Most in US want more action on climate change: AP-NORC poll
MATTHEW DALY AND NUHA DOLBY
October 25, 2022, 5:33
AM
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the federal government is not doing enough to fight climate change, according to a new poll that shows limited public awareness about a sweeping new law that commits the U.S. to its largest ever investment to combat global warming.
I am as native a Tennessean as I am a writer. In me, the origin stories of these two identities are inseparably entwined. I could not hope to parse them if I tried. From the start, the lands of my native state have informed my work as strongly as any other force that I've encountered.
On the page, I've composed version after version of the dark woods that surround the abandoned grounds of a Hickman County charcoal plant — land soon to become a Superfund site — where my grandfather once led me by my small hand, exploring the ruins of his work life. Or the top of a wooded ridge in Cheatham County, where for a decade I was nurtured and cooled by a heat shield created by the forest, until that protective respite all but vanished due to nearby logging.
When I look across Tennessee's literary ecosystem, I see how many of our writers feel compelled to write about their relationship to the land. Some have intertwined their literary vision with an environmental mission. Others have devoted their work to excavating truths about our history that have lain buried for too long.
We must open ourselves up to new ways of comprehending and relating to the natural world we inhabit — to the remarkable biodiversity of our ecosystem and to the barrage of escalating threats it now faces. In an era of collective trauma and aggressive conflict over basic agreements about what constitutes fact, the willingness to commit to this path does take real vulnerability.
So does art-making, as all writers know.
What does it mean for writers to be called to write about our land — our place of origin, our adopted homes, or our whole imperiled planet — during a time of continuous, overlapping crises? How do we prioritize our concerns? How can we endure the overload of troubling input and alchemize it all into fresh, compelling literary form?
Seamus Heaney, whose Northern Ireland origins provided him a bottomless reservoir of rich but fraught material for his poems, once insisted, "What matters is the shape-making impulse, the emergence and convergence of an excitement into a wholeness."
If we can withstand our own vulnerability in these times, then this shape-making impulse can light our way. Many of our state's writers have been following their own, opening up new ways for us to experience the natural world's incomprehensible complexity and interconnectivity.
What follows is merely a glimpse of the diverse landscape of writers in Tennessee engaging the subject of the environment in thoughtful or unexpected ways. Through one innovation of form after another, these writers have devoted their work to breaking the spells of complacency and ignorance that threaten our future. They have set out to learn, like never before, everything that we can know about the ground on which we stand…
New climate report warns of ‘uncharted territory of destruction’
The latest climate change news is pretty grim
By Shannon Cooper October 23, 2022 10:30AM
A new climate report
analyzing the most recent science and climate change news provides a bleak
outlook for the future. According to the United in Science 2022 report, we’re going in
the wrong direction. The world’s chances of avoiding the worst effects of the climate crisis are quickly slipping
away as we’ve collectively and repeatedly failed to take the necessary action.
In spite of increasingly dire warnings, global governments
and businesses have not been working fast enough to cut greenhouse gas
emissions—and we’re already facing the consequences. The recent increase
in extreme weather events is
only the beginning. Keep reading to learn about the biggest findings of this
report and what they mean for you.
(But not really. Cool song, though.)
Feeling your pain this morning, Yankees and Padres fans. Felt it myself a couple weeks ago, and many times before. Strange how much worse it feels when your team goes deep into the postseason before losing, as opposed to going out quickly. Just remember, as Chance the gardener said, there will be new growth in Spring.New ground as tech aims to help boost soil health
24 October 2022
Farmers used to test
the quality of their soil by burying a pair of underpants in the ground and
seeing how quickly they rotted.
The idea being that
the more healthy micro-organisms there are in the ground, such as bacteria and
fungi, the faster the fabric would be eaten away.
Bury the pants now and
they may well be dug up the following year in pristine condition.
That's because,
according to experts, more than half of the world's agricultural soil is
already degraded.
…The devastating effects of these changes on the Earth's natural ecosystems should be our most urgent concern. But we might also consider what we will miss, philosophically and spiritually, if winter as we know it disappears in the Anthropocene.
Winter, for me, is a period of reflection and regeneration, of withdrawal, reminiscent of a time when humans were forced to be more malleable and responsive to the seasons. Each year, I long to see the landscape around my home in Germany transformed by the cold: frost-limned trees, crisp air, and snow shrouding everything, muffling every sound, as if covering over the acoustic evidence of humanity.
But human intervention will affect the phenomenology of winter. This is not just because of meteorological change. Knowing that the caprices of the weather are caused by us, as much as by any 'natural' process, changes how we experience the seasons: our relation to them, the respect and interest we accord them, and the way that they affect our perception of our place in the world.
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California wildfires hit CTRL+Z on 18 years of CO2e removal
Time to start
considering forest blazes alongside industrial sources of greenhouse gases, say
scientists
Thu 20 Oct 2022 // 18:45 UTC
Researchers
studying the effects of California's record-breaking 2020 wildfire season have
uncovered some unsettling evidence. The fires in that single year undid all the
state's greenhouse gas emission reductions since 2003 by a factor of two.
Renewable energy is a failed path, scientist tells Utah legislators
Professor says true costs of wind and solar rule those
alternatives out. No other views were presented.
A legislative committee Wednesday gave a Washington University
professor opportunity to present his case for why wind and solar farms are a
failed energy strategy despite a worldwide effort to embrace them. No other
viewpoints were presented.
Oct. 21, 2022, 7:00 a.m.
A Utah legislative committee this week gave 45 minutes to a
scientist who argued that policy makers across the globe are committing a grave
mistake by turning to renewable energy.
William Hayden Smith, a professor of
earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote a research paper with colleagues in
Switzerland and South Africa that claims to calculate a full cost of producing
electricity from various sources. The paper was published this year in the
Journal of Sustainable Development, a Canadian scientific journal.
“Now everyone will say that wind turbines and photovoltaics are
cheaper than fossil fuels,” he told legislators. “That’s a stretch.”
A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of "viral spillover", according to research published Wednesday.
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-climate-boost-arctic-virus-spillover.html
What the World Will Lose if Ancient Trees Die Out
Oct.
20, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Jared Farmer
Dr. Farmer is a professor of history
at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Elderflora: A Modern
History of Ancient Trees.”
Old trees are in big trouble.
Whole forests with
fire-resistant giant sequoias up to 3,000 years in age have
recently gone up in flames. Whole stands of drought-resistant Great Basin bristlecone pine, a species that can reach
5,000 years in age, have been sucked dry by bark beetles. Monumental baobabs, the longest-living flowering plants, buckle
under the stress of drought in southern Africa. The iconic cedars of Mount Lebanon, ancient symbols of longevity,
struggle in warmer, drier conditions. Millennial kauris in New Zealand and centenarian olive trees in Italy succumb to invasive diseases.
Cumulatively, this is more than a
cyclical turnover. This is a great diminution: fewer megaflora (massive trees),
fewer elderflora (ancient trees), fewer old-growth forests, fewer ancient
species, fewer species overall.
It's the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.
https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=8867.html
