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Stories about Biodiversity and Biodevastation.

Big Pharma's pollution is creating deadly superbugs while the world looks the other way

By: 
Madlen Davies

Industrial pollution from Indian pharmaceutical companies making medicines for nearly all the world’s major drug companies is fuelling the creation of deadly superbugs, suggests new research. Global health authorities have no regulations in place to stop this happening.

A major study published today in the prestigious scientific journal Infection found “excessively high” levels of antibiotic and antifungal drug residue in water sources in and around a major drug production hub in the Indian city of Hyderabad, as well as high levels of bacteria and fungi resistant to those drugs. Scientists told the Bureau the quantities found meant they believe the drug residues must have originated from pharmaceutical factories.

Diet for a Warming Planet

By: 
George Wuerthner

I read two different studies this week that are connected but were not related in the media.

The first is record warmth across the country. Denver recorded 80 degrees in mid-November. And 29 states had the warmest December ever recorded. Instead of a white Christmas, it was 70 degrees on Christmas Eve in Vermont!

Such freakish weather might be written off as the normal variation, except that an analysis by NOAA found the last five years were the warmest ever recorded in the past 122 years.

With the Arctic sea ice melting and glaciers disappearing, along with record high temperatures across the planet, it is getting increasingly difficult to deny that the planet is heating up.

How Burger King's Palm Oil Addiction Is Devastating Local Communities—and Planet Earth

By: 
Hannah Lownsbrough

There’s nothing new about fast food corporations unleashing environmental chaos to maximize their profits. But the recent explosion of palm oil usage is a new threat. Burger King is at the front of the pack of corporations abusing human rights and the environment to satisfy its ever-growing appetite for the oil.

Burger King has always been a corporation defined by its competition. But now it is in danger of becoming the leader in a competition nobody should want to win: fueling the development of rapacious oil palm plantations. Burger King is one of a number of food and drink corporations that rely on palm oil for everything from fry oil to puddings. The recent increase in its use has been exponential: 485 percent in the last decade alone.

Fukushima Catastrophe at 6: Normalizing Radiation Exposure Demeans Women and Kids and Risks Their Health

By: 
Cindy Folkers

Since the election of President Trump, certain words have taken prominence in our lexicon: “alternative facts”, “gaslighting”, “normalization”. But the techniques these words represent have been used by the nuclear industry and its purveyors in government since the Cold War love affair with nuclear weapons began.

And as we deal with the continuing fallout 6 years after the Fukushima, and 31 years after the Chernobyl, catastrophes began, the nuclear industry continues to put these techniques to good use. They have labeled “radiophobic” those who question nuclear power or who refuse to move back to contaminated areas or eat contaminated food. They shame people into taking health risks and socially isolate those who refuse to comply. They sell the lie of decontamination despite the fact that what has been decontaminated one day, may be recontaminated the next.

Smokey was wrong. You can’t prevent wildfires, and you shouldn’t try.

By: 
Aura Bogado

Richard Minnich, a professor of science at University of California at Riverside, likes to play a word game that sums up how confused the general public is about wildfires. It starts with a well-known slogan.

“Smokey the Bear says, ‘Only you can prevent forest fires,’” Minnich says, then takes a pregnant pause. “Let’s change that last part. Smokey the Bear says, ‘Only you can prevent earthquakes.’ Or how about, ‘Only you can prevent tornadoes’ — except no one thinks that,” he says with a chuckle.

Editing Evolution

By: 
Paul Koberstein
Synthetic biology, commonly defined as the science of manipulating or editing genomes to engineer new living organisms, is basically genetic engineering 2.0. This rapidly growing biotech field is expected to be worth $38.7 billion by 2020. And right now, gene drives are the most exciting – and most potentially dangerous – new tool in the bio-hacking toolkit.

Trump administration exempts three CA oil fields from water protection rule at Jerry Brown's request

By: 
Dan Bacher  

As soon as I heard on election night that Donald Trump was going to be the next President, I predicted on Twitter, Facebook and in conversations with friends that Governor Jerry Brown, in spite of his “green” image, would try to make a deal with Trump to build his legacy project, the environmentally destructive Delta Tunnels, and expand fracking and other oil drilling in California. 

Sure enough, Jerry Brown has been working hard since the election to pressure Trump to support the Delta Tunnels, going so far as to praise Trump’s infrastructure plans in his state of the state. Departing from his prepared remarks, Brown remarked, “I say, ‘Amen to that, Brother!’” in reference to Trump’s focus on new infrastructure. (www.dailykos.com/...)

The Way Forward Post Zinke’s Repeal of Obama Ban on Lead Ammunition

By: 
Eliza Murphy

Surrounded by representatives from a host of sportsman’s organizations, including the National Rifle Association, Zinke overturned President Obama’s last minute effort to protect wildlife and human health. Toxic ammunition is not only deadly for the intended victim. One lead bullet that hits an animal fragments into hundreds of tiny particles that lodge in its flesh. Contaminated meat enters the food chain when hunters leave animal parts in the field or when a wounded animals runs off to die later or when so-called “nuisance” animals like coyotes are killed by ranchers are left to rot where they drop and become food for other wild carnivores.

8 things to know about Channel 4's Lost Tribe of the Amazon

By: 
David Hill

To put it mildly, "the documentary "First Contact" omitted some crucial information, used some extremely misleading language, and made numerous factual errors. Here are eight things worth highlighting."

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