Rishi’s Wrong, Skidmore’s Right

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Chris Skidmore said he could ‘no longer condone nor continue to support a government that is committed to a course of action that I know is wrong’. Photograph: Chris McAndrew/UK Parliament/PA

We rarely applaud those on the right side of the political spectrum when it comes to environmental issues. Most have been on the wrong side of history with regard to climate change. When one stands up and challenges the status quo, applause applause:

Chris Skidmore resigns Conservative whip over Sunak’s oil and gas licence plan

Former minister also resigns as an MP, which will trigger byelection in his Kingswood constituency

A former Conservative minister has announced he is resigning as an MP in protest at the party’s dash for oil and gas, setting up an awkward vote for the prime minister on the issue on Monday and an even more difficult byelection within weeks. Continue reading →

Dragon Fruit, Pineapple & Tropical Mix, Oh My

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It started with the dehydrated Pitaya. I was sent a sample. I did not open it for many days because the last time a food artisan tried making something from this fruit I did not like it. Love the fruit, did not love that attempt at hot sauce. The man who sent me the sample called me to ask how I liked what he sent, and because the sample was sitting right next to me I opened it and tried it. Oh. My.

Then I opened the pineapple. Oh my, again.

And then the mix of mango, pineapple and papaya, the latter of which is difficult to dehydrate without making tough to chew. Again, oh my.

So now all three are in our packaging, and going in the Authentica shops today.

Give Earth A Chance, & Other EcoPosters

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A poster from 1970 by Milton Glaser. via Poster House

If you happen to be in New York City and enjoy graphic design related to conservation you might enjoy this:

Told Ya So: The Prescient Posters of the Environmental Movement

Graphic artists have been helping call attention to climate change for decades, and a new exhibition charts the evolution of their pleas.

Last year was the warmest in recorded history. The graphic artists of the environmental movement tried to warn us. Their posters aimed to scare people straight with pictures of ecological ruin, or glorified nature, clean air and water, sunshine and verdure. Some offered earworm-y slogans and haunting visuals. Whatever their approach — bright, witty, somber, blunt, even sexy — they sought an image, a phrase, that could change enough minds to literally save the world. Continue reading →

Tipped Bus, Photo Found, Auspicious Start

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Authentica’s opening at Hacienda El Viejo over the last couple weeks has been more auspicious than the interrupted bus ride pictured here. That said, we all seem to have kept our sense of humor intact, and maybe learned something about resiliency. It has come in handy over the 25 years since then.

Ted Greene’s Treetime

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Thanks to the Guardian for bringing the above book to our attention:

‘The trees are trying to tell us things’: the ecologist championing Britain’s ancient forests

Ted Green, a conservation adviser to the crown estate at Windsor, has a provocative take on our ‘living heritage’

Ted Green is a rebel. He calls sheep “land maggots”. A horse-riding centre is “a dog-food complex”. And the ancient tree expert’s new book includes a photo of him sticking up two fingers at a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Continue reading →

More Honey & Bees, Also

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Tarkis Ríos Ushiñahua harvesting honey from stingless bees in a tree-trunk hive, at her home in Puerto Huamán in the Peruvian Amazon, 2019. [Hannah Hutchinson]

Along with anything else to get 2024 off to a good start, an article by Andrew Wingfield and Michael P. Gilmore that we missed from last year. The topic is one that we have only briefly touched on a couple times. The wider world of honey and the bees responsible for it are topics we hope to share more of this year.

To begin, let this bring some joy:

A Sweet and Potent Harvest

Tarkis Ríos Ushiñahua teaches her daughter to divide a hive, 2022. [Dylan Francis]

For the Maijuna of the Peruvian Amazon, harvesting honey from stingless bees is bringing prosperity and empowerment. Local beekeeping might also help preserve a vast ancestral forest.When Tarkis Ríos Ushiñahua collects honey from one of her beehives, she wears no protective clothing and uses just one tool, a large plastic syringe. 1 As she lifts the lid from the wooden box housing the hive, the bees swarm. They buzz around her face, land on her back, and settle in strands of her straight black hair, but they do no harm — these bees are stingless.

The bee yard of Loida Ríos Tamayo and Saúl Peterman Mosoline, 2021. [Enrique Redondo Navarro]

The slender tip of Ríos Ushiñahua’s syringe fits neatly inside the hive’s honeypots, brownish, papery-looking pouches that the bees have fashioned from wax and plant resins. Continue reading →

More Civic Responsibility In 2024, Please

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THR illustration.

Civic responsibility, short in supply in 2023, is worth pondering. The always interesting Hedgehog Review gets our vote for this final article link of 2023:

No Exit

The Uncivil Folly of Libertarian Flight
David Bosworth

Of all 36 ways to get out of trouble, the best way is—leave. —Chinese proverb

One of the scandalous revelations of the COVID pandemic was just how many of America’s superrich—our digerati, venture capitalists, corporate monopolists, hedge fund managers—had long been planning to abandon their fellow citizens should a dire national crisis arise. While poorly paid EMTs and other frontline health workers were risking their lives caring for the desperately ill, wealthy Americans who had amassed their fortunes during our tech-driven Gilded Age were fueling their private jets and stocking their remote shelters in unabashed displays of their proudly vaunted libertarian creed. Continue reading →

Franzen, In The Interest Of Birds, Debunks A Myth

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A long-serving animal-control officer described a system intensely pressured to keep animals moving through it. “No Kill sounds great,” the officer said. “But it’s a myth.”Illustration by Antoine Maillard

We have Jonathan Franzen to thank for some of the best writing on caring more about birds, and he helps close out 2023 with a detailed look at the implications and complications of a cat population explosion:

How the “No Kill” Movement Betrays Its Name

By keeping cats outdoors, trap-neuter-release policies have troubling consequences for city residents, local wildlife—and even the cats themselves.

This past June, at the height of kitten season in Los Angeles, Gail Raff got a call for help from the neighborhood of Valley Glen, where a young woman had trapped a cat that needed fixing. Although the City of Los Angeles subsidizes the sterilization of unowned cats, appointments at clinics are hard to come by, and Raff was known in the animal-rescue world as a trapper who secures as many appointments as she can. Continue reading →

Avocados & Michoacán

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An avocado farm in Yoricostio, Michoacán. All photographs from Mexico, August 2023, by Balazs Gardi for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

A decade ago we thought we should source from Harper’s more, but its blog no longer exists to read the whole story that prompted that idea. Still going strong after 173 years of publication, this recent article in the magazine helps us understand what is wrong with one of our favorite farm products:

Forbidden Fruit
by Alexander Sammon

The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán

Phone service was down—a fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm—and even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard manning the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military, refused to wave me through. My guide, Uli Escamilla, assured him that we had an appointment, and that we could prove it if only we could call or text our envoy. The officer gripped his rifle with both hands and peered into the windows of our rental car. We tried to explain ourselves: we were journalists writing about the town’s war with the avocado, and had plans to meet with the local council. We finally managed to recall the first name of our point person on the council—Marcos—and after repeating it a number of times, we were let through. Continue reading →

Mike Hulme’s Climate Change Isn’t Everything, Reviewed

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Nicholas Clairmont reviews the book in this publication we have recently been following:

Warm Planet, Cool Heads

A new book warns against pushing all the world’s problems into the climate bucket.

Mike Hulme, a Cambridge professor of human geography who has served on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and holds a certificate for his contributions to that body’s climate science from when it was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, is no climate denier. And yet time and again in his new book he is at pains to preempt the charge that, actually, he is. “Again, don’t misread me,” he writes at one point, “climate kills and climate change is real.” Elsewhere in the book he describes human-caused climate change as a “scientifically well-established fact.” So why the anxiety that readers will say, as he anticipates, “you sound just like a climate denier”? Continue reading →