Starbucks Puzzles

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Hannah Rosenberg/Sun File Photo. Cornell will be terminating its partnership with Starbucks following a recent National Labor Relations Board ruling.

While lecturing on social enterprise recently, as I have done each semester in recent years, I learned the following news from a student and found the article below in the University’s newspaper to explain it:

Cornell to End Partnership With Starbucks by June 2025

Cornell will be terminating its partnership with Starbucks no later than the expiration of its current contract, Student Assembly President Patrick Kuehl ’24 announced in an Aug. 16 email to the student body. The contract is set to expire in June 2025…

Thanks to Jonathan Mong at the Cornell Daily Sun for that clear explanation, worth reading in full if you care about the coffee business, and/or the basics of labor law in the USA. Bravo to the University for its consistent stand upholding those labor laws. Starbucks, a company I once admired without reservation, now primarily puzzles and frequently disappoints me:

Starbucks increases U.S. hourly wages and adds other benefits for non-union workers

Starbucks is increasing pay and benefits for most of its U.S. hourly workers after ending its fiscal year with record sales. Continue reading →

Endangered Eating By Sarah Lohman

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The author, culinary historian Sarah Lohman, came to our attention at the time her previous book was being published, and we are happy to see more of her work. From her own website:

American food traditions are in danger of being lost. How do we save them?

Apples, a common New England crop, have been called the United States’ “most endangered food.” The iconic Texas Longhorn Cattle is categorized at “critical” risk for extinction. Unique date palms, found nowhere else on the planet, grow in California’s Coachella Valley —but the family farms that caretake them are shutting down…

And the reviews suggest that the book is every bit as good as the author had hoped it would be.

Cruise Ships Constantly Careless

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Cruise ships docked in Southampton, where an analysis of ship schedules found most did not make use of onshore power facilities. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA

We have pointed in this direction plenty of times over the years, so by now you might say it is caveat emptor:

Cruise ships polluting UK coast as they ignore greener power options

Most liners rely on marine gas oil when docked, despite claims they reduce emissions by plugging into low-carbon electricity

Cruise ships visiting Britain are frequently failing to plug into “zero emission” onshore power and instead running their engines and polluting the local environment with fumes. Continue reading →

Nature Conservancy 2023 Global Photo Contest Winners

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BETWEEN THE STARS I photographed this moment underwater. I was able to do it by putting my camera in an underwater case, attaching it to a metal weight and placing it all under the eggs. I waited nearby for it to be dark, and when the newt appeared, I lit it with an LED lamp. I started the camera with a home-made wired remote release. It turned out 1-2 sharp pictures. © Tibor Litauszki/TNC Photo Contest 2023

We appreciate the break from the news of the day:

The Nature Conservancy is proud to announce the winners of the 2023 photo contest.

Your images gave voice to nature and showed us the power and peril of the natural world.

The following photos submitted to our 2023 photo contest captivated our judges the most.

This image is a clear display of the patience, coincidence, technical adaptability and composition that earns top choice in the competition. Well-constructed and simply beautiful. The outward simplicity of the photo almost makes it easy to forget how much waiting is required to get a shot like this. The high-speed nature of the subject means you have to be dialed in perfectly when the shot arrives.
— Cole Sprouse, Celebrity Guest Judge

We are happy to see Alan Taylor‘s photography in the mix this year:

A COOL DRINK A bull elk stopping in the Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to a refreshing drink © Alan Taylor/TNC Photo Contest 2023

This year the categories are: Continue reading →

Save The Wave In Iceland

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Surfers believe that construction work at Þorlákshöfn could ruin conditions. Photograph: Sigga Ella/The Guardian

Female surfer and business co-owner from Reykjavík, Elín Kristjánsdóttir Photograph: Sebastien Drews

Protecting waves from the effects of development, for surfing, has featured in two previous posts. Those were in locations more commonly associated with the sport. Iceland has featured in our pages many more times over the years, not once in relation to waves or surfing. Until today:

Improvements in wetsuit technology mean surfers can enjoy the waters in Iceland all year round. Photograph: Sigga Ella/The Guardian

Icelandic surfers fear port development will ruin ‘perfect point break’

Volcanoes, northern lights and midnight sun are all on offer at this haven, which locals want to preserve

Look at this wave,” says Mathis Blache, pointing to the sea from the shore’s black rocks as a swell rolls in. “It’s just perfect.” Despite air and water temperatures in the single digits, the 27-year-old student and surfer points out two other surfers – and a couple of seals – delighting in the conditions at Þorlákshöfn in south-west Iceland.

This spot, where surfers can enjoy either the midnight sun or the northern lights depending on the time of year, has in recent years become the heart of Iceland’s rapidly growing surfing community. Continue reading →

Big Turbines, Big Location, Big Wind Farm

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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 →

Frightening Future Facts For All Hallows’ Eve

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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 →

Crowdsourcing & OED

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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 →

Removing Environmental Protections Will Not Seem So Clever In Hindsight

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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:

How the US supreme court and an Idaho couple upended wetlands protection

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 →