El Encinal, Guatemala
Bird of the Day: Gray Silky-flycatcher
El Encinal, Guatemala
Seeding Clouds To Relieve Megadrought
Cloud seeding equipment on the wing of plane flying over North Dakota. JIM BRANDENBURG VIA MINDEN PICTURES
Times are tough with regard to water, among other things. Tough times call for creative measures. Be creative, but also beware of unintended consequences:
Can Cloud Seeding Help Quench the Thirst of the U.S. West?
In the midst of an historic megadrought, states in the American West are embracing cloud seeding to increase snow and rainfall. Recent research suggests that the decades-old approach can be effective, though questions remain about how much water it can wring from the sky.
Not since Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D. has the American West been so dry. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Stork-billed Kingfisher
Malayatoor, Kerala
Circularity & The Future Of Recycling Plastic
Getty
Since our earliest days we have had team members searching for news on the subject of plastic, and what to do about it. The Atlantic, publishing an article by Ula Chrobak that was originally featured in Undark, points out The False Promise of Plastic Recycling:
A French company has a new solution to the plastic problem. Not everyone is buying it.
Since the first factories began manufacturing polyester from petroleum in the 1950s, humans have produced an estimated 9.1 billion tons of plastic. Of the waste generated from that plastic, less than a tenth of that has been recycled, researchers estimate. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Brown Rock Chat
Vijayapura, Karnataka
Less Beef Is Better, No Beef Is Best
A beef rib lifter stacked with strip steak and a sagebrush tree. Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Styled by Martin Bourne
The photo to the left might have appealed to me last year or earlier. But having tried giving up beef for so long, and finally prevailing, now it has no appeal. It does not disgust me, but I expect to get there.
Ligaya Mishan’s article What Does the End of Beef Mean for Our Sense of Self? has excellent photography by Kyoko Hamada.
My highest compliment is reserved for the stylist Martin Bourne, for making the photos just slightly creepy, matching my current emotional response to looking at beef.
Strip steaks alongside a piece of sirloin tip. Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Styled by Martin Bourne
When it comes to America’s legacy of Manifest Destiny, there’s perhaps no meal more symbolic than a bleeding steak. So who are we now that we’re consuming less red meat?
MEAT IS PRIMAL, or so some of us think: that humans have always eaten it; that it is the anchor of a meal, the central dish around which other foods revolve, like courtiers around a king; that only outliers have ever refused it. But today, those imagined outliers are multiplying. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the consumption of beef per capita worldwide has declined for 15 years. Nearly a fourth of Americans claimed to have eaten less meat in 2019, according to a Gallup poll. The recipe site Epicurious, which reaches an audience of 10 million, phased out beef as an ingredient in new recipes in 2020. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Tennessee Warbler
Antigua de Guatemala, Guatemala
Technically Food
We instinctively favor real food, but this author’s book has our attention:
The inside story of the paradigm shift transforming the food we eat, and the companies behind it.
Eating a veggie burger used to mean consuming a mushy, flavorless patty that you would never confuse with a beef burger. But now products from companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Eat Just that were once fringe players in the food space are dominating the media, the refrigerated sections of our grocery stores, and, increasingly, the world. With the help of scientists working in futuristic labs––making milk without cows, and eggs without chickens––startups are creating wholly new food categories. Real food is being replaced by high-tech. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Orange-breasted Falcon
Parque Nacional Tikal, Guatemala
Stenophylla, A Coffee With Real Potential & Poster Child For Food Diversity
Our thanks to Dan Saladino, a food journalist and author of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them as well as recipient of a James Beard Award for food journalism.
He offers an inside look at a relatively unknown coffee varietal with potential, and at the same time, an argument in favor of diversity, in his article Edible Extinction: Why We Need to Revive Global Food Diversity:
A Khasi farmer growing millet in Meghalaya, India. NORTH EAST SLOW FOOD & AGROBIODIVERSITY SOCIETY
The Green Revolution helped feed a surging global population, but at the cost of impoverishing crop diversity. Now, with climate change increasingly threatening food supplies, the need for greater agricultural resilience means restoring endangered crop and food varieties.
Stenophylla beans up close. RBG KEW; KLAUS STEINKAMP / ALAMY
In August 2020, inside the cupping room of a London roastery, a team of botanists and baristas gathered to taste a coffee species that most believed had been lost forever. It was an important moment. Coffee experts had spent years searching in West Africa for the few remaining trees of this species, even issuing “wanted posters” to farmers asking if they had seen it. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Little Ringed Plover
Desert National Park, Rajasthan
Plastic, The Gift That Keeps Giving
An artwork at the Nairobi summit venue by the artist Benjamin von Wong, made with rubbish from Kibera slum, urging people to ‘turn off the plastic tap’. Photograph: Monicah Mwangi/Reuters
We have endless opportunities to demonstrate leadership, thanks to plastic:
World leaders agree to draw up ‘historic’ treaty on plastic waste
UN environment assembly resolution is being hailed as biggest climate deal since 2015 Paris accord
World leaders, environment ministers and other representatives from 173 countries have agreed to develop a legally binding treaty on plastics, in what many described a truly historic moment. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Green Bee-eater
Qeshm Island, Iran
As The World Burns
Heat waves have become hotter, droughts deeper, and wildfires more frequent, the I.P.C.C. report states, and the window of time for doing anything about it is fast closing. Photograph by David McNew / Getty
Even as a geopolitical crisis has our full attention, we cannot ignore other important information about our shared future. Click through to the magazine website where one of our favored interpreters of environmental news helps us understand how The Latest U.N. Climate Report Paints Another Grim Picture:
The Secretary-General cites a “criminal” abdication of leadership. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case that may hamper emissions regulations.
There were two front-page-worthy developments on Monday in the world of climate policy. Perhaps even more significant than either one was the fact that they were at cross-purposes. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: White-capped Redstart
Rishikesh, Uttarakhand
We Have Seen The Future, And It Is Youthful
Sunrise models itself on the civil-rights movement of the fifties and sixties. Photograph by Evan Jenkins for The New Yorker
In the current issue of the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz offers an inside view of The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics; we can only hope they succeed where previous generations have failed:
Sunrise has already shifted the conventional wisdom about climate change. Now it wants to create a mass movement, combining street protest with policy negotiation, while there’s still time.
On the evening of November 12, 2018, six days after being elected to Congress and six weeks before being sworn in, the socialist Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked into an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. Inside, more than a hundred activists in their teens and twenties milled around a font of holy water, wearing nametags on their flannel and fleece, eating pizza from paper plates. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Downy Woodpecker
Anderson Mill District, Central Texas
Subsidizing Environmental Degradation Must End
An electoral poster objecting to a proposed ban on subsidies for Swiss farms. A 2021 report found almost 90% of global farming subsidies are harmful. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty
We missed this when it was first published a couple weeks ago, but it is still fresh and important:
World spends $1.8tn a year on subsidies that harm environment, study finds
Research prompts warnings humanity is ‘financing its own extinction’ through subsidies damaging to the climate and wildlife
The world is spending at least $1.8tn (£1.3tn) every year on subsidies driving the annihilation of wildlife and a rise in global heating, according to a new study, prompting warnings that humanity is financing its own extinction. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Wire-crested Thorntail
Wild Sumaco, Ecuador
What Remains, A Documentary
In this short documentary film by Paavo Hanninen, with text by David Kortava, the director says “It’s kind of a tragic story of the herculean effort that’s required just to build 1.3 miles of coastline”:
Protecting Louisiana’s Coastline with Oyster Shells in “What Remains”
Paavo Hanninen’s documentary looks at a surprisingly simple intervention with the potential to slow runaway land loss along the state’s fragile coast.
As early as the nineteen-thirties, oystermen in southern Louisiana began to notice the shoreline that they worked was creeping inland. Continue reading
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