Piers Sellers, Before the Flood

Piers Sellers, former astronaut and climate change scientist, passed away on December 23, 2016, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 61. Before his death, though, he recorded this short video message, reaching out to the global community as a scientist concerned about these changes and their largest cause: humanity.

Throughout his career, Sellers focused on characterizing and understanding changes in the Earth’s climate system. He was particularly interested in interactions between the Earth’s biosphere — its life — and the atmosphere.

In his message, Sellers describes Earth as a “beautiful planet” and speaks about how the planet and the life it supports have evolved “to fit each other perfectly.” However, humanity’s clear and measurable impact on the climate has the potential to wreak “potentially disastrous” results. He calls for groups such as scientists, policymakers, and industrialists to work together towards the common goal of maintaining the Earth as “a planet that can continue to support life — including all of us.” astronomy.com

The White House Blocked My Report on Climate Change and National Security/Defending Science...

Politics intruded on science and intelligence. That’s why I quit my job as an analyst for the State Department.

By Rod Schoonover
Dr. Schoonover was a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.
July 30, 2019

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities. It was important work. Two words that national security professionals abhor are uncertainty and surprise, and there’s no question that the changing climate promises ample amounts of both.

I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Drumpf administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.

After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and State Department, at the eleventh hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute verbal summary of the 11-page testimony. However, Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record... (continues)==

SCIENCE SALON # 77

Dr. Lee McIntyre — The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience

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In this engaging conversation on the nature of science, Dr. McIntyre and Dr. Shermer get deep into the weeds of where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. It may seem obvious when you see it (like Justice Potter’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it”), from a philosophical perspective it isn’t at all easy to articulate a formula for science that perfectly weeds out all incorrect or fraudulent scientific claims while still retaining true scientific claims. It really comes down to what Dr. McIntyre describes as a “scientific attitude” in an emphasis on evidence and scientists’ willingness to change theories on the basis of new evidence. For example, claims that climate change isn’t settled science, that evolution is “only a theory,” and that scientists are conspiring to keep the truth about vaccines from the public are staples of some politicians’ rhetorical repertoire. In this podcast, and in more detail in his book, McIntyre provides listeners and readers with answers to these challenges to science, and in the process shows how science really works.

McIntyre and Shermer also discuss:

• the strengths and weaknesses of Karl Popper’s “falsification” criteria for the line of demarcation
• how conspiracy theorists draw their own line of demarcation between their version of the conspiracy vs. that of others within their own community
• the problem of anomalies that are not explained by the mainstream theory and what to do with them
• McIntyre’s adventure at the Flat Earth conference
• Graham Hancock and alternative archaeology
• Creationists and why they are wrong (and how evolution could be falsified)
• similarities between Evolution deniers and Holocaust deniers
• anti-vaxxers and their motives
• climate deniers and why they’re inappropriately skeptical of climate science, and
• how to talk to a science denier of any stripe.

Listen to Science Salon via iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Soundcloud.

Green burial

Rest Me in a Pine Box and Let the Fiddle Play

After helping her father have the homegrown funeral he planned, an environmentalist is designing her own.
By Mallory McDuff

“I hope to be around for a long time,” my father said, “but I’ve written my funeral plan so we’re all prepared.”

That morning, he’d cycled to the farm in Fairhope, Ala., where he volunteered in exchange for organic vegetables. My dad was 62 but could pedal faster than his four middle-aged kids. He had gathered us at our childhood home to share his goal of having a burial that relied on family and friends, not a funeral home.

After almost four decades of marriage, he was learning to live alone. Dad had lost his cycling partner when my mom was hit and killed by a teenage driver while biking to the same farm the month before. My father, a retired IBM salesman, wanted to make sure he — and we — were prepared for his death when the time came.

“First I’d like my body to rest in the bed under Mom’s quilt for four hours,” he said. “Then you can wrap me in linen tablecloths as a shroud and place me inside the casket. I’ve talked to my friend Jeff who’ll build my pine casket if I can’t do it myself.”

(continues)

The Trees Might Save Us Yet

A new study suggests that restoring forests could help reverse global warming.
By Margaret Renkl

...A new study recently sought to quantity the benefits that could be derived from planting trees in the coming cataclysm. A Times summary of the new report noted that “the planet could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms, and that those additional trees, when they mature, could store a whole lot of the extra carbon — 200 gigatons of carbon, to be precise — generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years.” Planting trees, in other words, could go a long way toward saving us from ourselves. Although ecosystem changes may complicate the planting in this new climate, we have to try.

In Richard Powers’s magnificent novel “The Overstory,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, one character repeats a Chinese saying: “When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.”

Then she continues: “When is the next best time? Now.”

nyt

Why Donald Drumpf Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment

“Brazen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is the Interior Secretary, and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who is the administrator of the E.P.A.—both of whom have been trying to gut America’s environmental laws. Oh, and on the day when a rainfall described by local authorities as “historic” managed to flood the White House basement.

By now, we are used to Trump’s big-lie technique. Even by that standard, however, the claim that “we are working harder than many previous Administrations, maybe almost all of them,” on environmental protection will be believed by exactly no one for whom words have not yet lost their common-sense meaning. Trying to parse the nonsense of Trump’s speech sentence by sentence is silly, so concentrate instead on its underlying meaning: the oil companies clearly won a crucial battle with Trump’s election, postponing their moment of reckoning. (Less so the coal barons, whose decline was already too far advanced). But they clearly sense that they are losing the war, and more decisively than before. Trump’s big-man folly—withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, for instance, when it would have been easy enough to sabotage progress more quietly—has decisively discomforted the suburban voters that he must retain for reëlection.

By all accounts, it was the President’s pollsters who insisted on this strange talk, because they are desperately afraid that they are losing those independents (particularly women) who have come to fear the physical future that climate change is imposing. What does it mean, after all, to boast that we have the “cleanest air” ever, when wildfire smoke now obscures swaths of sky for large portions of the year? What does it mean to say the water is cleaner than it was in 1970, when water now drops from the sky in such volumes that insurance companies have begun to declare cellars “uninsurable?”

The absurdity of the whole enterprise is clear when you remember that Trump doesn’t even believe that global warming is real—he has stated this repeatedly. In that case, only fear of the polls could possibly drive him to stress that America’s carbon emissions are down (except for, um, last year, when they went, um, up). Why else would he care? So that’s craven as well as brazen. But cravenness is probably a good sign—it means that the school strikers and the divestment campaignersand the pipeline protesters and the marching scientists have carried the debate. The tiny minority of climate deniers currently wield federal political power, but it’s finally beginning to sink in with the broader public that climate change is the threat of our time. Among Democrats, that process is well advanced—by some measures, climate change is the No. 1 voting issue in the primary, and, indeed, they are announcing serious cash-on-the-barrelhead plans to do something about it. But Trump’s performance on Monday must indicate that it’s also increasingly the case among independents, the group that holds the key to his electoral future.

This is good not because it means that Trump will act—he won’t. It’s good because it means that if we move past Trumpism there’s at least a somewhat greater chance that the larger political system will move, too. But, at this point, it’s also hard to believe that political action will be swift enough or comprehensive enough to make a decisive difference. After all, the Obama Administration, which sincerely believed that climate change was real, succeeded only in replacing some coal-fired power generation with natural gas, which in turn succeeded only in replacing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions with heat-trapping methane emissions. (It’s not clear that total greenhouse-gas emissions budged at all during the Obama years.) If the G.O.P. maintains any political traction at all in the next dispensation, it will be hard to pass legislation like the Green New Deal, which represents precisely the scale of commitment needed to catch up with the out-of-control physics of global warming. If the Trump follies have lowered the bar to the point where a return to Obama-era politics is all that’s politically possible, then significantly slowing the rise of the planet’s temperature by federal action will remain difficult.

So it’s profoundly important that activists keep the pressure on other power centers, too: on state and local governments, and on the financial institutions that keep the fossil-fuel industry afloat. To use an unfortunately apropos metaphor, all that pressure will eventually force a hole in the dam. The political flop sweat that Trump was trying to mop up on Monday is a sure small sign of the coming deluge.

By Bill McKibben
July 8, 2019

Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. His latest book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”Read more »

NYer

Climate Change, as Explained by a Sex-Ed Teacher

Photograph from Everett

You have probably noticed some differences in our planet lately, and I want you to know that they are completely normal. Just like the changes that your body is going through, they’re part of a natural cycle. With all that’s happening, it’s important you stay calm, and know that any uncomfortable or strange sensations that may arise are part of a sometimes awkward, but absolutely predictable, process. Like your body, on some days, the entire outside world might appear alien to you. Is this really my planet? It looks and feels so different! I assure you, it most certainly is.

Some of you may notice body hair growing in funny places, or plants growing in seasons they never grew in before. Don’t let this alarm you. Simply buy yourself a razor and enjoy the fact that we still have flowers—they won’t be here forever! And, remember, if you cut yourself the first time you try to shave, don’t panic. Instead, take a tip from our international climate agreements and just put a Band-Aid on it.

At times, the weather might seem as unpredictable as your moods. You may not understand why you’re suddenly angry, or why it’s sunny and hot outside one minute and thirty degrees and snowing the next. Sometimes, it will feel like you’re your own worst enemy, and like the weather is literally trying to make packing for a weekend trip to the Catskills impossible. Take a deep breath, and calmly whisper to yourself, “This is all part of the change.”

You may be experiencing urges to do things you never did before, like kissing someone you find attractive. You might even fantasize about things you are ashamed of. Don’t worry—you are not alone! The earth also has new wants and desires. It craves sustainable energy and, for some reason, Priuses make it super horny. If you get overwhelmed, just remember: you don’t have to act on every impulse you have—like how we clearly don’t have to act on any of the carbon goals that we’ve set.

A lot of you are getting hotter than you used to be and are starting to perspire under your arms. At the same time, you might notice the outside temperature hitting record highs and miles of ice collapsing into the oceans. This is nothing to be embarrassed about! Can you imagine what would happen if the earth cried every time an ice cap melted? Our entire continent would be underwater by now. So, please, dry your eyes—we can’t afford the sea-level rise.

You are becoming a new person, and the earth is becoming a new planet. Be patient. Take baths. Journal. In just a few short years, you will be a woman, and Earth will be Mars. 

New Yorker

• Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough is a writer, actress, and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.
  Read more »

Writing the Pulitzer-Winning The Overstory Changed Richard Powers’s Life

The author’s 12th novel was inspired by what he’s described as a kind of “religious conversion.”

“Writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live,” the author Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books. Before writing the book, Powers had been living and teaching in Palo Alto, between tech-centric Silicon Valley and California’s old-growth forests. An encounter with a giant redwood shook him; in a Guardian profile, he describes it as a kind of “religious conversion” that showed him his place in “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.” Powers then began work on the novel, and his research took him to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Months later, he moved there to live deep in the woods, where “walking a trail has become as important to me as writing.”

The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction on Monday, is as close as it gets to a founding text for Powers’s environmentalism. The novel follows nine characters—among them a Vietnam veteran, a young coding prodigy, and the last descendant of immigrant pioneers—whose close relationships with trees, lasting sometimes for generations, lead them to a deep appreciation of the world’s threatened forests. Nearly all the characters become activists in some form—five of them eventually come together in protest against a timber company—and throughout their personal transformations, the trees around them are so exquisitely rendered that they seem like characters themselves. The result is what the Pulitzer committee praises as “an ingeniously structured narrative” that approaches trees and the threats facing them with wonder, reverence, and an urgency that could be enough to change minds.

Powers’s novels can be categorized as part of “the grand realist tradition”; Nathaniel Rich, writing in the June 2018 issue of The Atlantic, noted the author’s penchant for critical documentation of contemporary society, exploring “our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma.” Powers himself, however, views his work as allegorical, and, indeed, The Overstory in particular has a mythic scope. The trees at its heart are godlike in scale, “as old as Jesus or Caesar”; over hundreds of years, they engage in social behaviors, communicating with one another through a vast network of roots. Human characters treat them as revered ancestors; after all, they share significant amounts of DNA with us. Fantastic as they might sound, all these qualities of trees are real. With The Overstory, Powers has not created a fable so much as translated reality into a compelling system of belief.

The Overstory fits well within the growing genre of “climate fiction,” which explores the effects of climate change and humans’ impact on the Earth. Although the term, coined by the former journalist Dan Bloom, has been in use for about a decade, it’s gained new prominence within the past few years as a number of recent works have tackled ever more pressing problems such as global warming, drought, and rising sea levels. Climate fiction is often speculative: Books such as Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, for example, envision drought-stricken dystopias in the American West. But as other novels—such as C. Morgan Babst’s The Floating World, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—demonstrate, the consequences of climate change don’t need to be imagined. They’re already very real.

Powers was a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker, about a woman struggling to care for her brother after a brain injury, which won the National Book Award for fiction. That book, as Powers told the Los Angeles Review of Books last year, was also in part “a story of forgotten kinship” between humans and birds, whose intelligence is “deep and foreign enough to be invisible to many of us.” The Overstory takes this theme of connection with the natural world a step further, challenging people to recognize trees as creatures like themselves. It is the 12th novel Powers has published, and after a storied three-decade career, he seems to regard it as a kind of arrival, artistic and personal, at the place where he’s always been headed. “I just want to walk, look, listen, breathe, and write this same book,” he told the Chicago Review of Books, “again and again, from different aspects and elevations, with characters as old and large as I am able to imagine.”

Atlantic

The Flower That Came Back From the Dead

The Tennessee coneflower is proof that much of nature might yet recover — if we commit ourselves to change.
By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — Certain old-fashioned words from fairy tales and storybooks still cling to me from childhood. Moor. Vale. Bog. Glade. For a child, such words conjure magical places — untouched, holy lands where fairies might live and animals might speak in ways I understand. Not long after I moved to Tennessee, I heard the term “limestone cedar glade” for the first time and immediately thought again of magic. But I’ve been here almost 32 years now, and until last week I had never visited the site of one of conservation’s greatest success stories: the Tennessee coneflower.

This unassuming purple flower is a member of the genus echinacea. It grows in a tiny ecological niche — the limestone barrens and cedar glades of Tennessee’s Davidson, Rutherford and Wilson Counties. In limestone cedar glades, rock formations lie so close to the surface that soil is too shallow for the kinds of trees that grow in the deciduous forests surrounding them. Instead, this hot, stony land supports vegetation more typical of grasslands or deserts, including uncommon wildflowers: limestone fame flower, limestone glade milkvetch, cedar gladecress, glade savory, glade violet, glade bluet and a host of others.

The star of the cedar glades of Middle Tennessee is the Tennessee coneflower. First identified as a distinct species in 1898, it was for decades assumed to be extinct. In 1968 it was rediscovered by Elsie Quarterman, a legendary Vanderbilt botanist, who immediately went to work to protect it. The Tennessee coneflower became one of the first plant species added to the Endangered Species List.

Through the combined efforts of Dr. Quarterman, the Tennessee chapter of the Nature Conservancy, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as many private and corporate donors, the Tennessee coneflower population rebounded. It was removed from the endangered species list in 2011. Dr. Quarterman attended the delisting ceremony at Cedars of Lebanon State Park. She was 101... (continues)

Climate crisis (TED)

JUNE 7, 2019

Climate Crisis

There's no greater threat to humanity than climate change. What can we do to stop the worst consequences? This hour, TED speakers explore how we can save our planet and whether we can do it in time. Guests include climate activist Greta Thunberg, chemical engineer Jennifer Wilcox, research scientist Sean Davis, food innovator Bruce Friedrich, and psychologist Per Espen Stoknes.

• Download

Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction

One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?
By Margaret Renkl
May 13, 2019 nyt

NASHVILLE — The gift of springtime is the panoply of new life: gray buds breaking open into bright flowers, gray branches sprouting leaves in a thousand shades of green to make a bower of our common lives. In the treetops, birds throw back their heads to sing their full-throated, body-shuddering songs. An ordinary suburban yard becomes a carpet of wildflowers, each one visited by tiny, iridescent bees which seem to materialize overnight out of nothing but the mild springtime air.

But it’s not all flowers and bird song; springtime is also deadly. All the new mouths must be fed. The bluebirds in my nest box are catching those tiny bees for their four hungry nestlings. Somewhere in this yard a large rat snake is hunting, and I can’t be sure if the baffle I’ve mounted on the nest-box pole is large enough to keep the snake out. Even if it does, a house wren with murder on his mind is scooting around in the underbrush with a dagger of a beak, and he will kill those bluebird nestlings in an instant if their father isn’t vigilant enough to protect them.

I worry. Every year I worry about the bluebird babies, and every year I remind myself that house wrens and snakes have their own purposes for springtime, each as urgent as the bluebird’s. This is just the way the natural world works. Pay attention, and it will break your heart a dozen times before dinner.

Last week, the United Nations released the summary of an enormous report that broke my heart in more ways than any backyard-nature observations ever have. The Times article about the report, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” called it “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization.” The story opens with the picture of an olive ridley sea turtle washed up on an Indian beach. The turtle is dead, apparently strangled: Fishing rope is looped around its neck, cutting into its throat.

That photo undid me. All week long I found myself coming back to it until I had it committed to memory, the shapes and the colors, though part of me would prefer never to think about that image again. I kept being struck anew by the sorrow of that one lost creature, that one preventable tragedy. The turtle’s great head is bowed, resting on the sand. Its eyes are closed; its ancient face is drawn back in a mask of grief. The turtle’s whole body signals resignation, surrender. In the background, children play in the surf.

If the photo is traumatizing, the story is worse. Because of human activity — both direct activity, like fishing and farming, and indirect activity, like the fossil fuels that accelerate climate change — up to one million species of plants and animals are headed for extinction if we don’t take immediate measures to halt the devastation.

That’s one million species. Every individual creature in a species — times one million. We can’t possibly conceive of such a thing. We can hold in mind, however uncomfortably, the image of a single animal who died a terrible death. Devastation on this scale is beyond the reach of imagination. How could we hold in mind a destruction so vast it would take not just one sea turtle but all that animal’s kind, as well as all the kind of 999,999 other species?

Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.

I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?

I asked myself those questions even as I filled the bird feeders and cleaned the birdbaths, even as I planted more milkweed seeds and watered the new cedar and serviceberry trees we planted this spring to feed wildlife in the years to come. What’s the point? How will any of this matter?

And then I noticed that I hadn’t seen any activity in the bluebird box for some time. Over and over again I’d get up from my desk, stand at the front window and watch — but there was no sign of either parent. In midafternoon, just as I’d made up my mind to check on the nestlings that I was sure were dead, the male bluebird flew up with a caterpillar in his beak and climbed into the box. Relief whooshed through my body; all the muscles I didn’t know I was tensing relaxed.

I don’t have the power to reclaim soil degraded by industrial farming practices. I can’t persuade equatorial countries to protect their rain forests. I’m not able to affect in any way the irresponsible decisions of my own country’s president — decisions that will unquestionably hasten the great extinction — much less those made by the leaders of other nations. But I can put up boxes for cavity-nesting birds and roosting boxes for bats. I can cultivate the host plants of butterflies, knowing that some of their caterpillars will feed baby birds. I can make my yard a haven for insects, including the red wasp, an important pollinator which is too quickly maligned. I can keep my yard free from chemicals and let the wildflowers go to seed.

And I can remind myself, all day long every day, that there’s a difference between doing something and doing nothing. That “something,” small as it might seem, is not “nothing.” The space between them is far apart, limitless stretching distances apart. It’s the difference between a heartbeat and silence.

UN Report: unprecedented human impact is accelerating extinction

Civilization Is Accelerating Extinction and Altering the Natural World at a Pace ‘Unprecedented in Human History’

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in... (continues)
==

	Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)
5/7/19, 10:52 AM I literally wrote a book called "The End of Nature" and I still can't really wrap my head around yesterday's extinction report vox.com/science-and-he…

The UN biodiversity report states that a million species are on the verge of extinction. So confident are we that humans are not among them that we’re spending the week obsessing about Met Gala costumes and whether the new royal baby will  be named Arthur.

— Barbara Ehrenreich (@B_Ehrenreich) May 7, 2019

Final: We still have time!

Before enrolling into Environmental Ethics, I always understood the impact that humans had on the environment, but I always just looked at this situation from my point of view, I never searched for different ideas from credible environmentalist; after this course, I am glad I did. I got to learn so much more about global situations from the assigned readings. I look at the world much differently now, and I have a completely different opinion on the correlation of global warming and humans.

Each reading gave me more clearer views on our world today. Not only did the readings help, but analyzing and commenting my colleagues posts really helped me to understand that there are more opinions just as good as mine. Some of their post shared the same view as mine, but overall, both they both had points that made me open my eyes to new realizations.

The reading that had the most impact on me this semester is "The Vegetarian Myth". After watching the Netflix show "What The Health?". It was really confusing because the author was an ex-vegetarian, so there must've been a really good reason for a switch of life style and to write a novel on why it is bad for the environment. I understand that some plants may be bad for earth, but the Netflix show gave credible reasons from experience medical professionals on why they are still good for our bodies and how livestocks has a more destructive effect on earth and it's atmosphere. From this, I plan on researching deeper into this situation to understand it enough and choose which side O think is better for human health and earth's existence.

The main text that got me to search further into environmental issues is "Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction by Erle Ellis". I say this because throughout this semester, I fervently believed that humans are causing negative impacts on earth. He made me want to search more in depth why the climate is changing so drastically. This is because of the many practices that are conducted by humans, or capitalist as what I would call them. The mindset of humans now are only to cater to themselves and to make money for their enjoyment. Many of them ignore the fact that Earth is a gift given to us and it must be taken care off. If we look at all of the oil disasters, pollution in the Pacific Ocean, deforestation, heavy air pollution, and over-consumption of resources, the only factor causing this are Humans. After reading about the Anthropocene, I realized that it grew on me and I began to discuss it more with different colleagues of the same major. Many were clueless about this epoch, so it only made sense for me to explain it more to them. Also, I have been able to speak about this situation on social media to people that have no clue on how our environmental is reacting to human actions.*see image below* With my major, I want to help create systems to make human impact on the environment less harsh and to implement more clean energy for major industrial companies. When I continue to research more on the Anthropocene epoch, it would make me more than credible when I present different ideas on why it should be changed. This is because our world is ending because of us and change has to start somewhere. I want that changed to start with me.

In conclusion, as said before, this class made me look into a new venue of different realizations. I learned so much more about the environment that I ever had before. It is so vital that we all know more about it because this is the only way that we can save OUR planet. We are in control on whether we want to stay here for the rest of our time and have it wither away before our eyes. We, as environmentalist, should continue to share the knowledge of what practices should be put in place. This would be such a hard battle for us but I know within my heart this can be done.

I most definitely enjoyed this course, Professor Oliver, and what I've learned is that "We still have time!"

Final: A New Look On Life Itself

Life Outside of Life

Before taking this class I already had an interest in the environment. This was one of the main reasons why I decided to study Environmental Sustainability and Technology. I wanted to learn more about life outside of life.

Taking this class opened my eyes to a lot of different things. From reading other people's views on different topics to other people commenting on my views. It all allowed me to look at the world in a different aspect.

When I read Tiara's post on Vegetarian Myths, I really got to see another side of how some people view vegetarians. Although I am not a vegetarian myself, I grew up around it. So I never thought about them consuming plants could, in a sense, be the same as them consuming animals. They are both living things, so how do you make one ethical and not the other. When I really sat down and thought about it, I had to realize that she wasn't completely wrong. Even down to the vegans, they eat nothing that comes from animals, but eat plants. Just because they aren't animals doesn't mean that they aren't living things. Even when Dr. Oliver showed us that their are actual rules to consuming food. Who ever knew that? The only rules that I ever heard of were the ones when I was a child, "eat your vegetables first" "don't drink all that juice" , etc. I never knew that their were actual rules.

Even when I read "Staying with the Trouble", I was able to learn how some people actually think that technology could be our savior. While I disagreed, Dr. Oliver showed me that it was ok to disagree. He didn't feel that technology could be our savior either but it definitely wasn't "the main thing hurting us". Reading his comment in a way showed me that even though technology has crippled the world in a lot of aspects, we still need it to survive.


Reading Madison's post on "Birth Strike", was very informal. I never knew that this even existed. I was able to learn how it not only existed but people that had been yearning for kids were even participating in this. The strikers knew that they had to keep global warming under 1.5°C,after which,“ even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.” These people were willing to sacrifice their opportunity of having a family in order to protect the climate. Wanting to be a environmental engineer, I don't think I would be willing to not bare children in order to protect the climate. What if that child that I was supposed to have could have came up with a more ethical way to solve this crisis. We would have never known.

Tiara's post about her home town was quite interesting to read. How do you deal with keeping a certain animal from becoming extinct but not cutting off the income of the people in your community. I didn't think that the Bahamas was going through a crisis like this. At least we know that their fish is real and not genetically modified, because if it was they wouldn't have to worry about it becoming extinct. But could that be a answer to their problem? People would still be able to fish and make a profit. You wouldn't have to worry about them turning to a different type of fish to keep their business a float. But this is a issue that our world is facing.


Talking about issues, why did I not know that the government plays a big role in the Health of American Citizens. The companies that you go to for help are the main ones giving you medicine to fix one problem back make another one worse! This is all a money game and a way for the government to get rid of civilians by letting them fall into their trap. This might not be a environmental issue, but it can turn into one and is still indeed a issue that should not go unnoticed. Humans have a great impact on the environment, if all of them cease to exist what will happen to the environment. Will it prosper or die out?

Humans do play a big role in the tarnishing of the environment, but honestly without us would it even exist?

Some people look at humans to be the "super heroes" of the environment.... but honestly how can all of that responsibility fall on us? Its going to take more than a couple of strikes to replenish the environment to what it is supposed to be. But then again, it is our fault for the state that the environment is in now.

Being in this class has taught me to think deeper on a situation. Being able to post my thoughts and read other's, was a very helpful experience. I was able to learn so much about different issues within the environment and as well as about myself.

How did this class help me to learn about myself?

I had to realize that my opinions aren't always what everyone else see's. There is way more that I could do to help my environment. I'm not saying that I would go as far as going on a strike, but I could help by starting campaigns like "hug a tree save a tree" or the "plastic campaign" getting others around me involved in making a difference with the environment. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be in this class. Even though I was a little late, I still gained a lot.

Outdoors for All

A nascent global movement proclaims that access to nature is a human right

From Sierra Magazine

A nascent global movement proclaims that access to nature is a human right

BY RICHARD LOUV | APR 25 2019

A FEW YEARS AGO, pediatrician and clinical scientist Nooshin Razani treated a four-year-old girl whose family had recently fled Yemen and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The family had received news the night before that members of the father's family had been killed in a bombing back home. The child was suffering from anxiety. "I was thinking, 'I have nothing to give to this little girl. What can I give her?'" Razani says. The typical medical response would be to offer the girl some counseling and, if necessary, medication. Razani decided the patient needed an additional, broader prescription. She asked the girl and her parents if they would like to go to the park with her. "The expression on that child's face, the yearning for a piece of childhood, was deeply moving," the doctor recalls.

Razani is the founder of the Center for Nature and Health, which conducts research on the connection between time in nature and health and is the nation's first nature-based clinic associated with a major health provider, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. The clinic collaborates with the East Bay Regional Park District to offer a program called Stay Healthy in Nature Everyday. Participating physicians share local park maps with their patients and offer family nature outings–70 of them so far. Often, the physicians will join the outings. Burned-out doctors need these experiences too, Razani says... (continues)

Uninhabitable Earth, Losing Earth

Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells

LOSING EARTH
A Climate History
By Nathaniel Rich

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.

Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair, despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” To avoid the most terrible possible versions of our future, we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral response to this crisis. And there are grounds to do so, as David Wallace-Wells argues in his brilliant new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”: “We have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy, a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.”

Global emissions could be cut by a third if the richest 10 percent of humanity cut their use of energy to the same level as affluent, comfortable Europe. One prospective technique to scrub carbon from the atmosphere would cost $3 trillion a year, a colossal amount — but significantly less than the current level of subsidies paid out globally for fossil fuel, estimated at $5 trillion. Taken all in all, solutions are “obvious” and “available.” The only obstacle to implementing them is political will.

This litany of ideas might make “The Uninhabitable Earth” sound upbeat. That would be misleading. At the heart of Wallace-Wells’s book is a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet. Climate change is “not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and scale,” he writes. Even if collective action manages to keep us to 2 degrees Celsius of warming — a target it looks like we are currently on course to miss — we would be facing a world in which “the ice sheets will begin their collapse, global G.D.P. per capita will be cut by 13 percent, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer.”

But remember, he writes, “this is our best case scenario.” Wallace-Wells takes us through a compendium of the ways in which things could get so much worse, from simple “heat death” through catastrophic storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, pollution, plague, economic collapse and war. We will see migration on a scale the world has never experienced: United Nations and World Bank estimates of how many people will be forcibly displaced by the middle of this century range from the tens to the hundreds of millions. All of this will affect the world’s poor far more than the world’s rich. The innocent, who have done the least to damage the environment through the consumption of fossil fuels, will suffer more than the guilty.

“The Uninhabitable Earth” gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought round to the writer’s “acceptance of responsibility.” I stress the emotional aspect because it is crucial: We are facing a call to action that we are, on the evidence of our behavior so far, likely to ignore, unless we directly feel its urgency. We know this, because that’s what we have been doing. The science of global warming has been settled for 40 years, but we have not just continued to pollute, we have accelerated the rate at which we’ve been doing so. Most of the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere has been emitted in the last three decades. As Wallace-Wells tartly puts it, “We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on the climate than in all the centuries — all the millenniums — that came before.”

This is part of the tragedy. It’s not just that we know what’s happening, it’s that we’ve known for years and done nothing. Nathaniel Rich observes in “Losing Earth: A Recent History” that “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.” His gripping, depressing, revelatory book is an expanded version of a whole-issue article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year. It is an account of what went wrong — of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction.

The story runs from 1979 to 1989. Rich frames his narrative through a central character, Rafe Pomerance, a Friends of the Earth lobbyist who first came across the issue of global warming in a 1979 E.P.A. report. In the ’80s, Congress had several hearings into climate change, which was accepted as an urgent priority even by a figure as conservative and anti-intellectual as Dan Quayle: “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue. We need to get on with it.”

So why didn’t they?

Rich offers a number of reasons. Scientists struggled to put across a clear message with sufficient force, for one. Pomerance looked with envy at the clarity with which the “hole in the ozone layer” was targeted for action by concerned scientists, notwithstanding the fact that, as Rich writes, “there was no hole, and there was no layer.” The climate scientists’ honorable struggles with complexity, probability models and time-lags between cause and effect helped dilute the impact of their message. A 1983 report by the Academy of Sciences, “Changing Climate,” was interpreted as calling for “caution not panic.” Roger Revelle, one of America’s leading scientists and author of a 1957 paper that was one of the first to describe the greenhouse effect, said that “we’re flashing a yellow light but not a red light. It’s not an unmitigated disaster by any means. It’s just a change.” The effect of all this was that the fight against climate change lost momentum at a critical point.

The greater part of responsibility for the failure, however, lies with politicians and energy companies. The big fossil fuel firms knew the realities of human-caused climate change but chose to ignore them and to lobby for the right to damage the environment; the Republican Party had factions that were in league with Big Energy, overlapping with other factions in denial about the scientific realities. The Reagan administration fought hard against environmental protections of any kind; the Bush administration made rhetorical gestures but John Sununu, George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, did not believe in anthropogenic climate change and fought the scientists hard, and ultimately successfully.

The first meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989 ended without the thing it was convened to achieve, binding targets on global emissions. With American leadership, Rich writes, “warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.” The United States chose to shoot down the agreement. “And with that a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.” More carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere since that 1989 conference than in the preceding history of civilization.

Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime — a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.

nyt

John Lanchester is the author, most recently, of “The Wall.”

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells
310 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.

LOSING EARTH
A Climate History
By Nathaniel Rich
204 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Conchservation

Being from The Bahamas, I thought it was necessary to share some common problems that we face on our islands. We had cases of many species going endangered, some extinct, due to over fishing. I would expect this to happen because many people on the island, especially the family island depend on selling fish for a living. Our latest problem that we face is the depletion of conch in areas where they are usually in abundance. We are now considering having an open and closed season on this Bahamian delicacy because of the over-consumption. Many people disagree with this because this a very well liked mean down on the islands. The Bahamas National Trust did a mini presentation on when I went back home over the Christmas break. Here is a video that tells some stuff that they talked to about in their informational.

https://bnt.bs/science/conchservation/

Earth Day!

Rachel Carson’s Bittersweet Farewell to the World: Timeless Advice to the Next Generations from the Woman Who Catalyzed the Environmental Movement

In 1962, after pioneering a new aesthetic of poetic writing about science and the natural world, the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making book Silent Spring — a courageous exposé of the pesticide industry, illuminating the profound interconnectedness of nature. It stunned and sobered humanity’s moral imagination, effecting a tidal wave of unprecedented citizen concern, with consequences reaching across popular culture and policy, leading to the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson had been following the science of pesticides and their grim effects on nature, meticulously glossed over by the agricultural and chemical industries, for more than a decade. Already the most esteemed science writer in the country, she used her voice and credibility to hold the government accountable for its abuses of power in the assault on nature. “Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” she wrote to her beloved. Fully aware that speaking out against the pesticide industry would subject her — as it invariably did — to ruthless attacks by corporate and government interests, she saw no moral choice but to defend what she held dearest by catalyzing a new kind of conscience...

Rachel Carson’s Bittersweet Farewell to the World: Timeless Advice to the Next Generations from the Woman Who Catalyzed the Environmental Movement

In 1962, after pioneering a new aesthetic of poetic writing about science and the natural world, the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making book Silent Spring — a courageous exposé of the pesticide industry, illuminating the profound interconnectedness of nature. It stunned and sobered humanity’s moral imagination, effecting a tidal wave of unprecedented citizen concern, with consequences reaching across popular culture and policy, leading to the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson had been following the science of pesticides and their grim effects on nature, meticulously glossed over by the agricultural and chemical industries, for more than a decade. Already the most esteemed science writer in the country, she used her voice and credibility to hold the government accountable for its abuses of power in the assault on nature. “Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” she wrote to her beloved. Fully aware that speaking out against the pesticide industry would subject her — as it invariably did — to ruthless attacks by corporate and government interests, she saw no moral choice but to defend what she held dearest by catalyzing a new kind of conscience...

==

	CBS Sunday Morning  (@CBSSunday)
4/22/19, 11:29 AM Earth Matters: Climate change challenges from every corner of the globe #Earthday cbsn.ws/2vjl62g pic.twitter.com/MkM6zn73Mm

	Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)
4/11/19, 2:26 PM Grateful as always to ⁦‪@wenstephenson‬⁩ for his insight and steadfastness. This reading of my new book taught me a thing or two about it! thenation.com/article/climat…

	NPR (@NPR)
4/22/19, 12:22 PM New #EarthDay Poll: Fewer than half of parents have discussed climate change with their children. n.pr/2XvdMwH

	Varshini Prakash  (@VarshPrakash)
4/22/19, 9:08 AM On Earth Day in 2019 let’s remember this image of Earth Day in 1970. 20 million marched the streets, calling for clean air & water as part of a revolution that would pass the most sweeping env. legislation this country had ever seen. Remember the true legacy of this day. pic.twitter.com/qMGpmIDSgd

It's really not a radical stance to hope for some ice at the poles and the odd coral reef in between.
Thanks to the Guardian for this small chunk from my new bookhttps://t.co/56OEPyO1W4

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) April 23, 2019

“That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

On #EarthDay, Carl Sagan's iconic Pale Blue Dot, animated:  https://t.co/7pSbndYSOB

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) April 23, 2019