. About 70,000 people in Puerto Rico’s northwestern municipalities of Isabela and Quebradillas were being urged to evacuate immediately Friday after the Guajataca Dam there was found to be in “imminent” danger of failing.
The storm has dumped more than 20 inches of rain across a wide swath of the island.
A complete failure of the structure would unleash a deadly, fast-moving wave of water as the 2-square-mile lake it once held back is funneled downhill.
“We don’t know what the details are,” Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said at a news conference Friday.
Jery Stedinger, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Cornell University who has studied dam safety, told HuffPost that Puerto Rico’s dams are particularly vulnerable because Hurricane Irma also swiped the island just two weeks ago.
“We’re seeing a lot more hurricanes these days, and this was back to back,” he explained. “The first one probably got the ground wet, and it really enhances the runoff from the second one.
“So when doing dam safety studies, one worries about more than one flood.
Conservation & Sustainability
. Alba, an albino orangutan, snacks on a watermelon at the orangutan rehabilitation centre in central Kalimantan, Indonesia. The conservation group wants to create a 12-acre forest island for the world’s only known albino orangutan after rescuing it from villagers five months ago. Alba can’t be returned to the wild because of health issues related to her albinism.
California condors huddle around a watering hole in the Ventana wilderness east of Big Sur, California. Three decades after being pushed to the brink of extinction, the California condor is staging an impressive comeback, thanks to captive-breeding programs and reduced use of lead ammunition near their feeding grounds.
. Blackpoll warblers, Connecticut warblers, bobolinks and perhaps other species all make this paradoxical choice, setting off across a watery abyss as they make their way to winter destinations in South America.
Keith made the case that Bermuda was on the path of a songbird “regular overwater migration route.” They noted that species which wintered in South America were more likely to be seen in Bermuda during fall.
One additional and dramatic bit of circumstantial evidence for the ocean flyway came in 1987 during the confluence of a hurricane and migrating birds over Bermuda.
Tracking work by Emily McKinnon and her coauthors that was published this year shows that Connecticut warblers lift off from the east coast and fly for two days before making landfall on Caribbean Islands (Cuba, Haiti and Dominican Republic).
Why do these birds choose the overwater route?
Birds use a tailwind to head southbound until they reach tradewinds north of the Caribbean that guide them southwestward to island stopover sites.
On his first voyage, Columbus happened to be sailing on the tradewinds north of Puerto Rico at the peak of fall migration in early October.
As climate changes, winds may also change.
For example, we now know that the fate of Connecticut and blackpoll warblers hinges in part on habitat availability and quality in the Caribbean islands.
As tree densities change, so do types of flowers, birds, trees and other small mammals.
Why, you may now be asking, are squirrels living in these certain areas?
“You had all this serotiny that would rain down after a fire, and in areas where serotiny was really low, you would have more meadows than trees because there was no seedbank up there,” he says.
The magnitude of the results surprised even Talluto.
It only took, on average, about one pine squirrel per football field of forest to dramatically change rates of serotiny.
Since Benkman and Talluto’s research was published, Talluto moved onto other universities and Benkman continued his work with crossbills.
“The squirrels eat pine, but also fungi,” Benkman says.
. Puerto Rico, along with both the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands, are bracing for a hit from Maria on Wednesday night, according to the National Hurricane Center’s forecast. As of Monday afternoon, the storm was packing 130 mph winds and set to bring storm conditions to Dominica, Guadeloupe and Martinique later at night.
The threat of destructive rain ― predicted to be as high as 20 inches in some areas ― severe winds and storm surge come just as many who live in the Caribbean attempt to get back on their feet after Irma, which claimed at least three lives in Puerto Rico, at least four in the British Virgin Islands, and at least three in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where electricity may not be restored for months.
She had moved there with her husband 46 years ago and lost everything ― “a lifetime of labor and love” ― to Irma’s destruction.
Irma largely spared Puerto Rico but still knocked out power for about a million residents, which is simultaneously grappling with its worst economic crisis in modern history and has been in a near-continuous recession for the last 10 years.
As Maria neared, Rosselló said that about 85 percent of customers in and around San Juan, the territory’s capital, were still without electricity because of Irma.
National Weather Service meteorologist Jessie Smith told Florida Today that it never hurts to be prepared.
Editor’s note: News about conservation and the environment is made every day, but some of it can fly under the radar.
Asia’s glaciers to shrink by a third by 2100, threatening water supply of millions Himalayan glaciers — a crucial source of fresh water for millions of people in South Asia and China — will lose up to a third of their mass, a study found.
The story: The Asian high mountains, the new study said, were already warming more rapidly than the global average, Agence France Presse reported Wednesday in The Guardian.
The bad news: This is a best-case scenario, as it assumes that global average temperature rise can be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The big picture: While much of the conservation world’s attention is focused on protecting forests, wetlands and coral reefs, mountains are sometimes taken for granted — yet climate change could crumble their ability to support life as we know it.
Mountains’ contributions to fresh water, energy and biodiversity are at risk in a changing climate.
The story: Much of the food we grow has been growing less nutritious over the years: A 2004 study of fruits and vegetables found that nutrients had declined significantly since 1950.
No one has been able to say exactly why, but now, a handful of scientists are beginning to suspect that the atmosphere itself — i.e. higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air — may be changing the food we eat.
Unlike in 2005, when the U.S. was racked by Katrina, Rita and Wilma, scientists are now more willing to link factors like worsened storm surge flooding and hurricane rainfall to climate change, Mooney writes.
Want to read more stories like this?
California will become the first state to ban pet stores from selling cats, dogs or rabbits that don’t come from a shelter or rescue group if Gov.
Jerry Brown (D) signs the bill sent to him this week.
The Pet Rescue and Adoption Act, AB 485, passed the California State Senate with a 32-0 vote on Tuesday, NBC San Diego reports.
The governor has until Oct. 15 to sign the bill into law or veto it, the Bee notes.
Under the legislation, pet store owners that still wished to sell cats, dogs or rabbits would have to work with local animal shelters and rescue groups to do so.
First, it would prevent California pet stores from supporting breeding facilities that mass-produce animals, often in deplorable conditions.
Additionally, the legislation would promote the adoption of pets from animal shelters.
Last year, an estimated 1.5 million companion animals were euthanized in shelters in the United States, according to ASPCA data.
Dr. Gary Weitzman, president and CEO of the San Diego Humane Society, pointed out that the measure could also save taxpayer money.
Cambridge’s ordinance bans pet stores from selling any non-rescue animals other than fish — meaning that besides dogs and cats, it also covers everything from birds to snakes to small animals like mice, rats and hamsters.
Understanding Today’s Climate Politics.
More than a decade later, we know that climate change is literally baked into the atmosphere and while we continue the transition to a renewable resource-based economy, we must also address the impact of the global warming that has already taken place.
President Trump and his pals deny the importance of climate change, but they have inadvertently mobilized America’s businesses, states, cities and civil society to engage even more intensely in mitigating climate change and in building a renewable resource based economy.
The impacts of climate change are not immediate and are (still) largely in the future.
It was not a response to a model of damage that is coming, but a response to extreme weather events such as Katrina and Sandy that many experienced.
But understanding that the world is changing does not mean that people believe they should sacrifice their lifestyle to mitigate or adapt to global warming.
We are already seeing modifications of lifestyles with the development of the sharing economy.
And the business of ride sharing may take on some new forms.
By the middle of this century it will not be autos we consume, but “rides”.
We adapt our consumption patterns and they have the important impact of reducing environmental damage and mitigating climate change.
Meet the People Who’ve Dedicated Their Lives to Protect the Last Ecosystem Where Rhinos, Orangutans, and Tigers Live.
Palm oil companies often destroy extensive areas of rainforest by igniting fires that kill and displace countless wild animals and cause serious health problems for local people.
The Leuser Ecosystem’s gradual transformation from lush, vibrant rainforest to sterile palm plantations has serious implications for the ecosystem’s indigenous animal species.
There is still much that needs to be done to restore the Leuser Ecosystem to its full glory, but dedicated Sumatran groups such as The Rangers of Tangkahan are determined to see it through.
The Rangers of Tangkahan are a group of forest rangers who regularly patrol the rainforest around the community of Tangkahan in North Sumatra.
Their tasks involve removing snares to ensure that wild animals cannot become caught in them, helping to reduce human-wildlife conflict, and working alongside forest edge communities to help them create alternative livelihood schemes.
They are the only patrol unit that specifically strives to protect the Leuser buffer zone of North Sumatra.
Two of the rangers can be seen removing a snare in this photograph.
You can support these amazing people by contributing to their vitally important Snare Removal in North Sumatra campaign on GoFundMe.
Alternatively, you can make a direct donation on the Rangers of Tangkahan website.
Forest has been cleared from vast areas of land, some of which is cultivated to provide our food.
Our harvest of plants for food extends to uncultivated pasture and rangelands, which are used by grazing animals.
At the moment, we manage about 11% of the land surface for agriculture and 24% for grazing animals.
We are on a roll to manage more land as a response to feeding the unrelenting growth of the human population.
The growth enhancement is nearly all due to supplements that humans provide to agricultural ecosystems in the form of fertilizers, irrigation waters, pesticides, and cultivation.
The harvest of plant production by humans has been estimated repeatedly.
About 7.2 percent of the world’s photosynthetic output goes to food production, either directly or indirectly, such as the consumption of eggs, milk and meat from animals that are fed plant materials.
So, albeit rough, our best estimate of how much of the world’s plant productivity goes to feed seven billion humans is certainly less than a few percent, which we take from about 35% of the land that we manage for that purpose.
Our direct harvest of plants for food is rather small, but we disturb a vast area of land to provide that food.
What really matters is the plant productivity that is diverted from the other species that share the planet with us, and that seems to be about half of the Earth’s photosynthetic bounty.
