Daily Quick Read - September 3, 2019

Not the Only Rainforest

The Amazon is not the planet's only rainforest facing grave danger.  It would be useful if some of the celebrities making so much noise about what’s going on in Brazil would also make some noise about the Trump administration plans to devastate Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.  The Tongass is part of the largest temperate rainforest in the world.

But we only now are beginning to understand how logging does not mean just the loss of trees like the Sitka spruce, the Western hemlock, and the Alaskan yellow cedar — forest sentries that are already most vulnerable to climate change. Logging also means the loss of what lives beneath them: Sitka black-tailed deer, some 10,000 bald eagles and 7,000 grizzlies, wolves, northern goshawks, the magical all-white Kermode bear. Most critically, the trees provide cover for all five species of Pacific salmon, with 40 percent of those that live off the West Coast spawning in Tongass streams. "The biggest old-growth trees that the timber industry wants are found along streams, and you can't cut them and build logging roads to get them out without hurting the salmon," conservationist Brian McNitt, who believes in responsible logging, told Christian Science Monitor.

Earlier this week, President Trump instructed his agriculture secretary to look into opening up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to such a fate. It absolutely cannot be allowed to happen.

Not The Love Boat Anymore

                                                                                       Richard Bond/Alamy Stock Photo

The cruise industry is basically the process of moving massive floating resorts from place to place. These massive ships bring economic benefits to the places they visit. The also bring pollution and other environmental damage.

They first noticed the body when the Grand Princess loomed toward the dock in Ketchikan, Alaska. Those tasked with securing the vessel to shore spotted the limp, lacerated humpback whale pinned atop the cruise ship’s bulbous bow. Many of the passengers stepping ashore on the morning of August 9, 2017 were faced with the unfortunate sight. Some raised their smartphones and tablets, others simply shook their heads and continued on to Ketchikan’s museums, shops, and lumberjack show or took excursions farther afield. While they were away, the body was towed to a nearby inlet so the cause of death could be determined. Did the whale die of natural causes before being struck by the Princess Cruises’ ship? Or was it a casualty of increasing cruise ship traffic? Later on, the passengers returned to the ship and continued north on a circuit that brought over a million people to Alaska that year, a small part of a global industry that served nearly 27 million passengers and took in an estimated US $37.8-billion. Over the next few days, the humpback whale briefly made the news and was shared on social media, then it faded away.

Recent research has also found that cruise travel makes an outsized contribution to climate change—and it begins before the ship leaves port. A single passenger flying from New York to Vancouver or Seattle (the two busiest departure ports for Alaska cruises) produces about a tonne of carbon dioxide. Double that if you’re flying round trip. Once on board the cruise ship, the climate cost soars. The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit research group with offices around the globe, found even the most efficient cruise ships emit three to four times more carbon dioxide per passenger kilometers than a jet. Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union, a German NGO, found that a mid-sized cruise ship burns up to 150 tonnes of fuel per day, which releases as much particulate matter into the atmosphere as one million automobiles.

Profits Before People

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC) on Climate Change latest report, “Climate Change and the Land,” lays out a bleak future for humanity if we don’t make urgent changes in our food production and distribution systems.  The changes are big, but they are practical, however they will impact the profit of many large multi-national corporations, so there will be massive pushback.

The IPCC identifies a range of impacts on land, water, and other natural resources, and offers a set of welcome if unsurprising recommendations to both reduce the contributions of our food systems to climate change and adapt to feed a global population expected to grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050. They include: Stop draining wetlands to grow biofuels; reduce demand for beef and strengthen regulations to prevent deforestation in critical areas like the Amazon; cut food waste, which now squanders one-third of consumable food; reduce excessive fertilizer use; and improve cropping systems to turn croplands from heavy greenhouse-gas emitters to carbon sinks.

As with most UN climate proposals, these seem like common sense, yet little seems to change. The reason is clear: the corporate interests threatened by such reforms are large and dominant, and they use their undue influence over governments to prevent progress.

Do you think Koch Industries wants to see an 85 percent reduction in its fertilizer sales? Does Monsanto want a 97 percent drop in pesticide use? If the reduction in land planted to corn and soybeans raised prices above their punishingly low levels now, how would Smithfield, Tyson, and other industrial livestock producers like the higher feed costs for their animals? Archer Daniels Midland sure doesn’t want to pay more for the corn it refines into ethanol.

In 2017, Art Cullen, editor of northern Iowa’s Storm Lake Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering a secret agribusiness fund, bankrolled by Monsanto, Koch Fertilizer, and other companies, to defeat a lawsuit seeking to control water pollution from agricultural fields around Storm Lake and other districts along the Upper Raccoon River. The goal of the lawsuit, brought by the Des Moines Water Works, was to reduce water pollution by forcing local agricultural districts to regulate the kinds of chemical-intensive farming practices the IPCC says we need to change.

When the Balloon Goes Up

Say your neighbour gave a party, didn’t invite you, but dumped all the party trash in your yard when the party was over.  Would you be upset?  So, when everyone at a children’s birthday party attaches a note to a helium filled balloon and throws that balloon in the air, should we all be a little upset?

But research into balloon debris is, well, ballooning. Activists who had been toiling on the fringes for decades say their work appears to be at a tipping point.

At least five states and more than a dozen cities nationwide have some form of a ban, including Virginia and Baltimore. More than a half-dozen other states have considered prohibitions in recent years, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures.

Last summer, Clemson University, under pressure from animal rights activists and environmentalists, decided to abandon its three-decade tradition of releasing thousands of orange helium-filled balloons while the football team stormed into the stadium at each home game.

Last week, Balloons Blow — the anti-balloon-release advocacy group — took aim at another prolific source: students at the University of Nebraska. It addressed them with a billboard not far from campus that says: “We know better. Let’s do better.”

For a half-century, students there have released red helium balloons during football games at Memorial Stadium. An Omaha resident sued to stop the practice but the lawsuit was thrown out. In March, students voted to keep the balloon release but ban plastic bags on campus.

A Billion Per Year

It is estimated that one billion birds die annually due to collisions with buildings.  The birds don’t see windows or are tricked by the reflection of the sky from the windows.  The situation can be mitigated, but….. Well, money is involved.

In every session of Congress since 2010, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) has introduced legislation aimed at saving many of the up to one billion birds killed each year by crashing against buildings. The unlucky victims frequently fly into clear glass facades that they don’t see, or reflective ones whose images of trees and shrubs look like inviting habitat. Bird-safe materials exist—fritted glass, for example, has a texture they can see and avoid—and could prevent up to 90 percent of those deaths, yet their use remains the exception while fatal collisions remain depressingly common.

Advocates are also encouraged by local action to protect birds from some of the country’s biggest urban obstacles. In Chicago—the deadliest city in the United States for migrating birds—Alderman Brian Hopkins in January introduced a Bird Friendly Design Ordinance. It would limit use of transparent and reflective glass and reduce nonessential lighting for large residential buildings and all commercial buildings when they’re built or updated. The measure now has nine co-sponsors and counting, says Chicago Audubon Society President Judy Pollock, who hopes to see it up for a vote by the end of the year.