At the intersection of our coffee business and our work with local artisans, there is Ceiba. Today, just a snapshot and a few words celebrating this brush, a prototype that Ceiba shared with us to test out. They did not specifically identify it as a brush for use with a coffee grinder, but for me that is what it is. And it works like a charm.
Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Rajasthan
A Chinese labourer sorting out plastic bottles on the outskirt of Beijing. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images
With over a billion consumers, even with exemptions these bans will hopefully have relevant impacts. Thanks once again to the Guardian for bringing these actions to our attention.
China moves to phase out single-use plastics
Plastic bags to be banned in all major cities by end of 2020, says state planner
China is stepping up restrictions on the production, sale and use of single-use plastic products, according to the state planner, as it seeks to tackle one of the country’s biggest environmental problems.
Vast amounts of untreated plastic waste are buried in landfills or dumped in rivers. The United Nations has identified single-use plastics as one of the world’s biggest environmental challenges.
The national development and reform commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which issued the policy, said plastic bags would be banned in all of China’s major cities by the end of 2020 and banned in all cities and towns in 2022. Markets selling fresh produce will be exempt from the ban until 2025. Continue reading
Baylands Nature Preserve, California
In response to mounting public pressure, Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, announced, in a letter to investors, that the firm will make some modest policy changes related to climate change.
Photograph by Damon Winter / NYT / Redux
One of the authors, also a prolific activist, who we cite most frequently has shared his view on the news we linked to earlier this last week:
Citing Climate Change, BlackRock Will Start Moving Away from Fossil Fuels
By Bill McKibben
If you felt the earth tremble a little bit in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, it was likely caused by the sheer heft of vast amounts of money starting to shift. “Seismic” is the only word to describe the recent decision of the asset-management firm BlackRock to acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis and begin (emphasis on begin) to start redirecting its investments.
By one estimate, there’s about eighty trillion dollars of money on the planet. If that’s correct, then BlackRock’s holding of seven trillion dollars means that nearly a dime of every dollar rests in its digital files, mostly in the form of stocks it invests in for pension funds and the like. So when BlackRock’s C.E.O., Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to investors to explaining that climate change has now put us “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” it marked a watershed moment in climate history. Continue reading
female – Uttarakhand
A 3-D model of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth. Most of what we know about its topography has been gathered by sonar. Only three crewed expeditions have reached the bottom. (Data Design Co)
Our goal of highlighting stories mostly about solutions to environmental issues is being challenged more and more, here being the latest example:
History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin
It’s underwater—and the consequences are unimaginable.
Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair, you probably haven’t spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean. Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it’s a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore. Mountains surge from underwater plains, canyons slice miles deep, hot springs billow through fissures in rock, and streams of heavy brine ooze down hillsides, pooling into undersea lakes.
These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land. Continue reading
Burgenland, Austria
Martin Saavedra
It is a brutal story, and we thank Cathleen O’Grady for telling us about The Price of Protecting Rhinos in the long form narrative such a complex topic deserves:
Conservation has become a war, and park rangers and poachers are the soldiers.
Martin Saavedra
Hsst!” hisses Charles Myeni. “Leave space!” Silently, the men in his anti-poaching unit spread out as they move through the bush in single file, leaving a few feet between them.
Myeni explains his command to me: If a rhinoceros poacher attacks us and we’re all neatly squished together in a line, he whispers, they “can take us all out, one-one-one-one. We’re all gonna die.”
Is he serious? His sardonic half smile is difficult to read. He may just be trying to scare me, the city-dwelling white girl tagging along on his morning patrol through South Africa’s Somkhanda Game Reserve. But I still stick as closely as I can to him and his automatic rifle. Continue reading
Wayanad, Kerala
James Eaton/Birdtour Asia
Thanks to Karen Weintraub for sharing the rare story that our bird-oriented readers will appreciate as breaking news:
Trove of New Bird Species Found on Remote Indonesian Islands
Researchers found 10 new species and subspecies of songbirds off the coast of Sulawesi, with distinct songs and genetics from known birds.
A Togian jungle-flycatcher, one of several new bird species found in the Wallacean islands off Indonesia’s east coast. James Eaton/Birdtour Asia
One day in 2009, Frank Rheindt was wandering up a forested mountainside on an Indonesian island when the skies opened up. He had spent months planning this trip, days finding a charter boat that would carry him to this remote place, and hours plodding uphill, but the local tour guides insisted that the rain would make the search impossible. Continue reading
female – Vijayapur, Karnataka
Damon Winter/The New York Times
He may be late, but better that versus never. Investing with consideration for the environment seemed obvious long ago to some, but not to the decision-makers who most count–those whose investment decisions impact generations to come. Presumably, from the size of fund he manages, one of the most respected investors has decided to do the right thing as best he can, and that may be huge:
BlackRock Will Put Climate Change at Center of Investment Strategy
In his influential annual letter to chief executives, Larry Fink said his firm would avoid investments in companies that “present a high sustainability-related risk.”
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of BlackRock, plans to announce Tuesday that his firm will make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal.
BlackRock is the largest in its field, with nearly $7 trillion under management, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit. Continue reading
Sani Lodge, Ecuador
Bristlecone pines have the look of survivors, not conquerors. Fittingly, they found fame during the Cold War, when atomic tests were taking place not far off, in the Nevada desert. Bristlecones are post-apocalyptic trees, sci-fi trees. Photograph by John Chiara for The New Yorker
Alex Ross mainly writes about music, but when he sets his sights on other important topics his musicality illuminates in a powerful way:
The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees
Bristlecone pines have survived various catastrophes over the millennia, and they may survive humanity.
About forty-five hundred years ago, not long after the completion of the Great Pyramid at Giza, a seed of Pinus longaeva, the Great Basin bristlecone pine, landed on a steep slope in what are now known as the White Mountains, in eastern California. The seed may have travelled there on a gust of wind, its flight aided by a winglike attachment to the nut. Or it could have been planted by a bird known as the Clark’s nutcracker, which likes to hide pine seeds in caches; nutcrackers have phenomenal spatial memory and can recall thousands of such caches. This seed, however, lay undisturbed. On a moist day in fall, or in the wake of melting snows in spring, a seedling appeared above ground—a stubby one-inch stem with a tuft of bright-green shoots.
Most seedlings die within a year; the mortality rate is more than ninety-nine per cent. The survivors are sometimes seen growing in the shadow of a fallen tree. Continue reading
Borneo, Indonesia
Experts have identified oceans as a key battleground in the fight to protect humanity’s natural ‘life support system’. Photograph: Christian Loader/Alamy
The plan provides one possible answer, its execution is an important question:
UN draft plan sets 2030 target to avert Earth’s sixth mass extinction
Paris-style proposal to counter loss of ecosystems and wildlife vital to the future of humanity will go before October summit
Almost a third of the world’s oceans and land should be protected by the end of the decade to stop and reverse biodiversity decline that risks the survival of humanity, according to a draft Paris-style UN agreement on nature.
To combat what scientists have described as the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, the proposal sets a 2030 deadline for the conservation and restoration of ecosystems and wildlife that perform crucial services for humans.
The text, drafted by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, is expected to be adopted by governments in October at a crucial UN summit in the Chinese city of Kunming. It comes after countries largely failed to meet targets for the previous decade agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Continue reading
Iguazú, Argentina
People demonstrate in support outside the trial of 12 activists who stormed and played tennis inside a Credit Suisse office in November 2018. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Bott/AP
We love Greta. We love Roger. We love a strenuous challenge between two strong contenders, as long as the climate may be the beneficiary:
- Credit Suisse closely linked with fossil fuel industry
- #RogerWakeUpNow has been trending on Twitter
Roger Federer has issued a cautiously worded response to mounting criticism, including from climate activist Greta Thunberg, over his sponsorship deal with Credit Suisse. Continue reading
Refugio Pantanos de Villa, Peru
Organikos 