Daily Quick Read - September 30, 2019

Free Solar  — Alex Honnold’s New Big Climb

One of the life lessons that can be gleaned from Free Solo, the remarkable documentary of Alex Honnold’s climb of El Capitan, is that Honnold is not a daredevil.  He is a highly organized, extremely patient and focused individual.  His El Cap climb was based on a careful study and rehearsal of each  segment of the climb – an incremental approach designed to minimize the danger and optimize the potential for success. The Honnold Foundation is based on that same patient, incremental approach. And, the passion and energy of Alex himself.

Back in 2010, Honnold was also only two years from another important goal: starting the Honnold Foundation. A nonprofit initially supported solely by Honnold himself, now augmented by funds from sponsors and public donations, his foundation helps fund solar projects all over the world. This year it's on track to raise over $1 million.

"If I've learned one thing from climbing," he says, "it's the power of incremental progress."

Honnold believes many global inequalities stem from access to power. He believes they could be alleviated, at least in part, by solar energy. Some 1.1 billion people -- 14% of the world's population -- don't have access to power. To Honnold, that's a tremendous waste of human potential.

"You drive through these villages [in places like Chad] and you see kids playing around. If those kids were born somewhere else, they could be airline pilots or astronauts. They could do anything," Honnold, 34, tells me. "But the reality is they're going to wind up hurting their entire life. That's just the reality of it. They have no access to education, no access to power, and no real way to change their livelihood.

"The unfairness of that bothers me."

The Design of Zoos

Is the display of “wild” animals in a captive environment beneficial to those species in the actual wild?  Some of the world’s zoos are critical partners and often leaders in the conservation of endangered species, but does that good work balance the forced captivity of other animals?  These are tough questions without easy answers. The architecture of zoos has undergone dramatic changes over the centuries.  Changes that reflect human’s relationship to the animals the zoos contain.

“I was amazed by how little literature and discussion there has been,” says Natascha Meuser, author of a weighty new tome, Zoo Buildings: Construction and Design Manual. Meuser, an architect and professor, aims to redress this balance and provide guidance for future zoos. She began researching the topic a decade ago, when a toy manufacturer asked her to design some typical zoo structures to go with its animal figures, a task less straightforward than she imagined.

“There wasn’t a simple answer,” she says. “But I became fascinated by how the architecture of zoos reflected man’s changing relationship with animals: going from a sense of exoticism and wonder, to better hygiene and animal welfare, to the idea that the architecture should disappear altogether.”

While the book is full of such best-practice models, even the boldest proposals – like the series of islands, each housing creatures from a different continent, surrounded by water and dotted with biospheres imagined for St Petersburg – feel like strange anachronisms, curious relics from a bygone age. As Hancocks has pointed out, zoos’ claims of existing for conservation and education are questionable: the main priority is still the display of charismatic “megafauna” for visitors to gawp at. A growing awareness of captivity-related problems – including malnutrition, repetitive activity “zoochosis” and even cannibalism – has caused a number of zoos around the world to close. It might not be too long before Meuser’s thought-provoking guide finds itself in the history section.

Three Billion Bird  Hype?

Last week’s media blitz regarding the loss of three billion birds in North America since 1970 was, to some, another welcome “wake up” call, but did the often overhyped media coverage overlook some critical subtleties?

The finding received widespread media coverage. “Where Have All the Birds Gone?” a headline in The Seattle Times asked. A piece in Vox wondered whether the trend would end in a “bird apocalypse.” (Not necessarily, the piece conceded.) And the headline on a front-page story in The New York Times declared that “Birds Are Vanishing From North America.” The dramatic opening line of the piece: “The skies are emptying out.”

Researchers affiliated with the Cornell team even managed to land an accompanying op-ed essay in The Times the very same day. “The Crisis for Birds,” the headline opined, “Is a Crisis for Us All.”

The declines were certainly notable, but some ecologists have begun to question whether the calculus undertaken in the paper truly warranted this sort of language, and the ominous future it seemed to suggest. And those concerns have raised further questions among some scientists — and even some reflection among authors of the paper themselves — about how high-stakes research, the constraints of high-profile journal publishing, and sophisticated publicity can sometimes combine to drive a story into the news cycle while eclipsing important uncertainties, and perhaps even delivering an incomplete message to the public.

“I’m Melting!”

European glaciers are melting, too.  On Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, the Planpincieux glacier  is in danger of breaking apart, sending 9 million cubic feet of ice (the equivalent of 67.3 million gallons of water) into the valleys below.  Italian authorities have closed down areas on the Italian side of the mountain as a precaution.

The section of the glacier at imminent risk of collapse is currently at an altitude of 12,500 feet and straddles the border between France, Switzerland and Italy. This entire region is supposed to be a crucial venue for the 2026 winter Olympics, which was just awarded to Italy this year. The French towns impacted by the closure are Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and Chamonix in France, where the first-ever Winter Olympics were held.

The dire situation comes as world leaders met in New York for a Climate Action Summit this week. Italy’s prime minister Giuseppe Conte, who attended the summit, said Wednesday that the Mont Blanc disaster is a call to action. “The news that part of Mont Blanc risks collapsing is a warning that should not leave us indifferent,” he said through his spokesman from New York. “It must shake us all and force us to mobilize.”

Getting Gas Out of “The City”

Not to be outdone by those Berkeley hippies, San Francisco supervisors are proposing to require all-electric appliances in all new construction in “The City” effective January 2020.  In July, Berkeley became the first city in the country to ban natural gas in new construction in that city. Natural gas accounts for 27% of Berkeley’s greenhouse gas emissions – about  average for US cities.

The measure would, if approved, require all-electric appliances in construction after Jan. 1, 2020. It also would offer incentives to owners of existing buildings who convert natural gas systems to electric ones.

The announcement by San Francisco District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and District 5 Supervisor Vallie Brown echoes a recent proposal in the city of San Jose, and the first-in-the-country measure in Berkeley in July that bans the use of natural gas in all new construction.

Original story, July 29: To reach its ambitious climate change goals, California will have to entice homeowners to electrify everything. The state is trying to become carbon neutral by 2045 and around a quarter of the state’s emissions come from energy used by buildings.

Team Lioness

The eight young women that make up Team Lioness are bringing a new perspective and skill set to the ranger unit. While Maasai men at a certain age have to kill a lion to prove their masculinity, women have always been committed to conservation. Although it was hard for them to get support from the Council of Elders, the women are now on their way to preventing poaching and protecting local wildlife. Their days are now filled with reading tracks, recognizing animal movements and collecting data. 

Through providing sustainable income and professional opportunities for women who have never been employed before, the project also aims to increase general community development.  --- Deutsche Welle

If Only...

Perhaps Brexit could be avoided if this was Parliament.

Banksy’s derisive portrayal of The House of Commons reduced to an assembly of parliamentary primates, will go on public display in London for the first time at Sotheby’s just a mile away from The Palace of Westminster. The exhibition will run from September 28 – October 3, ahead of the next scheduled ‘Brexit Day’. Spanning an impressive 13 feet, this is the largest known canvas by the anonymous street artist whose subversive practice has granted him a reputation of infamy as much as world renown.

Living Dangerously

For some wildlife photographers out there, capturing the true essence of a photo is their primary goal – a photo where it goes beyond the physical image and portrays the raw emotion of another’s world. For Charlie Lynam this is exactly what drives his passion for wildlife photography and ignites his desire to continually seek out and create incredible shots. It is through photography that Charlie has been able to connect with nature, one incredible click of a second at a time – to express and capture brief, fleeting moments, otherwise lost. His photos showcase the best that African wildlife and landscapes have to offer – unique images that create awareness and appreciation of the beauty and rawness of the natural world.  --- Africa Geographic

Amboseli National Park

                                 Amboseli National Park, Kenya                                                              © Brigitta Moser

Amboseli belongs in the elite of Kenya’s national parks, and it’s easy to see why. Its signature attraction is the sight of hundreds of big-tusked elephants set against the backdrop of Africa’s best views of Mt Kilimanjaro (5895m). Africa’s highest peak broods over the southern boundary of the park, and while cloud cover can render the mountain’s massive bulk invisible for much of the day, you’ll be rewarded with stunning vistas when the weather clears, usually at dawn and/or dusk. Apart from guaranteed elephant sightings, you’ll also see wildebeest and zebras, and you’ve a reasonable chance of spotting lions, cheetahs and hyenas. The park is also home to over 370 bird species, and it has an excellent array of lodges and an agreeably mild, dry climate.  --- Lonely Planet

Grizzly Bear Fight

Bears do not understand English or French, but they do understand a language of dominance and submission. The wildlife manager can assert his dominance by posturing or faking the bear into believing the human is in control of the situation. The person then becomes the “alpha” bear, if you will, the one calling the shots. The wildlife manager’s body posture and tone of voice can make it perfectly clear to the bear that it is not welcome in an area. If the bear is not being respectful of that message, the message can be reinforced with a rubber bullet in the hindquarter or a shot of pepper spray in its face delivered in an assertive manner.  --- Get Bear Smart

Daily Quick Read - September 25, 2019

Sublethal, Yet Still Deadly

Following last weeks report on the disappearance of three billion North American birds this study provides evidence that neonicotinoid pesticides are a contributing factor.  The Trump administration has rolled back Obama era restrictions on the use of neonicotnoids, although  some states have banned their use.

"The sublethal effects of imidacloprid on food consumption, body condition, and stopover duration have clear links with survival and reproduction and are predicted to negatively affect populations of migratory birds that commonly use agricultural habitats for refueling," the authors wrote in a study published today in Science.

Neonicotinoids—widely used on corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans and on some other fruits and vegetables—are thought to be at least partially behind bee declines in recent years and also have been linked to widespread impacts on aquatic insects and invertebrates.

Spring migration for birds happens the same time that many farmers are seeding pesticide-treated crops in northern midlatitudes, which is the heart of the Midwest and major U.S. farming regions.

Here is the summary of the study’s conclusions.

Neonicotinoids are neurotoxic insecticides widely used as seed treatments, but little is known of their effects on migrating birds that forage in agricultural areas. We tracked the migratory movements of imidacloprid-exposed songbirds at a landscape scale using a combination of experimental dosing and automated radio telemetry. Ingestion of field-realistic quantities of imidacloprid (1.2 or 3.9 milligrams per kilogram body mass) by white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) during migratory stopover caused a rapid reduction in food consumption, mass, and fat and significantly affected their probability of departure. Birds in the high-dose treatment stayed a median of 3.5 days longer at the site of capture after exposure as compared with controls, likely to regain fuel stores or recover from intoxication. Migration delays can carry over to affect survival and reproduction; thus, these results confirm a link between sublethal pesticide exposure and adverse outcomes for migratory bird populations.

Defenses Are Failing

The oceans have mitigated the impact of global warming, but now they have reached their limit.  As the oceans warm both the oceans and the land will be subject to the worst effects of our addiction to fossil fuels.

For decades, the oceans have served as a crucial buffer against global warming, soaking up roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans emit from power plants, factories and cars, and absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on Earth by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Without that protection, the land would be heating much more rapidly.

But the oceans themselves are becoming hotter and less oxygen-rich as a result, according to the report. If humans keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an increasing rate, the risks to human food security and coastal communities will increase sharply, particularly since marine ecosystems are already facing threats from plastic pollution, unsustainable fishing practices and other man-made stresses.

“We are an ocean world, run and regulated by a single ocean, and we are pushing that life support system to its very limits through heating, deoxygenation and acidification,” said Dan Laffoley of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading environmental group that tracks the status of plant and animal species, in response to the report.

The report warns that more dramatic changes could be in store. If fossil-fuel emissions continue to rise rapidly, for instance, the maximum amount of fish in the ocean that can be sustainably caught could decrease by as much as a quarter by century’s end. That would have sweeping implications for global food security: Fish and seafood provide about 17 percent of the world’s animal protein, and millions of people worldwide depend on fishing economies for their livelihoods.

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

                                                                                                        Camille Seaman     

There are several climate assessment scenarios that ICONICS (International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios) has developed.  There is growing evidence that the world is on a path to achieve the worst of those scenarios.

Our opening dystopian portrait of the climate-ravaged global order of the next century is only partly a work of speculation. It’s based, in broad outline, on what the climate science community calls the “regional rivalry” scenario. In the suite of now-imaginable climate projections before us, it is known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3 (SSP3). It’s one of five carefully crafted pathways that climate scientists employ to game out what global society, economics, policy, and demographics might look like under longer-term pressures of climate change. Scientific forecasters use these political and economic pathways in climate models to inform their understanding of how greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures will shift amid shifting new geopolitical alliances and confrontations.

SSP3 is the worst possible pathway for the global climate and conflict, according to Bas van Ruijven, the co-chair of the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios, and a key analyst for the SSP narratives. “It is a world that breaks down on many dimensions,” he said. “Countries have their own interests first, with a narrow definition of what their ‘interests’ are.” Van Ruijven is understandably wary about handicapping the likelihood of SSP3—or any speculative future scenario—coming true, but he very much wants global leaders to have them firmly in mind. The whole idea, he said, is to get policymakers to understand that “if you keep going in a certain direction, [this is] where you end up.”

Some signs already strongly suggest we’re about to head down the SSP3 pathway. After all, the American Republican Party is far from the only political force presiding over the toxic fusion of climate denialism and hyper-nationalism: Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Narendra Modi’s India, and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary are all countries now led by dismal Trumpian comrades in arms. Parties with right-wing authoritarian tendencies now govern or share power in seven European Union nations; such parties have achieved double-digit results in the most recent elections in Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom, in addition to numerous former Eastern bloc countries.

We Need A Bigger Boat

                                                                                                  U.S. Geological Survey

Don’t mess with mother walruses.  Just good advice for anyone, but Russian sailors specifically.

"The walruses probably feared for their cubs and attacked the rubber landing craft," the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) said in a Sept. 18 statement reported by The Independent. "The boat sank, but a tragedy was avoided thanks to the prompt action by the squad leader. All landing participants safely reached the shore."

"The incident is another confirmation that no one is expecting humans in the Arctic," the scientists wrote.

However, that doesn't mean that the Arctic is free from human influence. Walruses are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. During the 18th and 19th centuries, they were hunted extensively for their tusks, oil, skin and meat and were even driven to extinction in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around Sable Island, according to National Geographic. Today, they can only be hunted by indigenous communities, but they are still threatened by other human activities including oil and gas drilling, shipping and air travel, pollution and the way the climate crisis is changing their Arctic habitat.

US Losing the E-bus Race

New Chinese buses for Chile

Buses are a key component in the urban transportation infrastructure.  China leads the world in the implementation of electric buses, but South American cities are adding e-buses at a rapid rate.  In the US, not so much.  Imagine the growing global E-bus market that so far has no meaningful US company engaged.

In Santiago, some 200 battery-powered buses now circulate in the capital city, with 200 more slated to arrive later this year. The Chilean government aims to fully electrify public transport systems nationwide by 2040, a goal that will require deploying thousands more zero-emission buses. In Colombia, the nation’s Green Growth Commission has called for electric buses to comprise 100 percent of future municipal purchases. Bogotá’s mayor recently announced plans to buy nearly 600 electric buses for its bus rapid transit system, and the city of Cali recently purchased 26 units. Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, has bought 20 battery-powered buses.

The region’s fleets still represent only a small fraction of the electric buses in operation globally. Worldwide, nearly 425,000 electric buses were on the roads last year — 99 percent of them in China, where government policies to improve air quality and support manufacturers are accelerating the industry. European cities deployed some 2,245 battery-powered buses in 2018. The United States, meanwhile, had just 300, according to the research firm BloombergNEF.

Showy Snowy Owl

                                                                                                                                 Jim Cumming

The regal Snowy Owl is one of the few birds that can get even non-birders to come out for a look. This largest (by weight) North American owl shows up irregularly in winter to hunt in windswept fields or dunes, a pale shape with catlike yellow eyes. They spend summers far north of the Arctic Circle hunting lemmings, ptarmigan, and other prey in 24-hour daylight. In years of lemming population booms they can raise double or triple the usual number of young.

• The Snowy Owl can be found represented in cave paintings in Europe.
• In some years, some North American Snowy Owls remain on their breeding grounds year-round, while others migrate in winter to southern Canada and the northern half of the contiguous United States. In the northern plains, New York, and New England, Snowy Owls occur regularly in winter. Elsewhere, such as in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and eastern Canada, Snowy Owls are irruptive, appearing only in some winters but not in others.

--- All About Birds

Daily Quick Read - September 24, 2019

Billions Lost 

                                                            Etienne Laurent/EPA

Three billion birds gone since 1970.  This is the result from the latest comprehensive review of North American birds.  It’s a startling number that suggests that the reduction of habitat and the widespread use of chemical insecticides have a profound impact on the overall bird population.  This study actually significantly adds to the alarm that was raised in 2016, when another study concluded that at least one billion birds were missing since 1970.  

The US and Canada have lost more than one in four birds – a total of three billion – since 1970, culminating in what scientists who published a new study are calling a “widespread ecological crisis”.

Researchers observed a 29% decline in bird populations across diverse groups and habitats – from songbirds such as meadowlarks to long-distance migratory birds such as swallows and backyard birds like sparrows.

“Multiple, independent lines of evidence show a massive reduction in the abundance of birds,” said Ken Rosenberg, the study’s lead author and a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy.

The study, published today in the journal Science, did not analyze the reason for the drop. But around the world, birds are thought to be dying more and having less success breeding largely because their habitats are being damaged and destroyed by agriculture and urbanization.

I posted the 2016 study here and here.

Anaconda Company — Polluting the World For a Century

Open pit copper mines have a tendency to pop up on EPA Superfund clean-up list quite often.   In Nevada there is a fight going on to keep the site out of the EPA’s hands and deal with it through corporate and state agencies.  It is hard to imaging Atlantic Richfield or its corporate owner BP (formerly The British Petroleum Company and BP Amoco) doing a competent job with only state level oversight.

By 1978, Anaconda had halted its operations. The mine had changed hands to Atlantic Richfield, known as ARCO, after the Anaconda Copper Company merged with a subsidiary of the oil giant. For ARCO, the consequences of that deal proved long-lasting. It was inked while global copper prices slumped. And to this day, ARCO — now under the auspices of BP, an even larger corporation — is responsible for Anaconda’s pollution across the West.

Before long, ARCO offloaded the copper mine to a Yerington businessman, and by 1989, the site was sold again, eventually falling into the hands of an Arizona-based miner: Arimetco.

Then came another wave of contamination.

Arimetco left Anaconda’s pit — about one-mile long, 800-feet deep and filling with water — largely untouched. Instead it worked on about 250 acres, isolating copper by sending acidic fluid through heaps of ore. Regulators say the liners it used to protect groundwater from toxic drainage were leaky and the acidic solution created some of the most immediate hazards at the mine. When Arimetco went bankrupt, it left about 90 million gallons of acidic fluid. Lacking the proper bonding, it also left Nevada a multimillion-dollar unfunded liability, known as the “orphan share.”

Offshore Wind

Offshore wind power is coming to the East Coast.  The seeds are being planted off Block Island, but the big payoff is on the way.  The key is convincing all the stakeholders that off-shore turbines will have a minimal impact.

Block Island may be home to the smallest town (New Shoreham) in the country’s smallest state, but big things have happened here. Since December 2016, the seas off this speck of land in the Atlantic Ocean—Block Island is under 10 square miles in area, or less than half the size of the island of Manhattan—have been the proving grounds for the privately funded firm of Deepwater Wind, the primary driving force behind the first and so far only commercial offshore wind farm in North America.

This five-turbine, 30-megawatt endeavor has been effectively acting as a multi-year, real-world experiment in offshore wind power for the United States, paving the way for offshore wind farms on the northeast coast and the mid-Atlantic that could each be as much as 600 times the size of this test site, with hundreds of turbines generating electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes from just one full-scale, industrial-sized wind farm. There are more than a dozen large offshore “wind lease areas” suitable for wind farms currently up for bid from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, stretching from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Massachusetts alone is soliciting contracts for 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind development (half have now been sold), which is more than 50 times the size of this pilot project off of Block Island. (Because it is the region’s financial powerhouse, and its major cities represent a large market of potential wind power consumers next to the coast, the doings of Massachusetts dominate the conversation of little Rhode Island next-door.) Once it is built and running, the Massachusetts project off Martha’s Vineyard alone will provide enough energy to power at least 230,000 households, or about a third of the state’s residential energy demand. Other states are working on a similar gargantuan scale. All told, there are 28 offshore wind projects in the works on the East Coast, with a total capacity of 24 gigawatts, or 24,000 megawatts. To give a sense of the massive size of the generating power of the wind farms now in the works, the first commercial civilian nuclear reactor in the United States—Massachusetts’ Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station, now decommissioned—generated just 185 megawatts at its peak.

Renewables Don’t  Need Subsidies

Renewables are so cheap that subsidies aren’t necessary.  Perhaps when people discover that government is subsidizing fossil fuels while renewables are standing one their own, that will be the end of fossil fuel subsidies.  

Today, renewable energy is so cheap that the handouts they once needed are disappearing.

On sun-drenched fields across Spain and Italy, developers are building solar farms without subsidies or tax-breaks, betting they can profit without them. In China, the government plans to stop financially supporting new wind farms. And in the U.S., developers are signing shorter sales contracts, opting to depend on competitive markets for revenue once the agreements expire.

“The training wheels are off,” said Joe Osha, an equity analyst at JMP Securities. “Prices have declined enough for both solar and wind that there’s a path toward continued deployment in a post-subsidy world.”

The reason, in short, is the subsidies worked. After decades of quotas, tax breaks and feed-in-tariffs, wind and solar have been deployed widely enough for manufacturers and developers to become increasingly efficient and drive down costs. The cost of wind power has fallen about 50% since 2010. Solar has dropped 85%. That makes them cheaper than new coal and gas plants in two-thirds of the world, according to BloombergNEF.

Do Electric Car Subsidies Make Sense?

It’s not an either/or situation, but doesn’t it make sense to invest in means to get people out of cars at least as heavily as we are willing to invest in electric vehicles.   Various alternative transit options – bikes, scooters, public transportation are tools that would substantially  reduce the use of cars and reduce congestion in urban areas.

They all want to spend billions, replacing cars with – cars. Meanwhile, a new study from INRIX Research shows that fully 48 percent of trips taken by cars in the USA are less than three miles, a distance that could easily be covered by bike, e-bike or scooter (modes that INRIX calls "micromobility"). Fully 20 percent are less than a mile, which could easily be done on foot.

Meanwhile, while all of transportation Twitter argues about whether to throw billions at electric cars or transit, I repeat the INRIX finding that 48 percent of car trips in the USA are less than three miles. If you got half the people who are now doing these trips in cars, you would be reducing the number of trips taken in the USA by a quarter.

This would not be that hard in much of North America; micromobility lanes (formerly known as bike lanes?) cost a lot less than nuclear power plants or subways. Decent sidewalks that aren't full of cars, electric or otherwise, cost less than a Tesla Gigafactory. They are a lot faster to build, too, and we don't have time or the resources to convert the world's fleet of cars to electric. We have to get people out of cars, and the best place to start is with the shortest trips.

African Penguins - Boulders Beach

Boulders Beach is a sheltered beach made up of inlets between granite boulders, from which the name originated. It is located in the Cape Peninsula, near Simon's Town towards Cape Point, near Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. It is also commonly known as Boulders Bay. It is a popular tourist stop because of a colony of African penguins which settled there in 1982. Boulders Beach forms part of the Table Mountain National Park.

These African penguins are only found on the coastlines of Southern Africa - (South Africa & Namibia). These penguins are currently on the verge of extinction. As a result, the penguins are under the protection of the Cape Nature Conservation.

Although set in the midst of a residential area, it is one of the few sites where this vulnerable bird (Spheniscus demersus) can be observed at close range, wandering freely in a protected natural environment. From just two breeding pairs in 1982, the penguin colony has grown to about 3,000 birds in recent years. This is partly due to the reduction in commercial pelagic trawling in False Bay, which has increased the supply of pilchards and anchovy, which form part of the penguins' diet.  -- Wikipedia 

Global Climate Strike - Update 3

Update 3:  Follow along on The Guardian.

Update 2:

Sidney, Australia

Hamburg, Germany

Update 1:  In New York City, 1.1 million pupils will be allowed to skip school on Friday after the city announced it would not penalize public school students joining the strikes, but made it clear that the students did need parental consent.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted he supported the move: "New York City stands with our young people. They're our conscience."

Crowds will rally in downtown Manhattan at 12 p.m. ET, where a roster of young climate activists will speak, including Greta Thunberg, who sailed to New York to attend the UN Climate Action Summit.

What's happening?

Young people are asking others all over the world to join them in global climate strikes starting today. More events will take place before another big day of action September 27.

Students across the US and beyond are planning to walk out of class to call attention to the issue.

But everyone is invited to express solidarity and "disrupt business as usual," organizers say.

"Together, we will sound the alarm and show our politicians that business as usual is no longer an option," they say. "The climate crisis won't wait, so neither will we."

Not Always Pretty

“We were photographing this leopardess with her cub, who were both showing signs of being hungry. The cub was licking its mom’s face and rubbing up against her, while she was looking thin and acting restless. Soon the leopardess left the cub in the safety of a thick bush and headed down the riverbed in search of food. Leopards normally eat every three to five days, although with a growing cub it can be more frequently.”  -- Africa Geographic

Daily Quick Read - September 19, 2019

Bureaucratic Conservation

Last week a group of academics, professional and researchers met under the auspices of the World Wildlife Federation to discuss the causes of the failure of the conservation movement to stem the planets loss of wildlife.  The group identified to political systems failures, but they also pointed the finger at conservation NGOs.

Dissatisfaction with the “corporate nature” model of conservation practised by the big international non government groups is growing, said Sarah Milne, a researcher at the Australian National University.

“[They] now consume and channel a significant proportion of available conservation funding. This is corporate nature [where] branding is fundamental, market-based and technocratic. It risks being top-down, impervious and homogenous and calls for a rethink of how global conservation works.”

These groups count success by numbers and the money they attract, not by consideration of conservation, said Dominique Bikaba, director of Strong Roots, a group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “They do not understand local people. They come with big degrees and an idea from London or Washington. They don’t want to learn from local and indigenous peoples.”.

“Conservation still thinks in terms of separating people from nature and of saving pristine places,” said South African anthropologist Anselmo Matusse, who has just spent a year in a remote, forested part of Mozambique where people have lived successfully and sustainably for years, but which governments and conservation groups now want to “protect”.

“If we continue with the present path of nature conservation then biodiversity will soon be like art that is of value to only some – kept locked away in highly guarded museums where only the rich can visit. Is the current path of protecting biodiversity not another form of colonialism? Are the state and the market the only options to change the route of human civilisation and Earth, which [are] heading towards collapse?” asked Matusse.

Deus Vult

I’ve been in Singapore when Indonesian farmers were conducting their annual forest burns.  The smoke and haze were so thick you couldn’t see buildings directly across the street.  Much like fires in the Amazon and Africa, this is an annual event that could be controlled, but apparently governments either actively encourage or are to incompetent to mitigate.

Indonesia’s president has admitted negligence on the part of the government, as top officials engage in a blame game amid the worst spate of forest fires since 2015 that’s sending clouds of toxic haze across large swaths of the country and abroad.

This year’s fires, most of them set deliberately to clear land for planting, have burned nearly 340,000 hectares (840,000 acres) as of Aug. 31 — an area a third the size of Jamaica — according to data from the environment ministry.

“Ahead of the dry season, everyone should have been prepared,” President Joko Widodo said on Sept. 17 during a meeting with officials in Sumatra’s Riau province, one of the worst-affected regions.

The president’s remarks come after several of his top aides issued a series of widely ridiculed claims about the fires, haze, and their cause. Siti Nurbaya Bakar, the environment minister, was criticized last week for denying that the fires in Indonesia were sending haze to Malaysia and Singapore, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Meanwhile, the president’s chief of staff, Moeldoko, called on people affected by the haze to be patient and pray, blaming the disaster squarely on “God.”

Aliens Bug Me

Spotted lanternflies have journeyed from China to the US, where there are no natural enemies and plenty of food.  Some have developed a taste for wine (the grape vines at least).  Other than drenching vines in pesticides, there is one other solution.  Bring in another Chinese insect to do the work.  But, first make sure that we aren’t trading one foreign pest for another.

The people who are getting hit first, and hardest, are vineyard owners.

Leach takes me to see one of them: John Landis, co-owner of Vynecrest Vineyards and Winery, west of Allentown.

When we arrive, Landis is pressing grapes. He is smiling. Harvest is always a good time, he says. But then I ask him about lanternflies, and he turns serious.

"We've never had a situation like this in 40 years," he says. "If it starts to decimate your vineyard, it could cause people to go out of the winery business. It definitely kills vines."

…in China, the lanternfly has natural enemies that hold it in check. They are tiny wasps, so small you barely see them.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working with colleagues from China, have brought two of these wasps to the U.S. under tight security. The wasps are under quarantine in a couple of USDA labs.

Elephants Belong in the Wild

After delegates at the August CITES meeting voted to restrict the trade of live elephants, elephant advocates organized an Indaba in South Africa to discuss the status of captive elephants in that country.  Despite a large number of captive elephants being  exploited at roadside attractions and a global controversy over elephants at the Johannesburg Zoo,  no representatives of the South African government attended the Indaba.  

CITES now only allows the live trade of wild elephants within their natural and historic range in Africa, except in exceptional or emergency circumstances.

“This means that wild baby elephants can no longer be ripped away from their families and sold to zoos and captive facilities, which is a great start,” states Audrey Delsink of HSI Africa.

One of the aims of the Indaba was to bring awareness to the plight of captive elephants and the cruel methods of training used to break these animals into submission to facilitate interaction. To achieve perpetual submissiveness, they are often also put on the Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone, which reduces their testosterone levels but has severe side including causing genital deformities.

Hence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is regularly identified in elephants, especially those kept in captivity, stated Dr Gay Bradshaw from the Kerulos Center for Nonviolence.

“When subjected to genocide, imprisonment, cultural destruction, enslavement, loss of homeland, torture, and war, or in the language of elephant managers and conservationists, culls, translocation, captivity training, human-elephant conflict, and crop protection, both humans and elephants experience psychological and social breakdown. Elephant trauma survivors can only begin to heal when elephant ways of life are reinstated.”

Climate Strike — Find an Event

Find a strike near you to attend on September 20 on the map below. If you don’t see an event in your area, organize one! We’ll provide everything you need to get started in planning something in your community so no experience is necessary. Whether you’re 7 or 77, you’re invited to join the movement.

For more information, please visit strikewithus.org.

Peregrine Falcon

Jessica Flock

Peregrine Falcons are the largest falcon over most of the continent, with long, pointed wings and a long tail. Be sure to look at shape as well as size—long primary feathers give the Peregrine a long-winged shape. As with most raptors, males are smaller than females, so Peregrines can overlap with large female Merlins or small male Gyrfalcons.

Peregrine Falcons catch medium-sized birds in the air with swift, spectacular dives, called stoops. In cities they are masterful at catching pigeons. Elsewhere they feed especially on shorebirds and ducks. They often sit on high perches, waiting for the right opportunity to make their aerial assault.  -  All About Birds

Daily Quick Read - September 17, 2019

Suppressing Science

Galileo before the Holy Office, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

In a Guardian article six former government scientist describe their experience attempting to tell the American people about the impact of climate change and how those efforts were aggressively thwarted by the Trump administration.  Here are quotes from the six on how they felt as this important work was being subverted. Read the whole article to see how willing Trump is to suppress science.

“It broke my heart. I’d had this wonderful career, playing a small role in making the world a better place. Then we had a political leadership making decisions on ideology, denying science, basically being climate deniers. It felt horrible.”

“I have faced retribution, I was threatened and placed in a hostile work environment. It’s clear in some agencies there’s a culture of fear where scientists are being intimidated. When I wrote this report, politics was the last thing on my mind, I was thinking about climate change and these coastal parks.”

“There’s not even lip service to the science. Science can’t be controlled like ideological spin, so the administration is afraid of that. They don’t want scientists and their evidence-based opinions – they’d rather have cronies trot out the same tired talking points on fringe scientific views.”

“The Trump administration is threatened by evidence, by science and by expertise. These things interfere with their ability to hobble government agencies and reduce oversight. It’s mind-boggling and a profound threat to democracy but it also increases risks to American health and safety. Every American should be concerned, regardless of political stripe.”

"Within a couple of days of me leaving an opposition research firm did a freedom of information request for all my emails and the EPA immediately handed them over. I found out they made a big effort to connect with all the rightwing media to trash me. They made up this lie that I was being paid more than a Congress member for every year of my retirement. It got really ugly, so I got off social media.”

“They try to downplay the role of climate change and research that they’re funding. So even in grants that the agencies are receiving, they’re now being vetted by political officials to essentially make sure that climate change is not mentioned in those proposals. It’s not a great time to be a climate change scientist in the federal government.”

What About the People?

Just shut down the coal power plants.  Easy to say from a distance, but those plants and the mines that feed them their coal are operated by people.  What happens to them?  Do these folks in Wyoming move to China ad start building solar panels or do they watch their communities die?

“Pacificorp’s own analysis shows that keeping aging coal plants running will mean higher electricity bills for Wyoming families and businesses,” Connie Wilbert, director of Sierra Club’s Wyoming chapter, said in a statement. Her organization has campaigned against coal burning.

“Wyoming can no longer keep its head in the sand on the declining economics of coal power,” she wrote. “Now is the time to help coal-dependent communities in Southwest Wyoming make an orderly transition away from coal rather than risking the sort of sudden job losses that we’ve seen in recent coal bankruptcies.”

Not Enough Water

Once water was abundant with three seemingly infinite sources — the river and two vast aquifers.  But, when the climate changes and droughts persist, agriculture based upon abundance struggles with shortage.  As always the family farm and the small operators feel the burden first and the deep pocketed, well connected corporate farms expand.

Like Nissen, Brown’s ultimate hope is for people to face up to the conditions at hand and then consider what sort of future they want for the valley, before it’s too late. For both of them, the point of the subdistrict system, this experiment in self-governance, is not simply to guarantee the valley’s economic future, but, crucially, to sustain a certain sort of life on the land and the communities this life supports.

“If we want as many people, as many families, working the land as possible, that’s a value we need to be working towards,” Brown said.
Even while family farms and smaller operations endure in the San Luis Valley, many people describe a trend towards consolidation — larger farms growing at the expense of smaller operations, while outside dollars buy up land as investments or tax write-offs. Department of Agriculture census records show an increase in the number of large, rich farms in recent decades.

Trump Destroys Credibility In Everything

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”  Mark Twain may have said this, but it never appeared in any of his writings.  In any event, we finally have a president who is more than willing to do something about the weather.  As with everything else, he lies about it.  To the detriment of one of the last shreds of commonality we had as Americans.

We need all the indisputability our government can offer as climate change brings us more intense hurricanes. Most people know weather forecasting is a complex, science-based endeavor, and we all count on its being as accurate as possible. Millions of Americans hang on every word and graphic to make life and death storm preparations.

This of course escapes Trump. Even before Hurricane Dorian, Trump displayed his disinterest in accuracy with repeated proposals for major cuts to the National Weather Service. Congress thus far has ignored those cuts.

Dorian brought out the worst of this disinterest. The man who has sowed fathomless division with his more than 12,000 falsehoods as counted by the Washington Post, gave the nation his now infamous fake Alabama alert and altered map. Worse, rather than own up to his mistake, Trump set off a shameful chain reaction of bullying.

Maybe Meat is the Problem

The burning Amazon may actually generate some light on US agricultural practices and encourage change.  Maybe…..

...American companies are responding. In late July, as global attention began to focus on the fires, U.S. agricultural giant Cargill announced a target to cut the emissions intensity across its North American beef supply chain by 30 percent, by 2030. In August, Brazilian firm Marfrig Global Foods SA announced a partnership with U.S.-based agribusiness company Archer Daniels Midland Co to introduce a plant-based meat alternative — which will be called the Rebel Whopper — to Burger King restaurants in Brazil. Last year, Marfrig had sold Keystone, a U.S. subsidiary, to Tyson Foods, which is responsible for 15 percent of beef exports from Brazil.

“President Bolsonaro’s reaction has given companies sourcing from Brazil little option,” says Richard George, spokesperson for Greenpeace.