Yaxha National Park, Guatemala
Bird of the Day: Brown-hooded Parrot
Yaxha National Park, Guatemala
Big Turbines, Big Location, Big Wind Farm
Image via U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
A map shows the location of Dominion’s federal lease and where the company proposes to run associated infrastructure.
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) station WHRO for this news.
It is a big deal:
Dominion can soon start building Virginia Beach offshore wind farm, feds say
Dominion Energy will soon have the green light to start building its long-awaited wind farm off the Virginia Beach coast.
Dominion Energy’s pilot turbines off Virginia Beach this summer. (Photo by Laura Philion)
The Biden administration announced Tuesday its approval of the $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which when constructed will be the largest in the country’s history.
Dominion can now start constructing infrastructure for the project on-shore, said spokesperson Jeremy Slayton. The company just needs the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to OK its construction and operations plan for the offshore farm. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Walden’s Scops Owl
Andaman Islands
Frightening Future Facts For All Hallows’ Eve
Faced with climate change on the one hand and the material demands of new energy infrastructure on the other, humanity had better figure out how to reuse the resources it has already dug up. Illustration by Laura Edelbacher
Not to rain on the parade of the candy and costumes fun of October 31, but to heighten the mood of the day with some sobering truths facing all of us, our thanks as always to Elizabeth Kolbert for getting our attention pointed where it needs to go:
The Real Cost of Plundering the Planet’s Resources
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Woodland Kingfisher
Legon Botanical Gardens, Accra, Ghana
Crowdsourcing & OED
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Wikimedia; Getty.
The origins and uses of words have been of interest to us since early on, because the terminology around conservation is relatively young; also because words are essential to the cause. Stephanie Hayes, writing this review in the Atlantic, reminds us to keep paying attention to how we know what we know about words:
Who Made the Oxford English Dictionary?
A new book gives life to one of the world’s greatest crowdsourcing efforts.
The Oxford English Dictionary always seemed to me like the Rules from on high—near biblical, laid down long ago by a distant academic elite. But back in 1857, when the idea of the dictionary was born, its three founders proposed something more democratic than authoritative: a reference book that didn’t prescribe but instead described English, tracking the meaning of every word in the language across time and laying out how people were actually using each one. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black Woodpecker
Seewinkel National Park, Austria
Removing Environmental Protections Will Not Seem So Clever In Hindsight
Sunset in the trees at Manatee Springs, Florida. Photograph: Michael Warren/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Oliver Milman, again, brings our attention to an environmental activism that deserves attention, this time for all the wrong reasons:
Experts fear half of the 290m wetland acres have lost federal protection and could be at risk from developers
Lake Caddo, on the border between Louisiana and Texas, is a beautiful cypress swamp. Photograph: wanderluster/Getty Images
Often dismissed as dismal wet bogs and rampantly cleared since European arrival in the US, the underappreciated importance of wetlands has been placed into sharp relief by a supreme court ruling that has plunged many of these ecosystems into new peril.
The extent of wetlands, areas covered or saturated by water that encompass marshes, swamps and carbon-rich peatlands, has shrunk by 40% over the past 300 years as the US drained and filled them in for housing, highways, parking lots, golf courses and other uses. Globally, wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests are. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Yellow-throated Longclaw
Nairobi National Park, Kenya
Frogs, Western Ghats & Science
Sathyabhama Das Biju (from left), James Hanken, Harvard’s Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, and Sonali Garg during a June 2023 field trip to study amphibians in the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot in India. Photo by A.J. Joji
During our seven years living and working in the Western Ghats we came to appreciate frogs through the eyes of our family, those of our staff, as well as travelers and occasional scientific references (the man on the left in the photo to the left having shown up in our pages one of those times). Good to know that the science is being shared for good cause, thanks to Anne J. Manning in this article for the Harvard Gazette:
The Indian Purple Frog, first described by Sathyabhama Das Biju in 2003.
Indian herpetologists bring their life’s work to Harvard just as study shows a world increasingly hostile to the fate of amphibians
Having pulled themselves from the water 360 million years ago, amphibians are our ancient forebears, the first vertebrates to inhabit land.
After 136 years from its original description, Günther’s shrub frog was recently rediscovered in the wild. Credit: S.D. Biju and Sonali Garg
Now, this diverse group of animals faces existential threats from climate change, habitat destruction, and disease. Two Harvard-affiliated scientists from India are drawing on decades of study — and an enduring love for the natural world — to sound a call to action to protect amphibians, and in particular, frogs.
Sathyabhama Das Biju, the Hrdy Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor at the University of Delhi, and his former student Sonali Garg, now a biodiversity postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, are co-authors of a sobering new study in Nature, featured on the journal’s print cover, that assesses the global status of amphibians. It is a follow-up to a 2004 study about amphibian declines.
Franky’s narrow-mouthed frog is among the threatened species. Credit: S.D. Biju and Sonali Garg
Biju and Garg are experts in frog biology who specialize in the discovery and description of new species. Through laborious fieldwork, they have documented more than 100 new frog species across India, Sri Lanka, and other parts of the subcontinent.
According to the Nature study, which evaluated more than 8,000 amphibian species worldwide, two out of every five amphibians are now threatened with extinction. Climate change is one of the main drivers. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Northern Parula
Male
Pedernales River Area, TX
Hurricane Otis & A Gut Punch
Acapulco shows signs of Hurricane Otis’s devastation on Wednesday.Photograph by Francisco Robles / AFP / Getty
While Acapulco got pummeled, a climate denier was elected to lead the majority party in the US House of Representatives, a different kind of gut punch. Thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for this juxtaposition of facts:
Hurricane Otis and the World We Live in Now
The unexpected Category 5 storm is just the latest in a series of unprecedented climate disasters this year.
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Otis crashed into the western coast of Mexico, just north of the resort city of Acapulco. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Limpkin
Trust, The Most Essential Technology
Eric Risberg/Associated Press
On occasion, Ezra Klein’s work overlaps with themes of interest to us in these pages. Today is one of those days:
The Chief Ideologist of the Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas
In July, Marc Andreessen — the godfather of the web browser, one of the founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and arguably the chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite — published a Substack piece that struck me as unusually revealing.
This was back when Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were considering whether to settle their differences once and for all by beating on each other in a cage. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Brown-throated Wattle-eye
Yaoundé, Cameroon
Civil Disobedience & Civil Response
A sign made by William Rixon, who has been protesting L.L. Bean’s partnership with Citibank to offer the Bean Bucks credit card. Courtesy photo
Thanks to Bill McKibben for bringing this to our attention. And kudos to L.L. Bean’s CEO for having the decency to respond to this activist’s efforts to raise awareness of the company’s climate-unfriendly banking choice. Iconic companies messaging their environmental responsibilities need to be held to the same standard as the lousiest companies.
Climate demonstrator outside L.L. Bean gets surprise visit from CEO
Bill Rixon outside the L.L. Bean retail store earlier this month. He was joined by Molly Schen, a member of Third Act Maine. Luna Soley / The Times Record
Freeport resident and retired schoolteacher William Rixon has been demonstrating outside L.L. Bean since the beginning of September. This week, he got a response.
“PROTECT MOTHER EARTH,” William Rixon’s homemade climate banner reads. Assembled with drop cloth and PVC piping, it stands at 10 feet, dwarfing Rixon.
Since September, Rixon and a group of fellow retirees have been standing with signs outside L.L. Bean’s sprawling downtown Freeport campus as well as its corporate headquarters just down the road. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Painted Bunting
Comal County, TX
Really, Poland Spring?
Tristan Spinski
We all need drinking water. Those of us lucky enough to have good quality water from a public source can avoid bottled water, but still too many need or want what Poland Spring sells.
The New York Times deserves high praise for this series on water abuses, especially Hiroko Tabuchi‘s reporting on Poland Springs and its parent company’s practices:
Inside Poland Spring’s Hidden Attack on Water Rules It Didn’t Like
The BlueTriton bottling plant in Poland Spring, Maine, this month.
When Maine lawmakers tried to tighten regulations on large-scale access to water, the brand’s little-known parent company set out to rewrite the rules.
When Maine lawmakers tried to rein in large-scale access to the state’s freshwater this year, the effort initially gained momentum. The state had just emerged from drought, and many Mainers were sympathetic to protecting their snow-fed lakes and streams.
Water trucks filling up at a Poland Spring facility in Lincoln, Maine.
Then a Wall Street-backed giant called BlueTriton stepped in.
BlueTriton isn’t a household name, but its products are. Americans today buy more bottled water than any other packaged drink, and BlueTriton owns many of the nation’s biggest brands, including Poland Spring, which is named after a natural spring in Maine that ran dry decades ago.
Maine’s bill threatened BlueTriton’s access to the groundwater it bottles and sells. The legislation had already gotten a majority vote on the committee and was headed toward the full Legislature, when a lobbyist for BlueTriton proposed an amendment that would gut the entire bill. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Hildebrandt’s Starling
Nairobi National Park, Kenya
Pop-up Lake At Badwater Basin Salt Flats, Death Valley
Visitors gather at the sprawling temporary lake in the Badwater Basin salt flats of Death Valley national park, California. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
We had been wondering what the place might look like after Burning Man brought the rare weather to our attention:
Death Valley visitors delight in rare ephemeral lakes left behind by storm
Shimmering bodies of water have appeared in the sand dunes of the recently reopened national park after a summer deluge
After months of closure, visitors to Death Valley national park are being greeted by stunning new features, including lakes left behind by a ferocious summer deluge. Continue reading
Organikos 