Parque Nacional Yaxha, Guatemala
Bird of the Day: Bicolored Hawk
Parque Nacional Yaxha, Guatemala
About The Food Waste Known As Diversion
Photograph by Grant Cornett
As still life compositions go, the photo to the right is classic in style and weirdly perfect for the essay it accompanies. Helen Rosner frequently writes about food, including a review that convinced me to watch The Bear, and this is the best of her work that I have read:
The Promises of the Home “Composting” Machine
A new crop of techy appliances wants to help fight the food-waste crisis. How virtuous should we feel using them?
In the course of a week, my kitchen produces a shocking quantity of what we might think of as edible trash: apple peels, garlic nubs, a bit of gristle from a steak, Dorito dust, tea bags, the iron-hard heel of a loaf of bread that’s been sitting out overnight. The meat scraps I feed to my dog. The bones and vegetable scraps I store in the freezer in gallon-size ziplock bags and periodically bung into a pot and simmer into stock. But even then, once the stock is made, and the chicken bones or onion ends are leached of all their flavor, I’m left again with edible trash—only now it’s soggy. And then there are the times when the strawberries aren’t sealed right and become fuzzy with mold, or the delivery sandwich turns out to be gross, or the refrigerator’s compressor breaks and somehow we don’t notice, or I’m just exhausted and overwhelmed and want everything gone. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Pied Bushchat
Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand
Another Year, Another Invasive Python Initiative: Inversa Leathers
The invasive Burmese python has become the apex predator in the Florida Everglades, displacing the native American alligator. Photograph: Dorling Kindersley ltd/Alamy
We have been paying attention to this problem for more than a decade, and seen ideas like this before; until the problem is mitigated, we will continue sharing:
Could handbags be the haute couture solution to Florida’s python problem?
Invasive Burmese pythons are devastating wildlife but one firm believes turning snake leather into accessories could be a win-win
The fight to eradicate Burmese pythons from the Florida Everglades has intertwined with New York’s haute fashion scene in a project launched by a group of environmental activists who have already experienced success working with the skins of other invasive species. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Rufous-naped Wren
The Lost Tinamou Nature Preserve, Guatemala
Butterfly Origin Story
A blue morpho butterfly sits on a leaf. A new study finds that butterflies likely originated somewhere in western North America or Central America around 100 million years ago. Kristen Grace/Florida Museum
It is almost a certainty that if you visit Costa Rica you will see the blue morpho fluttering by somewhere. And you may be in the location of its origin story:
Butterflies originated in North America after splitting from moths, new study suggests
Akito Kawahara remembers being eight years old when he went on a special tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He marveled at the vast array of pinned bugs before stopping in front of a large picture of the butterfly family tree.
A red lacewing butterfly perches on a plant. Rachit Pratap Singh
A number of spots on that tree, he saw, were curiously blank.
“Just looking at it, realizing that scientists at these museums still don’t know these basic things — I’ll never forget that day,” Kawahara says.
That moment sparked a lifelong passion in Kawahara to fill in those blanks and determine where these charismatic insects originated. Now, he’s gotten a little closer to an answer. His latest research shows that butterflies probably first flapped their wings in present-day western North America or Central America. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Yellow-breasted Greenfinch
Mandala, Arunachal Pradesh
When In A Hole, Stop Digging
For many Americans, cars are as potent a symbol of freedom as guns are, even if they have similarly destructive consequences. Photograph by René Burri / Magnum
An interview with the author of one of the books reviewed in the linked essay below is effective motivation to read the entire review of both books:
They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction?
The Honeymooners” (1955-56), the greatest American television comedy, is—to a degree more evident now than then—essentially a series about public transportation in New York. Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is a New York City bus driver, deeply proud to be so and drawing a salary sufficient to support a nonworking wife in a Brooklyn apartment, not to mention a place in a thriving bowling league and membership in the Loyal Order of Raccoon Lodge. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Siberian Stonechat
Hanchinal Lake, Karnataka
What Does Positive & Progressive Permitting Look Like?
We have seen the Center for Biological Diversity mentioned in his newsletters before, but this week Bill McKibben links to this recently released document. The Center offers a positive and progressive consideration of priorities we should give to permitting renewable energy, contrasting efforts to gut regulatory protections related to fossil fuel permitting highlighted in his current newsletter:
Introduction
It is indisputable that the climate emergency requires the United States to rapidly transform its majority fossil energy system to 100% clean and renewable energy.
Distributed solar on rooftops alone can generate a significant portion of our energy demands while also bringing key benefits like resilience, local job generation, and avoided wildlife impacts. Once distributed energy is maximized, building renewables on top of parking lots and canals as additional built surfaces can fill the remaining gap in our current energy demand. Prioritizing these sites for renewable energy can avoid the community impacts and bottlenecks associated large-scale transmission construction.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent sixth synthesis report makes absolutely clear that an unprecedented bold transition to renewable energy with an equally aggressive effort to halt new fossil fuel development and phase out existing fossil fuel usage is absolutely vital to avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of climate change (1). This necessary transformation presents a tremendous opportunity to pursue a far more just path forward—one that ends the status quo entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry; empowers federal agencies to use their authorities to accelerate the transitions to a justly sourced, justly implemented, resilient, and equitable power system; actualizes the principles of environmental justice; and preserves our core environmental laws. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Verdin
Spicewood, Burnet County, TX
Reversal Of Absurd Destruction Counts As Progress in Brazil’s Amazon
An aerial view shows a deforested area during an operation to combat deforestation at the Cachoeira Seca indigenous reserve, in Uruara, Para State, Brazil January 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino
What counts as good news now in one part of the world is simply a reversal of absurd destruction trends of recent years. Without minimizing its importance we can acknowledge that a positive reversal is a low bar for what needs to be accomplished:
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon falls 68% in April, first major drop under Lula
SAO PAULO, May 12 (Reuters) – Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest fell 68% in April from the previous year, preliminary government data showed on Friday, a positive reading for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as it represents the first major drop under his watch. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black-rumped Flameback
Rishikesh, Uttarakhand
About That Bloom
Figueroa Mountain. April, 2023.
We had a quick look at this phenomenon recently, but Dana Goodyear is just the person to give it this depth of follow up that is worth a read and luxuriant gazing:
Point Buchon Trail, Montaña de Oro State Park. February, 2023.
The Superbloom Is a Glimpse of California’s Past
This year’s rains reversed, temporarily, more than a decade of catastrophic drought. Some of the seeds that caused the bloom have lain dormant for years.
This winter, it rained in California. Ten inches in San Francisco in the ten days after Christmas alone. Thirty-one atmospheric rivers—columns of vapor that move water from the tropics. Record-breaking snow at Mammoth Lakes. Los Angeles measured its wettest year on record since 2004-05, the year I moved here.
Carrizo Plain National Monument. April, 2023.
My memories from that first winter are of driving in a rental car on slick gray roads, weaving around Jurassic-looking fallen palm fronds; my elderly neighbor calling, terrified, as the water rushed from my basement office toward her house; a picture on the front page of the paper showing a swimming pool sliding off a hill.
Pinnacles National Park. April, 2023.
People hunkered down; red tags went up, flagging damaged buildings. I had left all my sweaters in New York, and froze. I learned the city through a veil of rain. Looking at the mountains, downtown is to the right, and the coast is to the left.
By April, the rain had stopped, and nasturtiums, not muddy rivers, were cascading down the hillsides. Seussian red bottlebrush trees and violet jacarandas made the days vivid, and at night the white blooms emanated perfume.
So this was Los Angeles: abundant, intoxicating, unmoored. It must have been a Superbloom, though I don’t remember anyone calling it that then. I didn’t know that it would be eighteen years before I would see this Los Angeles again. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Fasciated Tiger-heron
Arenal, Costa Rica
The Lab Of Peter Girguis
Giant tubeworms take up chemicals from a hydrothermal vent 6,200 feet deep in the Gulf of California (the Girguis lab is world-renowned for research on these worms). Photograph courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute
Our thanks to Veronique Greenwood (after a few years’ absence from our notice) for her most recent article in Harvard Magazine:
Top: a remote dive at Emery Knoll, a deepwater reef off Southern California, reveals crabs, sponges, and corals. Bottom: a rare sighting of the massive seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus. Photographs courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute
Peter Girguis on terra firma in the lab. Photograph by Jim Harrison
Peter Girguis probes life on the ocean floor
In a cavernous underground space behind Harvard’s Biological Laboratories, biochemist Peter Girguis frowns at the pressure vessel in his hand. The machined titanium cylinder, about the size of a French press, gleams as he works to release the cap, and he chuckles at his own stubbornness. He could probably find a tool to loosen it, he remarks. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Resplendent Quetzal
female with avocado fruit for hatchling
Volcano Atitlan, Guatemala
Chilekwa Mumba, 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner
The 2023 Goldman Prize goes to this man:
Alarmed by the pollution produced by the Konkola Copper Mines operation in the Copperbelt Province of Zambia, Chilekwa Mumba organized a lawsuit to hold the mine’s parent company, Vedanta Resources, responsible. Chilekwa’s victory in the UK Supreme Court set a legal precedent—it was the first time an English court ruled that a British company could be held liable for the environmental damage caused by subsidiary-run operations in another country. This precedent has since been applied to hold Shell Global—one of the world’s 10 largest corporations by revenue—liable for its pollution in Nigeria.
Our thanks to Jocelyn C. Zuckerman for this conversation with him:
The Nchanga copper mine, operated by Konkola Copper Mines, in Chingola, Zambia. WALDO SWIEGERS / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
This Zambian Took on a U.K. Mining Giant on Pollution and Won
Chilekwa Mumba led a court battle to hold a U.K.-based company responsible for the gross pollution from a copper mine it owns in Zambia. In an interview, he talks about how he and local villagers faced arrest to overcome long odds and finally win a landmark legal victory.
The southern African nation of Zambia is home to a wealth of minerals — in particular, lots of the copper and cobalt that the world will require to power a green economy. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Montagu’s Harrier
Vijayapura, Karnataka
India’s Progress With Solar Power Generation
Reuters Graphics
Progress on solar power generation in India is a big deal. The country’s reduction in poverty, remarkable as it has been, is counterbalanced by its environmental impoverishment. Thanks to Reuters for this article by Sarita Chaganti Singh and Sudarshan Varadhan:
Exclusive: India amends power policy draft to halt new coal-fired capacity
NEW DELHI/SINGAPORE, May 4 (Reuters) – India plans to stop building new coal-fired power plants, apart from those already in the pipeline, by removing a key clause from the final draft of its National Electricity Policy (NEP), in a major boost to fight climate change, sources said. Continue reading
