a bit of hope:
Al Gore on Extreme Heat and the Fight Against Fossil Fuels
The past few weeks have him even more worried than usual.
It’s been 17 years since former Vice President Al Gore raised the alarm about climate change with his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, he’s been shouting from the rooftops about the risks of global warming more or less nonstop. Continue reading
Illustration by João Fazenda
Bill McKibben acknowledges in his most recent newsletter that in spite of all his efforts over the decades, he and we all are failing on climate change mitigation. But he has not given up hope:
A rapid end to burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating that has caused extreme damage in recent weeks; and that rapid end is possible.
In the list of ill-timed corporate announcements, historians may someday give pride of place to one made by Wael Sawan, the new C.E.O. of Shell, the largest energy company in Europe. In 2021, Shell said that it would reduce oil and gas production by one to two per cent a year up to 2030—a modest gesture in the direction of an energy transition. Continue reading
Jeff Goodell shares his opinion in the newspaper of record in the USA. It will serve as a preview of his book to the right, reviewed here. He has also spoken about this topic. There is no pleasure to be had here. Only awareness, and the question why we are not doing more:
In Texas, Dead Fish and Red-Faced Desperation Are Signs of Things to Come
In 2019, I happened to be visiting Phoenix on a 115-degree day. I had a meeting one afternoon about 10 blocks from the hotel where I was staying downtown. I gamely thought I’d brave the heat and walk to it. How bad could the heat really be? I grew up in California, not the Arctic. I thought I knew heat. I was wrong. After walking three blocks, I felt dizzy. After seven blocks, my heart was pounding. After 10 blocks, I thought I was a goner. Continue reading
Organikos 