China Says It Will Ban Plastics That Pollute Its Land and Water
Though likely to be welcomed by many Chinese who worry about pollution, the measures could be a hard sell for a society used to convenience.
BEIJING — It’s piled up in landfills. It clutters fields and rivers, dangles from trees, and forms flotillas of waste in the seas. China’s use of plastic bags, containers and cutlery has become one of its most stubborn and ugliest environmental blights.
So the Chinese government has introduced measures to drastically cut the amount of disposable plastic items that often become a hazard and an eyesore in the country, even deep in the countryside and in the oceans.
Among the new guidelines are bans on the import of plastic waste and the use of nonbiodegradable plastic bags in major cities by the end of this year. Other sources of plastic garbage will be banned in Beijing, Shanghai and wealthy coastal provinces by the end of 2022, and that rule will extend nationwide by late 2025.
Previous efforts to reduce the use of plastic bags have faltered in China, but the government has indicated that, this time, it will be more serious and systematic in tackling the problem.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/worl ... 3053090121
Environment and Spirituality
Planting Trees Won’t Save the World
Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion.
One trillion trees.
At the World Economic Forum last month, President Trump drew applause when he announced the United States would join the forum’s initiative to plant one trillion trees to fight climate change. More applause for the decision followed at his State of the Union speech.
The trillion-tree idea won wide attention last summer after a study published in the journal Science concluded that planting so many trees was “the most effective climate change solution to date.”
If only it were true. But it isn’t. Planting trees would slow down the planet’s warming, but the only thing that will save us and future generations from paying a huge price in dollars, lives and damage to nature is rapid and substantial reductions in carbon emissions from fossil fuels, to net zero by 2050.
Even a 16-year-old can tell you that.
Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion. Worse still, it takes attention away from those responsible for the carbon emissions that are pushing us toward disaster. For example, in the Netherlands, you can pay Shell an additional 1 euro cent for each liter of regular gasoline you put in your tank, to plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from your driving. That’s clearly no more than disaster fractionally delayed. The only way to stop this planet from overheating is through political, economic, technological and social solutions that end the use of fossil fuels.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opin ... 0920200212
Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion.
One trillion trees.
At the World Economic Forum last month, President Trump drew applause when he announced the United States would join the forum’s initiative to plant one trillion trees to fight climate change. More applause for the decision followed at his State of the Union speech.
The trillion-tree idea won wide attention last summer after a study published in the journal Science concluded that planting so many trees was “the most effective climate change solution to date.”
If only it were true. But it isn’t. Planting trees would slow down the planet’s warming, but the only thing that will save us and future generations from paying a huge price in dollars, lives and damage to nature is rapid and substantial reductions in carbon emissions from fossil fuels, to net zero by 2050.
Even a 16-year-old can tell you that.
Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion. Worse still, it takes attention away from those responsible for the carbon emissions that are pushing us toward disaster. For example, in the Netherlands, you can pay Shell an additional 1 euro cent for each liter of regular gasoline you put in your tank, to plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from your driving. That’s clearly no more than disaster fractionally delayed. The only way to stop this planet from overheating is through political, economic, technological and social solutions that end the use of fossil fuels.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opin ... 0920200212
Coronavirus: Revenge of the Pangolins?
China has banned the trade of wildlife, suspecting that exotic animals infected humans. What will that really do?
“We can’t be indifferent anymore!” President Xi Jinping of China fumed at top officials early last month, referring to the public health risks of eating wildlife. On Feb. 24, the 13th National People’s Congress issued a decision “Comprehensively Prohibiting the Illegal Trade of Wild Animals, Eliminating the Bad Habits of Wild Animal Consumption and Protecting the Health and Safety of the People.” This and an earlier ban on wildlife markets were direct responses to concerns that the new coronavirus, which is thought to have originated in bats, may have been transmitted to humans via a wild animal for sale at a wet market in Wuhan, a city in central China.
Genetic analyses have come up short of pinpointing the culprit so far, but among the prime suspects is the pangolin, a long-snouted, scaly, ant-eating mammal virtually unknown in the West but widely prized in China as a delicacy and for its purported medicinal virtues.
So now, on suspicion that it might have infected humans with Covid-19, the pangolin will finally be spared and protected. Or will it?
China has had wildlife trading bans on the books for three decades, but those haven’t prevented pangolins from becoming the most trafficked mammal in the world.
The country’s first wildlife protection law dates back to the late 1980s, as does an official list of some 330 endangered species. Illegally poaching, smuggling or trading pangolins, for example, can carry lengthy prison terms.
In 2000, China issued detailed regulations for more than 1,700 protected species considered to have biological, scientific or social value. Hunting toads in a pond or catching geckos could count as a violation.
In 2007, the sale of pangolin products outside of specially certified hospitals and clinics was outlawed. In 2018, Hubei Province, where Wuhan is, created some 300 wildlife conservation zones and cracked down on unlicensed hunting and trading.
But none of this has helped pangolins. In January 2019, nine tons of pangolin scales — thought to have come from some 14,000 animals — were seized in a single shipment in Hong Kong. The next month, 33 tons of pangolin meat were discovered in Malaysia, and in April, 14 tons of scales in Singapore.
According to a 2016 report by the wildlife advocacy group WildAid, more than a million pangolins had been poached over the previous decade, accounting, some say, for as much as 20 percent of all illegal wildlife trading.
According to TRAFFIC, a global wildlife trade monitoring network, from 2007 to 2016 some 90,000 pangolins were smuggled into China. In 2017, a ban on the international commercial trade of all eight species of pangolins went into effect under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (China is a party to it). Yet by last year, the Chinese pangolin had become “functionally extinct” in China, according to the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Group, a Chinese organization.
Over the past two decades, the population of Malayan pangolins has dropped by 80 percent and those of Filipino and Indian pangolins by 50 percent.
Photo and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opin ... 0920200305
China has banned the trade of wildlife, suspecting that exotic animals infected humans. What will that really do?
“We can’t be indifferent anymore!” President Xi Jinping of China fumed at top officials early last month, referring to the public health risks of eating wildlife. On Feb. 24, the 13th National People’s Congress issued a decision “Comprehensively Prohibiting the Illegal Trade of Wild Animals, Eliminating the Bad Habits of Wild Animal Consumption and Protecting the Health and Safety of the People.” This and an earlier ban on wildlife markets were direct responses to concerns that the new coronavirus, which is thought to have originated in bats, may have been transmitted to humans via a wild animal for sale at a wet market in Wuhan, a city in central China.
Genetic analyses have come up short of pinpointing the culprit so far, but among the prime suspects is the pangolin, a long-snouted, scaly, ant-eating mammal virtually unknown in the West but widely prized in China as a delicacy and for its purported medicinal virtues.
So now, on suspicion that it might have infected humans with Covid-19, the pangolin will finally be spared and protected. Or will it?
China has had wildlife trading bans on the books for three decades, but those haven’t prevented pangolins from becoming the most trafficked mammal in the world.
The country’s first wildlife protection law dates back to the late 1980s, as does an official list of some 330 endangered species. Illegally poaching, smuggling or trading pangolins, for example, can carry lengthy prison terms.
In 2000, China issued detailed regulations for more than 1,700 protected species considered to have biological, scientific or social value. Hunting toads in a pond or catching geckos could count as a violation.
In 2007, the sale of pangolin products outside of specially certified hospitals and clinics was outlawed. In 2018, Hubei Province, where Wuhan is, created some 300 wildlife conservation zones and cracked down on unlicensed hunting and trading.
But none of this has helped pangolins. In January 2019, nine tons of pangolin scales — thought to have come from some 14,000 animals — were seized in a single shipment in Hong Kong. The next month, 33 tons of pangolin meat were discovered in Malaysia, and in April, 14 tons of scales in Singapore.
According to a 2016 report by the wildlife advocacy group WildAid, more than a million pangolins had been poached over the previous decade, accounting, some say, for as much as 20 percent of all illegal wildlife trading.
According to TRAFFIC, a global wildlife trade monitoring network, from 2007 to 2016 some 90,000 pangolins were smuggled into China. In 2017, a ban on the international commercial trade of all eight species of pangolins went into effect under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (China is a party to it). Yet by last year, the Chinese pangolin had become “functionally extinct” in China, according to the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Group, a Chinese organization.
Over the past two decades, the population of Malayan pangolins has dropped by 80 percent and those of Filipino and Indian pangolins by 50 percent.
Photo and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opin ... 0920200305
When It Hits Home: Climate Change & Isolated Communities | Anila Bano | TEDxLutherCollege
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
What is home to you? Anila Bano asks this question as she shares with us her personal story of climate change hitting home. When Anila returned to her hometown, Gilgit, Pakistan, in 2016, she was struck by the many isolated villages devastated by the effects of climate change. Anila reflects on her experiences as she shares with us how a sense of global connectedness has driven her to push for change. With interviews from Gilgit villagers and photos from the flood, Anila takes us on a journey to her own home while encouraging us to take action and claim responsibility for our shared home- planet Earth. Anila Bano grew up in Gilgit, the northern areas of Pakistan. She is currently a student at Luther College studying biology, psychology, and religion. In 2015, Anila won the “Go Make a Difference” grant to work on local issues in Gilgit. Through her work, Anila has discovered a sense of global connectedness that inspires her to immerse herself in a life of community service, engagement with matters of peace and sustainability, and building connections with diverse people. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
What is home to you? Anila Bano asks this question as she shares with us her personal story of climate change hitting home. When Anila returned to her hometown, Gilgit, Pakistan, in 2016, she was struck by the many isolated villages devastated by the effects of climate change. Anila reflects on her experiences as she shares with us how a sense of global connectedness has driven her to push for change. With interviews from Gilgit villagers and photos from the flood, Anila takes us on a journey to her own home while encouraging us to take action and claim responsibility for our shared home- planet Earth. Anila Bano grew up in Gilgit, the northern areas of Pakistan. She is currently a student at Luther College studying biology, psychology, and religion. In 2015, Anila won the “Go Make a Difference” grant to work on local issues in Gilgit. Through her work, Anila has discovered a sense of global connectedness that inspires her to immerse herself in a life of community service, engagement with matters of peace and sustainability, and building connections with diverse people. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Bought for a Song: An Indonesian Craze Puts Wild Birds at Risk
CURUP, Indonesia — Hiding in the dense Sumatran jungle, the poacher chose a thin branch, coated it with homemade glue and played a snippet of birdsong on an old cellphone. Within moments, three tiny birds alighted on the branch and were trapped.
Known as ashy tailorbirds, they were destined for the Indonesian island of Java, where they were likely to spend their lives in a collector’s cage.
Millions of similar birds are stolen from the wild every year, and prized specimens can ultimately sell for thousands of dollars. These birds are not treasured for their plumage or meat, but for their songs.
An illicit trade that begins in the primeval forests takes many of the birds to Indonesia’s teeming capital, Jakarta, where they are entered into high-stakes singing competitions at which government officials frequently preside.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3
CURUP, Indonesia — Hiding in the dense Sumatran jungle, the poacher chose a thin branch, coated it with homemade glue and played a snippet of birdsong on an old cellphone. Within moments, three tiny birds alighted on the branch and were trapped.
Known as ashy tailorbirds, they were destined for the Indonesian island of Java, where they were likely to spend their lives in a collector’s cage.
Millions of similar birds are stolen from the wild every year, and prized specimens can ultimately sell for thousands of dollars. These birds are not treasured for their plumage or meat, but for their songs.
An illicit trade that begins in the primeval forests takes many of the birds to Indonesia’s teeming capital, Jakarta, where they are entered into high-stakes singing competitions at which government officials frequently preside.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Video Quote: MHI on the Use of Technology to Address Environmental Issues
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMyr0gxyVPA
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the 2010 Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Doha, Qatar, 24 November 2010.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMyr0gxyVPA
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the 2010 Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Doha, Qatar, 24 November 2010.
Video Quote: MHI on Clean Energy
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgtoNMfUZ7s
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the Bujagali hydropower project, Jinja, Uganda, 21 August 2007
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgtoNMfUZ7s
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the Bujagali hydropower project, Jinja, Uganda, 21 August 2007
World Environment Day: Building a sustainable future
The world is made up of different races, nations, languages, and opinions, but we all share one thing in common: the Earth we inhabit. We depend on the planet’s resources to live our lives. The faith of Islam teaches followers to care for Allah’s creation, as part of our values of ethical behaviour and good character.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has often spoken of the importance of caring for the environment. In Ottawa in 2013, he said, “Our faith constantly reminds us to observe and be thankful for the beauty of the world and the universe around us, and our responsibility and obligation, as good stewards of God’s creation, to leave the world in a better condition than we found it.”
Stewardship is the understanding that humans are responsible for nurturing, protecting, and conserving the earth — a tradition that has existed and been practiced for many centuries. In fact, our own lives and wellbeing depend on a thriving environment.
The word environment itself has many layers of meaning. It can be understood as our surroundings, conditions, or the natural world as a whole. It comprises our planet and its atmosphere, humans, animals, plants, and the buildings that societies construct. The environment is all around us, and everyday we live within it.
For Muslims, the principles of responsibility and stewardship apply to both human society and the natural world. The Qur’an encourages us to leave behind a better social and physical environment for our children and grandchildren. This prompts the question: What changes can we make in our lives to be more mindful of our impact on the world, not just on World Environment Day, but every day?
One of the silver linings of the ongoing public health crisis is that humans everywhere are exploring ways to better care for the environment. Whether this involves walking or cycling instead of driving, reducing waste, recycling more, saving water, using less plastic, or making more discerning choices with food and other essentials.
With a recent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and harmful industrial activity, the global pandemic has helped us to pause and envision a cleaner and brighter future. As Mother Teresa once said, “A healthy ecology is the basis for a healthy economy.” Finding a balance between human progress and respecting the planet we live on will be crucial to building a sustainable future for ourselves and the generations to follow.
For a number of years, the Aga Khan Development Network has been working in harmony with the natural world to improve the conditions in which individuals and communities live. Its various agencies, projects, and programmes follow a multi-input approach to development, advancing socio-economic prospects for disadvantaged populations, while simultaneously enhacing the natural and built environments they work within.
From Bamako to Kabul, and Delhi to Toronto, the Network’s urban regeneration projects, including the restoration of monuments, the rehabilitation of parks, and the creation of new green space, has provided millions of urban dwellers with a much-needed oasis and restored hope to communities for a better future.
One such project is the Azhar Park in Cairo. Located in the heart of Egypt’s capital, the open urban space has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists. Landscaping features include walkways, fountains, lawns, and gardens overlooking a lake in the traditional chahar bagh style. The park features over 300 different plant species — many native to Egypt — grown in a special nursery, and an orchard provides shade from the sun.
The Azhar Park project and its positive impact on the natural and built environment in Cairo is the focus of a new film entitled Close to Home: Al-Khimyah.
Written and directed by Prince Aly Muhammad, the film shines a spotlight on the 30-hectare Al-Azhar Park — converted from a mound of rubble — and the stories of local residents of the adjacent Darb al-Ahmar neighbourhood. Since opening in 2005 after 20 years of careful excavation and design, Al-Azhar Park has provided much-needed leisure and recreational space to the inhabitants of the city, and is today often referred to as “Cairo’s green lung.”
The film is an account of a city whose foundations were laid over a thousand years ago, which has seen a 500-year-old rubbish dump rebuilt into a lush green oasis, and a poor inner-city district transformed into a thriving community.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/feature ... ble-future
The world is made up of different races, nations, languages, and opinions, but we all share one thing in common: the Earth we inhabit. We depend on the planet’s resources to live our lives. The faith of Islam teaches followers to care for Allah’s creation, as part of our values of ethical behaviour and good character.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has often spoken of the importance of caring for the environment. In Ottawa in 2013, he said, “Our faith constantly reminds us to observe and be thankful for the beauty of the world and the universe around us, and our responsibility and obligation, as good stewards of God’s creation, to leave the world in a better condition than we found it.”
Stewardship is the understanding that humans are responsible for nurturing, protecting, and conserving the earth — a tradition that has existed and been practiced for many centuries. In fact, our own lives and wellbeing depend on a thriving environment.
The word environment itself has many layers of meaning. It can be understood as our surroundings, conditions, or the natural world as a whole. It comprises our planet and its atmosphere, humans, animals, plants, and the buildings that societies construct. The environment is all around us, and everyday we live within it.
For Muslims, the principles of responsibility and stewardship apply to both human society and the natural world. The Qur’an encourages us to leave behind a better social and physical environment for our children and grandchildren. This prompts the question: What changes can we make in our lives to be more mindful of our impact on the world, not just on World Environment Day, but every day?
One of the silver linings of the ongoing public health crisis is that humans everywhere are exploring ways to better care for the environment. Whether this involves walking or cycling instead of driving, reducing waste, recycling more, saving water, using less plastic, or making more discerning choices with food and other essentials.
With a recent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and harmful industrial activity, the global pandemic has helped us to pause and envision a cleaner and brighter future. As Mother Teresa once said, “A healthy ecology is the basis for a healthy economy.” Finding a balance between human progress and respecting the planet we live on will be crucial to building a sustainable future for ourselves and the generations to follow.
For a number of years, the Aga Khan Development Network has been working in harmony with the natural world to improve the conditions in which individuals and communities live. Its various agencies, projects, and programmes follow a multi-input approach to development, advancing socio-economic prospects for disadvantaged populations, while simultaneously enhacing the natural and built environments they work within.
From Bamako to Kabul, and Delhi to Toronto, the Network’s urban regeneration projects, including the restoration of monuments, the rehabilitation of parks, and the creation of new green space, has provided millions of urban dwellers with a much-needed oasis and restored hope to communities for a better future.
One such project is the Azhar Park in Cairo. Located in the heart of Egypt’s capital, the open urban space has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists. Landscaping features include walkways, fountains, lawns, and gardens overlooking a lake in the traditional chahar bagh style. The park features over 300 different plant species — many native to Egypt — grown in a special nursery, and an orchard provides shade from the sun.
The Azhar Park project and its positive impact on the natural and built environment in Cairo is the focus of a new film entitled Close to Home: Al-Khimyah.
Written and directed by Prince Aly Muhammad, the film shines a spotlight on the 30-hectare Al-Azhar Park — converted from a mound of rubble — and the stories of local residents of the adjacent Darb al-Ahmar neighbourhood. Since opening in 2005 after 20 years of careful excavation and design, Al-Azhar Park has provided much-needed leisure and recreational space to the inhabitants of the city, and is today often referred to as “Cairo’s green lung.”
The film is an account of a city whose foundations were laid over a thousand years ago, which has seen a 500-year-old rubbish dump rebuilt into a lush green oasis, and a poor inner-city district transformed into a thriving community.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/feature ... ble-future
Video Quote: MHI on Natural Blessings and Human Creativity
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uscFJsBGXb4
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2016 Ceremony, Al-Ain, UAE, 6 November 2016
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uscFJsBGXb4
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2016 Ceremony, Al-Ain, UAE, 6 November 2016
Pandemic’s Cleaner Air Could Reshape What We Know About the Atmosphere
Coronavirus shutdowns have cut pollution, and that’s opened the door to a “giant, global environmental experiment” with potentially far-reaching consequences.
WASHINGTON — In the crystalline air of the pandemic economy, climate change researchers have been flying a small plane over Route I-95, from Boston to Washington, measuring carbon dioxide levels. Scientists have mounted air quality monitors on Salt Lake City’s light rail system to create intersection-by-intersection atmospheric profiles.
And government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have started a Covid air quality study to gather and analyze samples of an atmosphere in which industrial soot, tailpipe emissions and greenhouse gases have plummeted to levels not seen in decades.
The data, from Manhattan to Milan to Mumbai, will inform scientists’ understanding of atmospheric chemistry, air pollution and public health for decades to come, while giving policymakers information to fine-tune air quality and climate change laws and regulations in hopes of maintaining at least some of the gains seen in the global shutdown as cars return to the roads and factories reopen.
Already, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, has assigned his top environment official to use the pollution data gathered by a University of Maryland scientist in flights over Baltimore to push new policies through the state legislature this fall, expanding telework and promoting electric vehicles.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Coronavirus shutdowns have cut pollution, and that’s opened the door to a “giant, global environmental experiment” with potentially far-reaching consequences.
WASHINGTON — In the crystalline air of the pandemic economy, climate change researchers have been flying a small plane over Route I-95, from Boston to Washington, measuring carbon dioxide levels. Scientists have mounted air quality monitors on Salt Lake City’s light rail system to create intersection-by-intersection atmospheric profiles.
And government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have started a Covid air quality study to gather and analyze samples of an atmosphere in which industrial soot, tailpipe emissions and greenhouse gases have plummeted to levels not seen in decades.
The data, from Manhattan to Milan to Mumbai, will inform scientists’ understanding of atmospheric chemistry, air pollution and public health for decades to come, while giving policymakers information to fine-tune air quality and climate change laws and regulations in hopes of maintaining at least some of the gains seen in the global shutdown as cars return to the roads and factories reopen.
Already, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, has assigned his top environment official to use the pollution data gathered by a University of Maryland scientist in flights over Baltimore to push new policies through the state legislature this fall, expanding telework and promoting electric vehicles.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/clim ... 778d3e6de3
How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases
What do Covid-19, Ebola, Lyme and AIDS have in common? They jumped to humans from animals after we started destroying habitats and ruining ecosystems.
Excerpt:
Zoonotic pathogens do not typically seek us out nor do they stumble onto us by pure coincidence. When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely. Deforestation, mining, intensive agriculture and urban sprawl destroy natural habitats, forcing wild creatures to venture into human communities. Excessive hunting, trade and consumption of wildlife significantly increase the probability of cross-species infection. Modern transportation can disperse dangerous microbes across the world in a matter of hours. “Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations,” David Quammen wrote in his 2012 book “Spillover,” “while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/maga ... 778d3e6de3
What do Covid-19, Ebola, Lyme and AIDS have in common? They jumped to humans from animals after we started destroying habitats and ruining ecosystems.
Excerpt:
Zoonotic pathogens do not typically seek us out nor do they stumble onto us by pure coincidence. When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely. Deforestation, mining, intensive agriculture and urban sprawl destroy natural habitats, forcing wild creatures to venture into human communities. Excessive hunting, trade and consumption of wildlife significantly increase the probability of cross-species infection. Modern transportation can disperse dangerous microbes across the world in a matter of hours. “Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations,” David Quammen wrote in his 2012 book “Spillover,” “while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/maga ... 778d3e6de3
We are all plastic people now, in ways we can’t see – and can no longer ignore
Our global plastics problem has been steadily growing for decades, polluting the planet in obvious ways. Less obvious are the microplastics that we eat and breathe, and the impacts they have on our health. I experimented on myself to find out more
Rick Smith is the executive director of the Broadbent Institute and co-author of Slow Death by Rubber Duck, an examination of toxic chemicals in people.
For most of us, the COVID-19 pandemic is a terrible disruption to our lives and livelihoods. For the plastics industry, it would seem, it’s an opportunity to be exploited.
With a brazenness that would make even Joe Exotic of Tiger King fame blush, the plastics industry has been using this time of heightened public concern for hygiene to argue that single-use plastics are the healthiest choice. Fashioning itself as a champion of consumer safety and worker rights, the industry has recently persuaded some U.S. cities and states to reverse bans on plastic bags, and has sought to position recyclable shopping bags as germ-ridden biohazards. Their argument isn’t in the slightest bit subtle and can be boiled down to the title of a recent column circulated on one of the industry’s many lobbying websites: “The War on Plastic Makes the Virus Worse.”
Coronavirus or no, the plastics industry is determined to gain ground. When Dustin Hoffman’s character was told in the 1967 classic movie The Graduate that there was “a great future in plastics,” global production of the stuff was a meagre 25 million tonnes a year. Today, that number has risen to about 400 million tonnes per year, and is projected to double again in the next two decades. Amazingly, half of all plastics ever made have been produced in the past 13 years.
If the magnitude of increased plastic production is eye-popping, the resulting mountain of waste is even more so. Nearly one-half of all the plastics produced every year are for single use. Often, as in the case of fast food take-out containers, this use lasts for only a few minutes. In addition, it’s estimated that up to a trillion plastic bags and about half a trillion disposable water bottles are used globally every year, and in the United States alone, an estimated 500 million plastic straws are used each day. Less than 10 per cent of plastics are recycled, meaning the vast majority winds up discarded in landfills or dumped in the environment.
Video and more...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Our global plastics problem has been steadily growing for decades, polluting the planet in obvious ways. Less obvious are the microplastics that we eat and breathe, and the impacts they have on our health. I experimented on myself to find out more
Rick Smith is the executive director of the Broadbent Institute and co-author of Slow Death by Rubber Duck, an examination of toxic chemicals in people.
For most of us, the COVID-19 pandemic is a terrible disruption to our lives and livelihoods. For the plastics industry, it would seem, it’s an opportunity to be exploited.
With a brazenness that would make even Joe Exotic of Tiger King fame blush, the plastics industry has been using this time of heightened public concern for hygiene to argue that single-use plastics are the healthiest choice. Fashioning itself as a champion of consumer safety and worker rights, the industry has recently persuaded some U.S. cities and states to reverse bans on plastic bags, and has sought to position recyclable shopping bags as germ-ridden biohazards. Their argument isn’t in the slightest bit subtle and can be boiled down to the title of a recent column circulated on one of the industry’s many lobbying websites: “The War on Plastic Makes the Virus Worse.”
Coronavirus or no, the plastics industry is determined to gain ground. When Dustin Hoffman’s character was told in the 1967 classic movie The Graduate that there was “a great future in plastics,” global production of the stuff was a meagre 25 million tonnes a year. Today, that number has risen to about 400 million tonnes per year, and is projected to double again in the next two decades. Amazingly, half of all plastics ever made have been produced in the past 13 years.
If the magnitude of increased plastic production is eye-popping, the resulting mountain of waste is even more so. Nearly one-half of all the plastics produced every year are for single use. Often, as in the case of fast food take-out containers, this use lasts for only a few minutes. In addition, it’s estimated that up to a trillion plastic bags and about half a trillion disposable water bottles are used globally every year, and in the United States alone, an estimated 500 million plastic straws are used each day. Less than 10 per cent of plastics are recycled, meaning the vast majority winds up discarded in landfills or dumped in the environment.
Video and more...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Humanitarianism and Environmental Protection
Our environment affects our quality of lives in many ways. It is time we start taking responsibility for it and strive for a more sustainable lifestyle.
As our world continues to develop, we put the environment at risk, disrupting our environmental synergy and balance. In the UAE, governments have placed a significant focus on environmental sustainability, and work is also being done within Jamati institutions to combat the effects of climate change. Let us explore this work and how we are striving toward achieving environmental protection.
“Corruption appears on both land and sea because of (the evil) which men's hands have done” The Holy Qur’an [30:41]
This ayah from the Qur’an communicates one of the most pressing issues in the world today: environmental degradation. Our actions have caused harm to our planet and it is time we accept responsibility and ensure that we are doing our part in protecting the environment.
Humanitarianism is defined as ‘the promotion of human welfare’ and one way that this can be achieved is through actions that protect our environment. Over the years, climate change has had detrimental effects on society: food shortages, rising sea levels, and extreme temperatures are just a few ways in which humans suffer the effects of global warming. In the UAE, efforts have been taken at macroscopic levels in the form of policy development, but also at the microscopic level via community initiatives, including those within Jamati institutions.
In an attempt to combat environmental change, the United Arab Emirates has recently invested in ‘The Green Economy Initiative’. Through this initiative, the UAE aims to become one of the world leaders in the green economy acting as a hub for technology development, and the export and re-export of green products and technologies. This is a way to maintain a sustainable environment to support long-term economic growth. The initiative has taken form through an investment in regulating the carbon production of businesses. The cross-sectoral cooperation between the legal, technological, and management sectors allows for tangible impact to be made across all income levels. At a macroscopic level, the UAE is a world leader in combating climate change.
Furthermore, members of the Jamat have also taken efforts in an attempt to combat climate change. When mentioning the work of the youth in developing solutions to environmental problems, Saira Gulamani, member of the ITREB board, emphasizes the talent and innovation she has seen. “One idea that students of the robotics club developed is a robotic garbage bin, cleaning up the environment by removing trash using robotics and AI technology.” This work is a further reinforcement of the words of His Highness the Aga Khan in the keynote address at the Institute for Ismaili Studies (IIS). When speaking about the importance of using science and innovation to understand and better the environment, His Highness noted that “Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry, and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty”
Governments are doing their part but let us do ours, and strive to make changes in our daily lives. For example, if you own a manufacturing business, are there ways that you can make your production more environmentally friendly by discharging lower emissions? If you are a teacher, could you educate the youth on the importance of taking care of our environment by consuming natural resources more responsibly? If you are an events manager, could you use recyclable material in the events that you plan? Let us embody the fundamental ethics that underpin the work of the AKDN: governance, innovation, respect for our planet, and compassion.
Written by: Zayaan Merchant
https://the.ismaili/uae/humanitarianism ... protection
Our environment affects our quality of lives in many ways. It is time we start taking responsibility for it and strive for a more sustainable lifestyle.
As our world continues to develop, we put the environment at risk, disrupting our environmental synergy and balance. In the UAE, governments have placed a significant focus on environmental sustainability, and work is also being done within Jamati institutions to combat the effects of climate change. Let us explore this work and how we are striving toward achieving environmental protection.
“Corruption appears on both land and sea because of (the evil) which men's hands have done” The Holy Qur’an [30:41]
This ayah from the Qur’an communicates one of the most pressing issues in the world today: environmental degradation. Our actions have caused harm to our planet and it is time we accept responsibility and ensure that we are doing our part in protecting the environment.
Humanitarianism is defined as ‘the promotion of human welfare’ and one way that this can be achieved is through actions that protect our environment. Over the years, climate change has had detrimental effects on society: food shortages, rising sea levels, and extreme temperatures are just a few ways in which humans suffer the effects of global warming. In the UAE, efforts have been taken at macroscopic levels in the form of policy development, but also at the microscopic level via community initiatives, including those within Jamati institutions.
In an attempt to combat environmental change, the United Arab Emirates has recently invested in ‘The Green Economy Initiative’. Through this initiative, the UAE aims to become one of the world leaders in the green economy acting as a hub for technology development, and the export and re-export of green products and technologies. This is a way to maintain a sustainable environment to support long-term economic growth. The initiative has taken form through an investment in regulating the carbon production of businesses. The cross-sectoral cooperation between the legal, technological, and management sectors allows for tangible impact to be made across all income levels. At a macroscopic level, the UAE is a world leader in combating climate change.
Furthermore, members of the Jamat have also taken efforts in an attempt to combat climate change. When mentioning the work of the youth in developing solutions to environmental problems, Saira Gulamani, member of the ITREB board, emphasizes the talent and innovation she has seen. “One idea that students of the robotics club developed is a robotic garbage bin, cleaning up the environment by removing trash using robotics and AI technology.” This work is a further reinforcement of the words of His Highness the Aga Khan in the keynote address at the Institute for Ismaili Studies (IIS). When speaking about the importance of using science and innovation to understand and better the environment, His Highness noted that “Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry, and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty”
Governments are doing their part but let us do ours, and strive to make changes in our daily lives. For example, if you own a manufacturing business, are there ways that you can make your production more environmentally friendly by discharging lower emissions? If you are a teacher, could you educate the youth on the importance of taking care of our environment by consuming natural resources more responsibly? If you are an events manager, could you use recyclable material in the events that you plan? Let us embody the fundamental ethics that underpin the work of the AKDN: governance, innovation, respect for our planet, and compassion.
Written by: Zayaan Merchant
https://the.ismaili/uae/humanitarianism ... protection
ANTHROPOCENE: THE AGE OF HUMAN IMPACT ON EARTH
Part of the scientific community points out that we have already entered a new geological age. Discover in this video what is
Geological eras are periods of time that comprise all the rocks formed during that time. Its use allows to divide and to study the different stages through which the planet has passed since its creation until the today.
You probably know the Cenozoic, Mesozoic or Paleozoic, but have you heard about the Anthropocene? For the last two hundred years humankind has caused such a negative footprint on the environment that some scientists describe it as a new geological age: the age of human impact on Earth or the Anthropocene.
Since the pre-industrial era, and especially since the second half of the last century, the degradation of the environment and the climate change caused by humans have increased at a rate never seen in any other time in history.
Causes of the Anthropocene
When analyzing the reasons that have caused the appearance of this new geological age, we can speak of two main causes: the model of energy production and the resource consumption model. The energy produced from coal, oil and natural gas emits large amounts of greenhouse gases, the main causes of global warming.
For its part, the growing population needs a greater use of natural resources that nowadays surpasses the capacity of the Earth to regenerate them.
Watch video:
https://www.activesustainability.com/su ... he4QyC5gEc
Part of the scientific community points out that we have already entered a new geological age. Discover in this video what is
Geological eras are periods of time that comprise all the rocks formed during that time. Its use allows to divide and to study the different stages through which the planet has passed since its creation until the today.
You probably know the Cenozoic, Mesozoic or Paleozoic, but have you heard about the Anthropocene? For the last two hundred years humankind has caused such a negative footprint on the environment that some scientists describe it as a new geological age: the age of human impact on Earth or the Anthropocene.
Since the pre-industrial era, and especially since the second half of the last century, the degradation of the environment and the climate change caused by humans have increased at a rate never seen in any other time in history.
Causes of the Anthropocene
When analyzing the reasons that have caused the appearance of this new geological age, we can speak of two main causes: the model of energy production and the resource consumption model. The energy produced from coal, oil and natural gas emits large amounts of greenhouse gases, the main causes of global warming.
For its part, the growing population needs a greater use of natural resources that nowadays surpasses the capacity of the Earth to regenerate them.
Watch video:
https://www.activesustainability.com/su ... he4QyC5gEc
A ‘Crossroads’ for Humanity: Earth’s Biodiversity Is Still Collapsing
Countries have made insufficient progress on international goals designed to halt a catastrophic slide, a new report found.
The world is failing to address a catastrophic biodiversity collapse that not only threatens to wipe out beloved species and invaluable genetic diversity, but endangers humanity’s food supply, health and security, according to a sweeping United Nations report issued on Tuesday.
When governments act to protect and restore nature, the authors found, it works. But despite commitments made 10 years ago, nations have not come close to meeting the scale of the crisis, which continues to worsen because of unsustainable farming, overfishing, burning of fossil fuels and other activities.
“Humanity stands at a crossroads,” the report said.
It comes as the devastating consequences that can result from an unhealthy relationship with nature are on full display: A pandemic that very likely jumped from bats has upended life worldwide, and wildfires, worsened by climate change and land management policies, are ravaging the American West.
“These things are a sign of what is to come,” said David Cooper, an author of the report and the deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the global treaty underlying the assessment. “These things will only get worse if we don’t change course.”
The report looked at a decade of efforts by national governments. In 2010, after painstaking scientific work and arduous negotiation, almost every country in the world signed on to 20 goals under the convention to staunch the biodiversity hemorrhage.
At the time, the science was already clear: Human activity was decimating animals and plants across the planet, causing a wave of extinctions and throwing ecosystems so out of balance that the domino effects threatened humans themselves. The agreement, with a deadline of 2020 for the new goals, was a hard-won diplomatic triumph.
The report, which assesses progress on the 20 goals, has found that the world is doing far too little.
“Some progress has been made, but it’s not good enough,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the leader of the U.N. convention.
As with climate change, scientific alarms on biodiversity loss have gone largely unheeded as the problem intensifies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Countries have made insufficient progress on international goals designed to halt a catastrophic slide, a new report found.
The world is failing to address a catastrophic biodiversity collapse that not only threatens to wipe out beloved species and invaluable genetic diversity, but endangers humanity’s food supply, health and security, according to a sweeping United Nations report issued on Tuesday.
When governments act to protect and restore nature, the authors found, it works. But despite commitments made 10 years ago, nations have not come close to meeting the scale of the crisis, which continues to worsen because of unsustainable farming, overfishing, burning of fossil fuels and other activities.
“Humanity stands at a crossroads,” the report said.
It comes as the devastating consequences that can result from an unhealthy relationship with nature are on full display: A pandemic that very likely jumped from bats has upended life worldwide, and wildfires, worsened by climate change and land management policies, are ravaging the American West.
“These things are a sign of what is to come,” said David Cooper, an author of the report and the deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the global treaty underlying the assessment. “These things will only get worse if we don’t change course.”
The report looked at a decade of efforts by national governments. In 2010, after painstaking scientific work and arduous negotiation, almost every country in the world signed on to 20 goals under the convention to staunch the biodiversity hemorrhage.
At the time, the science was already clear: Human activity was decimating animals and plants across the planet, causing a wave of extinctions and throwing ecosystems so out of balance that the domino effects threatened humans themselves. The agreement, with a deadline of 2020 for the new goals, was a hard-won diplomatic triumph.
The report, which assesses progress on the 20 goals, has found that the world is doing far too little.
“Some progress has been made, but it’s not good enough,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the leader of the U.N. convention.
As with climate change, scientific alarms on biodiversity loss have gone largely unheeded as the problem intensifies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/clim ... 778d3e6de3
AKDN and Duke of Cambridge partner to launch Earthshot Prize
With our shared planet at the heart of its thinking, the new Earthshot prize is centred around five simple yet ambitious goals to repair the natural environment.
The most prestigious global environment prize in history is being launched today by Prince William with the Aga Khan Development Network as a Founding Partner. The Earthshot Prize aims to encourage large-scale change over the next 10 years — a critical decade for the Earth.
As a Global Alliance Founding Partner of the Earthshot Prize, AKDN will work closely with The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to deliver this ambitious and exciting project. The Prize will support the global effort to protect and restore the environment while also turning the current pessimism surrounding these issues into optimism, highlighting the ability of human ingenuity to bring about positive change.
The idea takes inspiration from United States President John F. Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’; an aspirational and ground-breaking programme which succeeded in landing the first human on the moon in 1969, catalysed the development of new technology in the 1960s, and made the seemingly impossible, possible.
Placing our shared planet at the centre of its thinking, the new prize is centred around five Earthshots, each a simple yet ambitious goal to repair the natural environment. The five Earthshots unveiled today are:
• Protect and restore nature
• Clean our air
• Revive our oceans
• Build a waste-free world
• Fix our climate
Together, these form a unique set of challenges rooted in science, which aim to generate new ways of thinking, as well as new technologies, systems, policies, and solutions. By bringing these five critical issues together, The Earthshot Prize recognises the interconnectivity between environmental challenges and the urgent need to tackle them together.
As Chair of AKDN’s Environment and Climate Committee, Prince Rahim remarked on the significance of this new prize and the importance of caring for the environment, saying, “The Aga Khan Development Network is proud to be a Founding Partner of The Earthshot Prize. It is our collective responsibility to be good stewards of the planet. At this critical moment, we must all nurture and invest in solutions that can repair our planet before it is too late.”
“The AKDN has been working for over a century in Asia and Africa to improve quality of life - through education and healthcare, livelihoods and infrastructure, and long-term institutions of civil society. The decades of progress now hang in the balance: environmental degradation and climate change will wipe out these gains entirely unless we act now with urgency and conviction.”
Prince Rahim also spoke of AKDN’s own efforts to find solutions to environmental crises, particularly for communities who are most at risk from climate change, saying, “To do its part, AKDN has a net-zero carbon target for its own operations and will mobilise its agencies to mitigate the effects of climate change and help vulnerable communities to adapt. We are excited to partner with The Earthshot Prize which, over the next decade, will identify fifty solutions with the potential to keep our planet habitable. Working together, we can and must help ensure a future for life on Earth.”
Prizes could be awarded to a wide range of individuals, teams or collaborations — scientists, activists, economists, community projects, leaders, governments, banks, businesses, cities, and countries — anyone whose workable solutions make a substantial contribution to achieving the Earthshots.
Every year from 2021 until 2030, Prince William, alongside The Earthshot Prize Council, will award a £1 million prize to five winners, one per Earthshot, whose evidence-based solutions make the most progress towards these goals. An annual global awards ceremony will be held in a different international city each year, beginning with London in the autumn of 2021.
The next 10 years will determine whether humanity stands any chance of preventing runaway climate change, mass extinction, and irreparable damage to nature, both on land and underwater. The existing problems are urgent and complex, but with a spirit of optimism, can be tackled.
Like the famous Moonshot of the 1960s, this new collaborative project addresses a large problem, proposes radical solutions, and encourages innovation over the course of a decade to make lasting change. If achieved by the year 2030, it will contribute to repairing the Earth, and improving the quality of life for us and many generations to come.
To find out more, visit www.earthshotprize.org.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/institu ... shot-prize
With our shared planet at the heart of its thinking, the new Earthshot prize is centred around five simple yet ambitious goals to repair the natural environment.
The most prestigious global environment prize in history is being launched today by Prince William with the Aga Khan Development Network as a Founding Partner. The Earthshot Prize aims to encourage large-scale change over the next 10 years — a critical decade for the Earth.
As a Global Alliance Founding Partner of the Earthshot Prize, AKDN will work closely with The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to deliver this ambitious and exciting project. The Prize will support the global effort to protect and restore the environment while also turning the current pessimism surrounding these issues into optimism, highlighting the ability of human ingenuity to bring about positive change.
The idea takes inspiration from United States President John F. Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’; an aspirational and ground-breaking programme which succeeded in landing the first human on the moon in 1969, catalysed the development of new technology in the 1960s, and made the seemingly impossible, possible.
Placing our shared planet at the centre of its thinking, the new prize is centred around five Earthshots, each a simple yet ambitious goal to repair the natural environment. The five Earthshots unveiled today are:
• Protect and restore nature
• Clean our air
• Revive our oceans
• Build a waste-free world
• Fix our climate
Together, these form a unique set of challenges rooted in science, which aim to generate new ways of thinking, as well as new technologies, systems, policies, and solutions. By bringing these five critical issues together, The Earthshot Prize recognises the interconnectivity between environmental challenges and the urgent need to tackle them together.
As Chair of AKDN’s Environment and Climate Committee, Prince Rahim remarked on the significance of this new prize and the importance of caring for the environment, saying, “The Aga Khan Development Network is proud to be a Founding Partner of The Earthshot Prize. It is our collective responsibility to be good stewards of the planet. At this critical moment, we must all nurture and invest in solutions that can repair our planet before it is too late.”
“The AKDN has been working for over a century in Asia and Africa to improve quality of life - through education and healthcare, livelihoods and infrastructure, and long-term institutions of civil society. The decades of progress now hang in the balance: environmental degradation and climate change will wipe out these gains entirely unless we act now with urgency and conviction.”
Prince Rahim also spoke of AKDN’s own efforts to find solutions to environmental crises, particularly for communities who are most at risk from climate change, saying, “To do its part, AKDN has a net-zero carbon target for its own operations and will mobilise its agencies to mitigate the effects of climate change and help vulnerable communities to adapt. We are excited to partner with The Earthshot Prize which, over the next decade, will identify fifty solutions with the potential to keep our planet habitable. Working together, we can and must help ensure a future for life on Earth.”
Prizes could be awarded to a wide range of individuals, teams or collaborations — scientists, activists, economists, community projects, leaders, governments, banks, businesses, cities, and countries — anyone whose workable solutions make a substantial contribution to achieving the Earthshots.
Every year from 2021 until 2030, Prince William, alongside The Earthshot Prize Council, will award a £1 million prize to five winners, one per Earthshot, whose evidence-based solutions make the most progress towards these goals. An annual global awards ceremony will be held in a different international city each year, beginning with London in the autumn of 2021.
The next 10 years will determine whether humanity stands any chance of preventing runaway climate change, mass extinction, and irreparable damage to nature, both on land and underwater. The existing problems are urgent and complex, but with a spirit of optimism, can be tackled.
Like the famous Moonshot of the 1960s, this new collaborative project addresses a large problem, proposes radical solutions, and encourages innovation over the course of a decade to make lasting change. If achieved by the year 2030, it will contribute to repairing the Earth, and improving the quality of life for us and many generations to come.
To find out more, visit www.earthshotprize.org.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/institu ... shot-prize
Save the Planet, Win a Prize
Rising seas, raging fires, hotter temperatures — and a bit of positivity.
At a time when elected officials appear stymied by the challenge of climate change, or even in denial about it, it is heartening to see a royal prince pitch in with a good initiative.
The Earthshot Prize announced Thursday by Prince William, second in line to the British throne, along with the venerable English broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough, proposes to award five £1 million prizes every year for the next 10 years toward five environmental goals (“earthshots”) — fixing the climate, cleaning the air, protecting and restoring nature, reviving oceans and tackling waste.
Any person, group or corporation around the world is eligible, and any suggestion — even those that “may sound crackpot,” said Mr. Attenborough — is welcome, so long as it is applicable on a global scale. It could be a new technology, a new approach, a new governmental policy or any other “insights, flashes of genius and ideas.” The goal is no less than “to repair our planet by 2030.”
That might be a tad overly ambitious. But the purpose of the prize, and what distinguishes it from several others with the same broad goals, is to generate excitement and what Prince William called “a bit of a catalyst, a bit of hope, a bit of positivity” into an endeavor more often pushed by doomsday scenarios. “Earthshot” was chosen to echo “Moonshot,” President John F. Kennedy’s giant 10-year project announced in 1961 to get a person on the moon within a decade.
According to the BBC, Prince William has been developing the prize for some time through the charitable foundation that he and his wife, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, support. The money will come from donors around the world, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Jack Ma Foundation and the Aga Khan Development Network. The prize council includes celebrities ranging from the actress Cate Blanchett to the Colombian singer Shakira.
The announcement comes at a time when a dose of positivity is sorely needed, with the coronavirus raging through the world and symptoms of global warming, like the wildfires in California and the melting Arctic ice, becoming ever more acute and dangerous.
Prince William has environmental activism in his blue blood. His grandfather, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was an active environmentalist, as is Prince William’s father, Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. Last month, speaking on the opening day of New York’s Climate Week, Prince Charles spoke of “a planet that has been pushed beyond its planetary boundaries.”
Prince William acknowledged his heritage with a sideswipe at those who continue to question the human responsibility for the warming. Reminded in an interview that his father, Prince Charles, once acknowledged that his ideas on the environment were sometimes seen as a bit “dotty,” Prince William quipped, “I regularly wonder what my father’s banging on about,” but then said he had always listened, learned and believed what he was saying about the environment. “I think the dotty person now would be the person who doesn’t believe in climate change,” said the prince.
These are wise words out of the mouth of princes, and the prize is a good one. A million pounds — roughly $1.3 million — is significantly more than a Nobel Prize and should inspire some serious and creative thinking about the plight of Planet Earth. Unlike the Nobel Prize money, moreover, the Earthshot money is supposed to be spent on the winning project.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/opin ... ogin-email
Rising seas, raging fires, hotter temperatures — and a bit of positivity.
At a time when elected officials appear stymied by the challenge of climate change, or even in denial about it, it is heartening to see a royal prince pitch in with a good initiative.
The Earthshot Prize announced Thursday by Prince William, second in line to the British throne, along with the venerable English broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough, proposes to award five £1 million prizes every year for the next 10 years toward five environmental goals (“earthshots”) — fixing the climate, cleaning the air, protecting and restoring nature, reviving oceans and tackling waste.
Any person, group or corporation around the world is eligible, and any suggestion — even those that “may sound crackpot,” said Mr. Attenborough — is welcome, so long as it is applicable on a global scale. It could be a new technology, a new approach, a new governmental policy or any other “insights, flashes of genius and ideas.” The goal is no less than “to repair our planet by 2030.”
That might be a tad overly ambitious. But the purpose of the prize, and what distinguishes it from several others with the same broad goals, is to generate excitement and what Prince William called “a bit of a catalyst, a bit of hope, a bit of positivity” into an endeavor more often pushed by doomsday scenarios. “Earthshot” was chosen to echo “Moonshot,” President John F. Kennedy’s giant 10-year project announced in 1961 to get a person on the moon within a decade.
According to the BBC, Prince William has been developing the prize for some time through the charitable foundation that he and his wife, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, support. The money will come from donors around the world, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Jack Ma Foundation and the Aga Khan Development Network. The prize council includes celebrities ranging from the actress Cate Blanchett to the Colombian singer Shakira.
The announcement comes at a time when a dose of positivity is sorely needed, with the coronavirus raging through the world and symptoms of global warming, like the wildfires in California and the melting Arctic ice, becoming ever more acute and dangerous.
Prince William has environmental activism in his blue blood. His grandfather, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was an active environmentalist, as is Prince William’s father, Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. Last month, speaking on the opening day of New York’s Climate Week, Prince Charles spoke of “a planet that has been pushed beyond its planetary boundaries.”
Prince William acknowledged his heritage with a sideswipe at those who continue to question the human responsibility for the warming. Reminded in an interview that his father, Prince Charles, once acknowledged that his ideas on the environment were sometimes seen as a bit “dotty,” Prince William quipped, “I regularly wonder what my father’s banging on about,” but then said he had always listened, learned and believed what he was saying about the environment. “I think the dotty person now would be the person who doesn’t believe in climate change,” said the prince.
These are wise words out of the mouth of princes, and the prize is a good one. A million pounds — roughly $1.3 million — is significantly more than a Nobel Prize and should inspire some serious and creative thinking about the plight of Planet Earth. Unlike the Nobel Prize money, moreover, the Earthshot money is supposed to be spent on the winning project.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/opin ... ogin-email
AKU, AKAH, UCA launch climate change documentary series for South and Central Asia
Karachi, Pakistan and Geneva, Switzerland, 14 October 2020 - In a bid to spotlight the dire consequences of climate change in Central and South Asia, the Aga Khan University, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the University of Central Asia launched a film series focusing on the catastrophic impact of the rapid melting of the world’s largest repository of ice outside the polar regions. Echoing the call to action of the #EarthshotPrize, Voices from the Roof of the World (VRW) will help local filmmakers produce impactful documentaries about the consequences of global warming for the wildlife and the 240 million people living among the world’s highest mountains and the almost two billion people dependent on the great rivers that all begin here. www.aku.edu/vrw
“The future of South and Central Asia will be decisively shaped by environmental conditions in the mountainous region stretching from Nepal to Kyrgyzstan,” said Aga Khan University President Firoz Rasul. “We believe it is crucial to draw attention to what is happening, what is at stake and what can be done to address this looming crisis. We aim to reach millions of people through Voices from the Roof of the World, and to build support for efforts to protect the region’s environment both for its inhabitants and the countless people who depend on its waters.”
“The people of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Pamir mountains live on the frontline of climate change, much like Pacific islanders and residents of the Bay of Bengal,” said Onno Rühl, General Manager of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat. “The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat works with them to protect their habitat and to ensure that they can thrive, even with the mounting danger. By developing solutions and studying climate change adaptation, our work will benefit other people under similar threat, now and in the future. Not only will this project give vulnerable communities a voice, it will help others feel the starkness of the climate-change challenge.”
“Global warming is not coming. It is already here, and the University of Central Asia, through its Mountain Societies Research Institute, is uniquely placed in the region to respond to the challenges of climate change,” said Dr. Bohdan Krawchenko, Dean of the Graduate School of Development at the University of Central Asia. “Voices from the Roof of the World” can help in creating urgently needed awareness of issues such as water management and food security, and the potentially devastating impact of climate change on mountain communities.”
Voices from the Roof of the World (VRW) is based on an award-winning series of 52 half-hour documentaries called Giving Nature a Voice, created at the Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi, Kenya. That series has already prodded policymakers, business leaders and citizens to take action, including banning plastic bags, stopping new coal fired energy plants and passing legislation to protect unregulated fisheries. VRW will use this proven model on the roof of the world.
“We are literally seeing the earth’s future go up in flames. Only by working together across borders and cultures can we hope to stop this impending disaster. From farmers to filmmakers, from scientists to students, we can all play an important role in saving our planet,” said Andrew Tkach, director of the Voices from the Roof of the World project.
https://www.akdn.org/press-release/aku- ... ntral-asia
*******
Warning from the Roof of the World
The Aga Khan University, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the University of Central Asia launch a documentary film series about the climate crisis on the Roof of the World. Echoing the call to action of the newly launched Earthshot Prize, Voices from the Roof of the World will tell the stories of the millions of people and endangered wildlife living amongst these fast-melting glaciers and the billions more across Asia dependent on the rivers that flow from them.
Read press release: https://www.akdn.org/press-release/ak...
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nqN-gVIKHk
Karachi, Pakistan and Geneva, Switzerland, 14 October 2020 - In a bid to spotlight the dire consequences of climate change in Central and South Asia, the Aga Khan University, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the University of Central Asia launched a film series focusing on the catastrophic impact of the rapid melting of the world’s largest repository of ice outside the polar regions. Echoing the call to action of the #EarthshotPrize, Voices from the Roof of the World (VRW) will help local filmmakers produce impactful documentaries about the consequences of global warming for the wildlife and the 240 million people living among the world’s highest mountains and the almost two billion people dependent on the great rivers that all begin here. www.aku.edu/vrw
“The future of South and Central Asia will be decisively shaped by environmental conditions in the mountainous region stretching from Nepal to Kyrgyzstan,” said Aga Khan University President Firoz Rasul. “We believe it is crucial to draw attention to what is happening, what is at stake and what can be done to address this looming crisis. We aim to reach millions of people through Voices from the Roof of the World, and to build support for efforts to protect the region’s environment both for its inhabitants and the countless people who depend on its waters.”
“The people of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Pamir mountains live on the frontline of climate change, much like Pacific islanders and residents of the Bay of Bengal,” said Onno Rühl, General Manager of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat. “The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat works with them to protect their habitat and to ensure that they can thrive, even with the mounting danger. By developing solutions and studying climate change adaptation, our work will benefit other people under similar threat, now and in the future. Not only will this project give vulnerable communities a voice, it will help others feel the starkness of the climate-change challenge.”
“Global warming is not coming. It is already here, and the University of Central Asia, through its Mountain Societies Research Institute, is uniquely placed in the region to respond to the challenges of climate change,” said Dr. Bohdan Krawchenko, Dean of the Graduate School of Development at the University of Central Asia. “Voices from the Roof of the World” can help in creating urgently needed awareness of issues such as water management and food security, and the potentially devastating impact of climate change on mountain communities.”
Voices from the Roof of the World (VRW) is based on an award-winning series of 52 half-hour documentaries called Giving Nature a Voice, created at the Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi, Kenya. That series has already prodded policymakers, business leaders and citizens to take action, including banning plastic bags, stopping new coal fired energy plants and passing legislation to protect unregulated fisheries. VRW will use this proven model on the roof of the world.
“We are literally seeing the earth’s future go up in flames. Only by working together across borders and cultures can we hope to stop this impending disaster. From farmers to filmmakers, from scientists to students, we can all play an important role in saving our planet,” said Andrew Tkach, director of the Voices from the Roof of the World project.
https://www.akdn.org/press-release/aku- ... ntral-asia
*******
Warning from the Roof of the World
The Aga Khan University, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat and the University of Central Asia launch a documentary film series about the climate crisis on the Roof of the World. Echoing the call to action of the newly launched Earthshot Prize, Voices from the Roof of the World will tell the stories of the millions of people and endangered wildlife living amongst these fast-melting glaciers and the billions more across Asia dependent on the rivers that flow from them.
Read press release: https://www.akdn.org/press-release/ak...
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nqN-gVIKHk
Amir Jivraj: Civil engineering behind AKDN’s climate-friendly buildings
Whether it is more efficient smoke-free stoves in northern Pakistan, a hydroelectric plant in Uganda, cooling the buildings of the Aga Khan University in Karachi or installing a solar array at an Aga Khan Health Services-managed hospital in Afghanistan, good stewardship of the environment has always been one of the underlying ethics driving the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN)’s work. Now, as AKDN redoubles its efforts to meet the climate change crisis, it is important to reflect on the decisions that have affected – and continue to affect – the environment. Amir Jivraj has been intimately involved with many of these projects along the way.
For example, Pakistan’s hot weather was a major influence on the design of the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi, which was designed and built in the 1970s and 1980s. His Highness the Aga Khan favoured the use of specially baked clay tiles – on roofs, facades and walkways – that fended off heat. According to one article, the tiles, water features and landscaping reduced temperatures a minimum of five degrees. Ornate and historically traditional clay “jaalis”, or screens, were also used to shade and cool corridors and porches. The University’s energy saving design has also inspired other projects, including Karachi airport, as well as many other famous buildings in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore. And despite its special “green” characteristics, it was – and still is – a beautiful campus, and continues to attract many visitors.
Amir Jivraj was also involved in the construction of the Bamyan Provincial Hospital, which the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat built and the Aga Khan Health Services operates in Bamyan, Afghanistan. Providing oversight during construction and the installation of a solar array and commissioning of the facility, he remarks that the Hospital is “an amazing building – an oasis in the middle of a desert!” He also points to the rammed earth technology used in construction as having “enormous insulation value” and that it “maintains internal temperature pretty much constantly, thereby reducing heating costs.”
The Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa, for example, was another project on which Amir Jivraj helped manage the process of design and construction. The goal at the Academy was to use as little water and raw materials while cutting carbon emissions. Municipal water was in short supply. Well water was the only solution but the proximity to the ocean presented challenges for establishing a ready supply of potable water for domestic use and landscaping. Pioneering innovations in recycling water and well water management, alongside careful planting, helped alleviate the problem.
The Serena Hotel expansion in Islamabad, which was built between 2007-2009, also used energy-efficient technology. The design called for “mashrabiyas” – ornately screened box balconies that were traditionally built to provide privacy to women but also designed to store water in a cool and shady place. A roof garden hid the basement parking and provided insulation to the banquet halls.
During the design of the Aga Khan Academy in Hyderabad, a lot of emphasis was placed on natural ventilation, landscaping and the use of “jaalis” once again. Externally, an area was cordoned off to retain the natural terrain and its ecosystem, which would later be used as part of the learning for the school. “This was very impressive,” remarks Amir Jivraj. An “air gap” between the stone façade and the brick construction dramatically increased insulation. The clay brick cladding was intelligently able to retain the quality of heat reflection, while removing the clay’s absorptive properties, thereby keeping the heat and damp out.
As the AKDN refocuses its energies on environmentally friendly solutions, it is looking at further reducing its climate impact. Amir Jivraj is working with the Aga Khan Hospitals, for example, to reduce the waste that comes from the normal operations of hospitals. “Reduction of waste is a challenge in hospitals,” he says. “They require proper management to ensure waste is appropriately segregated and dealt with accordingly.” Amir Jivraj points out that technology has improved as incineration and wastewater treatment plant equipment have become more efficient. “There was a time when this equipment was massive,” he says. “Now they are much smaller in size and much more efficient. The latest incinerator installation at Dar es Salaam gives out zero smoke and absolutely no odour.”
As AKDN creates green parks and greener buildings, it is looking at its own carbon footprint and taking measures to reduce its impact. By making significant changes – in not only the way it builds, but in the whole lifecycle of a product, a place or a building – it is hoped that a combination of human drive and the efficiencies brought about by technological change will help repair the planet.
Photos at;
https://www.akdn.org/our-stories/amir-j ... -buildings
Whether it is more efficient smoke-free stoves in northern Pakistan, a hydroelectric plant in Uganda, cooling the buildings of the Aga Khan University in Karachi or installing a solar array at an Aga Khan Health Services-managed hospital in Afghanistan, good stewardship of the environment has always been one of the underlying ethics driving the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN)’s work. Now, as AKDN redoubles its efforts to meet the climate change crisis, it is important to reflect on the decisions that have affected – and continue to affect – the environment. Amir Jivraj has been intimately involved with many of these projects along the way.
For example, Pakistan’s hot weather was a major influence on the design of the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi, which was designed and built in the 1970s and 1980s. His Highness the Aga Khan favoured the use of specially baked clay tiles – on roofs, facades and walkways – that fended off heat. According to one article, the tiles, water features and landscaping reduced temperatures a minimum of five degrees. Ornate and historically traditional clay “jaalis”, or screens, were also used to shade and cool corridors and porches. The University’s energy saving design has also inspired other projects, including Karachi airport, as well as many other famous buildings in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore. And despite its special “green” characteristics, it was – and still is – a beautiful campus, and continues to attract many visitors.
Amir Jivraj was also involved in the construction of the Bamyan Provincial Hospital, which the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat built and the Aga Khan Health Services operates in Bamyan, Afghanistan. Providing oversight during construction and the installation of a solar array and commissioning of the facility, he remarks that the Hospital is “an amazing building – an oasis in the middle of a desert!” He also points to the rammed earth technology used in construction as having “enormous insulation value” and that it “maintains internal temperature pretty much constantly, thereby reducing heating costs.”
The Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa, for example, was another project on which Amir Jivraj helped manage the process of design and construction. The goal at the Academy was to use as little water and raw materials while cutting carbon emissions. Municipal water was in short supply. Well water was the only solution but the proximity to the ocean presented challenges for establishing a ready supply of potable water for domestic use and landscaping. Pioneering innovations in recycling water and well water management, alongside careful planting, helped alleviate the problem.
The Serena Hotel expansion in Islamabad, which was built between 2007-2009, also used energy-efficient technology. The design called for “mashrabiyas” – ornately screened box balconies that were traditionally built to provide privacy to women but also designed to store water in a cool and shady place. A roof garden hid the basement parking and provided insulation to the banquet halls.
During the design of the Aga Khan Academy in Hyderabad, a lot of emphasis was placed on natural ventilation, landscaping and the use of “jaalis” once again. Externally, an area was cordoned off to retain the natural terrain and its ecosystem, which would later be used as part of the learning for the school. “This was very impressive,” remarks Amir Jivraj. An “air gap” between the stone façade and the brick construction dramatically increased insulation. The clay brick cladding was intelligently able to retain the quality of heat reflection, while removing the clay’s absorptive properties, thereby keeping the heat and damp out.
As the AKDN refocuses its energies on environmentally friendly solutions, it is looking at further reducing its climate impact. Amir Jivraj is working with the Aga Khan Hospitals, for example, to reduce the waste that comes from the normal operations of hospitals. “Reduction of waste is a challenge in hospitals,” he says. “They require proper management to ensure waste is appropriately segregated and dealt with accordingly.” Amir Jivraj points out that technology has improved as incineration and wastewater treatment plant equipment have become more efficient. “There was a time when this equipment was massive,” he says. “Now they are much smaller in size and much more efficient. The latest incinerator installation at Dar es Salaam gives out zero smoke and absolutely no odour.”
As AKDN creates green parks and greener buildings, it is looking at its own carbon footprint and taking measures to reduce its impact. By making significant changes – in not only the way it builds, but in the whole lifecycle of a product, a place or a building – it is hoped that a combination of human drive and the efficiencies brought about by technological change will help repair the planet.
Photos at;
https://www.akdn.org/our-stories/amir-j ... -buildings
Green energy for industry
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY4xkYirySg
In response to the ever growing need to address environmental challenges, the Aga Khan Development Network is taking action to operate more sustainably across all its projects. In East Africa, Industrial Promotion Services (IPS) project companies are investing in solar power to reduce their carbon footprint. This film explores the progress of IPS’s first solar project, and what is to follow.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY4xkYirySg
In response to the ever growing need to address environmental challenges, the Aga Khan Development Network is taking action to operate more sustainably across all its projects. In East Africa, Industrial Promotion Services (IPS) project companies are investing in solar power to reduce their carbon footprint. This film explores the progress of IPS’s first solar project, and what is to follow.
Protecting the environment and helping populations adapt to the effects of climate change
Environment and climate are core strategic priorities for AKDN, stressing that good environmental stewardship is part of the development agenda and ensuring that the Earth can sustainably support future generations. In line with this goal, AKDN agencies and institutions have worked towards a number of goals, including reforestation.
For example, the Aga Khan Foundation and the Mountain Societies Development Support Programme (MSDSP) planted a forest in Roshtqala, Tajikistan, with support from the local community (pictured).
AKDN’s Serena tree-planting programme has been in place since 1991. It had an initial success in the Hombe Forest in Mount Kenya National Park, which suffered from the adverse effects of deforestation, and at Amboseli National Park, where the destruction of forests by elephants was on its way to being reversed.
Another focus area has been the use of solar power in a variety of ways:
- The 400-KW solar plant of the Bamyan Provincial Hospital in Afghanistan, which provides a majority of the electricity supply for the Hospital.
- Solar panels that have greatly reduced the carbon imprint of Kilaguni Serena Safari Lodge in Tsavo West National Park, which made it Kenya’s first fully solar-powered hotel.
- Solar irrigation in Bihar, where a group of smallholder farmers invested in a solar pumping system that is now producing higher crop yields at lower costs.
- The solar-powered early warning flood system in Gharbochung, Pakistan, which can set off an alarm in the village for villagers to evacuate if the river rises by a certain percentage due to an imminent flash flood.
In many places, protecting the environment and helping populations adapt to the effects of climate change has taken on increased urgency and importance. For example, in 2015, in Barsem, Tajikistan, a mudflow triggered by high temperatures, rapid snow and glacier melt inundated a village and blocked the flow of a nearby river. The resulting lake submerged the road, energy lines, farms and homes. Not only did the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat train the volunteer emergency technicians who ensured that there was no loss of life when the mudflow occurred, but they helped the community recover with new housing, water systems and other infrastructure.
Another example is livestock, which have traditionally been moved from villages to mountain pastures each spring. In recent years, the whole system has proven to be less reliable due to grazing pressures, pasture degradation and climate change. The University of Central Asia is studying the resilience of communities to these changes, including their strategies for livestock rearing.
Pamir Energy, an energy company supported by AKDN and its partners, is another example. Since 2002, Pamir Energy has restored 11 micro hydro power plants and upgraded 4,300 km of transmission lines, including the Khorog 1 Hydro Power Plant, in Khorog, Tajikistan. It has become evident that small-scale hydropower can play a critical role in energy security. In fact, the Government of Afghanistan has invited Pamir Energy to replicate this model, eventually bringing light and warmth to 1.5 million people in northern Afghanistan.
Through its programmes and projects, AKDN hopes to create awareness, influence policy, and impact societal transformation in terms of the quality of life. Above all, it strives to lead by example, showing that good environmental stewardship is possible even in remote communities.
Source: www.akdn.org
Photos at:
https://the.ismaili/portugal/protecting ... ate-change
Environment and climate are core strategic priorities for AKDN, stressing that good environmental stewardship is part of the development agenda and ensuring that the Earth can sustainably support future generations. In line with this goal, AKDN agencies and institutions have worked towards a number of goals, including reforestation.
For example, the Aga Khan Foundation and the Mountain Societies Development Support Programme (MSDSP) planted a forest in Roshtqala, Tajikistan, with support from the local community (pictured).
AKDN’s Serena tree-planting programme has been in place since 1991. It had an initial success in the Hombe Forest in Mount Kenya National Park, which suffered from the adverse effects of deforestation, and at Amboseli National Park, where the destruction of forests by elephants was on its way to being reversed.
Another focus area has been the use of solar power in a variety of ways:
- The 400-KW solar plant of the Bamyan Provincial Hospital in Afghanistan, which provides a majority of the electricity supply for the Hospital.
- Solar panels that have greatly reduced the carbon imprint of Kilaguni Serena Safari Lodge in Tsavo West National Park, which made it Kenya’s first fully solar-powered hotel.
- Solar irrigation in Bihar, where a group of smallholder farmers invested in a solar pumping system that is now producing higher crop yields at lower costs.
- The solar-powered early warning flood system in Gharbochung, Pakistan, which can set off an alarm in the village for villagers to evacuate if the river rises by a certain percentage due to an imminent flash flood.
In many places, protecting the environment and helping populations adapt to the effects of climate change has taken on increased urgency and importance. For example, in 2015, in Barsem, Tajikistan, a mudflow triggered by high temperatures, rapid snow and glacier melt inundated a village and blocked the flow of a nearby river. The resulting lake submerged the road, energy lines, farms and homes. Not only did the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat train the volunteer emergency technicians who ensured that there was no loss of life when the mudflow occurred, but they helped the community recover with new housing, water systems and other infrastructure.
Another example is livestock, which have traditionally been moved from villages to mountain pastures each spring. In recent years, the whole system has proven to be less reliable due to grazing pressures, pasture degradation and climate change. The University of Central Asia is studying the resilience of communities to these changes, including their strategies for livestock rearing.
Pamir Energy, an energy company supported by AKDN and its partners, is another example. Since 2002, Pamir Energy has restored 11 micro hydro power plants and upgraded 4,300 km of transmission lines, including the Khorog 1 Hydro Power Plant, in Khorog, Tajikistan. It has become evident that small-scale hydropower can play a critical role in energy security. In fact, the Government of Afghanistan has invited Pamir Energy to replicate this model, eventually bringing light and warmth to 1.5 million people in northern Afghanistan.
Through its programmes and projects, AKDN hopes to create awareness, influence policy, and impact societal transformation in terms of the quality of life. Above all, it strives to lead by example, showing that good environmental stewardship is possible even in remote communities.
Source: www.akdn.org
Photos at:
https://the.ismaili/portugal/protecting ... ate-change
Abundant, Clean, and Safe
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5OJRxZoMI8
If you truly want to save the planet from global warming, there’s one energy source that can do it. It’s not wind or solar. It’s not coal, oil or natural gas, either. So what is it? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, has the answer in this important video.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5OJRxZoMI8
If you truly want to save the planet from global warming, there’s one energy source that can do it. It’s not wind or solar. It’s not coal, oil or natural gas, either. So what is it? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, has the answer in this important video.
One Indian state is preserving its century-old trees with heritage tags.
REUTERS/PUNIT PARANJPE.
By Supriya Dedgaonkar
November 17, 2020
In an effort to save century-old trees that have been dying in Maharashtra, the state forest department has announced that they will prepare a database of heritage trees.
The officials have said that concerned citizens and non-governmental organizations (NGO) will be roped in to help with the project. According to official data with the environment ministry, Maharashtra ranks second in the number of trees felled in the 2016-2019 period with over 1.07 million trees. About 1.2 million trees were axed in Telangana in this period.
In an urban setting, heritage trees absorb polluting gases, prevent soil erosion, especially along urban water bodies, and serve as a habitat for biodiversity, according to a 2020 report on heritage trees of urban India. At the same time, they are a source of food, medicine, and raw material for us and are also of cultural and sacred significance, the report added.
Sachin Punekar, a Pune-based botanist and founder-president of Biospheres, an environmental NGO, stated that the initiative by the state government would be beneficial for conservation. However, he said, a tree shouldn’t be given the heritage tag just because it is old, but aspects such as its ecological value, and cultural and historical significance must also be taken into consideration.
Experts say thousands of trees are chopped off for development work, but now that the government has taken a decision to conserve these age-old trees, it would be difficult to cut these trees.
Anish Pardeshi, a researcher working in the Western Ghats, stated that the initiative will pave the way for the conservation, documentation, and protection of trees. “The motive here will go beyond the idea of just saving the tree alone but will help protect the dependent fauna, insects, butterflies, and birds. Going ahead, it will also help to connect ordinary citizens to the conservation movement,” he commented.
Identifying heritage trees
Heritage trees have great ecological value as they tolerate heavy clays and infertile or waterlogged soil, provide shade in parks, pastures, and roadsides, serve as windbreakers, stabilise the soil (preventing desertification) and are a food source for animals with long necks or trunks, according to the CPR Environmental Education Centre (CPREEC), an environmental education body created in association with union ministry of environment, forest and climate change.
A 200-year-old Ficus benghalensis in Pune’s Karve Nagar.
In July this year, Sahyadri Devrai, an environmental NGO in Maharashtra, approached the state government with the idea of protecting heritage trees. Sayaji Shinde, an actor and founder of Sahyadri Devrai, said that he took the idea to the state government, which decided to take it forward.
The organisation will identify the trees of topmost importance, in regards to shade, medicinal use and the amount of oxygen that the trees can supply, he explained. He said they will be working with the forest department across the state for this project. According to the CPREEC, a heritage tree is defined as a tree with some historical, environmental, or aesthetic value and it should be approximately sixteen inches in diameter or more when measured two feet above the ground level.
Sahyadri Devrai has created a form, which is being distributed in every district in the state, and the oldest citizen is being roped in to help in identifying old trees in the area.
Sachin Chandane, a Panvel-based member of Sahyadri Devrai, informed that the identification of heritage trees has already begun in June and now they are contacting zilla parishads and gram panchayats.
A few trees have already been shortlisted by the NGO and are awaiting government approval.
This includes a 200-year-old Ficus benghalensis, which is known as “Vadache Zaad” in Marathi. The tree is present in Pune’s Karve Nagar and has been a favourite among residents for years. Another such tree is a 300-year-old Ficus microcarpa, known as “Nandruk” by the residents of Gogalwadi area, in the outskirts of Pune. In July, the residents of the Bhose village in Sangli district had protected a 400-year-old banyan tree from getting axed for a state highway project. The villagers rallied around an old tree with a canopy of over 400 square metres.
Villagers protesting to conserve the 400-year-old banyan tree at Bhose village.DURGA BHOSLE/MONGABAY
Villagers protesting to conserve the 400-year-old banyan tree at Bhose village.
Several states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have adopted this initiative to tackle the dwindling numbers of heritage trees.
In January this year, chief justice SA Bobde had said, in a hearing related to felling of trees in West Bengal, “When you cut a heritage tree, look at the value of the oxygen the tree produced all these years. Then try to compare it to how much you would have to pay if you were to have to buy it from somewhere.”
Citizens’ role;
When Sahyadri Devrai’s Shinde approached the state government, it received a nod from deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and other members who were present for the meeting, which included forest officials and environmentalists.
Deputy CM Ajit Pawar said that the state government is striving to ensure that old trees in the state are conserved. The heritage entitlement, he said, is just one of the attempts. He informed that the government intends to give a heritage tag to 10 trees in every district and then conserve them in the best possible way by raising funds.
“We are ambitious that this will help in people engagement and they will be aware and keen on conserving the trees and environment. The intent is that every individual must be educated about the trees and make an effort towards conservation. We will be closely working with NGOs like Sahyadri Devrai for many such plantation and conservation drives in the coming days,” Pawar added.
The government believes that people’s participation in such projects is important as it stresses on creating awareness and inculcates a sense of responsibility among people.
Botanist Punekar emphasised that stress should be laid on planting and conserving old native trees as those of foreign origin will be ravaged during strong storms and downpours as they don’t adjust well in an alien ecosystem and don’t fit in with other indigenous foliage.
He stressed that the state government should appoint a committee for this project which will consist of forest officials, an environmentalist, a botanist, and an ornithologist who will review each tree personally.
https://qz.com/india/1934828/heritage-t ... source=YPL
REUTERS/PUNIT PARANJPE.
By Supriya Dedgaonkar
November 17, 2020
In an effort to save century-old trees that have been dying in Maharashtra, the state forest department has announced that they will prepare a database of heritage trees.
The officials have said that concerned citizens and non-governmental organizations (NGO) will be roped in to help with the project. According to official data with the environment ministry, Maharashtra ranks second in the number of trees felled in the 2016-2019 period with over 1.07 million trees. About 1.2 million trees were axed in Telangana in this period.
In an urban setting, heritage trees absorb polluting gases, prevent soil erosion, especially along urban water bodies, and serve as a habitat for biodiversity, according to a 2020 report on heritage trees of urban India. At the same time, they are a source of food, medicine, and raw material for us and are also of cultural and sacred significance, the report added.
Sachin Punekar, a Pune-based botanist and founder-president of Biospheres, an environmental NGO, stated that the initiative by the state government would be beneficial for conservation. However, he said, a tree shouldn’t be given the heritage tag just because it is old, but aspects such as its ecological value, and cultural and historical significance must also be taken into consideration.
Experts say thousands of trees are chopped off for development work, but now that the government has taken a decision to conserve these age-old trees, it would be difficult to cut these trees.
Anish Pardeshi, a researcher working in the Western Ghats, stated that the initiative will pave the way for the conservation, documentation, and protection of trees. “The motive here will go beyond the idea of just saving the tree alone but will help protect the dependent fauna, insects, butterflies, and birds. Going ahead, it will also help to connect ordinary citizens to the conservation movement,” he commented.
Identifying heritage trees
Heritage trees have great ecological value as they tolerate heavy clays and infertile or waterlogged soil, provide shade in parks, pastures, and roadsides, serve as windbreakers, stabilise the soil (preventing desertification) and are a food source for animals with long necks or trunks, according to the CPR Environmental Education Centre (CPREEC), an environmental education body created in association with union ministry of environment, forest and climate change.
A 200-year-old Ficus benghalensis in Pune’s Karve Nagar.
In July this year, Sahyadri Devrai, an environmental NGO in Maharashtra, approached the state government with the idea of protecting heritage trees. Sayaji Shinde, an actor and founder of Sahyadri Devrai, said that he took the idea to the state government, which decided to take it forward.
The organisation will identify the trees of topmost importance, in regards to shade, medicinal use and the amount of oxygen that the trees can supply, he explained. He said they will be working with the forest department across the state for this project. According to the CPREEC, a heritage tree is defined as a tree with some historical, environmental, or aesthetic value and it should be approximately sixteen inches in diameter or more when measured two feet above the ground level.
Sahyadri Devrai has created a form, which is being distributed in every district in the state, and the oldest citizen is being roped in to help in identifying old trees in the area.
Sachin Chandane, a Panvel-based member of Sahyadri Devrai, informed that the identification of heritage trees has already begun in June and now they are contacting zilla parishads and gram panchayats.
A few trees have already been shortlisted by the NGO and are awaiting government approval.
This includes a 200-year-old Ficus benghalensis, which is known as “Vadache Zaad” in Marathi. The tree is present in Pune’s Karve Nagar and has been a favourite among residents for years. Another such tree is a 300-year-old Ficus microcarpa, known as “Nandruk” by the residents of Gogalwadi area, in the outskirts of Pune. In July, the residents of the Bhose village in Sangli district had protected a 400-year-old banyan tree from getting axed for a state highway project. The villagers rallied around an old tree with a canopy of over 400 square metres.
Villagers protesting to conserve the 400-year-old banyan tree at Bhose village.DURGA BHOSLE/MONGABAY
Villagers protesting to conserve the 400-year-old banyan tree at Bhose village.
Several states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have adopted this initiative to tackle the dwindling numbers of heritage trees.
In January this year, chief justice SA Bobde had said, in a hearing related to felling of trees in West Bengal, “When you cut a heritage tree, look at the value of the oxygen the tree produced all these years. Then try to compare it to how much you would have to pay if you were to have to buy it from somewhere.”
Citizens’ role;
When Sahyadri Devrai’s Shinde approached the state government, it received a nod from deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and other members who were present for the meeting, which included forest officials and environmentalists.
Deputy CM Ajit Pawar said that the state government is striving to ensure that old trees in the state are conserved. The heritage entitlement, he said, is just one of the attempts. He informed that the government intends to give a heritage tag to 10 trees in every district and then conserve them in the best possible way by raising funds.
“We are ambitious that this will help in people engagement and they will be aware and keen on conserving the trees and environment. The intent is that every individual must be educated about the trees and make an effort towards conservation. We will be closely working with NGOs like Sahyadri Devrai for many such plantation and conservation drives in the coming days,” Pawar added.
The government believes that people’s participation in such projects is important as it stresses on creating awareness and inculcates a sense of responsibility among people.
Botanist Punekar emphasised that stress should be laid on planting and conserving old native trees as those of foreign origin will be ravaged during strong storms and downpours as they don’t adjust well in an alien ecosystem and don’t fit in with other indigenous foliage.
He stressed that the state government should appoint a committee for this project which will consist of forest officials, an environmentalist, a botanist, and an ornithologist who will review each tree personally.
https://qz.com/india/1934828/heritage-t ... source=YPL
The country rejecting throwaway culture
The combination of enthusiastic amateurs, repair cafes and new laws could help tackle the world's growing mountains of broken electronics.
"Hmm," sighs Bruno Mottis, squinting through his brown tortoiseshell glasses. "Did you spill water on it? Or put more than a kilogram of weight on top? The wiring inside appears to have been fried or disconnected somehow."
Mottis, a volunteer repairman, then flips over the set of red kitchen scales emblazoned with the phrase "Keep calm and make jam" and inspects the circuit board with a handheld voltage detector under a bright lamp at his side.
"It could have got wet when I was cleaning it," replies Imene, a Parisian who is attending a repair workshop at the town hall of the Ninth Arrondissement. "I hope it's repairable, so I don't have to buy another. If I do, there will eventually be another problem and I'll have to buy another. It's a vicious circle."
The French capital hosts a dozen of these so-called "repair cafes" – free, monthly initiatives that allow local residents to fix household objects and electronics with the help and advice of enthusiastic volunteers. Pioneered by journalist Martine Postma in Amsterdam in 2009, hundreds of similar workshops take place across Europe.
Nearly two-thirds of Europeans would rather repair their products than buy new ones
"We're a society of waste and overconsumption," says Emmanuel Vallée, organiser of the Repair Café Paris, which typically sees around 25 people attending per event, including some online, since it launched in May 2019. "We throw things away that we don't need to."
For Vallée and repairers like him, there's a lot of work to be done. The world produced nearly 45 million tonnes of e-waste in 2016 as consumers and businesses threw out their old smartphones, computers and household appliances – material worth an estimated $62.5bn (£45.6bn). Only 20% was properly recycled. In Europe, where the problem is particularly acute, researchers estimate only 12% to 15% of mobile phones are properly recycled – despite around 90% of the population owning one.
E-waste, which is often shipped illegally from the West to sprawling, toxic dumpsites in countries like the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria and China, is expected to grow to more than 52 million tonnes by the end of 2021, and to double by 2050 – making it the fastest growing type of domestic waste in the world. The environmental impact ranges from huge carbon emissions to pollution of water sources and food supply chains.
We want to limit consumption of the world's natural resources – Véronique Riotton
But significant amounts of that waste could be avoided through repairs. According to a study by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, only 40% of electronics breakdowns in France are repaired. But surveys have found nearly two-thirds of Europeans would rather repair their products than buy new ones. Much like Imene's kitchen scales, French officials believe the current system is broken and needs to be fixed.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... able-waste
The combination of enthusiastic amateurs, repair cafes and new laws could help tackle the world's growing mountains of broken electronics.
"Hmm," sighs Bruno Mottis, squinting through his brown tortoiseshell glasses. "Did you spill water on it? Or put more than a kilogram of weight on top? The wiring inside appears to have been fried or disconnected somehow."
Mottis, a volunteer repairman, then flips over the set of red kitchen scales emblazoned with the phrase "Keep calm and make jam" and inspects the circuit board with a handheld voltage detector under a bright lamp at his side.
"It could have got wet when I was cleaning it," replies Imene, a Parisian who is attending a repair workshop at the town hall of the Ninth Arrondissement. "I hope it's repairable, so I don't have to buy another. If I do, there will eventually be another problem and I'll have to buy another. It's a vicious circle."
The French capital hosts a dozen of these so-called "repair cafes" – free, monthly initiatives that allow local residents to fix household objects and electronics with the help and advice of enthusiastic volunteers. Pioneered by journalist Martine Postma in Amsterdam in 2009, hundreds of similar workshops take place across Europe.
Nearly two-thirds of Europeans would rather repair their products than buy new ones
"We're a society of waste and overconsumption," says Emmanuel Vallée, organiser of the Repair Café Paris, which typically sees around 25 people attending per event, including some online, since it launched in May 2019. "We throw things away that we don't need to."
For Vallée and repairers like him, there's a lot of work to be done. The world produced nearly 45 million tonnes of e-waste in 2016 as consumers and businesses threw out their old smartphones, computers and household appliances – material worth an estimated $62.5bn (£45.6bn). Only 20% was properly recycled. In Europe, where the problem is particularly acute, researchers estimate only 12% to 15% of mobile phones are properly recycled – despite around 90% of the population owning one.
E-waste, which is often shipped illegally from the West to sprawling, toxic dumpsites in countries like the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria and China, is expected to grow to more than 52 million tonnes by the end of 2021, and to double by 2050 – making it the fastest growing type of domestic waste in the world. The environmental impact ranges from huge carbon emissions to pollution of water sources and food supply chains.
We want to limit consumption of the world's natural resources – Véronique Riotton
But significant amounts of that waste could be avoided through repairs. According to a study by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, only 40% of electronics breakdowns in France are repaired. But surveys have found nearly two-thirds of Europeans would rather repair their products than buy new ones. Much like Imene's kitchen scales, French officials believe the current system is broken and needs to be fixed.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... able-waste
Can Trees Save Our World?
Hi Karim,
Long before animals inhabited the earth, leafy green giants covered this planet.
Trees created the world as we know it. Without them we wouldn't be here.
But today, they are being decimated... and now our beloved planet is in peril.
After the Amazon rainforest went up in flames two summers ago, the team and I took action.
We began creating a feature-length documentary called TREES.
Our mission with the Trees Movie https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/trees-movie#/ is to create a magical viewing experience that reveals the majesty and intelligence of trees, while illustrating the critical importance of coming together as a global community to replant and protect our forests.
So far, we've formed quite an incredible global coalition of like-minded individuals who want to see this documentary made. In fact, almost everyone we've told about the project has offered us their support.
WE ALL have something at stake here, and the truth is that the Trees movement will take every single one of us.
My question to you -- do you want to join us in creating the Trees Movie?
Click the link below to watch the trailer and learn how you can get involved:
https://www.thesacredscience.com/treesmovie
Trees have emerged as a promising way out of the climate crisis we're in. But we need to plant 1.2 trillion new trees by the year 2030.
These trees will suck up nearly 830 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's about how much carbon pollution we as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.
But we have to do it together.
This unprecedented, crowdsourced documentary is a love letter to the silent giants that control our fate. A global collaboration that shows what trees mean to you -- to your life, to your community, and to the world we share.
The TREES MOVIE is our story. As a species. As a planet.
Only by coming together can this film be made. Join us
https://www.thesacredscience.com/treesmovie
Stay curious,
Nick Polizzi
Host of Proven: Healing Breakthroughs Backed By Science
& Founder of The Sacred Science
Hi Karim,
Long before animals inhabited the earth, leafy green giants covered this planet.
Trees created the world as we know it. Without them we wouldn't be here.
But today, they are being decimated... and now our beloved planet is in peril.
After the Amazon rainforest went up in flames two summers ago, the team and I took action.
We began creating a feature-length documentary called TREES.
Our mission with the Trees Movie https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/trees-movie#/ is to create a magical viewing experience that reveals the majesty and intelligence of trees, while illustrating the critical importance of coming together as a global community to replant and protect our forests.
So far, we've formed quite an incredible global coalition of like-minded individuals who want to see this documentary made. In fact, almost everyone we've told about the project has offered us their support.
WE ALL have something at stake here, and the truth is that the Trees movement will take every single one of us.
My question to you -- do you want to join us in creating the Trees Movie?
Click the link below to watch the trailer and learn how you can get involved:
https://www.thesacredscience.com/treesmovie
Trees have emerged as a promising way out of the climate crisis we're in. But we need to plant 1.2 trillion new trees by the year 2030.
These trees will suck up nearly 830 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's about how much carbon pollution we as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.
But we have to do it together.
This unprecedented, crowdsourced documentary is a love letter to the silent giants that control our fate. A global collaboration that shows what trees mean to you -- to your life, to your community, and to the world we share.
The TREES MOVIE is our story. As a species. As a planet.
Only by coming together can this film be made. Join us
https://www.thesacredscience.com/treesmovie
Stay curious,
Nick Polizzi
Host of Proven: Healing Breakthroughs Backed By Science
& Founder of The Sacred Science
Warming and Warnings From the High Himalayas
The region is warming much faster than much of the planet, and the consequences are already showing.
On Sunday, a glacier in the Indian Himalayas burst apart, releasing a torrential flood that destroyed one hydroelectric dam project and damaged another, killed at least 32 people and left nearly 200 people missing and likely dead. Half a world away, this event might seem easy to disregard as yet another distant catastrophe — tragic yet unrelated to our daily lives.
In the Western world, we should not be so sanguine. The disaster was a direct result of extreme climate change in the world’s highest mountains. The rapid warming there offers a warning of the potential consequences for the United States and the rest of the world as greenhouse gases continue to heat the planet.
Since taking office, President Biden has sought to reaffirm what scientists have been saying for decades: An effective climate response must be guided by strong research. As his administration works to restore scientific integrity in government and slow climate change, it should also support research in the Himalayas.
Logistical barriers facing scientists in these remote mountains have complicated research efforts. Much more needs to be done to monitor weather and ecological changes and disruptions to the water cycle resulting from global warming.
Like the Arctic and Antarctic poles, the Himalayas are warming much faster than other parts of the world, at a rate estimated to be up to three times the global average. Warming has been rapid over the past century. Though temperatures have varied depending on location, they have averaged 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher since 2000 compared with the 25-year period preceding it. The Himalayas thus offer a natural experiment: They are showing the havoc that can occur if we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions.
Severe warming in parts of this towering mountain range, which stretches for 1,500 miles across Asia, from Pakistan to Bhutan, is demonstrating, for example, how climate change can drastically disrupt a region’s water cycle. Glaciers have lost mass and retreated significantly. Even moderate projections predict that the region’s massive ice flows will decline by approximately 60 percent by the end of this century, with a large number of glaciers disappearing outright.
Indeed, a recent assessment of warming by a group of scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology warned that continued warming in the broader Hindu Kush Himalaya region, “will further exacerbate the snowfall and glacier decline leading to profound hydrological and agricultural impacts.” The region is home to the largest area of permanent ice cover outside the North and South poles.
Compounding this loss of freshwater, the dry season has been more arid and drought-like, while the monsoon season has brought more intense, destructive rainstorms that have increasingly caused flooding and fatal landslides.
All of these changes threaten the flow of the great rivers of Asia that are the primary water source for more than one billion people. They have brought particular upheaval to the approximately 240 million residents of the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. As ecosystems unravel, these people are struggling to adapt to changes that attack their livelihoods on all fronts.
Herders are suffering because warming is hurting productivity in already overgrazed rangelands that are producing less feed for livestock. Farmers are seeing crop failures because of drier conditions. Based on observations of forests in Europe, researchers would have predicted that the timberline would advance to those higher, cooler altitudes, as they have in other mountain ranges. But some forests in the Himalayas did the opposite, underscoring how hidden and chaotic variables can upend expectations.
Other uncertainties that require attention include how these miles-high mountains affect the path of the jet stream, which can have an outsize impact on the Northern Hemisphere; the pace and extent of melting permafrost, which releases greenhouse gases; the long-term impact of planetary warming on the seasonal monsoons of South Asia; and the geopolitical implications of food and water scarcity in a region where tensions already run high.
Researchers also have an opportunity to develop mitigation strategies usable elsewhere. For example, to prevent deadly floods caused by rapidly melting glaciers, international organizations have lowered the level of glacial lakes and created downstream warning systems. Some of these flood-prevention efforts have been successful; others have proved ineffective. Both outcomes have provided lessons with the potential to save limited funds and countless lives.
To face humanity’s greatest crisis, we must look across the planet to understand what may come next. In that spirit, long-term environmental research in the Himalayas is critical. When dealing with global climate change, the Himalayas are not as far away as they may seem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The region is warming much faster than much of the planet, and the consequences are already showing.
On Sunday, a glacier in the Indian Himalayas burst apart, releasing a torrential flood that destroyed one hydroelectric dam project and damaged another, killed at least 32 people and left nearly 200 people missing and likely dead. Half a world away, this event might seem easy to disregard as yet another distant catastrophe — tragic yet unrelated to our daily lives.
In the Western world, we should not be so sanguine. The disaster was a direct result of extreme climate change in the world’s highest mountains. The rapid warming there offers a warning of the potential consequences for the United States and the rest of the world as greenhouse gases continue to heat the planet.
Since taking office, President Biden has sought to reaffirm what scientists have been saying for decades: An effective climate response must be guided by strong research. As his administration works to restore scientific integrity in government and slow climate change, it should also support research in the Himalayas.
Logistical barriers facing scientists in these remote mountains have complicated research efforts. Much more needs to be done to monitor weather and ecological changes and disruptions to the water cycle resulting from global warming.
Like the Arctic and Antarctic poles, the Himalayas are warming much faster than other parts of the world, at a rate estimated to be up to three times the global average. Warming has been rapid over the past century. Though temperatures have varied depending on location, they have averaged 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher since 2000 compared with the 25-year period preceding it. The Himalayas thus offer a natural experiment: They are showing the havoc that can occur if we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions.
Severe warming in parts of this towering mountain range, which stretches for 1,500 miles across Asia, from Pakistan to Bhutan, is demonstrating, for example, how climate change can drastically disrupt a region’s water cycle. Glaciers have lost mass and retreated significantly. Even moderate projections predict that the region’s massive ice flows will decline by approximately 60 percent by the end of this century, with a large number of glaciers disappearing outright.
Indeed, a recent assessment of warming by a group of scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology warned that continued warming in the broader Hindu Kush Himalaya region, “will further exacerbate the snowfall and glacier decline leading to profound hydrological and agricultural impacts.” The region is home to the largest area of permanent ice cover outside the North and South poles.
Compounding this loss of freshwater, the dry season has been more arid and drought-like, while the monsoon season has brought more intense, destructive rainstorms that have increasingly caused flooding and fatal landslides.
All of these changes threaten the flow of the great rivers of Asia that are the primary water source for more than one billion people. They have brought particular upheaval to the approximately 240 million residents of the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. As ecosystems unravel, these people are struggling to adapt to changes that attack their livelihoods on all fronts.
Herders are suffering because warming is hurting productivity in already overgrazed rangelands that are producing less feed for livestock. Farmers are seeing crop failures because of drier conditions. Based on observations of forests in Europe, researchers would have predicted that the timberline would advance to those higher, cooler altitudes, as they have in other mountain ranges. But some forests in the Himalayas did the opposite, underscoring how hidden and chaotic variables can upend expectations.
Other uncertainties that require attention include how these miles-high mountains affect the path of the jet stream, which can have an outsize impact on the Northern Hemisphere; the pace and extent of melting permafrost, which releases greenhouse gases; the long-term impact of planetary warming on the seasonal monsoons of South Asia; and the geopolitical implications of food and water scarcity in a region where tensions already run high.
Researchers also have an opportunity to develop mitigation strategies usable elsewhere. For example, to prevent deadly floods caused by rapidly melting glaciers, international organizations have lowered the level of glacial lakes and created downstream warning systems. Some of these flood-prevention efforts have been successful; others have proved ineffective. Both outcomes have provided lessons with the potential to save limited funds and countless lives.
To face humanity’s greatest crisis, we must look across the planet to understand what may come next. In that spirit, long-term environmental research in the Himalayas is critical. When dealing with global climate change, the Himalayas are not as far away as they may seem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
And Then the Gorillas Started Coughing
Humans are spreading the coronavirus to other animals. What does that mean for all of us?
The noises of nature sometimes carry broader meanings. The howl of a wolf signifies that wildness endures. The gronk of Canada geese moving south overhead reminds Americans to brace for winter. The sound of a coughing gorilla signals that Covid-19 is an even bigger problem than we thought.
Early last month, two gorillas started coughing at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a compound of open-air enclosures for wild animals, an annex to the city zoo but separate, out in an arid valley just east of Escondido. These gorillas were among a group of eight residing amiably there, on a patch of artfully constructed habitat known as the Gorilla Forest. Testing of fecal samples showed that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was among them. It could only have come from a person.
Presumably those two gorillas, and maybe others in the group, had caught the virus from a zookeeper who was infected but asymptomatic. Precautions had been taken — staff wore personal protective equipment when they were near the animals — yet the virus got through. Still, these gorillas were lucky. Within a few weeks the sick individuals recovered well, although not before one animal — a 48-year-old silverback with heart disease named Winston — had been treated with monoclonal antibodies. Winston also got cardiac medication and, as a precaution against a bacterial infection, some antibiotics. Had he been a wild gorilla, without doting health care, he might well be dead.
For the evening news, this was a cute animal story with a happy ending. For certain biologists and veterinarians around the world, it was a small seismic tremor, the latest in a series, that reminded them of some ominous, little-recognized possibilities related to our pandemic event, which has already been tectonic.
Covid-19 is a zoonosis, meaning a disease produced by a virus or other pathogen that has spilled into humans from an animal. The animal of origin this time, as all the world knows, was almost certainly a bat. Scientists use another fancy term for when the spilling goes back, or onward, from a human to some nonhuman animal: anthroponosis.
There’s been a smattering of news accounts over the past year about anthroponotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2: human into mink on the fur farms of Denmark, resulting in rampant spread and cullings by the millions; human into tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo in New York; human into snow leopards at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky; human into another tiger at the zoo in Knoxville, Tenn.
Laboratory studies have shown that domestic cats also are highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and can transmit it to other cats; dogs are less susceptible, and the virus doesn’t replicate as well within them. The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds people to practice “healthy habits” with their pets. Better for you — and better for them, since you are probably more likely to give the virus to your dog or your cat than to receive it from them.
As for wild animals in captivity, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, together with the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians, has issued an alert to members, with bulleted points of advice, one of which is that people should practice social distancing from big cats such as tigers. (Most of us knew that without being told.) Another is that staff should immediately report anything unusual. Coughing, for instance.
Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian and infectious-disease researcher with the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, is one scientist who pays close attention to anthroponotic spillovers, especially into vulnerable populations of nonhuman primates, such as the chimpanzees he has studied for two decades at Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast. Tom Gillespie, an ecologist based at Emory University in Atlanta, is another. Dr. Gillespie co-directs the ecosystem-health project at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where Jane Goodall did her field studies.
In March, just before the pandemic exploded, Dr. Leendertz and Dr. Gillespie wrote a letter in the journal Nature warning that Covid-19 might become not just a catastrophe for humans but also “a threat to our closest living relatives, the great apes.”
Great apes: That’s gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos (once called pygmy chimpanzees), all members — along with us — of the familial group known as hominids. The exposure of wild apes to human respiratory viruses is especially concerning, because those can be transmitted on a puff of breath (unlike blood-borne viruses such as Ebola or H.I.V.) and apes have susceptible respiratory cells very similar to ours. The fateful exposure might come either from field staff involved in primate research or from ecotourists visiting sites such as Taï, Gombe or Volcanoes National Park (with its mountain gorillas) in Rwanda.
For that reason, Dr. Leendertz and Dr. Gillespie recommended that “great-ape tourism be suspended and field research reduced” until the health risks to vulnerable animals could be balanced against the loss of income to local communities and the increased risk of poaching. Ape habitat from which tourists and researchers have absented themselves, to avoid passing an infection, is ape habitat in which illegal hunters can go unobserved.
During a recent Zoom call I had with him and Dr. Gillespie, Dr. Leendertz said: “It’s very easy to say, ‘Stop going to the great apes until we have solved the problem, or we have a vaccine.’ But if you do that, and the apes are dead because they will be shot … ” — he left the conclusion unspoken: It would be futile caution. Accordingly, to prevent any upsurge in poaching, he and Dr. Gillespie have helped organize international bridge funding for communities dependent on ape-focused ecotourism and research.
Decades of field experience as well as reports in the scientific literature show that the transmission of human viruses to apes can bring consequences that range from threatening to dire. One of them is a bug, human respiratory syncytial virus, that has been linked to chimpanzee deaths at Taï National Park and with bonobo deaths at a site in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
ImageMink at a fur farm near Naestved, Denmark, in November. The new coronavirus spilled into humans from an animal — but the spilling can also go back, or onward, from a human to some nonhuman animal, like mink.
Mink at a fur farm near Naestved, Denmark, in November. The new coronavirus spilled into humans from an animal — but the spilling can also go back, or onward, from a human to some nonhuman animal, like mink.Credit...Ritzau Scanpix/Via Reuters
Another threat is human metapneumonia virus (HMPV), which seems to have killed (or to have helped kill, along with a respiratory bacterial infection) two mountain gorillas and sickened nine in Rwanda a dozen years ago. Not long before that, at Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania, nine infant chimpanzees died during three consecutive outbreaks of HMPV. Another nine animals of the same group disappeared, presumed dead of the same cause, and many of those adults had also been seen coughing.
But there is a big distinction between such respiratory infections and SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Leendertz said, and that’s the “broad species range of this virus”: its capacity to infect and be transmitted among not just primates but also cats and mice and deer or mustelids like mink and ferrets, and not just in zoos, laboratories and farms but possibly also in the wild.
Other scientists have warned about this risk, too, describing it as a low-probability event with a potentially high-impact outcome. SARS-CoV-2 could become established as an endemic infection of wild mustelids or rodents living in forests, national parks and maybe old barns and sheds. Among the millions of mink raised on fur farms in Denmark each year, a few thousand typically escape, and some of those survive in the wild — as exotics, since the farmed species (known as American mink) aren’t native to Denmark. If some of last year’s escapees carry SARS-CoV-2, with or without symptoms, they could pass it to native Danish mustelids like pine marten, European polecat or Eurasian badger, either by falling prey to those animals or via contaminated feces.
That could result in what disease ecologists call a sylvatic cycle (from the Latin word “sylva,” meaning forest), with the virus circulating endlessly in wild animal populations, if they are large and dense, and spilling back into humans when circumstance allows. North American deer mice, for instance, also seem susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, suffering infection and transmitting the virus to other mice, according to one preprint study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Another preprint study found that white-tailed deer were also highly susceptible and, under laboratory conditions, capable of deer-to-deer transmission. If the virus established a sylvatic cycle among deer mice, a person might get infected simply by sweeping up the dust laced with mouse droppings in a garden shed. If among white-tailed deer, a hunter might become infected while dressing out a dead animal.
The mouse-sweeping scenario happens occasionally with hantaviruses, which can be lethal. The difference is that this coronavirus, unlike hantaviruses, can burst into a firestorm of human-to-human transmission once it’s back in a single person.
Five years from now, when much of the world’s population will have been vaccinated against Covid-19 but maybe a billion people won’t, either for lack of opportunity or by stubborn refusal, the virus will still be with us. It will circulate among the unvaccinated, sometimes inconspicuously, sometimes causing severe illness or death, and it could also abide among wildlife populations, mutating and evolving in ways no one can predict. If it crosses back from them to us, it may ignite new outbreaks, start us coughing again and even bring with it some ugly genomic innovations.
If that happens, this coronavirus will also be reminding us — by the ease with which a bat virus became a human virus, which became a gorilla virus and a mink virus, then perhaps a badger virus and a mouse virus, and finally a human virus again — of the humbling fact to which Charles Darwin alerted us more than a century and a half ago: We are animals, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Humans are spreading the coronavirus to other animals. What does that mean for all of us?
The noises of nature sometimes carry broader meanings. The howl of a wolf signifies that wildness endures. The gronk of Canada geese moving south overhead reminds Americans to brace for winter. The sound of a coughing gorilla signals that Covid-19 is an even bigger problem than we thought.
Early last month, two gorillas started coughing at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a compound of open-air enclosures for wild animals, an annex to the city zoo but separate, out in an arid valley just east of Escondido. These gorillas were among a group of eight residing amiably there, on a patch of artfully constructed habitat known as the Gorilla Forest. Testing of fecal samples showed that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was among them. It could only have come from a person.
Presumably those two gorillas, and maybe others in the group, had caught the virus from a zookeeper who was infected but asymptomatic. Precautions had been taken — staff wore personal protective equipment when they were near the animals — yet the virus got through. Still, these gorillas were lucky. Within a few weeks the sick individuals recovered well, although not before one animal — a 48-year-old silverback with heart disease named Winston — had been treated with monoclonal antibodies. Winston also got cardiac medication and, as a precaution against a bacterial infection, some antibiotics. Had he been a wild gorilla, without doting health care, he might well be dead.
For the evening news, this was a cute animal story with a happy ending. For certain biologists and veterinarians around the world, it was a small seismic tremor, the latest in a series, that reminded them of some ominous, little-recognized possibilities related to our pandemic event, which has already been tectonic.
Covid-19 is a zoonosis, meaning a disease produced by a virus or other pathogen that has spilled into humans from an animal. The animal of origin this time, as all the world knows, was almost certainly a bat. Scientists use another fancy term for when the spilling goes back, or onward, from a human to some nonhuman animal: anthroponosis.
There’s been a smattering of news accounts over the past year about anthroponotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2: human into mink on the fur farms of Denmark, resulting in rampant spread and cullings by the millions; human into tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo in New York; human into snow leopards at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky; human into another tiger at the zoo in Knoxville, Tenn.
Laboratory studies have shown that domestic cats also are highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and can transmit it to other cats; dogs are less susceptible, and the virus doesn’t replicate as well within them. The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds people to practice “healthy habits” with their pets. Better for you — and better for them, since you are probably more likely to give the virus to your dog or your cat than to receive it from them.
As for wild animals in captivity, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, together with the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians, has issued an alert to members, with bulleted points of advice, one of which is that people should practice social distancing from big cats such as tigers. (Most of us knew that without being told.) Another is that staff should immediately report anything unusual. Coughing, for instance.
Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian and infectious-disease researcher with the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, is one scientist who pays close attention to anthroponotic spillovers, especially into vulnerable populations of nonhuman primates, such as the chimpanzees he has studied for two decades at Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast. Tom Gillespie, an ecologist based at Emory University in Atlanta, is another. Dr. Gillespie co-directs the ecosystem-health project at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where Jane Goodall did her field studies.
In March, just before the pandemic exploded, Dr. Leendertz and Dr. Gillespie wrote a letter in the journal Nature warning that Covid-19 might become not just a catastrophe for humans but also “a threat to our closest living relatives, the great apes.”
Great apes: That’s gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos (once called pygmy chimpanzees), all members — along with us — of the familial group known as hominids. The exposure of wild apes to human respiratory viruses is especially concerning, because those can be transmitted on a puff of breath (unlike blood-borne viruses such as Ebola or H.I.V.) and apes have susceptible respiratory cells very similar to ours. The fateful exposure might come either from field staff involved in primate research or from ecotourists visiting sites such as Taï, Gombe or Volcanoes National Park (with its mountain gorillas) in Rwanda.
For that reason, Dr. Leendertz and Dr. Gillespie recommended that “great-ape tourism be suspended and field research reduced” until the health risks to vulnerable animals could be balanced against the loss of income to local communities and the increased risk of poaching. Ape habitat from which tourists and researchers have absented themselves, to avoid passing an infection, is ape habitat in which illegal hunters can go unobserved.
During a recent Zoom call I had with him and Dr. Gillespie, Dr. Leendertz said: “It’s very easy to say, ‘Stop going to the great apes until we have solved the problem, or we have a vaccine.’ But if you do that, and the apes are dead because they will be shot … ” — he left the conclusion unspoken: It would be futile caution. Accordingly, to prevent any upsurge in poaching, he and Dr. Gillespie have helped organize international bridge funding for communities dependent on ape-focused ecotourism and research.
Decades of field experience as well as reports in the scientific literature show that the transmission of human viruses to apes can bring consequences that range from threatening to dire. One of them is a bug, human respiratory syncytial virus, that has been linked to chimpanzee deaths at Taï National Park and with bonobo deaths at a site in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
ImageMink at a fur farm near Naestved, Denmark, in November. The new coronavirus spilled into humans from an animal — but the spilling can also go back, or onward, from a human to some nonhuman animal, like mink.
Mink at a fur farm near Naestved, Denmark, in November. The new coronavirus spilled into humans from an animal — but the spilling can also go back, or onward, from a human to some nonhuman animal, like mink.Credit...Ritzau Scanpix/Via Reuters
Another threat is human metapneumonia virus (HMPV), which seems to have killed (or to have helped kill, along with a respiratory bacterial infection) two mountain gorillas and sickened nine in Rwanda a dozen years ago. Not long before that, at Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania, nine infant chimpanzees died during three consecutive outbreaks of HMPV. Another nine animals of the same group disappeared, presumed dead of the same cause, and many of those adults had also been seen coughing.
But there is a big distinction between such respiratory infections and SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Leendertz said, and that’s the “broad species range of this virus”: its capacity to infect and be transmitted among not just primates but also cats and mice and deer or mustelids like mink and ferrets, and not just in zoos, laboratories and farms but possibly also in the wild.
Other scientists have warned about this risk, too, describing it as a low-probability event with a potentially high-impact outcome. SARS-CoV-2 could become established as an endemic infection of wild mustelids or rodents living in forests, national parks and maybe old barns and sheds. Among the millions of mink raised on fur farms in Denmark each year, a few thousand typically escape, and some of those survive in the wild — as exotics, since the farmed species (known as American mink) aren’t native to Denmark. If some of last year’s escapees carry SARS-CoV-2, with or without symptoms, they could pass it to native Danish mustelids like pine marten, European polecat or Eurasian badger, either by falling prey to those animals or via contaminated feces.
That could result in what disease ecologists call a sylvatic cycle (from the Latin word “sylva,” meaning forest), with the virus circulating endlessly in wild animal populations, if they are large and dense, and spilling back into humans when circumstance allows. North American deer mice, for instance, also seem susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, suffering infection and transmitting the virus to other mice, according to one preprint study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Another preprint study found that white-tailed deer were also highly susceptible and, under laboratory conditions, capable of deer-to-deer transmission. If the virus established a sylvatic cycle among deer mice, a person might get infected simply by sweeping up the dust laced with mouse droppings in a garden shed. If among white-tailed deer, a hunter might become infected while dressing out a dead animal.
The mouse-sweeping scenario happens occasionally with hantaviruses, which can be lethal. The difference is that this coronavirus, unlike hantaviruses, can burst into a firestorm of human-to-human transmission once it’s back in a single person.
Five years from now, when much of the world’s population will have been vaccinated against Covid-19 but maybe a billion people won’t, either for lack of opportunity or by stubborn refusal, the virus will still be with us. It will circulate among the unvaccinated, sometimes inconspicuously, sometimes causing severe illness or death, and it could also abide among wildlife populations, mutating and evolving in ways no one can predict. If it crosses back from them to us, it may ignite new outbreaks, start us coughing again and even bring with it some ugly genomic innovations.
If that happens, this coronavirus will also be reminding us — by the ease with which a bat virus became a human virus, which became a gorilla virus and a mink virus, then perhaps a badger virus and a mouse virus, and finally a human virus again — of the humbling fact to which Charles Darwin alerted us more than a century and a half ago: We are animals, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Can We Patch Up the Natural World We’ve Hurt?
Book Review
UNDER A WHITE SKY
The Nature of the Future
By Elizabeth Kolbert
A few years ago YouTube recommended I watch a video with the word “carpocalypse” in its title. I clicked the link — of course I did — and stared in awe at what resembled a mash-up of a video game, nature documentary and war movie. I saw a river full of fish leaping from the water like chaotic piscine fireworks and men in speedboats yelling and holding out nets to catch them as if they were wet and weighty butterflies. Fish hitting people in the face, fish landing in boats, fish flapping between people’s feet in a mess of slime and blood. This, the video informed me, was the annual Redneck Fishing Tournament in Bath, Ill., the object of which was to kill as many Asian carp as possible. An invasive species that has spread throughout the Mississippi basin since its introduction as a “safe” agent of biological control in the 1960s, Asian carp jump when they feel in danger, and the sound of boat engines is sufficiently alarming to push them en masse into the air.
The video was a startling coincidence of science, culture and environmental disaster, and I thought of it often as I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent new book. I did so partly because her opening chapter deals with the continuing struggle to prevent Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes system, with solutions ranging from electrified water barriers to thrillingly impractical suggestions from members of the public to stop them with flying knives. But as I read on, I was reminded of the carp for a different reason. They seemed no longer just a sign of environmental disaster or a ready metaphor for xenophobia. In my mind they became proxies for us — creatures in mass panic, leaping out of their comfort zone, desperate to avoid catastrophe.
“Under a White Sky” is a fascinating survey of novel attempts to manage natural systems of all sizes, from preserving tiny populations of desert fish to altering the entire atmosphere (the title refers to the color the sky would turn were solar engineers to implement plans to spread mineral particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cut global warming).
One of the great science journalists, Kolbert has for many years been an essential voice, a reporter from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Her new book crackles with the realities of living in an era that has sounded the death knell for our commonly held belief that one can meaningfully distinguish between nature and humanity. Our world is too much changed for nature to be preserved simply by leaving it alone. “Humans,” she explains, are producing “no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future.” The systems that support us are now hybrid human-natural ones, and maintaining them increasingly requires us to adopt inventive strategies to correct for our previous attempts at control, efforts that have frequently led to highly unfortunate outcomes.
Kolbert has a phenomenal ability to communicate complex scientific information. She explains CRISPR gene-editing and atmospheric physics in prose that is a model of clarity and generosity; she traces environmental histories deftly. She moves us gracefully across numerous scales, from aerial views of clouds reflected in Louisiana lakes right down to an individual scientist picking aquatic beetles from a mesh screen, a fish egg with a visibly beating heart, a single gene. She has a marvelous eye for the quirky, from the plywood palm tree outside an Arctic research station to the local term for used condoms floating in water (“Chicago River whitefish,” a phrase I will never be able to forget, no matter how hard I try), and she wields figurative language in truly glorious ways: All the desert pupfish in the world, she explains, weigh less than a Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Isn’t that perfect?
All the while, we are introduced to a wonderful cast of people. She interviews scientists and engineers, coastal geologists, solar geoengineers, tattooed fishermen in gore-smeared overalls, a director of an Arctic institute with an icicle-hung beard and a Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw chief living on doomed land. One frustration I had was the omission of Black voices in the chapter about land loss and environmental disaster in Louisiana. A significant aspect of managing natural systems has to do with the paternalism of such projects — the question of whether the people most affected by these endeavors have a say in how they are carried out.
Kolbert repeatedly turns to attempts by humans to recreate the natural world. She visits large-scale dynamic hydrological models; marine tanks in which corals are subjected to stress to assist their artificial evolution into hardier organisms capable of coping with our changing seas; the construction of a desert pool in a building that looks like an industrial warehouse. These spaces, strangely irrigated with both hope and despair, remind us that Earth itself is a discrete system under stress, the site of an experiment in survival we have busily been conducting on ourselves.
Though as a writer she has a transporting ability to conjure place and atmosphere, Kolbert can at times be a strangely elusive presence in her own book. At many points, I wanted desperately to know how she felt about things. When I read her assessment of the scenery surrounding her in northern Greenland — which “could be described as bleak, or alternatively, as sublime” — I blinked, curious as to which she preferred. Pointing out this personal reticence is not a criticism of her work: “Under a White Sky” is important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting. It has, however, made me muse on the ways we choose to write about the environmental emergency.
In 2014, Kolbert was asked whether she found writing about extinction depressing. She said it was, but it had to be looked in the face. “I’ve tried to transcend my own feelings,” she explained. There’s good reason to do so: In such a politically charged field, honest sentiment is too often weaponized as evidence of bias and weakness. Furthermore, the voice of reportage, like the voice of scientific papers, carries enormous cultural power. It bespeaks objectivity. It’s the voice we are told to use when we want to be taken seriously, when we don’t want our conclusions to be interpreted as simply being emotional; we’re taught such things muddy the force of truth.
Yet the people who toil to stop invasive carp or preserve desert pupfish do so for reasons that do not exist solely in the realm of science. All the conservation biologists I know have deep attachments to the creatures they study, and it is these passionate motivations that spur their efforts and assist the continued survival of the creatures in question. I’m reminded of the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, writer and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, who maintains that science can be a path to kinship with other species, and that it should be animated by more than simply pure analysis.
Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment; time to work with what we have, using the knowledge we have, with our eyes fully open to the realities of where we are. Rigorous analysis and science journalism, the form in which Kolbert truly excels, is needed now more than ever. But alongside it, to enrich it, there should be other stories too: tender, careful investigations into the feelings that drive and shape our efforts to save the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/book ... ks_norm_20
Book Review
UNDER A WHITE SKY
The Nature of the Future
By Elizabeth Kolbert
A few years ago YouTube recommended I watch a video with the word “carpocalypse” in its title. I clicked the link — of course I did — and stared in awe at what resembled a mash-up of a video game, nature documentary and war movie. I saw a river full of fish leaping from the water like chaotic piscine fireworks and men in speedboats yelling and holding out nets to catch them as if they were wet and weighty butterflies. Fish hitting people in the face, fish landing in boats, fish flapping between people’s feet in a mess of slime and blood. This, the video informed me, was the annual Redneck Fishing Tournament in Bath, Ill., the object of which was to kill as many Asian carp as possible. An invasive species that has spread throughout the Mississippi basin since its introduction as a “safe” agent of biological control in the 1960s, Asian carp jump when they feel in danger, and the sound of boat engines is sufficiently alarming to push them en masse into the air.
The video was a startling coincidence of science, culture and environmental disaster, and I thought of it often as I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent new book. I did so partly because her opening chapter deals with the continuing struggle to prevent Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes system, with solutions ranging from electrified water barriers to thrillingly impractical suggestions from members of the public to stop them with flying knives. But as I read on, I was reminded of the carp for a different reason. They seemed no longer just a sign of environmental disaster or a ready metaphor for xenophobia. In my mind they became proxies for us — creatures in mass panic, leaping out of their comfort zone, desperate to avoid catastrophe.
“Under a White Sky” is a fascinating survey of novel attempts to manage natural systems of all sizes, from preserving tiny populations of desert fish to altering the entire atmosphere (the title refers to the color the sky would turn were solar engineers to implement plans to spread mineral particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cut global warming).
One of the great science journalists, Kolbert has for many years been an essential voice, a reporter from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Her new book crackles with the realities of living in an era that has sounded the death knell for our commonly held belief that one can meaningfully distinguish between nature and humanity. Our world is too much changed for nature to be preserved simply by leaving it alone. “Humans,” she explains, are producing “no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future.” The systems that support us are now hybrid human-natural ones, and maintaining them increasingly requires us to adopt inventive strategies to correct for our previous attempts at control, efforts that have frequently led to highly unfortunate outcomes.
Kolbert has a phenomenal ability to communicate complex scientific information. She explains CRISPR gene-editing and atmospheric physics in prose that is a model of clarity and generosity; she traces environmental histories deftly. She moves us gracefully across numerous scales, from aerial views of clouds reflected in Louisiana lakes right down to an individual scientist picking aquatic beetles from a mesh screen, a fish egg with a visibly beating heart, a single gene. She has a marvelous eye for the quirky, from the plywood palm tree outside an Arctic research station to the local term for used condoms floating in water (“Chicago River whitefish,” a phrase I will never be able to forget, no matter how hard I try), and she wields figurative language in truly glorious ways: All the desert pupfish in the world, she explains, weigh less than a Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Isn’t that perfect?
All the while, we are introduced to a wonderful cast of people. She interviews scientists and engineers, coastal geologists, solar geoengineers, tattooed fishermen in gore-smeared overalls, a director of an Arctic institute with an icicle-hung beard and a Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw chief living on doomed land. One frustration I had was the omission of Black voices in the chapter about land loss and environmental disaster in Louisiana. A significant aspect of managing natural systems has to do with the paternalism of such projects — the question of whether the people most affected by these endeavors have a say in how they are carried out.
Kolbert repeatedly turns to attempts by humans to recreate the natural world. She visits large-scale dynamic hydrological models; marine tanks in which corals are subjected to stress to assist their artificial evolution into hardier organisms capable of coping with our changing seas; the construction of a desert pool in a building that looks like an industrial warehouse. These spaces, strangely irrigated with both hope and despair, remind us that Earth itself is a discrete system under stress, the site of an experiment in survival we have busily been conducting on ourselves.
Though as a writer she has a transporting ability to conjure place and atmosphere, Kolbert can at times be a strangely elusive presence in her own book. At many points, I wanted desperately to know how she felt about things. When I read her assessment of the scenery surrounding her in northern Greenland — which “could be described as bleak, or alternatively, as sublime” — I blinked, curious as to which she preferred. Pointing out this personal reticence is not a criticism of her work: “Under a White Sky” is important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting. It has, however, made me muse on the ways we choose to write about the environmental emergency.
In 2014, Kolbert was asked whether she found writing about extinction depressing. She said it was, but it had to be looked in the face. “I’ve tried to transcend my own feelings,” she explained. There’s good reason to do so: In such a politically charged field, honest sentiment is too often weaponized as evidence of bias and weakness. Furthermore, the voice of reportage, like the voice of scientific papers, carries enormous cultural power. It bespeaks objectivity. It’s the voice we are told to use when we want to be taken seriously, when we don’t want our conclusions to be interpreted as simply being emotional; we’re taught such things muddy the force of truth.
Yet the people who toil to stop invasive carp or preserve desert pupfish do so for reasons that do not exist solely in the realm of science. All the conservation biologists I know have deep attachments to the creatures they study, and it is these passionate motivations that spur their efforts and assist the continued survival of the creatures in question. I’m reminded of the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, writer and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, who maintains that science can be a path to kinship with other species, and that it should be animated by more than simply pure analysis.
Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment; time to work with what we have, using the knowledge we have, with our eyes fully open to the realities of where we are. Rigorous analysis and science journalism, the form in which Kolbert truly excels, is needed now more than ever. But alongside it, to enrich it, there should be other stories too: tender, careful investigations into the feelings that drive and shape our efforts to save the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/book ... ks_norm_20
There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way.
Dozens of countries are backing an effort that would protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have been disregarded, or worse, in the past.
With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.
But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much.
In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous people put their bodies on the line to protect native lands threatened by loggers and ranchers. In Canada, a First Nations group created a huge park to block mining. In Papua New Guinea, fishing communities have set up no-fishing zones. And in Guatemala, people living in a sprawling nature reserve are harvesting high-value timber in small amounts. In fact, some of those logs could end up as new bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge.
More and interesting photos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Dozens of countries are backing an effort that would protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have been disregarded, or worse, in the past.
With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.
But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much.
In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous people put their bodies on the line to protect native lands threatened by loggers and ranchers. In Canada, a First Nations group created a huge park to block mining. In Papua New Guinea, fishing communities have set up no-fishing zones. And in Guatemala, people living in a sprawling nature reserve are harvesting high-value timber in small amounts. In fact, some of those logs could end up as new bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge.
More and interesting photos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/clim ... 778d3e6de3
The Wind and Solar Boom Is Here
Just one word, Benjamin: Solar.
Well, actually, one more: Wind.
The sun, the air and the chemistry to bottle their limitless power — it’s looking more and more as if these constitute the world’s next great technological advance, a leap as life-changing for many of us as was aviation, the internet or, of course, plastics.
Faster than many thought possible, and despite long doubt about renewable energy’s practicality, a momentous transformation is now well underway. We are moving from a global economy fueled primarily by climate-warming fossil fuels to one in which we will cleanly pluck most of our energy out of water, wind and the fire in the sky.
People who study energy markets say economics alone ensures our eventual transition to clean fuels, but that policy choices by the governments can speed it up. Last October, the International Energy Agency declared solar power to be the cheapest new form of electricity in many places around the world, and in particularly favorable locations, solar is now “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” the agency said.
It can be difficult to muster much optimism about humanity’s capacity to address climate change, and I have argued before that it is wisest to look toward the future with a pessimistic eye, if only to encourage urgent action toward collective problem-solving. (We are more likely to do something to solve our problems if we’re frank about how bad things might get.)
There are lots of reasons to cast doubt on the clean-energy future. Wind and solar still account for just a tiny fraction of the world’s energy production. Even their most enthusiastic supporters concede that much will need to change to realize the full potential of renewable energy. Over the coming decades consumers and businesses will have to adapt to many novel technologies, while governments will need to build new infrastructure and overhaul energy regulations built around fossil fuels.
Still, amid the general gloom of climate change, the clean-energy boom offers the rare glimmer not just of hope, but something more: excitement. The industry’s bold claims are bolstered by bolder trends. Over the last couple of decades experts have consistently underestimated the declines in price, the improvements in performance and the subsequent speed of adoption of renewable power.
Unlike fossil fuels — which get more expensive as we pull more of them from the ground, because extracting a dwindling resource requires more and more work — renewable energy is based on technologies that get cheaper as we make more. This creates a virtuous flywheel: Because solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and related technologies to produce clean energy keep getting cheaper, we keep using more of them; as we use more of them, manufacturing scale increases, cutting prices further still — and on and on.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Just one word, Benjamin: Solar.
Well, actually, one more: Wind.
The sun, the air and the chemistry to bottle their limitless power — it’s looking more and more as if these constitute the world’s next great technological advance, a leap as life-changing for many of us as was aviation, the internet or, of course, plastics.
Faster than many thought possible, and despite long doubt about renewable energy’s practicality, a momentous transformation is now well underway. We are moving from a global economy fueled primarily by climate-warming fossil fuels to one in which we will cleanly pluck most of our energy out of water, wind and the fire in the sky.
People who study energy markets say economics alone ensures our eventual transition to clean fuels, but that policy choices by the governments can speed it up. Last October, the International Energy Agency declared solar power to be the cheapest new form of electricity in many places around the world, and in particularly favorable locations, solar is now “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” the agency said.
It can be difficult to muster much optimism about humanity’s capacity to address climate change, and I have argued before that it is wisest to look toward the future with a pessimistic eye, if only to encourage urgent action toward collective problem-solving. (We are more likely to do something to solve our problems if we’re frank about how bad things might get.)
There are lots of reasons to cast doubt on the clean-energy future. Wind and solar still account for just a tiny fraction of the world’s energy production. Even their most enthusiastic supporters concede that much will need to change to realize the full potential of renewable energy. Over the coming decades consumers and businesses will have to adapt to many novel technologies, while governments will need to build new infrastructure and overhaul energy regulations built around fossil fuels.
Still, amid the general gloom of climate change, the clean-energy boom offers the rare glimmer not just of hope, but something more: excitement. The industry’s bold claims are bolstered by bolder trends. Over the last couple of decades experts have consistently underestimated the declines in price, the improvements in performance and the subsequent speed of adoption of renewable power.
Unlike fossil fuels — which get more expensive as we pull more of them from the ground, because extracting a dwindling resource requires more and more work — renewable energy is based on technologies that get cheaper as we make more. This creates a virtuous flywheel: Because solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and related technologies to produce clean energy keep getting cheaper, we keep using more of them; as we use more of them, manufacturing scale increases, cutting prices further still — and on and on.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3