Daily Quick Read - October 1, 2019

Jane Goodall

Great Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview with Jane Goodall.  She is a world treasure.  Here is part of the Q and A with her, but please read the whole thing.

[Question] We're having this conversation while young people around the world are calling for stronger action around climate change. What's your message to people, especially young people, who want to make a difference but they feel like what they're up against is so big?

[Jane Goodall] I was meeting so many young people who seemed not to have much hope. This was back in the 90s, and they said to me, "We feel hopeless because you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it."

We have indeed compromised their future. We've stolen it, or we're still stealing it today. But we're realizing there is a lot we can do, this is a window of time, and that's when I began our Jane Goodall Institute Roots and Shoots program, which is now in some 60 countries.

Ever since 1991, we've been encouraging young people to take action to help people, animals, and the environment. The awareness has been growing. I've been traveling 300 days a year giving lectures. Other people have taken up the cause.

[Question] Do you foresee a day when you're going to want to slow down?

[Jane Goodall]  I'm 85, closer to 86. And people say, 'Well, why don't you slow down?" But I have to speed up. Because I know there's going to be a time when I can't do it anymore.

I wouldn't do it if it didn't make an impact. But [then] everybody comes up and tells me, "I'm going to do my bit. You've given me hope. You've inspired me to take action."

I have to go on because if we don't all get together, and soon, it's going to be too late.

Dude, Where’s My Beach?

                                                                            Devon Meyers / TMT

When someone say Southern California to you, what do you envision?  OK, not smog, crowded freeways, the homeless or wildfires….  Come on, you think of beautiful sandy beaches.  Soon, they might be just that.  Only a memory.  

As a precaution, the report recommends that state officials anticipate 10 feet of rise when building crucial infrastructure along the coast.

Keep in mind some researchers think we've been underestimating just how bad things could get.

According to a paper co-authored by Barnard, SoCal could lose between 31% - 67% of its beaches by 2100.

"I mean these are very, very narrow beaches. They're already having lots of issues, and just a bit of sea level rise and they're going to be completely gone," said Barnard, adding that Malibu could see a major loss of its beaches in the coming decades.

Flooding the Swamp

As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington.  We knew it was lie then, but every  day we see the reality of Trump’s lie.  In Northern California, Shasta Dam collects the run off from winter snows and provides water to maintain  healthy rivers and feed thirsty crops in the state’s central valley.  For over a decade agricultural interest have advocated raising the dam (currently  the  nation’s tallest), to allow for the collection of more water which they could use for their crops.  Government scientists have argued against raising the dam due to the environmental damage that such an action would cause.  But, now Trump’s Secretary of the Interior is a former lobbyist for those agricultural interests, so guess what?  

…the project is going forward now, in a big win for a powerful consortium of California farmers that stands to profit substantially by gaining access to more irrigation water from a higher dam and has been trying to get the project approved for more than a decade.

For much of the past decade, the chief lobbyist for the group was David Bernhardt. Today, Mr. Bernhardt is the Interior Secretary.

It is not the first time that the Interior Department under Mr. Bernhardt’s leadership has taken actions that benefit his former client, the Westlands Water District, a state entity created at the behest of, and largely controlled by, some of California’s wealthiest farmers. Mr. Bernhardt also promoted the weakening of an endangered-species regulation that would get Westlands more water, a move that has put him under scrutiny from his department’s inspector general.

More Red Meat

Challenging the almost universal medical consensus that the over consumption of red and process meats has long term negative health impacts, a panel of scientist has published a study they say exonerates red and process meats.  So go ahead an gorge yourselves.  Wait….Maybe this new study has a flawed methodology.

The prominent medical journal has also published a new recommendation from a panel of scientists, many of whom are not nutrition experts: "The panel suggests adults continue current processed meat consumption," according to the guideline paper. In other words: no need to cut back.

Scores of nutrition experts say this conclusion contradicts a large body of evidence, from decades of observational studies, that has found that people who consume less red and processed meats, over time, have lower rates of heart disease and death from certain cancers, including colorectal cancer.

Recommendations from the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society, as well as the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, all call for limiting red meats and processed meats.

"I am outraged and bewildered," says nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. "This is perplexing, given the ... clear evidence for harm associated with high red meat intake," says Frank Hu, the chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Plastic Tea Bags

So, who knew that tea bags were made from plastic?  At first only partially, but now, why not, make them entirely of plastic.  But, you ask, what about the billions of micro and nano particles of plastic that the bags shed when placed in hot water?  Don’t worry, says the plastic industry.  A nice hot cup of plastic particles will calm you down.

Just when we thought (or hoped?) food manufacturers were moving away from plastic packaging, some tea companies are embracing it. There has been a subtle shift toward using all-plastic tea bags, rather than the conventional type that contains up to 25 percent plastic (still problematic). This change concerned researchers at McGill University in Montreal, who decided to investigate. Their study has just been published in the American Chemical Society's journal, Environmental Science & Technology.

Led by chemical engineering professor Nathalie Tufenkji, the researchers purchased four types of commercial teas packaged in plastic bags. They removed the tea leaves, rinsed the bags, then steeped them at 95F, which is typical tea-making temperature. What they found is alarming. From a McGill press release,

"Using electron microscopy, the team found that a single plastic teabag at brewing temperature released about 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into the water. These levels were thousands of times higher than those reported previously in other foods."