Stories about Biodiversity and Biodevastation.
The two-week marathon of the annual UN climate conference is underway in Madrid, and the world’s expectations have perhaps never been lower. The Amazon is burning and unprecedented storms are raging worldwide, but the world’s climate diplomats are still mostly talking business-as-usual.
China’s failure to kick a long-standing addiction to coal has thrown a knockout punch to the Paris Agreement of 2015, including its 195 signatories. Suddenly, out of the blue, the world has turned upside down!
Sixteen months ago July 16, 2018: “China and the European Union on Monday reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris climate change pact and called other signatories to do the same, saying action against rising global temperatures had become more important than ever.” (Source: China and EU Reaffirm Paris Climate Commitment, Vow More Cooperation, Reuters, July 16, 2018)
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
– E.O. Wilson
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.”
–Cree Proverb
We can repair the Earth's ruptured carbon cycle by recarbonizing it with the living carbon of biodiversity.
The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity — an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems — that can meet all our needs and sustain life.
Everyone who gives a damn about the planet is denouncing Trump’s latest attack on the Endangered Species Act. But little is being said about this law’s actual impact on the fate of endangered species. In theory, the collapse of global biodiversity was supposed to be prevented by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Convention on International Trade of Endangered (CITES). But in reality this has amounted to trying to stop a raging wildfire with a squirt gun.
America’s reservoirs are filling up with sediment. Their storage capacity peaked in the 1980s and it’s been going downhill ever since—sometimes with disastrous consequences.
What happens when reservoirs become rivers again and when salmon get a chance to reach their upstream limits for the first time in a century? And perhaps most importantly: What lessons from the largest-ever dam-removal project can we apply to future efforts on other rivers in the United States and around the world?
“It's their futures. It's all of our futures and it's all of our traditions and rights and cultures to keep this land healthy and to keep our people happy. And economic growth and money is not a part of that conversation. It should only be our futures that we are worried about right now because it is urgent and it is now.”
