Daily Quick Read - July 24, 2019

Plastic-free Lifestyle - Good Luck With That!

Walk through any grocery store and try to avoid plastic – bags, packages, plastic coatings, the list goes on…  Is it possible for a family to go plastic-free in an American city?  One family is trying.

For the last two years, Jasper and Vjera Watts, along with their daughter Isla, 8, and son, James, 5, have been trying their best to live plastic-free. No matter where they go — from school and the office to the mall, airport or park — everyone travels with a stainless steel water bottle and his or her own utensils. Ice cream served in paper cups with wooden spoons at the farmers market has replaced once-regular treks to Jamba Juice. Most toys bought are used ones. Toothbrushes are made of bamboo. A family snack favorite — tortilla chips from Baja Fresh — is bought and carried home in paper bags. And every three months, a service called Who Gives a Crap delivers 48 rolls of toilet paper and six of paper towels without plastic wrapping to the family’s Altadena home.

My motivation is to leave a better world for our kids,” Jasper says. “It’s our job to make smart decisions as consumers, and to educate the next generation, or the situation is only going to get worse.”

To Whom Does “This Land” Belong?

To whom do the hundreds of million acres of public lands in the American west belong? Apparently to whomever the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service decides to allow to exploit it. Christopher Ketcham's new book tells the sordid story.

Government agencies tasked with protecting our lands have failed. But how this happened is complex and has taken decades to unfold, as he explains. "The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government," he writes. "The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only."

Government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service manage for "multiple uses," which includes logging, mining, grazing and drilling — activities that are at their core incompatible with conservation and wildlife protection. "The BLM and Forest Service are schizoid," Ketcham writes. "With one hand they protect; with the other they ravage."

“This Land” is available through Amazon.

This Land is a colorful muckraking journey–part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair–exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham’s vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

My Name Is Hyperion 

The world’s tallest living tree has a name - Hyperion. Hyperion is a 1200 year old coast redwood that when last measured in 2017 had achieved a height of 380 feet and 1 inch. Hyperion is one of the lucky ones as 95% of the millions of old growth coast redwoods have been harvested since the 1850s.

The tallest of the tall are California's coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens). They are so tall that mats of soil on the upper branches support other plants and whole communities of worms, insects, salamanders and mammals. Plants that grow on other plants are called epiphytes; some of the redwoods' epiphytes are trees themselves. Some of the trees that have been documented growing on coast redwoods reach heights of 40 feet on their own!

The Coming Traffic Apocalypse

                                                             Lonely Planet/Getty

Volkswagen hedging its bets by developing “last-mile” transportation solutions.  Is the era of urban automobiles coming to an end?

The car brands in the Volkswagen Group–VW, Škoda, SEAT and Audi–are promoting last-mile “micromobility” solutions including e-scooters. Why? Because the car era is coming to an end, at least for cities. That is the obvious conclusion from a July 3 posting from the group which states: “Answers are needed to avoid the threat of traffic collapse on the one hand and to meet the changing demands of modern mobility on the other.”

Bugs – A Vital Link in the Chain

This article is a good place to find links to research on the frightening disappearance of insects.  If you don’t have time to read the articles, do the windshield test for yourself.  Or, you could read this.

Are there really fewer insects than there used to be? Yes, in fact – a lot fewer. Is this drop-off an effect of a warming globe? Partly. We might call it one of the ways in which climate change is a threat multiplier – shifts in temperatures, rainfall, and drought increase the damage caused, for instance, by habitat loss and pesticides.