Hero Horse

This horse runs back to find his family during the Easy Fire in Simi Valley, California.  October 30, 2019.

Scary Fire Day In LA Area

                                                                                                                                                         Christian Monterrosa

There are a lot of incredible images of the various fires burning in southern California today.  This gentleman's Twitter account has captured the drama and crazy that has been the day so far.

Daily Quick Read - October 29, 2019

Sky High Roaming Charges

(I. Karyakin/Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network)

Apparently, this Russian research team didn’t read the fine print in their cellular contract (who does). They wired up 13 steppe eagles with SMS text based tracking devices that would text their location four times per day.  If the widely traveled birds’ devices couldn’t find a network, the messages were stored and sent when the device finally got a bar or two.  They didn’t count on at least one bird being such an explorer.

When a team of Russian researchers set out to track endangered steppe eagles using a device that sends the birds’ locations via text messages, they knew they would occasionally lose track of the birds when they flew into regions with little or no cellular coverage. Going off the grid isn’t a huge deal; usually when that happens, the messages are sent once the eagles flew back into range, which works great as long as they stay in network.

But what they didn’t plan for was Min, a globetrotting steppe eagle whose taste for adventure turned into a big international texting habit.

That’s not a problem when the birds send messages on the Kazakh or Russian networks. But when Min reappeared in early October after being out of range, the eagle did so in Iran, where roaming rates are sky-high.

The bad news is that the birds’ travel habits broke the researcher’s budget, but the good news is that after this story broke numerous phone companies have reached out to offer the project heavily discounted rates, so the birds can phone home within budget.

Greening The Big Apple

                                                                        Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times

Building a green meadow on your building’s roof isn’t cheap. This Greenpoint site cost $1.2 million for a 22,000 square foot rooftop meadow ($500,000 for structural upgrades to the building and $700,000 for the green space itself).  New York’s law mandating green spaces on new buildings should reduce the cost per square foot for installation but will still increase overall building cost.  

Green roofs like the one in Greenpoint, for instance, are expected to multiply under a city law that is set to take effect next month and will require new buildings to be topped with green spaces or solar panels. Either measure can help reduce carbon emissions and rising temperatures; green roofs also reduce storm-water runoff. Currently, the 730 green roofs in New York cover just 60 of the city’s 40,000 rooftop acres, according to the Green Roof Researchers Alliance.

Much of New York City’s potential in this regard remains untapped, experts say. But the law taking effect next month could change that.

With it, New York will join cities like Chicago, Denver and San Francisco, which use requirements or tax incentives to promote the development of green roofs. New York State also recently increased the value of the tax abatements it offers for such roofs in some city neighborhoods.

“Location, Location, Location”

Credit: "Climate and Health Benefits of Increasing Renewable Energy Deployment in the United States"

Renewable energy projects that will have the largest overall climate change and health impact need to be in places where the alternatives have the largest negative impacts.  This study suggests the most impactful renewable deployment is in the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions.

"To ensure that climate policies are cost-effective, the location where renewables are built is much more important than the specific technology," said Drew Michanowicz, a study author and a research fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement.

"If you want to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of the health and climate benefits of renewables, investing in the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions will keep populations downwind healthier while also taking important steps to decarbonize," he added.

“healthy hydration”

Is clean, drinkable water a human right or a “grocery commodity?”  Those seem to be the battle lines as local communities and environmentalist battle a giant corporation to determine who has the rights to water on public lands.  

Strawberry Creek is emblematic of the intense, complex water fights playing out around the nation between Nestlé, grassroots opposition, and government officials. At stake is control of the nation’s freshwater supply and billions in profits as Nestlé bottles America’s water then sells it back in plastic bottles. Those in opposition, like author and nutritionist Amanda Frye, increasingly view Nestlé as a corporate villain motivated by “greed”.

Ultimately, the debates’ particulars lead back to a question at the heart of issue: Should water be commodified and sold by private industry, or is it a basic human right?

Former Nestlé CEO and chairman Peter Brabeck labeled the latter viewpoint “extreme” and called water a “grocery product” that should “have a market value”. He later amended that, arguing 25 liters of water daily is a “human right”, but water used to fill a pool or wash a car shouldn’t be free. At its current pace, the world will run out of freshwater before oil, Brabeck said, and he suggests privatization is the answer.

I don’t think many people fill their pools or wash their cars with bottled water.  I know I pay for every gallon of water I use in my house.  Fortunately, I don’t have to buy my water in the grocery store.  Yet.

Pendley Controls 10% of US Land

William Perry Pendley is the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management.  As the “acting” director, he did not require Senate confirmation.  Considering his background it’s hard to imaging even a Republican Senate confirming such a wacko.  Wait, of course they would have, but the process would have been messy.  Pendley isn’t just an anti-government, anti-environment lawyer… he’s quite proud to broadcast that message even if it means consorting with neo-Nazis.

 William Perry Pendley, a top Trump administration official in charge of managing one-tenth of all land in the United States, is a past contributor to 21st Century Science & Technology, a fringe magazine of the late cult leader, convicted fraudster and paranoid conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche.

“If you’re writing for 21st Century Science & Technology, you’re writing for people who really had some Nazi sympathies.”  Freelance journalist Dennis King, on Pendley’s articles in a LaRouche magazine.

The magazine was also a go-to platform for the so-called “Wise-Use movement,” a group of anti-government organizations pushing to boost mining, drilling and logging on federal lands while deriding environmentalists as domestic terrorists. Pendley, a conservative lawyer with extreme anti-government and anti-environmentalism views, was a key figure in that movement as it gained momentum in the 1980s.

Not a Good Sight if You're a Fish

                                                                                                                                                                  Max Pixel

Ospreys are very large, distinctively shaped hawks. Despite their size, their bodies are slender, with long, narrow wings and long legs. Ospreys fly with a marked kink in their wings, making an M-shape when seen from below.

Ospreys search for fish by flying on steady wingbeats and bowed wings or circling high in the sky over relatively shallow water. They often hover briefly before diving, feet first, to grab a fish. You can often clearly see an Osprey's catch in its talons as the bird carries it back to a nest or perch.   ---  All About Birds

Daily Quick Read - October 27, 2019

Fence the Humans In

In Sri Lanka population growth and the expansion of farmlands have put tremendous pressure on the relationship between humans and elephants. For decades the government policy was to fence elephants into forest enclaves, but human encroachment and shortages of food in the elephant reserves have resulted in a lethal situation for elephants and humans.  

Asian elephants are under pressure. Their numbers have declined by an estimated 50 percent in the last 75 years, leaving just 40,000 to 50,000 in the wild. Although they aren’t poached anywhere near as much as their African cousins, their forest homes are being rapidly fragmented. Nowhere is the problem more acute than in Sri Lanka. It accounts for just 2 percent of their total habitat, yet is home to over 5000 Asian elephants – more than 10 percent of the remaining global population.

Hungry elephants raid crops, trampling fields and sometimes people. In response, farmers attack the animals with flaming torches, firecrackers, home-made guns and even explosives embedded in fruit, known as hakka patas or “jaw exploders”. Last year, more than 300 elephants were killed in altercations with humans and around 70 people lost their lives to elephants. “Sri Lanka has the highest level of human-elephant conflict in the world,” says Fernando. “Wherever there are people and elephants, there’s conflict.”

Elephant experts have convinced the government to try another approach to elephant and human interaction. Fencing the people and allowing the elephants more freedom of movement.

In 2013, the village of Galewewa pioneered a programme designed by Fernando and his colleagues to use electric fences to encircle crops and homes rather than elephants. The locals took some convincing. “People just assumed it wouldn’t be successful because they’d seen the government fences,” says Sampath Ekanayaka, manager of the Centre for Conservation and Research’s community programmes in the region. “To them, this was just another fence.”

The results have been encouraging. After six years with the fences, no people or elephants have been killed, nocturnal raids are practically non-existent and crop yields and earnings have significantly increased. Galewewa’s success has prompted around 25 more villages to join the programme, and Sri Lanka’s wildlife department has now established another 30 village fences.

Lion Farming

Lions raised for canned hunting

Earlier this year a quiet modification was made to South Africa’s Animal Improvement Act (AIA).  The AIA, outlines a variety of requirement for the breeding of domestic/farm animals, including mechanism to “manipulate breeding outcomes.”  The modification reclassifies 33 species of wild animals as “farm animals.”   South Africa now considers wild animals such as Cape buffalos, mountain zebras, lions, giraffe, white and black rhinos and cheetahs under the same rules as cattle, sheep, goats, etc.

So this raises the question: if the AIA amendment is not for the protection of the 33 wild animals that now fall under the act, what was behind the request from “the industry”? A clue might be in the permit restrictions and constraints imposed by NEMBA on the hunting and particularly the movement of listed and protected animals.

The act requires strict control over conveying, moving or otherwise translocating any specimen of a threatened or protected species, as well as “selling or otherwise trading in, buying, receiving, giving, donating or accepting as a gift, or in any way acquiring or disposing of any specimen of a listed threatened or protected species”. The AIA has none of these restrictions in pursuit of “improved” stock.

Placing wild animals under a set of rules designed to assist commercial livestock operations to increase productivity and manipulate animals for food might help the canned hunting industry, but it isn’t likely to improve the quality of wild animals.  Prior to this modification, the only wild species that was included in the provisions of the AIA was the ostrich and that hasn’t turning out so well.

Scientific reports indicate that haphazard breeding and cross-breeding between, for instance, the Northern African ostrich and the Southern African ostrich was done to improve feather production. The South African ostrich industry is known to experience reproduction and chick survival problems as a result of breeding practices.

Some Forest are Underwater

                                                             Steve Lonhart / NOAA MBNMS

The great bull kelp forests that sustain a great variety of marine life along the northern California coast have virtually disappeared.  In 2013, a mysterious disease decimated the sea star population along the coastline.  Sea stars eat purple sea urchins.  Purple sea urchins love to eat bull kelp.  With the stars gone the urchins have proliferated to the detriment of the kelp forests.  In 2014, an ocean heat wave deprived the kelp of sufficient nutrients and the forest’s growth was impacted.  Between 2014 and 2015, the purple sea urchin population exploded.  Today the kelp forest is less than ten percent  of its 2013 size.

The coastal waters of northern California were once home to undulating forests of bull kelp, a type of seaweed that offers shelter to a host of sea creatures. But a series of adverse ecological events have jolted the region’s marine ecosystem out of whack. Populations of purple sea urchins, a voracious, kelp-eating species, have exploded. And now, according to a new study in Scientific Reports, more than 90 percent of bull kelp canopy along 217 miles of California’s coast is gone.

As is usually the case when part of an ecosystem collapses, the decimation of bull kelp forests has had a devastating ripple effect. According to the study, 96 percent of red abalone, a type of sea snail that feeds on bull kelp, have died from starvation. Red sea urchins, which are bigger and meatier than their purple relatives, are similarly declining from a lack of food. Last year, a recreational abalone fishery worth $44 million had to close. The north coast commercial red sea urchin fishery has collapsed.

Barehanded Bee Handling

Bees didn’t always live in man-made hives.  Michael Thiele is a dedicated bee advocate who is working to rewild bees.  He and his team are helping bees to set up housekeeping in more natural environments.

As he began dedicating more of his time to bees – he did a stint as the official beekeeper of San Francisco Zen Center from 2002 to 2005 – he became increasingly disenchanted with typical beekeeping techniques. He gave up the traditional beekeeping boxes, refused to use chemicals, smoke, or protective clothing when interacting with bees, going so far as to begin scooping them up bare-handed.

Fast-forward to 2006 and Thiele's entwined path with bees found a new place roost – a mission to "rewild" the beleaguered bees who are suffering from a devastating decline. Working with a team of biologists, apiculturists, and botanists, the idea is to coax bees out of manmade hives and back into more natural environs. This comes in the form of log hives elevated off the ground, much like the nests bees lived in for millions of years before they were domesticated.

Screw the Straws

Can the metal straw you use for your Frappuccino really save the planet?  How about  that recycled cotton grocery tote bag?  Do these items allow us to feel like we are part of the solution, while the climate crisis rages on?  It’s complicated.

“We are putting more materials out into the world,” says Emma Rose Cohen, CEO and founder of Final Straw, a company that sells the colorful, foldable metal straw Dufoe carries with her. “There is the irony of buying something to reduce consumption.” Plus, she adds, thanks to the proliferation of cheap knockoffs of her product, “inadvertently, we actually created a ton of additional waste because of these knock-offs. It wasn’t our direct waste, but still.”

Nik Sawe, a neuroscientist specializing in environmental decision-making at Stanford University, says that purchasing products that claim to be environmentally friendly allows people to participate in environmentalism without causing themselves too much discomfort. Considering how to act ethically in an environmental context requires people to confront the gravity and scale of the problem — which can feel overwhelming and, according to Sawe, actually cause them not to act. A more positive experience, on the other hand, is more likely to spur action.

…some think this entire discussion is moot, claiming that the impact of individual purchases pale in the face of the massive environmental challenges we face, and argue that larger and systemic changes are needed. In Heede’s words, “screw the straws, and do something serious.”

Neighborhood View

Large Magellanic Cloud, our galactic neighbor

On Oct. 22, 2019, the inaugural images from the German X-ray telescope eROSITA were presented to the public at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Bavaria, Germany. These "first light" images are a combination of pictures from all seven of the telescope's Wolter-1 mirror modules, which have been scanning the sky with custom CCD cameras.  --- Space.com

eROSITA X-ray telescope

On the Road

Cheetahs can run 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour, yet they can't run away from habitat loss, a reduced gene pool, and conflicts with humans and their livestock. Namibia is home to the world's largest remaining cheetah population, with 90% of its cheetahs living on livestock farmlands where conflict with humans is the greatest threat.

The survival of the Namibian cheetah lies in the hands of about 1,000 commercial farmers, who generally view this predator as a threat to their livelihoods. In the 1980s, the Namibian cheetah population declined by half as farmers killed more than 6,000 animals; another 3,000 were killed in the 1990s.  ---  EarthWatch Institute

The Great Migration

Each year, almost two million wildebeest and 20 000 plains game migrate from Tanzania's Serengeti to the south of Kenya's Masai Mara in search of lush grazing grounds and life-giving water. This treacherous odessey is dictated by the seasons and where the rains are, the wildebeest are not far behind. This epic journey from north to south spans almost 3000 kilometres and is virtually endless.

This great spectacle of nature is an iconic safari option for avid travellers, nature lovers and those who want a little more from their African experience.  ---  Discover Africa

Daily Quick Read - October 25, 2019

New Uber Drivers

Researchers at the University of Richmond (Go Spiders!) have trained rats to drive rat sized electric cars in search of food.  The rats were able to accelerate and steer the cars while negotiating their way around a four meter square arena to receive Froot Loop cereal rewards.

Rats have mastered the art of driving a tiny car, suggesting that their brains are more flexible than we thought. The finding could be used to understand how learning new skills relieves stress and how neurological and psychiatric conditions affect mental capabilities.

The team encouraged the rats to advance their driving skills by placing the food rewards at increasingly distant points around the arena. “They learned to navigate the car in unique ways and engaged in steering patterns they had never used to eventually arrive at the reward,” says Lambert.

Learning to drive seemed to relax the rats. The researchers assessed this by measuring levels of two hormones: corticosterone, a marker of stress, and dehydroepiandrosterone, which counteracts stress. The ratio of dehydroepiandrosterone to corticosterone in the rats’ faeces increased over the course of their driving training.

Girl Scouts Helping Bees

                                                                                                          Patrick Pearce 

Bees are a cornerstone species.  Their numbers have declined substantially in the wild due to habitat destruction, pesticides and climate change.  There are at least 20,000 species of bees, most of which are pollinators, while only a few are honey producing.  They do critical work for the environment and so are these young ladies.

…In Colorado, the task of saving bees from the consequences of climate change has fallen to the girls who sell us the best cookies. Yes, you heard that right. Over the summer, at a Girl Scout day camp in Denver, Girl Scout troops fashioned tiny homes for wild bees called “bee hotels” to fight the depopulation of bees across the country.

After building their bee hotels, the girls went out to install them in green pockets of their community, such as community gardens and the local botanical garden. They also donated one to a local beekeeper who spoke to the troops. “The most interesting thing I learned is probably when you think of bees, you just think of honeybees, but there are so many different types out there,” said Aimee, another 11-year-old Girl Scout.

Million $ Whales

Whales are more efficient at carbon sequestration than trees.  Humans have hunted whales to near extinction, while they have been saving us from climate change.  Now the International Monetary Fund has generated an analysis that monetize their value to the environment.  That’s $2 million per great whale or $1 trillion for all existing great whales.  

As it turns out, whales are doing far more for us than most people realize. Consider this, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF):

“Whales absorb more carbon than rain forests and help produce half of the planet's oxygen supply.”

And now, a team of economists led by Ralph Chami, assistant director of the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development, has decided to crunch the numbers and see what the value of these benefits might be. The results were published in an article published in Finance & Development on the IMF website.

Since they are economists, they go further into the economics of the whole thing – of which you can read more about in the article. But the gist is this: The role of whales in fighting climate change is undeniable and we would be well served to be focusing on this.

Is Oakland For Sale?

The port of Oakland, California is one of the country’s largest marine cargo handling facilities.  A facility that generates a substantial number of quality jobs in a city that has always struggled in comparison to neighboring San Francisco.  A local group, The Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT) has proposed building a new marine terminal in Oakland that will generate more jobs and revenue.  However, in 2016 the Oakland city council voted to ban the handling and storage of coal within the city limits.  The company proposing the new terminal fully intends to use the facility to load coal for shipment to Asia.

OBOT sued the city and in May 2018 a federal judge sided with the company by invalidating the coal ban. The city appealed the judge’s ruling and court hearings are scheduled for November.

Insight Terminal Solutions, a Kentucky-based company led by veteran coal industry executive John Siegel, paid half of OBOT’s legal costs to overturn the city’s coal ban. ITS hopes to lease the terminal from OBOT once it’s built, however, Siegel’s company filed for bankruptcy protection in July.

The records show that at the same time the coal terminal investors have been battling the city in court, they have also spent tens of thousands on local lobbyists hoping to convince Oakland’s city council to drop its legal opposition.

Who are the coal interests lobbying?  African American civic leaders.

Finding allies in Oakland’s black community, which has suffered from disproportionate exposure to pollution from the city’s port for decades, has been a key goal of the coal lobbyists.

One city official who met repeatedly with Siegel and McConnell over the past year was Oakland City Council president Rebecca Kaplan.

A document provided by Insight Terminal Solutions to Kaplan in July, just before she met with the company’s lobbyist Greg McConnell in a private room at a seafood restaurant in Oakland’s Jack London

Square, states that “without coal, the terminal cannot be built”, but the company promised only “clean coal” will be handled. The same document claims that the city will see $6m in revenue each year from a wharfage fee plus $5m in contributions to an Oakland Initiatives Fund, which can support charities and health programs.

Crumbs to Oakland’s poor, that will dry up much sooner than the coal lobbyists promise.  

Renewable Power Growth

Renewable energy capacity will increase by 50% over the next five years in the IEA bases case, with the potential to match the output of coal power generation by 2024.

This would mean global hydro, wind, solar and biomass capacity rising from 2,501 gigawatts (GW) in 2018 to 3,721GW in 2024. The increase of 1,220GW means the world would be building renewable capacity equal to the entire U.S. electricity system today, says the IEA.

It is worth noting, however, that the IEA's base-case has historically underestimated the pace of growth, as the chart above shows. As a result, successive forecasts have been revised upwards in light of increasingly favorable policy conditions and faster-than-expected reductions in cost.

Moby-Duck or the Yellow Rubber Ducky

Sometimes you learn much more from the search than you expect.  When 28,800 plastic toys from China are lost at sea, the adventure begins.

At the outset, I figured I'd interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, read up on ocean currents and Arctic geography, and then write an account of the incredible journey of the bath toys lost at sea, an account more detailed and whimsical than the tantalizingly brief summaries that had previously appeared in news stories. And all this I would do, I hoped, without leaving my desk, so that I could be sure to be present at the birth of my first child.

The next thing you know, it's the middle of the night and you're on the outer decks of a post-Panamax freighter due south of the Aleutian island where, in 1741, shipwrecked, Vitus Bering perished from scurvy and hunger. The winds are gale force. The water is deep and black, and so is the sky. It's snowing. The decks are slick. Your ears ache, your fin­gers are numb. Solitary, nocturnal circumambulations of the outer decks by supernumerary passengers are strictly forbidden, for good reason. Fall overboard and no one would miss you.   ---  Excerpt from Moby-Duck 

Leopard and Cub

Nompethu, the beautiful female leopard and her cub, have been showing up on a regular basis. The cub is growing fast, and Nompethu is making regular kills to keep up with the little cub’s appetite. She is obviously a fantastic mother as the youngster is looking very healthy and growing by the day!  ---  Africa Geographic

Daily Quick Read - October 23, 2019

Trump’s New Island

The Russian navy has discovered five previously unknown islands in the Arctic Ocean.  The islands were revealed as the Arctic glacier covering them melted away in the warming ocean.  Rumor has it that the islands will be named Exxon, Shell, BP, Mobil and Trump.

An expedition in August and September charted the islands, which have yet to be named and were previously hidden under glaciers, said the head of the northern fleet, Vice-Admiral Alexander Moiseyev.

“Mainly this is of course caused by changes to the ice situation,” Moiseyev, who headed the expedition, said at a press conference in Moscow. “Before these were glaciers; we thought they were (part of) the main glacier. Melting, collapse and temperature changes led to these islands being uncovered.”

Glacier loss in the Arctic in the period from 2015 to 2019 was more than in any other five-year period on record, a United Nations report on global warming said last month.

Steel City Farming

In the Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, a relic of the regions steel making past is being renovated and fitted out as an indoor vertical farm.  We wrote about a new vertical farm being completed in Ohio back in August.  Urban industrial farming like these start-ups may be a high-tech vision of the future of farm to table agriculture or money sucking high tech busts.  One thing that gives me confidence that this may be a viable concept – the Koch brothers are against it.

In the shadow of one of Pittsburgh’s long-standing steel mills, a startup is hoping to cultivate a farm out of the grit of Braddock.

Next door to U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works, Fifth Season is building an indoor vertical farm that will integrate high-tech elements like artificial intelligence, data analysis and robotics to seed, harvest and package leafy greens to ship to local grocery stores and restaurants.

The Braddock farm is expected to produce more than 500,000 pounds of lettuce, spinach, kale, arugula and herbs from a 25,000-square-foot grow room during the first full year of operation.

Who Pays For the Clean-up?

Earlier this month, we wrote about the financial woes of the fracking industry.  It is highly likely that the fracking wells will require massive public funding to be safely retired.  In many cases fracking companies will follow the example of coal and other mining interest, declare bankruptcy and walk away from any mitigation costs. There already are millions of abandoned oil and gas wells in the US.  The fracking boom has created hundreds of thousands of additional wells that are likely to be abandoned as the glut of natural gas in the market makes it unprofitable to operate them.

Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on.

"It's starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in," Bruce Hicks, assistant director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said in August about companies abandoning oil and gas wells. If North Dakota's regulators, some of the most industry-friendly in the country, are sounding the alarm, then that doesn't bode well for the rest of the nation.

Oil and gas companies are obligated to set aside funds to pay for well clean-ups. However, the financial set-asides, known as bonding, are skewed in the industries favor, often covering a small percentage of the actual clean-up costs. Insufficient bonding funds are hidden government subsidy to the oil and gas industry.

South Dakota allows companies to post a $30,000 bond for as many wells as the company chooses to drill. Spyglass Cedar Creek is a Texas-based company that was operating in South Dakota and recently abandoned 40 wells, which the state has estimated will have a cleanup cost of $1.2 million.

However, there is a twist to this story. That $30,000 bond doesn't really exist. The owners of the company had put $20,000 of it into a Certificate of Deposit. But when the state went looking for that money, the owners said they had cashed it in 2015 because, as reported by the Rapid City Journal, "company officials did not remember what the money was for."

The math works out pretty well for the oil company.  Even if they had set aside the full bonding amount of $30,000, the taxpayers in South Dakota would have been on the hook for $1,170,000.

Seashells by the Seashore

In 1921 an Italian immigrant started an unusual project on a small parcel of land he owned in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.  Over the next 33 years his project became the world famous Watts Towers.  

Sabato Rodia was a beachcomber. Barely five feet tall, with a face as creased as a used map and eyes perpetually squinted against the sun, he spent untold days prowling the beaches and estuaries of Southern California with an old cement sack slung over his shoulder. As he walked, he filled the sack with the shells that marine mollusks had once built from seawater to protect their vulnerable bodies.

Rodia hauled some 10,000 seashells from the coast to his property, where he built a whimsical fantasy of concrete walls, arches, and towers that soared to over 30 meters. He studded the structure with the shells, as well as with broken tools, plastic toys, glass bottles, pieces of tile, and thousands of other found objects.

Rodia’s whimsical structure is now a National Historic Landmark and a Los Angeles cultural center. That alone would be enough, but Rodia’s beachcombing resulted in a remarkable shell collection that is literally built into the towers.  A collection that puts three decades of natural history in plain sight.

Bruno Pernet, a marine biologist at California State University, Long Beach, decided to look at Rodia’s history through the mollusks he collected. After several years of identifying clams, abalone, and other shells, Pernet and his colleagues realized that they not only corroborated scattered accounts of Rodia’s beachcombing habits, they captured a richer moment in the region’s environmental history. Some of the towers’ most common species are now locally extinct or rare, and invasive newcomers have become common.

Rodia isn’t alone in his affinity for seashells.  Shell are powerful symbols in human societies across the globe.

For millennia, people have carried shells over mountains and across deserts and through city streets with the belief that somehow these chambers built from seawater can help us find our way home. Maybe they can. Maybe as our ties to the natural world grow increasingly frayed, their true power is simply that they remind us how beautiful the world can be.

More Santa Ana Winds Coming

California’s three major public utilities have decided that instead of spending money on clearly identified and understood power distribution grid improvements they are going to plunge the state into darkness for days at a time if necessary.  The world’s 5^th largest economy is being forced to emulate a 3^rd world country.  

California is doing just about everything to make the problem worse and handle it poorly. Even as global warming extends its droughts, decades of poor forest and land management have made the state a tinderbox. More and more Californians are living in the most remote, fire-prone areas in the state, doing too little to make their houses and communities resilient in the face of fire. Meanwhile, the state’s biggest utility, PG&E, is a debt-ridden, mismanaged omnishambles currently being chewed over by a bankruptcy court. Covering its enormous maintenance and fire-prevention backlog is going to cause rates to rise even as power becomes less reliable.

Quick Trip to Visit M87

Messier 87  is a super giant galaxy 53 million light years from Earth.  At the galaxy's heart is a massive black hole.  Astronomers were able to generate an image of light waves bending around the M87 black hole.  Take the tour from Earth to the M87 black hole.  

This zoom video starts with a view of the ALMA telescope array in Chile and zooms in on the heart of M87, showing successively more detailed observations and culminating in the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole’s silhouette. --- Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL)

Credit: ESO/L. Calçada, Digitized Sky Survey 2, ESA/Hubble, RadioAstron, De Gasperin et al., Kim et al., EHT Collaboration. Music: Niklas Falcke

Aye-Aye's Hidden Thumb

                                                                                                                           Image: © David Haring/Duke Lemur Center

There's a little extra thumb-thing on the hand of the aye-aye, a strange-looking nocturnal lemur native to Madagascar. Tucked near each wrist is a small nub of bone and cartilage that's like a miniature thumb — and until recently, scientists didn't know this pseudothumb existed. --- LiveScience

24 Billion Pairs of Shoes

Twenty-four billion pairs of shoes were sold in 2018 – seven pairs for every person on the planet. And, it’s likely that an equivalent number of shoes were tossed out to make room in the closet for the new ones.

Most of those shoes are partly, or in many cases completely, fabricated from plastic and plastic-like materials, from the squishy soles to the pointy heels to the knit polyester uppers to the brittle eyelet holes. Because of their construction—usually, their many components are stitched and glued and molded together in complicated ways—they’re almost impossible to recycle. So your feet are only a short stopover in their long, long lifetimes, before they pile up in landfills and float down waterways, often living on like zombies for hundreds of years.

Turns out that plastics are the best material for shoe construction and there is little hope that much will change in the near future.  There are some efforts to simplify construction and make recycling more viable, but humans are addicted to shoes so the future of footwear remains plastic.

Do Plastics Make Us Sick

We are learning that the answer to that is YES. The plastics that are major components of virtually everything we touch and everything that touches us present a myriad of potential health dangers to us. Early in October first-ever global Plastic Health Summit was held in Amsterdam. Dr. Peter Myers was one of those who presented at the event.

We know enough already to be concerned, Myers said: How hormone-altering chemicals are both purposefully and inadvertently added to the plastics ubiquitous in our lives and how tiny exposures to these compounds can have large impacts on our health and the health of children.

"No plastic has been tested thoroughly—none. Zip. Zero. Nada," Myers said, adding that the health tests used by regulators on plastic contaminants are based on"16th century" principles.

The summit brought together scientists, policymakers and innovators to discuss the impact of plastics on the health of the planet.  All of the presentations from the summit are available here. 

No Deposit Says Coke

When the Atlanta Recycles coalition met in January to review the new year’s recycling plans and budget, one of the group’s financial partners, Coca-Cola, made it clear that they would pull their support for the group if it promoted a “bottle bill” -  a container deposit law to encourage plastic bottle recycling.  

Audio from a meeting of recycling leaders obtained by The Intercept reveals how the soda giant’s “green” philanthropy helped squelch what could have been an important tool in fighting the plastic crisis — and shines a light on the behind-the-scenes tactics beverage and plastics companies have quietly used for decades to evade responsibility for their waste.

Coke and its beverage company competitors may be at war in the grocery store aisles, but they have amazing solidarity in their opposition to deposit laws. These companies and the organizations they support have aggressively lobby against bottle deposits to the extent that only 10 states have bottle bills

 States with bottle bills recycle about 60 percent of their bottles and cans, as opposed to 24 percent in other states. And states that have bottle bills also have an average of 40 percent less beverage container litter on their coasts, according to a 2018 study of the U.S. and Australia published in the journal Marine Policy.

The soft drink industry has been firmly against up-front deposits to encourage recycling ever since they made the transition from glass to plastic bottles.  They quickly joined the campaign to blame consumers for litter. 

…it was the National Soft Drink Association, funded by Coke, that did the work to defeat the bill. At the same time, Keep America Beautiful was letting people know that “keeping America beautiful is your job.” Those who failed at that job were “litterbugs,” or, as the nonprofit organization made disturbingly clear in a video that year, pigs.

For Coke and the others, it’s all about the money.  Recycling is someone else's problem.

Shinrin Yoku

While in Brazil forests are being destroyed, a new study confirms the health benefits of “forest medicine.”  Quiet meditation, or just sitting, in the forest can have a real, measurable impact on a person’s health.  

Japanese “forest medicine” is the science of using nature to heal oneself of all that ails. In the 1980s, researchers in Japan started extolling the science behind the benefits of being outdoors. And in 1982, the Japanese government introduced the concept of shinrin yoku, or “forest bathing,” urging people to make use of the country’s generous wooded areas for therapy.

But, sensei, what do the scientists say?

“We found that spending time in, or living close to, natural green spaces is associated with diverse and significant health benefits. It reduces the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, premature death, and preterm birth, and increases sleep duration.

“People living closer to nature also had reduced diastolic blood pressure, heart rate and stress. In fact, one of the really interesting things we found is that exposure to greenspace significantly reduces people’s levels of salivary cortisol – a physiological marker of stress.

And, it might not be just the psychological impact, greater socialization or physical exercise associated with spending time in the forest, there may actually be a benefit of just breathing in the forest air.

“Much of the research from Japan suggests that phytoncides – organic compounds with antibacterial properties – released by trees could explain the health-boosting properties of forest bathing.”

Apparently, forests aren't just good for the trees and creatures that live in them, but can be pretty healthy for the folks that just visit them.

“Savannization”

                                                                                                           Chris Linder

Deforestation of the Amazon is creating an entirely new climate for the region.  A regional climate that will have a massive impact on the global climate, while devastating the regions agricultural capacity. Profound climate impact combined with crippling social dislocation.  

… it is where Brazilian and American scientists are keeping watch for the long-predicted tipping point – the moment when the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, begins a process of runaway degradation, when so much forest has been lost that the transition to savanna is irreversible. That will be the moment when the Amazon ceases to be a carbon sink that helps protect the planet from climate change, and turns into a global source for carbon emissions.

Deforestation is dramatically raising local temperatures. The air over the farm is on average 5 degrees Celsius hotter than in the forested reserve over the fence: 34 degrees C, rather than 29 degrees C. The difference rises to a staggering 10 degrees at the end of the dry season, says Coe.

And the dry season is lengthening. Across the Xingu Basin and through the southern Amazon region known as the “arc of deforestation,” it lasts almost four weeks longer than half a century ago.

Trees in the Amazon rainforest, don’t just convert CO2 into O2, they also generate water through a process called transpiration.  A process that not only creates water, but removes heat from the forest.

Transpiration requires large amounts of energy, taken from solar radiation. “Every square meter of forest removes the heat equivalent of about two 60-watt [light] bulbs burning 14 hours per day,” Coe calculated in one study. So it cools the air of intact forest. But take away the forest, and the air is instantly much hotter.

The transpiration of a typical large Amazon tree also releases around 500 liters of water a day into the atmosphere. The moisture creates clouds and rain that sustain the forest.

When the closed looped processes that the rainforest drives are disrupted, even in areas that haven’t been directly impacted by deforestation, the reduction in moisture can result in a process of “savannization” – where the dense, cool rainforest becomes an open dry grassland with far fewer trees.  Savannas have nowhere near the same impact on CO2 conversion than do rainforests. 

Nobre argued in 2007 that there could come a point where savannization is unstoppable across large swaths of the Amazon. He said the tipping point could occur if 40 percent of the forest was lost. More recently he has warned that, with the background global rise in temperatures, that threshold could be much closer – at between 20 and 25 percent loss. With Brazilian government scientists putting the current loss at 19.7 percent, the doomsday could be close.

The clock is ticking towards midnight in the world's largest rainforest.  Its collapse won't just drive global warming.  It will also have a profound impact on the global food supply.

ExxonMobil in Court

Please read this story from Daily Kos.  It's a great summary of the current legal actions in two states against ExxonMobil for its concerted efforts to deny the reality of climate change despite knowing the burning fossil fuels was the cause.

On Thursday evening, Bloomberg reported that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is proceeding with the state’s case against ExxonMobil for “engaging in unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in its efforts to cast doubt on climate science.

ExxonMobil brass may be particularly annoyed by the notification that Massachusetts is moving forward. This Wednesday, the oil giant will appear in a New York court for that state’s case against it. As E&E explains in an (unpaywalled) story, the New York case revolves around the company’s use of two sets of “proxy costs” to gauge how much of a hit the company would take from climate policies.

These companies knew about the impact of burning fossil fuels 40 years ago and their corporate response was to fund climate change denialism.  And, as they pump record volumes of oil and gas from the ground, they are still benefiting from their efforts to deny our children's future.

Pel's Fishing Owl

Pel’s fishing owl © Sausage Tree Safari Camp

The Pel’s fishing owl is one of the largest owls in the world and is found along rivers and lakes throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Their favourite habitat is riparian forests with large trees, such as we have along the Olifants. They’re residential in habit, so they don’t migrate but are territorial, staking out portions of riverbank and lakefront to call their own.

Although mostly nocturnal, we have been fortunate to see Pel’s during the day, especially when prey is scarce or hard to find. As their name implies, their main prey is fish and they are able to catch fish up to 2 kg in weight. They swoop down to catch fish just below the surface of the water with their powerful talons and don’t submerge or get themselves too wet doing so.  ---  Africa Geographic