rjzimmerman
Biophilia Hypothesis
Environment. Climate change. Urban ecology. Animals (domestic, farm, wild). Desert. Prairies. Farms. Wilderness. My photography (never photoshopped). Issues that scratch my progressive mind. Take the kids outside. You go outside. Hike, bike, climb. Blackhawks. Chicago. Southern California.
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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
For people who have spent their careers trying to expand access to rooftop solar energy, the announcement on Monday of $7 billion worth of project support from the Biden administration is almost unfathomable in its size and scope.
Money from the Solar for All program, which is part of the Inflation Reduction Act, will go to 60 recipients that include state and Tribal governments and nonprofit organizations. Its goal is to help lower-income and otherwise disadvantaged households obtain the financial and environmental benefits of solar.
“It’s a good day,” said Erica Mackie, CEO and co-founder of GRID Alternatives, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit that will receive two grants totaling more than $310 million and is involved with a third grant of $62.3 million.
These solar initiatives are a convergence of advocacy for clean energy and for environmental justice, based on the ideas that solar will help economically disadvantaged households reduce their energy costs and cut the use of fossil fuels. Once on the fringe and part of programs that often struggled for funding, these concepts have now reached the mainstream.
GRID Alternatives started in 2004 with the installation of two solar systems and has grown to about 500 employees who provide job training for solar installers and set up solar systems for qualifying low-income households.
Her group was well-positioned to be a successful applicant for Solar for All because it was already doing the kind of work envisioned in the program. This includes years of work in Tribal communities across the U.S. to install solar as part an effort to increase clean energy jobs and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
The Environmental Protection Agency selected the 60 Solar for All recipients from a pool of about 150 applicants. About $5.5 billion is going to 49 grants to states or state-level organizations; about $1 billion is going to five grants that cover multiple states; and about $500 million is going to six grants for Tribal governments or organizations that serve Tribal communities.
The largest grants are about $250 million each, given to three states (California, Texas and New York) and two applicants, including GRID Alternatives, whose work covers multiple states. The smallest grants are in the $25 million to $30 million range, including about $25 million for a partnership of the Hopi Tribe and Arizona State University to deploy rooftop solar on the Hopi Reservation.
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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
Nine years ago, Glenn Olson joined a panel whose members, in ordinary circumstances, would rarely appear in the same room together — let alone work as a collaborative team. Olson, chair of bird conservation and public policy at the National Audubon Society, sat with executives from Shell Oil, Toyota Motors and the National Rifle Association, as well as with sportsmen, scientists and former government officials. The panel’s stated goal was to design a new system of funding conservation, one that would ensure the long-term flourishing of the nation’s wildlife.
State and territorial wildlife agencies currently receive most of their funding from hunting and fishing fees and equipment purchases. This revenue is prioritized for game species, while non-game species have to rely on the approximately $60 million agencies receive from the federal budget every year — an amount that, once divided among more than 50 agencies, forces many state and tribal wildlife managers to pick and choose which species to protect. If annual funding was increased to $1.3 billion, Olson’s panel reported, those agencies could reach thousands more “species in greatest conservation need,” restoring some populations before they become endangered.
The panel laid the groundwork for what is now known as the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA). If passed, RAWA would secure an annual $1.3 billion for wildlife agencies and $97.5 million for conservation work by tribal nations. Since it was first introduced in 2021, RAWA has been backed not only by environmental groups but by corporations hoping to avoid the costs associated with federal endangered species regulations. In a polarized Congress, the bill has earned unusually broad bipartisan support. “We got to the point where we just got more and more co-sponsors,” Olson said. “Everybody came together and said, ‘This looks like a durable solution.’”
This year, RAWA is poised for another vote on the Senate floor. The bill continues to gain co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle, but lawmakers have yet to settle on a funding source. Now, a new conservation bill may compete for supporters, particularly among Republicans.
Last week, the America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act (AWHCA) cleared the House Committee on Natural Resources with a 21-17 vote along party lines. The bill seeks $300 million for local wildlife agencies and $20 million for tribes every year for five years. These funds would be “subject to appropriation” by Congress, however, meaning the full amount may not be granted each year. And to offset this spending, the bill would rescind $700 million of the federal funding appropriated to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) through the Inflation Reduction Act. (NOAA plans to use most of its funding from the federal investment for coastal resilience and conservation projects.)
The $320 million was the amount the bill’s authors felt comfortable offsetting, said an aide to the House Committee on Natural Resources. Regarding the rescission, the aide said that the committee looked at departments that had received funding from the Inflation Reduction Act but had yet to spend it.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, would also amend the Endangered Species Act, enabling states to submit their own recovery plans for threatened species to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In some cases, the agency would be required to establish “objective, incremental goals” for recovery, with regulations becoming less stringent as those goals are met. The bill would also limit the agency’s ability to designate critical habitat on private lands and remove the requirement that federal agencies update their land-management plans every time a new species is listed or new critical habitat is designated.
Supporters of Westerman’s bill say the proposed funding mechanism appeals to fiscally conservative Republicans, and they argue that the amendments to the Endangered Species Act would encourage private landowners and government agencies to collaborate on species recovery.
Environmental advocates, however, say the bill is riddled with dealbreakers. RAWA supporters contend that the five-year sunset provision would limit what agencies can accomplish and even who they can hire. In contrast, RAWA would provide the baseline funding necessary for long-term environmental projects, such as forest restoration. Many supporters also worry that the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act will weaken species conservation plans. As the new bill left the committee, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., lamented the loss of the “gold standard” embodied in RAWA.
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Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The Biden administration on Thursday finalized a rule meant to speed up federal permits for major transmission lines, part of a broader push to expand America’s electric grids.
Administration officials are increasingly worried that their plans to fight climate change could falter unless the nation can quickly add vast amounts of grid capacity to handle more wind and solar power and to better tolerate extreme weather. The pace of construction for high-voltage power lines has sharply slowed since 2013, and building new lines can take a decade or more because of permitting delays and local opposition.
The Energy Department is trying to use the limited tools at its disposal to pour roughly $20 billion into grid upgrades and to streamline approvals for new lines. But experts say a rapid, large-scale grid expansion may ultimately depend on Congress.
Under the rule announced on Thursday, the Energy Department would take over as the lead agency in charge of federal environmental reviews for certain interstate power lines and would aim to issue necessary permits within two years. Currently, the federal approval process can take four years or more and often involves multiple agencies each conducting their own separate reviews.
“We need to build new transmission projects more quickly, as everybody knows,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said. The new reforms are “a huge improvement from the status quo, where developers routinely have to navigate several independent permitting processes throughout the federal government.”
The permitting changes would only affect lines that require federal review, like those that cross federally owned land. Such projects made up 26 percent of all transmission line miles added between 2010 and 2020. To qualify, developers would need to create a plan to engage with the public much earlier in the process.
“Federal permitting isn’t the only thing holding back transmission, but if they can cut times down by even a year, and if we have fewer projects that take a decade or more, that’s a big win,” said Megan Gibson, the chief counsel at the Niskanen Center, a research organization that recently conducted two studies on federal transmission permitting.
The rule would not affect state environmental reviews, which can sometimes be an even bigger hurdle to transmission developers who are facing complaints and lawsuits over spoiled views and damage to ecosystems.
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More than 100 long-finned pilot whales stranded along the shores of Western Australia on Thursday have returned to the ocean, while 29 died on the beach, wildlife officials said.
Officials were working to remove the 29 whales that had died on the beach, Pia Courtis, a regional wildlife officer with the Parks and Wildlife Service for Western Australia, said on Thursday in a news conference posted by the agency on social media. The agency planned to take biological samples and measurements from the dead whales for research.
After marine officials and volunteers had helped the other whales back out to sea, boats were on the water and a spotter plane was monitoring the area to ensure they did not return to shore.
The four pods of 160 pilot whales were spread across about 1,640 feet of beach at the Toby Inlet, near the town of Dunsborough, in Western Australia on Thursday morning, local wildlife officials said, in a statement on social media.
Photos shared by the wildlife service on Facebook showed rows of whales lying on the shore as crowds gathered to see the mass stranding.
The rescued whales had moved farther offshore on Thursday and were last seen traveling north, the wildlife department said.
“So far, so good — they haven’t made it back to shore, but we will keep monitoring them,” Ms. Courtis said.
Officials said they did not know what had caused the stranding, which included mostly adult females and a few calves. In general, experts have theorized that the causes for such strandings may include pods of whales following a sick, or stuck, whale and getting stuck themselves; the confusion brought about by undersea noise caused by humans; or an attempt to avoid predators.
Several mass strandings have unfolded in Australia in recent years.
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A global study just revealed the world’s biggest known plastic polluters. (Washington Post)
Every year, companies produce more than 400 million metric tons of plastic. Some of that plastic spills onto waterways or beaches, clogging streams or floating in huge gyres in the ocean. Some of it breaks down into tiny microplastics or nanoplastics that float in the air and enter human lungs, blood and organs.
Sometimes it’s hard to know which companies are behind all this plastic — but now, scientists have identified some of the largest contributors.
A new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances has pinpointedsome of the major brands responsible for plastic pollution across six continents. The researchers, who used a team of over 100,000 volunteers to catalogue over 1.8 million pieces of plastic waste, found that 56 companies were responsible for more than 50 percent of branded plastic waste globally.
The largest contributor was Coca-Cola, which accounted for 11 percent of the branded plastic pollution worldwide.
Out of more than 1.8 million pieces of plastic surveyed, close to 910,000 had visible brands. (Plastics can lose their brand markers through exposure to sunlight and weather.) And of those hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic, the top companies responsible were Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Danone.
The researchers also found that there was a direct relationship between a company’s production of plastic and the amount of branded plastic waste found in the environment. If a company such as PepsiCoproduced 1 percent of the world’s plastic mass, for example, that company was responsible for roughly 1 percent of the waste found in the audit. If a company produced 0.1 percent of the world’s plastic mass, it was responsible for 0.1 percent of the waste.
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U.S. solar companies, imperiled by price collapse, demand protection. (Washington Post)
Several of the largest American solar manufacturing companies are demanding aggressive action against cheap imports, arguing in a petition filed Wednesday with the Commerce Department that firms in four Asian countries are illegally flooding the U.S. market with Chinese-subsidized panels.
Though the panels are not produced in China, the petitioners allege many are made in factories linked to China-based companies that benefit from massive price supports.
The complaint comes amid a glut of solar panels on the global market that has driven prices down by 50 percent over the past year, with the International Energy Agency projecting prices will fall even further. Manufacturers are currently making two solar panels for every one that is getting installed, according to the IEA. The oversupply is imperiling a boom in U.S. manufacturing driven by President Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We are seeking to enforce the rules, remedy the injury to our domestic solar industry and signal that the U.S. will not be a dumping ground for foreign solar products,” said Tim Brightbill, an attorney for the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, the group of U.S. firms that filed the petition. The group includes such industry giants as Ohio-based First Solar and Qcells, which has used Inflation Reduction Act subsidies to invest in huge new manufacturing facilities in Georgia.
In an email to The Washington Post, Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said his country’s “leading edge in new energy is gained through strong performance and full-on market competition, not government subsidies.”
“China has been and will always be open to industrial cooperation,” the statement said. “We hope relevant countries will embrace fair competition and work with China to contribute to a world-class, market-oriented and law-based environment for trade and economic cooperation.”
But the petition is also renewing tensions in the American solar industry, as installers of panels and developers of large solar farms warn that placing restrictions on imports could hurt consumers and raise prices. If the petitioners succeed, companies that buy solar panels from businesses in any of the four nations cited could be subject to steep penalties, which federal trade officials could enforce retroactively.
The industry only recently emerged from a bruising battle over the enforcement of trade laws, after the administration found Chinese companies were illegally sidestepping them by producing panels in China but then finishing assembly in other countries to avoid tariffs.
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Heavy rains and flooding kill dozens as extreme weather racks Kenya, (Washington Post)
Devastating floods during Kenya’s rainy season, aggravated by climate change, have killed at least 38 people and displaced thousands as rivers burst their banks and inundated low-income neighborhoods.
Social media sites were awash Thursday with images and videos of people on rooftops of submerged houses. Residents across Nairobi neighborhoods used boats to rescue those stranded by the rising floodwaters.
Venant Ndighila, the emergency response manager of the Kenya Red Cross, said 38 deaths and 11,275 displaced people have been reported across the country. He warned about accompanying risks, including disease outbreaks and the disruption of goods and services.
April is traditionally the peak of the spring rainy season, said David Koros, assistant director of the early-warning system at Kenya’s Meteorological Department. “Right now we have the remnants of what was happening last year in terms of El Niño effect, where we had a lot of the temperatures in the Indian Ocean that were a bit high.
“For the last two weeks, we have had extreme rainfall being observed over several parts of the country,” he said, which followed a heavier-than-usual rainy season at the end of last year. Even the north of the country has been getting rain after experiencing severe drought in 2023 that resulted in a major loss of livestock.
“The frequent extreme weather events such as the occurrence of droughts and heavy rainfall are definitely effects of climate change,” he said, adding that after weeks of 1.5 to 2 inches (40 to 50 millimeters) of rain a day, the ground was saturated.
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Frontier myth vilified the California grizzly. Science tells a new story. (Washington Post)
The grizzly, a subspecies of brown bear, has long held a place in mainstream American myth as a dangerous, even bloodthirsty creature. Its scientific name, Ursus arctos horribilis, means “the horrible bear.” But that image is being challenged by a new set of studies that combine modern biochemical analysis, historical research and Indigenous knowledge to bring the story of the California grizzly from fiction to fact.
In January, a team of experts led by University of California at Santa Barbara ecologist Alexis Mychajliw published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the diet of the California grizzly bear and how that influenced its extinction. The results challenge virtually every aspect of the bear’s established story.
“Pretty much everything that I thought I knew about these animals turned out to be wrong,” said Peter Alagona, an ecologist and historian at UCSB and co-author of the study.
Much of the grizzly bear’s long-standing narrative comes from stories, artwork and early photographs depicting California grizzlies as huge in size and aggressive in nature. Many of these reports, which found wide readership in newspapers elsewhere in the West and in the cities back East, were written by what Alagona calls the Californian influencers of their time.
“They were trying to get rich and famous by marketing themselves as these icons of the fading frontier,” Alagona said. “A lot of the historical sources that we have about grizzlies are actually not about grizzlies. They’re about this weird Victorian 19th-century celebrity culture.”
The team of ecologists, historians and archivists compared the image of California grizzlies from these frontier reports to harder data in the form of bear bones from museum collections all over the state.
The frontier myth had painted the California bears as larger than grizzlies elsewhere in the country, but the bone analysis revealed that they were the same size and weight, about 6 feet long and 440 pounds for the average adult.
In an even larger blow to the popular story of the vicious grizzly, the bones showed that before 1542, when the first Europeans arrived, the bears were only getting about 10 percent of their diet from preying on land animals. They were primarily herbivores, surviving on a varied diet of acorns, roots, berries, fish and occasionally larger prey such as deer.
As European-style farming and ranching began to dominate the landscape, grizzlies became more like the stories those frontier influencers were telling about them. The percentage of meat in their diet rose to about 25 percent, probably in large part because of the relative ease of catching a fenced-in cow or sheep compared to a wild elk.
Colonialism forced so many changes on the California landscape so quickly, affecting every species that the bears ate and interacted with, that the exact cause of this change will be difficult to ever fully understand.
Still, grizzlies were never as vicious or purely predatory as the stories made them out to be. The narrative of the huge killer bear instead fed a larger settler story of a landscape — and a people — that could not coexist with the settlers themselves. And that story became a disaster for more than just bears.
Although we will never have exact numbers, experts agree that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people were living in what is now California before White settlers arrived. One frequently cited estimate puts the population at 340,000.
By 1900, that number had been slashed by more than 95 percent to around 16,000 surviving tribal members throughout the state. Eliminating the bear and the vast majority of California’s Indigenous people can be seen as parts of the same concerted effort to replace one landscape — and one set of stories — with another.
“The annihilation of the California grizzly bear was part of a much larger campaign of annihilation,” Alagona said. “I think it’s clear that what happened in California meets the legal definition of a genocide. But in a way, it was even more than that, because these were not just attempts to eliminate groups of people. These were attempts to destroy an entire world.”
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Why the U.S. struggles to replace millions of lead pipes. ‘We’re just stuck.’ (Washington Post)
A decade after a crisis in Flint triggered national alarm about the dangers of lead in U.S. drinking water, the White House estimates that more than 9 million lead pipelines still supply homes across the country. In his first year in office, President Biden secured $15 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to address the problem. Still, residents across the country are grappling with a patchwork system of replacing those lines — which begins in some places as a partial replacement of lead pipes — sowing confusion and uncertainty about the safety of their everyday tap water.
The cost of drinking contaminated water can last for decades. There is no safe level of exposure to lead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause developmental delays, difficulty learning and behavioral problems. Even low-level exposure can cause permanent cognitive damage, especially in developing children, and it disproportionately harms Black and low-income families. Recent research found school-age children affected by the crisis in Flint endured significant and lasting academic setbacks.
The Environmental Protection Agency has projected that replacing the nearly 10 million lead pipes that supply U.S. homes with drinking water could cost at least $45 billion. The EPA has separately proposed requiring water utilities nationwide to replace all those lead pipes within 10 years.
The varying drinking water systems across the country reflect differences in state attitudes and cultures, but in a “perfect world, everyone would have the same system,” said Ronnie Levin, an environmental health instructor at Harvard University. To Levin, the piecemeal approach to lead replacement programs reflects lack of rigor on the part of federal officials.
“The EPA could have a more rigorous approach than it does, but water utilities tend to be feisty,” said Levin, who worked as a scientist at the EPA for more than 30 years. She equated the nation’s disparate public water systems to “trying to corral 60,000 teenagers with attitudes.”
Lead pipes were initially installed in cities decades ago because they were cheaper and more malleable. But the heavy metal can wear down and corrode, causing lead to leech into drinking water, which promptedCongress to ban installing them in 1986. Memphis’s utility stopped using lead for service lines in the 1950s, beforeTennessee banned the use of lead service lines in 1988.
Over 200 water utilities across the country have established lead service line replacement programs, according to data compiled by the Environmental Defense Fund, including both partial and full replacement programs.
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New rules will slash air, water and climate pollution from U.S. power plants. (Washington Post)
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday finalized an ambitiousset of rules aimed at slashing air pollution, water pollution and planet-warming emissions spewing from the nation’s power plants.
If fully implemented, the rules will have enormous consequences for U.S. climate goals, the air Americans breathe and the ways they get their electricity. The power sector ranks as the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change, and it is a major source of toxic air pollutants tied to various health problems.
Before the restrictions take effect, however, they will have to survive near-certain legal challenges from Republican attorneys general, who have been emboldened by the Supreme Court’s skepticism of expansive environmental regulations.
Another wild card is the November election, which could hand the White House back to former president Donald Trump, who has pledged to scrap dozens of President Biden’s green policies if he returns to office.
One of the most significant rules will limit greenhouse gas emissions from new natural gas-fired power plants and existing coal-fired power plants. It will push all existing coal plants by 2039 to either close orcapture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions at the smokestack.
A second regulation will reduce releases of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from the smokestacks of coal plants nationwide. Exposure to mercury, a powerful neurotoxin, can cause serious health effects, especially for developing fetuses and children.
A third rule will expand federal oversight of coal ash, the waste from coal plants that often contains a mix of chemicals linked to increased cancer risk. A fourth will limit the levels of toxic metals in the wastewater that coal plants candischarge into rivers, lakes, streams and other waterways.
Each rule will yield huge benefits for public health and the planet, according to the EPA. The greenhouse gas standards alone will prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital visits and 1,900 asthma cases in 2035, the agency said. They will also reduce carbon emissions through 2047 by 1.38 billion tons — equivalent to the annual emissions of 328 million gasoline-powered cars.
Together, the rules represent the culmination of an aggressive plan that EPA Administrator Michael Regan first outlined in 2022. Speaking to an energy industry conference in Houston that year, Regan promised an array of regulatory actions to tackle pollution from power plants, which he said often hits poor and minority neighborhoods the hardest.
Jody Freeman, who directs the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, said she thinks the rule is on solid legal ground, because EPA lawyers crafted it to comply with the 2022 decision and the Clean Air Act. But it is difficult to predict what the conservative justices will decide, she said.
“The Supreme Court will do what it wants, and it’s shown a particular hostility to EPA rules,” Freeman said.
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Everyone should have a favorite tree. Here’s mine. (Washington Post Opinion)
In 2020, Mark Hendricks’s first Father’s Day with two children, the weather was ideal for stargazing. After the kids went to bed, his wife encouraged that he go “see the tree and take your tripod.” (Mark Hendricks)
Do you have a favorite tree?
In the expanse of Big Meadows, one of the most popular areas in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, stands a lone gray birch tree. It is a beautiful tree. It emerges from the ground with multiple trunks sculpted by the wind, its form mimicking the veins of one’s hand. Its bark is white, rather unusual for the area, and it is adorned with triangular leaves that turn a golden hue come October.
The tree is a member of a disjunct population that serves as a reminder of the Blue Ridge Mountains’ boreal past. I met the tree two decades ago, on my first hike through the meadow. Over the years, I would admire its beauty through the seasons, from the way its bark matched the snows of winter to how its catkins wafted in spring winds. I began a photographic odyssey documenting the tree through seasonal changes and weather patterns. It was at first more akin to a muse but later became an old friend. I visit Shenandoah rather frequently to hike its trails and camp in the backcountry, and no trip is complete without a visit to my friend, my favorite tree.
Why do I admire this tree so much? Part of it, I guess, is its resilience. That it continues to thrive in a southerly latitude long past the period of itsprime is impressive. Of course, I admire its beauty. When the warm glow of the rising sun, or the cool blue of evening twilight, is reflected off its bark, it becomes something marvelous. As does the sound of its leaves under a midnight sky. But mostly it is because when I see this tree, I am able to travel to the past, specifically my past. To times of joy, times of sorrow, of grief and loss, of marriage and childbirth. The seasons of my life follow the seasons of this tree.
I think most of us can agree that trees in general deserve our admiration and respect. A Pew Research Center poll in 2020 found that 90 percent of Americans support planting trees to absorb carbon emissions. Not many issues can produce such a consensus. Trees provide food and oxygen as well as shade, and they increase property values. Planted in urban environments, they have positive effects on both physical and mental health. They protect wildlife: Brook trout thrive when Eastern hemlocks shade the mountain rivers they inhabit; the wandering salamander lives the entirety of its existence on the thick branch of a towering redwood. Trees inspire art and contribute to science.
But a favorite individual tree is something special. (Turns out, I’m not the only one who thinks so. After writing this, I was gratified to learn of a piece expressing similar sentiments, which I wholeheartedly approve.) It gives you a living thing of your own to admire and celebrate, to appreciate as time goes by. A favorite tree grows, as you do. A favorite tree has an expiration date, as you do. Take the time to find one and love it, if you haven’t realized that you have one already.
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Excerpt from this essay from Sierra Club:
I’ve spent years encouraging people to ditch single-use plastic. Probably the most egregious example of single-use plastic is bottled water: The bottles are made from fossil fuels, the water filling them is often taken from communities and ecosystems that need it, and the pollution created when they’re disposed of will outlast all of us.
So when I heard that people were getting excited about the Stanley cup—a durable, reusable alternative to bottled water—at first it seemed like a victory. Stanley drinkware has been around for decades, mostly marketed as a rugged brand for workmen and outdoorsmen. But recently the company repackaged its signature products in a rainbow of colors and began marketing to women, positioning itself as a lifestyle brand for people headed to the carpool line or yoga class. Stanley’s collaborations with influencers sparked a storm of social media buzz, with people rushing to snatch up the latest limited edition and amassing collections of the colorful tumblers. The excitement over the Stanley cup grew into a fad—and that fad has become costly for the planet.
Unfortunately, Stanley cups are far from the only eco-conscious product to get corrupted by consumerism. Earth Day is just around the corner, and my inbox is currently filling up with Earth Day promotions from nearly every company that’s gotten ahold of my email address.
A few months ago, I bought a new pair of organic cotton pants from a company that uses minimal packaging and donates to conservation. I loved the fit and felt good about my purchase. But now that it’s almost Earth Day, this eco-conscious company is trying to make me believe that the only way to help the planet is to buy another pair of pants. By commercializing Earth Day, we’ve missed the point.
It's like this every year. Earth Day has become another “Hallmark holiday” marked by special sales and promotions, just another excuse to get people to spend money on things they don’t really need. Somehow, it’s even become an opportunity to shower kids with gifts. An HGTV article published last year promotes “20 Buys to Help Kids Celebrate Earth Day Every Day.” The gift suggestions range from wooden toys and organic cotton tees to kid-sized gardening tools and animal-adorned dinnerware made from bamboo.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a junior gardening kit or bamboo dinnerware. In fact, many of the ideas on these lists are better-than-average products in terms of environmental impact. Anything that gets kids interacting with the environment is better than cheap, plastic indoor toys; if you’re in the market for durable plates your kids can’t break, looking for sustainable materials is a good call. The problem is that we’re being sold a myth that shopping is the solution to our environmental crises.
The first Earth Day was a call to action against rampant air and water pollution. Twenty million people took part in demonstrations across the United States, and the movement led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and some of our country’s strongest environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. There were rallies and teach-ins around the country. People talked about the connections between environmental health and poverty, population pressure and pesticides. There were gardening workshops and automobile burials. It was a political, radical, and joyous event. No one went home with a swag bag full of face creams in recyclable jars and bamboo plates for the kids.
Earth Day has been watered down from a revolutionary moment that recognized shared values and the common threat of environmental harm to a day that’s little more than a social media hashtag like National Siblings Day or National Ice Cream Day. No amount of sustainable Earth Day purchases can buy our way out of the climate crisis or protect endangered species from extinction.
When environmental action is defined by the types of products we buy, we’ve really lost the plot.
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Excerpt from this story from DeSmog Blog:
With its unparalleled purchasing power and exacting demands, fast food has long shaped agricultural systems in the United States, Europe, and China. But as major American fast food brands, like KFC, expand into so-called “frontier markets,” taxpayer-funded development banks have made their global expansion possible by underwriting the factory farms that supply them with chicken, a DeSmog investigation has found.
In all, the investigation identified five factory-scale poultry companies in as many countries that have received financial support from the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), or both since 2003, and that supply chicken to KFC. A sixth company has benefited from IFC advisory services but has not received financing.
A review of press accounts, financial disclosures, and the companies’ websites shows this support aided these firms’ KFC-linked operations in up to 13 countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe.
In Kazakhstan, both banks helped a Soviet-era poultry factory become a KFC supplier. In 2011, the IFC lent poultry company Ust-Kamenogorsk Poultry (UKPF) invested $2 million in refurbishing housing for chickens, among other projects. In 2016, the EBRD made a $20 million equity investment in the company’s parent, Aitas, to finance the construction of a new facility to raise and process poultry. In 2018, two years after announcing the financing deal, UKPF revealed it had become a supplier to KFC in Kazakhstan. The EBRD sold its stake in the company in 2019.
In South Africa, the IFC helped one KFC supplier bolster its operations across the region. In 2013, the bank loaned Country Bird Holdings $25 million to expand existing operations in South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia. Country Bird supplies KFC in all three countries, as well as Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Three years later, in 2016, Country Bird also became KFC’s sole franchisee in Zambia.
In Jordan, the EBRD’s technical support and a 2015 loan worth up to $21 million helped poultry company Al Jazeera Agricultural Company upgrade its facilities and expand its retail presence. Al Jazeera claims to produce half the country’s restaurant-sold chicken. It includes the local franchisees of KFC and Texas Chicken (known by its original name, Church’s Chicken, in the U.S.) as clients.
With this Global North-financed fast-food expansion comes a host of environmental, social, and health concerns in regions often unprepared to field them.
“It’s so clear that these investments are not consistent with any coherent notion of sustainable development,” Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director for the food and agriculture program at Friends of the Earth US, told DeSmog.
Providing Financial Security for Fast Food Suppliers
Both the IFC and the EBRD are financed primarily by the governments of developed countries for the benefit of developing countries. The IFC was founded in 1956 under the umbrella of the World Bank Group to stimulate developing economies by lending directly to businesses. Founded in 1991, the EBRD was formed to support Eastern Europe’s transition to a market economy. Since then, it has extended its geographic reach to include other regions.
Development banks often finance companies and projects in regions that more risk-averse commercial banks tend to avoid. The idea is to help grow a company’s operations and lower the risk for private sector investors.
Both of these development banks’ investments cover a range of sectors, including manufacturing, education, agribusiness, energy, and tourism. Because large agro-processors, such as poultry companies, can transform bushel upon bushel of local crops into more valuable products, like meat, they make especially attractive clients.
The world’s largest restaurant company, U.S.-based Yum! Brands, owns KFC, and calls the fried chicken powerhouse, which oversees more than 30,000 locations across the globe, a “major growth engine.”
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Excerpt from this story from the Associated Press (AP):
More than 80 years ago, a beautiful butterfly called Xerces Blue that once fluttered among San Francisco’s coastal dunes went extinct as stately homes, museums and parks ate up its habitat, marking the first butterfly species in the United States to disappear due to human development.
But thanks to years of research and modern technology a close relative of the shimmery iridescent butterfly species has been reintroduced to the dunes in Presidio National Park in San Francisco. Dozens of Silvery Blue butterflies — the closest living relatives of the Xerces Blue — were released in the restored habitat last week, officials said Monday.
Scientists with San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences utilized the Academy’s genetic sequencing capabilities and analyzed Xerces Blue specimens in their vast collection to confirm a group of Silvery Blues in Monterey County, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of San Francisco, could successfully fill the ecological gap left by the Xerces Blue.
“This isn’t a Jurassic Park-style de-extinction project, but it will have a major impact,” said Durrell Kapan, a senior research fellow and the lead Academy researcher on the project. “The Silvery Blue will act as an ecological ‘stand-in’ for the Xerces Blue, performing the same ecosystem functions as both a pollinator and a critical member of the food web.”
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Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:
If you’ve ever listened to “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors, you know that before any music from instruments begins, there is the sound of heavy rain and thunder, giving the song an ambience created by the “music” of nature. Likewise, about halfway through “Blackbird” by The Beatles, the sound of a male blackbird singing adds the inimitable chorus of the natural world to the melody.
As much as nature’s music has been sampled and added to songs over the history of modern music, its symphony of sounds have never been credited or given royalties.
Sounds Right is a new Museum for the United Nations – UN Live initiative that will allow artists who use sounds from the natural environment in their recordings to credit “NATURE” as a featured artist on streaming platforms like Spotify and give a portion of the royalties to conservation, a press release from the UN said.
“Sounds Right is a groundbreaking music movement. It unites people around the world in a shared commitment, recognizing the intrinsic value of nature. Together, we must act now to protect our planet for our common future,” said Melissa Fleming, UN under-secretary-general for global communications, in the press release.
With the goal of starting a global conversation about nature’s value, the platform will give millions of music listeners the chance to take action to help our planet.
An international mix of artists have already joined Sounds Right and released or mixed tracks that include Earth sounds to Spotify’s “Feat. NATURE” playlist, including Brian Eno, Ellie Goulding, AURORA, MØ, Anuv Jain and Bomba Estéreo.
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