Not So Happy Earth Day

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Over the past three decades, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold. Photograph by Kerem Yücel / AFP / Getty

On yet another Earth Day, whatever those two words mean together in tandem these days, a message from a reliable source:

It’s Earth Day—and the News Isn’t Good

New reports show that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than anticipated, and other disasters loom.

The Greenland ice sheet is, quite literally, a relic of the last ice age. It consists of snow that fell year after year, century after century, and never melted; at the very bottom, there are flakes that fell more than a hundred thousand years ago. Continue reading →

California’s Wildflower Bloom Boom

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People view fields of flowers at Carrizo Plain National Monument, California’s largest remaining grassland.
Claire Harbage/NPR

When lemons are plentiful, make the best of it:

California’s destructively wet winter has a bright side. You’ll want to see it

A benefit of California’s wet winter is what is known as a superbloom. Flowers including purple phacelia, yellow goldfields, hillside daisies and tidy tips grow at Carrizo Plain National Monument. Claire Harbage/NPR

CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — The roads are still rutted where rainwater carved them and farms are still flooded down the valley, but here in California’s largest remaining grassland, the benefits of the state’s destructively wet winter are on full display.

And they’re spectacular.

Wildflowers — yellow, purple, blue and orange — are splattered across the landscape in sweeps and pools like a clumsy airbrush painting.

Flowers are splattered across the landscape at Carrizo Plain. Claire Harbage/NPR

A superbloom. Continue reading →

Dam Damage Done

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A dried-up reservoir behind a dam in North Karnataka, India. LAKSHMIPRASAD S. / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A couple of our earliest posts was about life around a dam in India, so the photo heading this article rings a bell of sorts:

As Projects Decline, the Era of Building Big Dams Draws to a Close

Escalating construction costs, the rise of solar and wind power, and mounting public opposition have led to a precipitous decrease in massive new hydropower projects. Experts say the world has hit “peak dams,” which conservationists hail as good news for riverine ecosystems.

The end of the big dam era is approaching. Continue reading →

Plenty To Question About Milk’s Status

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We began featuring food-related stories by employees and interns, plus occasional visiting friends, during our first couple of years living in India. More recently, taste of place considerations first explored in India became for our Authentica shops in Costa Rica a key differentiator.

So my eye is drawn to food writing that overlaps with ethnicity considerations, and Mayukh Sen’s review of Spoiled brings out that book’s relevance to our pages:

A Fresh History of Lactose Intolerance

In “Spoiled,” the culinary historian Anne Mendelson takes aim at the American fallacy of fresh milk as a wonder food.

Six decades ago, Pedro Cuatrecasas, a fledgling resident at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was studying the lives of impoverished residents of Baltimore when he noticed an unsettling trend. In interviews, a number of his Black patients would confess that they found milk repellent. Continue reading →

McKibben Embraces Green Building Boom

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Grace J. Kim

We link to one person more than anyone else, for good reason:

ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING

Yes in Our Backyards
It’s time progressives like me learned to love the green building boom.

The United States is on the brink of its most consequential transformation since the New Deal. Read more about what it takes to decarbonize the economy, and what stands in the way, here. 

I’m an environmentalist, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. Continue reading →

Tagging Large Land Animals

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The team secure a darted rhino with nylon rope, then take its temperature and use a pulsemeter to monitor its heart rate and blood oxygenation

We have previous links to articles on tagging animals, but few land animals this big:

How to tag a rhino? Use tech, tact … and plenty of caution – a photo essay

Fewer than 2,000 rhino remain in Kenya, and the country’s wildlife service needs to keep tabs on them to make sure they thrive. It’s a major undertaking, involving a helicopter, 4x4s and a lot of rangers

Here comes a chopper … a helicopter is used to dart the highly aggressive black rhino

Kenya has the world’s third largest rhinoceros population: a total of 1,890 including 966 black rhinos, 922 southern white and two northern white. But how to keep track of them and ensure the species are thriving? Every two or three years, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) carries out an ear-notching exercise in all rhino sanctuaries in the country to ensure that at least 60% of the animals are uniquely identifiable. Continue reading →

Pesticide Practicalities

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The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

Our thanks, as always, to Margaret Renkl:

Long Live the Fireflies (and the Wildflowers and Mosquitoes, Too)

NASHVILLE — The day we moved into this house, 28 years ago next month, a thunderstorm knocked out the power late in the day. My husband was returning the rental van. Our 3-year-old was safely tucked into his old bed in his new room. As night began to fall in the silent house, I sat down on the sofa to cry. Continue reading →

Fort Lauderdale Weather In Context

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Police evacuate residents from this week’s epic Ft. Lauderdale floods

You probably did not need Bill McKibben’s newsletter to tell you about this weather event, but putting it in context is what he is particularly good at:

We’re in for a stretch of heavy climate

Ominous signs that the next step phase of global warming is starting;

This week’s Fort Lauderdale rainstorm was, on the one hand, an utter freak of nature (storms ‘trained’ on the same small geography for hours on end, dropping 25 inches of rain in seven hours; the previous record for all of April was 19 inches) and on the other hand utterly predictable. Continue reading →

A Proposal For The Colorado River States

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The Lake Mead reservoir in Nevada is showing a “bathtub ring” because of drought. Erin Schaff/The New York Times

We have featured the river plenty in recent years. No easy solutions. Bruce Babbitt, who was secretary of the Interior Department in the Clinton administration, and before that a governor of Arizona, has this to say:

Before Western States Suck the Colorado River Dry, We Have One Last Chance to Act

The Interior Department last summer dropped a bomb on the seven states that depend upon the Colorado River for water. Continue reading →

Anthropocene’s Marker

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The Ediacaran Period, which ended some 540 million years ago, is marked by a gold spike in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. JAMES ST. JOHN

We do not love the word Anthropocene, but we appreciate the marker it represents. And until now we did not know there would be a physical counterpart, a marker that will be placed in a representative location:

A Golden Spike Would Mark the Earth’s Next Epoch: But Where?

Before the Anthropocene can be officially proclaimed, a scientific working group must select a single site that permanently captures the new human-influenced epoch. Nine candidate sites — from California to China to Antarctica — are under consideration, with a decision expected soon.

The peatland below Poland’s Mount Śnieżka contains contaminants from burning fossil fuels, nuclear testing, and other human activities. MYSTICWALKER / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

At first glance, these nine sites scattered across the globe seem unremarkable. Continue reading →