San Isidro el General, Costa Rica
The Effects Of Fire Suppression
A controlled burn near the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland. SARAH BAKER
We have linked to many stories about wildfires over the years, noting their relationship to climate change. Our working assumption seems to have been that fire is always problematic, but here is reason to reconsider that, thanks to Gabriel Popkin and Yale e360:
Bringing Back Fire: How Burning Can Help Restore Eastern Lands
For millennia, North American ecosystems benefited from fire, mostly set by Indigenous people. Now, a movement is growing, particularly in the eastern U.S., to reintroduce controlled burns to forests and grasslands and restore the role of fire in creating biodiverse landscapes.
It’s an apocalyptic scene that has become all too familiar in recent years. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Blue-crowned Chlorophonia
female
Guatemala
Asking So What About Climate Change
Cynthia Rosenzweig at her farm in Tuscany, Italy, in 1969. She now works in a lab at Columbia University but her research takes her to farms around the world.
Shari Lifson
The expected effects of climate change have haunted these pages plenty over the years. We have not heard of this prize before but as practitioners who believe in the value of science, especially the value of good scientific questions, in mitigating those effects we appreciate that the World Food Prize goes to former farmer who answers climate change question: ‘So what?’
For scientist – and former farmer – Cynthia Rosenzweig, her work on climate change has always revolved around one big question: “So what?”
“Impacts of climate change are crucially important,” she says. “If the climate changes and nothing happened, why would we care?” Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Blue-crowned Chlorophonia
male
Guatemala
Indigenous Knowhow & Conservation
Prof Ian McNevin said ‘the scale of Indigenous oyster harvesting is extraordinary’, and compared it to contemporary commercial oyster farms. Photograph: Orjan F Ellingvag/Corbis/Getty Images
Some of us writing in these pages have been fans of oysters primarily for their culinary value (living in France, and then later in Croatia, could create such bias). But we have posted more frequently about the resiliency that oysters have come to represent in the search for protection against climate impact. Here is some more on that topic, intersecting with another theme we pay frequent attention to:
Precolonial First Nations oyster fisheries sustained millennia of intense harvests, study shows
Researchers in Australia and North America say management of oyster reefs should incorporate Indigenous knowledge
Oyster fisheries in Australia and North America survived for up to 10,000 years prior to colonisation, sustaining First Nations communities even under intense harvest, according to new research. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Little Egret
Varca Beach, Goa
Lawns Gone, Good Riddance
Jaime Gonzalez of Par 3 Landscape and Maintenance removed grass at a condominium complex in Las Vegas. The lawn is considered “nonfunctional” under a new state law.
In case you have been to the city, or even just heard about how water is flaunted as a key attraction, and wondered how they can justify such use of a limited resource, then Is That an Outlaw Lawn? Las Vegas Has a New Approach to Saving Water may be worth a few minutes of your time. We recently shared news of a voluntary initiative to reconsider lawns for reasons entirely different from those in the story below. Henry Fountain‘s text accompanied by Joe Buglewicz’s photos, tells the story of Las Vegas lawns, where water resources are so limited, this seems a long time coming:
Mr. Donnarumma documented water running off a sidewalk into the curb from sprinkler overspray.
With drought and growth taking a toll on the Colorado River, the source of 90 percent of the region’s water, a new law mandates the removal of turf, patch by patch.
LAS VEGAS — It was a perfectly decent patch of lawn, several hundred square feet of grass in a condominium community on this city’s western edge. But Jaime Gonzalez, a worker with a local landscaping firm, had a job to do. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Yellow-headed Caracara
San Isidro de General, Costa Rica
Personal Approaches To Carbon Footprint Reduction
Recycle to save the planet? Photograph: Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd/Getty Images
A public service request for your input, from the Guardian:
What is the single most effective thing I could do to reduce my carbon footprint?
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts
What is the single most effective thing I could do to reduce my carbon footprint? Without dying, preferably. Andrew Hufnagel, Caithness
Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published on Sunday.
Bird of the Day: Paradise Flycatcher
Ranthambhore National Park, Rajasthan
Food Waste Progress
Behind the scenes at CORe, Waste Management’s Central Organics Recycling facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where food waste is processed to be added to wastewater and turned into biogas and fertilizer. Photo by Saima Sidik.
Food waste has been a perennial topic in these pages since we started covering environmental issues. Thanks to Gastropod for point us to the future of this topic:
Black Gold: The Future Of Food…We Throw Away
Food takes up more space in American landfills than anything else. About 30 to 40 percent of food produced in the US gets thrown away, rather than eaten. What’s more, putting all that rotting food inside landfills produces a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: White-browed Wagtail
Varca Beach, Goa
First Drafts Of History
First reading of the day was this essay by a historian linked to once and referred to one time previously. And next up, the conscience of our generation compounds the idea, or rather pounds the idea home about who is writing the first draft of what will become our history, by defining reality as we see it today. I have listened to conversations with Daniel Yergin twice recently, and acknowledge being sucked into his expert definition of how to understand the fossil fuel world. I appreciate McKibben’s cold water on my face:
Who gets to define reality?
A search for the climate high ground
“Realism” is the high ground in politics—a high ground from which to rain down artillery fire on new ideas.
To wit, this week the New York Times profiled Canadian energy analyst Vaclav Smil, who—alongside others like Daniel Yergin—has long insisted that the transformation from fossil fuels to hydrocarbons must take a long time. Smil is a good writer and a smart historian; he’s documented the many-decades-long transitions from, say, wood to coal, and coal to oil as dominant energy sources. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Orange-fronted Parakeet
Playa Hermosa, Costa Rica
Sensory Loading, Overloading & Unloading
In early August, 2007 we arrived in a leafy suburb on the north side of Atlanta. We had spent the previous year living on this island, where doors did not have locks and during the daytime the only man-made sounds tended to be those of fishing boats coming and going. At night on that island there were no noises other than nature’s, including small waves hitting the shores and in summertime the crickets. On the first night in Atlanta I opened the window to let in the night air, and the sound of the superhighway, a mile or so away, was distracting enough that I had to close the window to sleep. It’s not that I had not appreciated the quiet of the island, but I was surprised by how much I had adapted to it. The opening of this book review, for these reasons, resonates with my own experience:
Sounds Wild and Broken review – a moving paean to Earth’s fraying soundtrack
David George Haskell’s often wonderful book explores some of the lost frequencies of nature – heard clearly again during Covid’s initial human hush
Lockdown was, among other things, a sudden collective experiment in volume control. Sound waves from the regular rush-hour thrum of cities usually penetrate more than a kilometre below the Earth’s surface. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Spotted Sandpiper
El Paredon, Guatemala
Unexpectedly Amazing In Kerala
Shaji has a prized collection of more than 200 varieties of tubers. Photograph: Shaji NM
In our Kerala days we visited Wayanad many times, but I would remember if I had met Shaji. We would have sought his advice to expand on the agricultural initiatives at the properties we developed and managed. Monika Mondal’s story ‘The tuber man of Kerala’ on a quest to champion India’s rare and indigenous crops brings back memories of unassuming neighbors doing unexpectedly amazing things:
Shaji NM has devoted his life to collecting and farming tubers such as yam, cassava and taro, and promoting them across the country
Shaji NM has spent the past two decades travelling across India to collect rare indigenous tubers. Photograph: Shaji NM
Known as “the tuber man of Kerala”, Shaji NM has travelled throughout India over the past two decades, sometimes inspecting bushes in tribal villages, at other times studying the ground of forests closer to home among the green hills of Wayanad in Kerala. His one purpose, and what earned him his title, is to collect rare indigenous varieties of tuber crops.
“People call me crazy, but it’s for the love of tubers that I do what I do,” says Shaji. “I have developed an emotional relationship with the tuber. When we did not have anything to eat, we had tubers.” Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Mangrove Cuckoo
Playa El Rey Rice Fields, Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica
Nature’s Energy Storage Potential
Decarbonization would be easier if we could bank clean energy for later. Illustrations by Hudson Christie
Thanks to Matthew Hutson for the article in the current edition of the New Yorker titled The Renewable-Energy Revolution Will Need Renewable Storage:
Can gravity, pressure, and other elemental forces save us from becoming a battery-powered civilization?
We need to vastly expand our energy-storage capacity if we’re to avoid climate catastrophe.
The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources stop renewing until the weather, or the planet, turns. Continue reading
Organikos 