“Homeowners and landscapers are learning what ecologists have known for decades: It’s time to shed the mighty American lawn in favor of native plants and perennials,” Chris Moody writes.
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Denali National Park is losing its only road due to climate damage
“For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly,” Andrew R. Chow reports.
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Dr. Seuss warned us fifty years ago, but we didn’t listen to ‘The Lorax’
“He’s describing what we would now call a ‘trophic cascade,’ and for me, as a scientist, I just find that genius that he anticipated that concept by a decade or more,” anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Nathaniel Dominy told NPR.
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Siberia’s wildfires are bigger than all the world’s other blazes combined
“Siberia is so vast that huge fires can burn without threatening any major settlements, transportation systems or infrastructure — but are still part of a swath of infernos that together are larger than all the other blazes around the world,” Robyn Dixon reports.
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Trees are the key to reducing heat deaths in urban areas, scientists say
In the words of Brian Stone: “Trees are, quite simply, the most effective strategy, technology, we have to guard against heat in cities.”
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Wildfire devastates Big Basin Redwoods State Park
A wildfire has destroyed all the historic structures in California’s first state park, leaving conservation advocates like Sam Hodder in mourning.
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Michael Moore’s partner Jeff Gibbs debuts new film Planet of the Humans — and it’s free to watch on YouTube
Planet of the Humans is “a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road.”
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America has a flooding problem it can’t manage. Vermont’s experience shows a possible way forward.
We can’t build our way out of future floods with better levees, just as we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion with wider highways.
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Garbage from Washington State’s booming pot industry clogs gutters, sewers and landfills
“Concentrated nutrients and fertilizers left over from cannabis growing operations are being dumped in public sewers and making their way past wastewater treatment plants into Puget Sound,” reports Kristen Millares Young. “And millions of pounds of weed harvest waste that could be composted are instead getting trucked to landfills.”
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Thousands of marchers in British Columbia say no to Trans Mountain pipeline
“If the opposition movement in British Columbia and Washington state has a totem animal, it is the critically-endangered southern resident killer whale that travels the waters even more tankers will use if the pipeline is built,” writes Lynda Mapes
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‘If we’re attacked, we’ll die together,’ a teenage anti-mining activist told her family. But when the bullets came, they killed only her.
The Los Angeles Times tells the story of Topacio Reynoso, a farmer’s daughter from a remote village in Guatemala who, at fourteen, “devoted herself to opposing construction of a large silver mine planned for a town nearby”.
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Here’s what oil drilling looks like in the Arctic Refuge, thirty years later
“These satellite images of a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge show the site of what, so far, is the only oil well ever drilled in the refuge, an exploratory well known as KIC-1 that was completed in the mid-1980s. The well was plugged and abandoned, and the drilling equipment and a special timber pad it sat on have long since been removed. “
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Drilling for oil in Arctic Refuge is in the Republican Party’s tax scam bill. Can Maria Cantwell thwart it?
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is trying to nix the Republican Party’s latest attempt to open the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling.
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Brazilian court blocks President Temer’s attempt to open vast stretches of Amazon to mining
Via the BBC, a victory (at least for now) over a blatant attempt to allow the forces of greed to wreak havoc in the Amazon: “A Brazilian court has suspended a government decree that would open up a vast natural reserve in the Amazon to commercial mining. The area covers 46,000 sq km (17,800 sq miles) and is thought to be rich in gold, manganese and other minerals. On Monday, following widespread criticism, the government revised the decree, prohibiting mining in conservation or indigenous areas.”
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Greed wins again: Brazil opens vast Amazon reserve to mining
It’s not just the Trump regime that is harming our environment. The BBC reports that the government of Brazil has “abolished a vast national reserve in the Amazon to open up the area to mining”. Conservationists are — appropriately — gravely distressed.
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New rule intended to protect West Coast whales, sea turtles gutted by Trump regime
Trump’s minions gutted rule created at the behest of the fishing industry to protect whales and sea turtles just because they could. The well-being of wildlife is no concern of theirs.
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Great Barrier Reef: Two-thirds damaged in ‘unprecedented’ bleaching
The BBC recaps the bad news: “Unprecedented coral bleaching in consecutive years has damaged two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, aerial surveys have shown. The bleaching – or loss of algae – affects a 1,500km (900 miles) stretch of the reef, according to scientists.”
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Hillary Clinton needs to take a stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline
“The fight at Standing Rock is a big damned thing,” writes Bill McKibben. “It’s a Flint-in-the-making, and it’s also a chance to for once do right by the continent’s oldest inhabitants. Surely Hillary Clinton can rise to the occasion. Can’t she?”
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Washington tribes stand with Standing Rock Sioux against North Dakota oil pipeline
“Tribes from across Washington and the Northwest have journeyed to remote Cannon Ball, N.D., to join the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in a peaceful occupation of ancestral lands where the tribe seeks an injunction to stop construction of an oil pipeline until its waters and cultural resources are protected,” Lynda Mapes reports.
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National Park Service calls on visitors to respect wildlife and safety regulations
The National Park Service is asking Americans and visitors to the United States to do their part to keep themselves and wildlife safe. In a
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Birds — and staff — return to Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
“In the aftermath of the winter occupation, spring birds are arriving and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge staff are making an uneasy return to their jobs and homes in Eastern Oregon’s Harney County,” reports Hal Bernton for The Seattle Times.
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