Seattle’s orcas are dying.
First was Tahlequah’s calf.
Then came news Thursday that another young orca, Scarlet, appeared to be dying.
Grieving orca mother carries dead calf for days as killer whales fight for survival Read more “This is what they have told the world – it is human actions that are responsible for the dead and stillborn calves, the sick and starving adults and the declining condition of the environment in which they live,” Solien said before calling for a moment of silence for Tahlequah and her calf.
Three years have passed since an orca calf born in the region survived.
In the past 20 years, 40 orcas have been born into the group while 72 have died.
I don’t believe we have another chance Phil Anderson The work of saving the orca in Washington has fallen to the Puget Sound Partnership, a taskforce of leaders from state agencies, interest groups and tribal governments.
“My first great grandchild was born this year,” Sanchez said.
Dams, pollution and fishing have depressed Pacific north-west stocks of Chinook, which often appear in supermarkets as king salmon.
Phil Anderson, a fisheries negotiator with the Pacific Salmon Council, said a proposed treaty with Canada will reduce the salmon catch if both governments approve it.
Conservation & Sustainability
“All that is the ‘new normal’ that we will have to face.” Why on earth is the word normal being thrown around to describe such extraordinary times?
The new normal is a catchy phrase, and one you’ve probably heard before — if not from Brown, then perhaps from the New York Times.
“It sounds like we left the old normal, the old conditions, and arrived at a new normal, a new stasis,” Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of Idaho, tells me.
When people invoke the “new normal,” Stamper says they’re not referring to an unchanging, static condition, but rather “a measure of uncertainty and worsening danger.” In other words, the cliche conveys exactly the message that climate scientists want to convey.
“I hear what the climate scientists are saying — you don’t want to say bad hurricanes are the new normal, and we should just get used to them,” Stamper says.
“Delaware can’t afford a future where climate change and sea level rise are the new normal.” There are valid fears about complacency in the face of radical climate change — that we’ll forget the way that things used to be, become blind to the environmental destruction happening around us, and fail to act to save what’s left.
It’s a concern with climate change, too, he says.
“We’re in the middle of a shift that can destroy what we hold dear, and to call this normal is absurd.” Stamper has some advice for scientists, like Pauly, who hate the phrase.
“Do they think normal is a static point?
Because linguistically, we can show that what people call ‘normal’ changes constantly.” In fact, reporters are already approaching the phrase this way in climate reporting, which suggests that we might be able to have the phrase and use it too, exactly in the manner scientists would want — even if they still hate the term.
What conservation books are most inspiring?
As CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek knows the power of great conservation books.
As the book reviewer for Cool Green Science, I’m always looking for great conservation reads.
Lanham describes himself as a “rare bird, an oddity”: an African-American ornithologist who loves birding, hunting and exploring the land.
His memoir explores the influences that led him to his land ethic and his career in science.
Mark and I are both David Quammen fans, and it appears a lot of Twitter users are, too.
I frequently turn to The Well-read Naturalist for my reading recommendations, so I’m not surprised that his choice was one of my favorites.
It turns out, there’s a scientific basis for nature’s healing powers, as top journalist Florence Williams reveals in The Nature Fix.
Desert Solitaire and other works by Edward Abbey frequently appear on lists like this.
Read this book and discover Abbey for yourself.
Aug. 1 marks Earth Overshoot Day 2018, the point in our calendars when we tip into consuming more natural resources than the planet can regenerate in a year.
“At the moment, we’re able to live in this ecological debt by using up the Earth’s future resources to operate our economies in the present ― in other words, we’re running a Ponzi scheme with our planet,” Mathis Wackernagel, CEO of Global Footprint Network, told HuffPost.
“The question,” he said, “is whether we do so by design or by disaster.” There’s a human cost to all of this, said Michael O’Heaney, executive director of environmental campaign group The Story of Stuff.
“When we don’t live in harmony with the Earth’s ability to sustain itself, people get hurt ― you see ecosystem collapse in places primarily impacting poor people, people in the global south,” O’Heaney said.
Research indicates that while the effects of climate change will be felt everywhere, the poorest nations will be hit hardest.
If the world’s population lived like the U.S. currently does we would need five planets to sustain consumption levels, according to Global Footprint Network’s data.
In other words, our planet relies on 1.7 planets worth of resources.
Take the example of bottled water.
We all did fine without water in plastic bottles 25 years ago.” As corporations have convinced us that we need things like bottled water, governments have been doing an increasingly bad job of protecting our natural resources, O’Heaney said.
All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations.
LAKEPORT, Calif. (AP) — A pair of wildfires that prompted evacuation orders for nearly 20,000 people barreled Monday toward small lake towns in Northern California, and authorities faced questions about how quickly they warned residents about the largest and deadliest blaze burning in the state.
Ed Bledsoe told CBS News he did not receive any warning to evacuate his home in the city of Redding before the flames came through last week and killed his wife, Melody, and his great-grandchildren, 5-year-old James Roberts and 4-year-old Emily Roberts.
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko told the network there’s an investigation into whether the Bledsoe home received a warning call or a knock on the door.
The blazes have destroyed seven homes and threaten 10,000 others.
So far, the flames have blackened more than 68,000 acres — well over 100 square miles — with minimal containment.
A fleet of aircraft made continuous water and fire retardant drops on the blaze.
The blaze, which killed two firefighters and four civilians including two children, has now destroyed 818 homes and 311 outbuildings and damaged 165 homes, McLean said.
More than 27,000 people remained evacuated from their homes although another 10,000 were allowed to return Monday as fire crews reinforced lines on the western end of the blaze.
He said he received a phone call from his wife 15 minutes after he left saying he needed to get home because the fire was approaching.
The dispatch center put out more than 18 emergency alerts between Thursday evening and midday Friday, Bartolo said.
“This summer has been seen as a make-or-break test,” for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, wrote Joshua Rhodes, who researches energy at the University of Texas, Austin.
Every year, Los Angeles seems to set a new electricity demand record, said Martin Adams, Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Rising temperatures trigger a dangerous chain reaction: More people run air conditioners to keep themselves cool, which strains electrical systems causing blackouts, which exposes people to hazardous heat.
Experts have a few suggestions: Replace old wires When electricity demand surged in Los Angeles, pieces of the electrical system started to blow up.
It’s better for both utility workers and customers if utilities can replace aging parts ahead of time.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of solar built in Texas in the next few years,” Rhodes said.
“When there’s a shortage of electricity, the prices go up, but customers are mostly still paying the same price they would at any other time,” explained James Bushnell, an energy economist and the University of California, Davis.
Manage demand A while back, Rhodes’s electricity provider made him an interesting offer: Austin Energy wanted permission to control his thermostat for 15 minutes at a time, four to six times a year, when electricity demand was peaking.
For instance, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power might see the temperatures rising toward 160 degrees in that underground vault, and react by turning down the air conditioners of the customers downstream, allowing the equipment to cool before it blows up and leaves them with no air-conditioning at all.
The more the climate changes, the more people need electricity to cool them down.
House Democrats later revealed that Zinke met with the project’s developers in his government office last summer, and they called on the Interior Department’s internal watchdog to investigate whether Zinke violated ethics rules by using taxpayer resources for personal financial gain.
CNN reported Thursday that it had uncovered several instances where Zinke’s official calendar excluded information about whom he met with or what was discussed.
The inspector general investigated Zinke’s use of private planes at taxpayers’ expense — a controversy Zinke dismissed as “a little BS” — and concluded that he “generally followed relevant law, policy, rules, and regulations.” However, it found that one trip ― a $12,375 chartered flight from Las Vegas to Montana aboard an oil company plane ― was approved by ethics officials “without complete information” and could have been avoided.
CNN reported in April that the Office of Special Counsel is reviewing whether the announcement violates the Hatch Act.
Last year, Zinke phoned Alaska Republican Sens.
And Interior ultimately thwarted a subsequent investigation by the Government Accountability Office by taking six months to respond, only to refuse to give the watchdog details about Zinke’s phone call.
In February, the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based government ethics watchdog, announced that it had asked Interior’s inspector general to open an investigation.
Interior’s internal watchdog looked into the matter, but was ultimately unable to determine if the reassignments violated federal law because of a lack of documentation.
Mixing work with politics.
While there, he flew on chartered planes, at a price of $3,150, and made an appearance at a Republican fundraising event.
Fossil fuel producers, airlines and electrical utilities outspent environmental groups and the renewable energy industry 10 to 1 on lobbying related to climate change legislation between 2000 and 2016, according to a new analysis released Wednesday.
“We seem to have a public opinion fetish where if we get public opinion to be supportive of climate change legislation, then it’ll happen,” Brulle said.
“My answer to that is, gee, well, we should have gun control legislation then.” During the period examined by the study, expenditures on federal lobbying aimed at climate issues topped $2 billion, representing on average 3.9 percent of annual federal lobbying dollars.
Searching for a dozen key terms ― including “climate change,” “global warming” and “carbon” ― he pinpointed more than 64,100 reports of such lobbying, identified the reports by business sector, and compared those figures to the sectors’ annual overall spending on lobbying.
Many other representatives of major corporate interests lobby the government but keep it under 20 percent of their time.
The climate change denial movement remains powerful if splintered.
Oil giants traditionally funded the network of misinformation outlets seeding doubt about the role of fossil fuels in warming the planet.
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas sector’s top lobbying group, noted the study’s finding that the fossil fuel industry spent nearly 18 percent of all climate lobbying dollars during the period examined, but suggested it wasn’t the whole story.
The EPA under then-Administrator Scott Pruitt started the process to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a federal rule that would have incentivized utilities to use more renewable energy and scale back emissions from coal.
We seem to have a public opinion fetish where if we get public opinion to be supportive of climate change legislation, then it’ll happen.
It may take generations to achieve this, but it is possible – and it remains vitally important that we do what it takes to make it happen.
Species loss has become an almost daily occurrence.
When it comes to growing food, dung beetles are among the most important insects in the Neotropics, areas that share a large number of plant and animal groups that are scattered from southern Florida and Texas and through the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and throughout most of South America.
In cattle pastures, they’ve been known to bury more than 80 percent of the dung pats.
Scientists are finding that many species of dung beetle are endangered.
We’re not just arresting its decline but restoring species populations, even in and around productive agricultural areas.
Colombian authorities are now talking about decreasing the amount of area used for cattle ranching by more than 20 percent while simultaneously increasing farm productivity.
And we’ve noted similar results in other parts of Latin America, particularly Chiapas state in Mexico, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.
With a Healthy Agricultural Systems approach, farming and ranching can be converted from a global environmental problem into the leading edge of an effort to avert looming biological disaster – and farmers themselves can become more productive and profitable.
We simply need to grow it better and in a way that turns the tide away from species loss and toward the restoration and preservation of Earth’s delicate ecological balance.
A high-pressure cell recently idled over southern California like the lid of Satan’s pressure cooker, wilting residents with record-shattering heat.
Others were trees — including avocado trees.
Turns out that’s too hot for avocados.
Avocado trees are vulnerable to extreme weather (hence the title of May’s cover story, “Are Avocados Toast?”), but Sayer resolved to plant a new avocado orchard because that wasn’t his only concern.
He also has to think about prices and his own ability to adapt.
Sayer, for instance, grows a cover crop that protects roots from the extremes of heat, cold, and rain.
pic.twitter.com/xDAhBAcX0v — Chris Sayer (@pettyranch) July 6, 2018 When the recent heat wave hit, Sayer saw it as a possible preview of what’s to come.
We saw 110.7 degrees on Friday.
Very hot for #avocados.
@savortooth 1/3 pic.twitter.com/2Dms44jVP4 — Chris Sayer (@pettyranch) July 9, 2018 Avocados don’t like temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but one of Sayer’s orchards — the one in a cooler clime — was able to hang in there without much suffering.
