Olivia Coalmine

https://www.threads.net/@nicky.crooks/post/DE2UZdEiMHh?xmt=AQGzf1ouCpEXncVSwg2Zj3RxfBfSHgLY-55Ctirjs_KRSA

It's the birthday of Aldo Leopold

(not to mention, William James, and my wife)…

It's the birthday of Aldo Leopold, born Rand Aldo Leopold in Burlington, Iowa (1887), the author of the conservation movement's cornerstone text, A Sand County Almanac (1949). As very small boy, he was drawn to the outdoors, and when he heard that Yale was going to begin one of the first forestry graduate programs, he set his mind to attend it. He went on to become one of the nation's first professional foresters.
He defied convention in his work. Assigned to hunt livestock predators in a New Mexico national forest, Leopold began to feel that these bears, wolves, and mountain lions shouldn't necessarily be sacrificed for the sake of local ranchers, and he made the point that removing them had a broader impact on the entire ecosystem. His philosophy ultimately came to argue that humans ought not dominate the land; he popularized the term "wilderness" to mean not grounds for outdoor activity but nature in its own, untended state.
After 15 years in the southwest — during which time he developed the first management plan for the Grand Canyon, wrote the Forest Service's first game and fish handbook, and succeeded in designating the nation's first wilderness area — Leopold started and chaired Wisconsin's graduate program on game management. In 1935, Leopold formed The Wilderness Society with other conservationists.
He bought a worn out farm for $8 an acre near the Wisconsin River, barren and nearly treeless from years of overuse and degradation, in an area known as the "sand counties." With his wife and children, he set about tending a garden, splitting firewood, and eventually planting more than 40,000 pine trees. The farm came to stand as a living example of Leopold's life work and ethic, that peaceful coexistence with nature could be possible, and that the same tools used to destroy land could help to restore it.
Leopold began to document his family's work and set some of his ideas about conservation down in essays that were published in 1948, one week before he died of a heart attack while battling a grass fire. The Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There continues to be one of the world's best-selling natural history books.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-026?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The World Is Falling Apart. Should I Scrap My Plans to Have Kids?

A hundred years ago, you would have been bringing a child into a country where perhaps a majority of people lived around or below the poverty line, where, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1926, "we continually have mobs fighting and doing unutterable things because at bottom, men are afraid of being unable to earn a respectable living," where stepping on a tack could prove fatal, where environmental regulation as we understand it hardly existed, where segregation was widely entrenched and reproductive rights were scarcely to be found. In the meantime, Stalin was consolidating his power in the U.S.S.R., Mussolini was eliminating forces of opposition in Italy and Hitler was rebuilding the Nazi Party in Germany. Still, people had kids, and so here you are, able to look back in horror at the way things used to be...

The Ethicist

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/magazine/family-planning-uncertain-times-ethics.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Jimmy Carter, Green-Energy Visionary

...Carter was correct. Had we embarked on an enormous project of solar research then and there, we could have cut the costs of renewable energy far faster than we did. There was no single technological breakthrough that finally lowered the cost of solar power below that of fossil fuel in the past decade, just a long series of iterative improvements that could have come much faster had we worked with the vigor of, say, the Manhattan Project. Instead, Reagan immediately cut the budget for solar research by eighty-five per cent and did away with the tax credit for solar panels, decimating the infant industry. His national-security adviser, Richard Allen, told Reagan about a book denigrating solar energy, whose author had claimed that it was "little more than a continuation of the political wars of a decade ago by other means. . . . Where salvation was once to be gotten from the Revolution, now it will come from everyone's best friend, that great and simplistic cure of all energy ills, the sun." The culture war against clean energy had begun...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary

This New Year, Resolve to Green Up Your News Feed

During this year's global election supercycle, as it was called, national elections were held in a record number of countries, accounting for roughly half the world's population. This scenario made the prospects for a climate turnaround, or at least the beginnings of one, seem especially promising. The human race is growing increasingly concerned about climate change, and 2024 was a global opportunity to elect leaders who were serious about addressing the greatest threat we face as a species.

That's not how it worked out.

"It's quite clear that in most advanced economies the big loser of the elections has been climate," Catherine Fieschi, an expert in European politics, told The Guardian last month.

This bitter pill was made more galling by the degree to which environmental issues generally — not just climate but also pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. — hardly registered in the run-up to our own elections. And yet when the environment was actually on the ballot in the form of initiatives that fostered conservation or climate resilience, it did very well...

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/climate-change-news-coverage-2025.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

How to Repair the Planet? One Answer Might Be Hiding in Plain Sight.

We tend to look at environmental problems in isolation. A holistic approach would be more effective, a new report says.

Sometimes, human needs can make problems like climate change and biodiversity collapse seem insurmountable. The world still relies on fossil fuels that are dangerously heating the planet. People need to eat, but agriculture is a top driver of biodiversity loss.

But what if we're looking at those problems the wrong way? What if we tackled them as a whole, instead of individually?

A landmark assessment, commissioned by 147 countries and made public on Tuesday, offers the most comprehensive answer to date, examining the sometimes dizzying interconnections among biodiversity, climate change, food, water and health.

"Our current approaches to dealing with these crises have tended to be fragmented or siloed," said Paula Harrison, a co-chair of the assessment and an environmental scientist who focuses on land and water modeling at the UK Center for Ecology & Hydrology, a research organization. "That's led to inefficiencies and has often been counterproductive."
...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/climate/biodiversity-climate-change-interconnections.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iE4.d22K.DrhnJ6y0rYq2&smid=em-share

Sun Queen

Happy Birthday to the "Sun Queen", Mária Telkes, born on December 12, 1900, in Budapest, Hungary. ☀️

A pioneer in the field of solar energy, Telkes designed the world's first house heated solely by the sun among other innovations.

Learn more about the extraordinary life and work of Mária Telkes in THE SUN QUEEN, now streaming on PBS.org and the free @PBS App.

https://to.pbs.org/49wuQZz