Khasi Hills, Meghalaya
Bird of the Day: Tawny-breasted Wren-Babbler
Khasi Hills, Meghalaya
Senegal’s Plastic Recycling Entrepreneurship
Waste pickers searching for plastics at the main dump in Dakar, Senegal.
The article below, written by Ruth Maclean and accompanied with photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly, is a portrait in developing world green opportunism. It is not a pretty picture, per se, but it is a sight to behold after the market for recycled plastic seemed to implode in recent years. The photo above shows the gritty reality of the work. The photos below show some of the prettier, and more entrepreneurial downstream opportunities from that work:
Workers stripping reusable plastic from mats at the Sosenap factory, which recycles plastic to make mats and carpets in Diamniadio, on the outskirts of Dakar.
‘Everyone’s Looking for Plastic.’ As Waste Rises, So Does Recycling.
Plagued by plastic pollution, Senegal wants to replace pickers at the garbage dump with a formal recycling system that takes advantage of the new market for plastics.
The main event at the outdoor venue for Dakar Fashion Week in December, which had a theme of sustainability.
DAKAR, Senegal — A crowd of people holding curved metal spikes jumped on trash spilling out of a dump truck in Senegal’s biggest landfill, hacking at the garbage to find valuable plastic. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: White-throated Kingfisher
Varca Beach, Goa
Agave, Night, Nectar
Video (click image above): Mexican long-nosed bats drinking nectar from agave flowers at night. Credit: Bat Conservation International
Bats, agave, and half a minute of night-time feeding are in the video above, which is also embedded in this article by Janet Marinelli, published in Yale e360:
How Preserving Agave Could Help Save an Endangered Bat
Drought linked to climate change, along with overgrazing, is destroying the agave plants on which the Mexican long-nosed bat depends. Now, an initiative is trying to restore the balance between the agaves, the bats that feed on them, and the people who live on these lands.
Agaves blooming in Estanque de Norias, Mexico. KRISTEN LEAR / BAT CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL
At the southeast tip of a large valley in the northern Sierra Madre Oriental is the small Mexican town of Estanque de Norias, some 200 miles west of the Texas border at Laredo.
Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Inca Jay
Cosanga, Ecuador
Volunteering For Town-Saving
The Ascutney ski resort once boasted 1,800 vertical feet of skiing on over 50 trails. When it closed for the last time in 2010, it was a crushing blow to the town of West Windsor. Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
Volunteers inspire more volunteerism, so here is another story about a community volunteering to save its own future, thanks to David Goodman and the New York Times for A Town That Saved a Mountain, and a Mountain That Saved a Town:
At the heart of the mountain’s revival is Ascutney Outdoors, a nonprofit with over 100 volunteers that now runs recreation on the mountain. Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
After the Ascutney ski resort in Vermont closed because of erratic snowfall and mismanagement, it threatened to take with it the nearby town of West Windsor. The community took the situation into its own hands.
Jim Lyall briskly skied up Mount Ascutney, eagerly pointing out the view. We were skinning up a ski area in southern Vermont, but the chairlifts are long gone. At the top of the mountain we arrived at an abandoned ski patrol cabin and lift station. A cold breeze whipped through the deserted structures. It had a ghostly, post-apocalyptic feel. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Pied Kingfisher
Kaziranga National Park, Assam
Big Agriculture, Anti-Regulation & Antisocial Behavior
Click any image here to go to an op-ed video that takes just over 14 minutes to watch. You’ll get an inside look into what has happened to food production in the USA, and how, and why.
Summed up, it is all about the power of big-ag lobbying. They want no regulations. They want to decide on their own how to produce food. And it is making a big mess. This anti-regulatory ideology, which has the hallmark of antisocial behavior, is not unique to agricultural lobbyists, but is quite well illustrated by them.
Meet the People Getting Paid to Kill Our Planet
American agriculture is ravaging the air, soil and water. But a powerful lobby has cleverly concealed its damage.
“We’re Cooked” is an Opinion Video series about our broken food system and the three chances you get to help fix it — and save the planet — every day.
The global food system is a wonder of technological and logistical brilliance. It feeds more people than ever, supplying a greater variety of food more cheaply and faster than ever.
It is also causing irreparable harm to the planet. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Rusty-cheeked Scimitar-babbler
Sattal, Uttarakhand
Aesop’s Animals Reviewed In Undark Magazine
An illustration from “Aesop’s Animals” by Hana Ayoob.
The fables attributed to Aesop were mentioned twice in posts in our pages during our first year. Again the following year. And plenty of times since then. But there is plenty more to say about the menagerie, and a new book takes on that task. Dan Falk offers this Book Review: The Science Behind Aesop’s Menagerie in Undark Magazine (click the image above or the title below to read the entire review at the source):
In “Aesop’s Animals,” zoologist Jo Wimpenny provides a guided tour of animal behavior drawn from the classic fables.
SEVERAL CHAPTERS into “Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables,” zoologist and science writer Jo Wimpenny explains that, as a very young girl, she sometimes wanted to be a dog. (In a footnote she credits growing up in Wales for encouraging her “to think outside the box.”) This childhood fantasy, as the reader can readily imagine, involved crawling along the ground on all fours. But that only gets one part-way toward doghood, as the grown-up Wimpenny would come to realize. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Southern White-crowned Shrike
Mokuti Lodge, Namibia
Palm Oil Potential
An oil palm plantation encroaches on a rainforest in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. NANANG SUJANA / CIFOR
Palm oil’s problems, and potential solutions have been catalogued in these pages many times. In this recent story by James Dinneen, writing again for Yale Environment 360, a new potential solution is explored:
Can Synthetic Palm Oil Help Save the World’s Tropical Forests?
Christopher Chuck, a chemical engineer at the University of Bath, is working to produce yeast able to generate more oil from cheaper feedstocks. UNIVERSITY OF BATH
Numerous startups are creating synthetic palm oil in the lab, hoping to slow the loss of tropical forests to oil palm cultivation. But palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil, and producing a synthetic version on a large scale remains a daunting challenge.
Tom Jeffries and Tom Kelleher met at Rutgers University in the 1970s while studying industrially useful microbes. Jeffries went on to run a yeast genomics program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Kelleher spent decades in the biomedical industry, working with biologics like insulin, which are produced by genetically modified microbes in giant, fermenting vats. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Vermilion Cardinal
male
Camarones, La Guajira, Colombia
Cairngorms Connect & Scotland’s Rewilding
Jeremy Roberts examines the root plate of a felled Scots pine. Photograph: Mark Hamblin/The Guardian
Rewilding looks different in earlier posts about Scotland’s pioneering projects. But here is an additional piece of the puzzle worth understanding:
Chopping, twisting, felling: the unruly way to rewild Scotland’s forests
Orderly pine plantations in the Cairngorms are being messed up as part of a plan to let nature thrive
Cairngorms Connect is the UK’s largest land restoration project
The Scots pine plantations in Abernethy forest are the crème de la crème in forestry terms: tall, straight and dense. These plantations were created in the 1930s, and the wood had a variety of uses, from ships’ masts to trench timbers. Now, this woodland is being retrofitted for wildlife as part of the UK’s largest land restoration project because, although it is striking to wander in such a regimented landscape, nature prefers things to be less orderly. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Vermilion Cardinal
females
Camarones, La Guajira, Colombia
Chinatown NYC + Blizzard = View To Behold
View from our window
On a day when we might have been out and about, we are not. From my desk, this view inspires. We lived not far from here 30+ years ago, and so much has changed (especially me) that the city as a whole does not seem familiar. From our Chinatown lodgings, something I crave apart from local food is just outside. For one, old buildings. Even the snowstorm. That said, I will take this view any other day.
Bird of the Day: Tricolored Munia
Cochin, Kerala
Big Win On Climate, Says McKibben
Early offshore action in Texas. the rigs are bigger now—so big that a federal court found yesterday that they’re endangering the climate.
His first book was an early harbinger that we wish had changed the world. Now, decades later, his newsletter is worth subscribing to. When Bill McKibben says something has gone right, we cannot wait to read it:
Something went right!?
Through no fault of its own, Biden’s team gets a big win on climate
Last summer the Biden administration granted the largest set of offshore oil leases in American history. The ironies abounded—Biden had insisted during his campaign that he would not be doing this (“And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” he’d explained during the New Hampshire primary); it was the Interior Department that officially sold the leases, headed by a secretary, Deb Haaland, that environmentalists had fought like crazy to get confirmed. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Gould’s Shortwing
How Are You With Snow?
Shackleton leading the Aurora relief party in the winter of 1916, searching for nine lost men.
We are headed to NYC, where snowy conditions await us. This is the perfect review to read en route, to remind me what others have accomplished in snowy conditions much more extreme:
One Good Antarctic Explorer Deserves Another
Hopefully you have an independent bookshop nearby if you plan to buy this book, but if you want to buy online please support an independent bookshop by clicking on this book image
Here is a test. Scott, Shackleton, Mawson, Amundsen — who comes next? As surely as “10” follows the pattern 2, 4, 6, 8, by almost any measure “Fiennes” is the name that should come after the other four synonymous with Antarctic exploration. To give him his full moniker, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes has probably man-hauled sledges farther, endured more blizzards and lost more fingertips to frostbite than the rest of them put together.
So when Fiennes produces a book about Ernest Shackleton, it should get our attention: It suggests an insider’s look into a very select club. In a sense, that creates a problem. It is easy to set expectations too high, though Fiennes himself is complicit in this. Continue reading
Organikos 