Topic: Biodiversity / Biodevastation
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An Even More Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing
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The appetite is global. For the airline industry and industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil fuel use. But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t —…
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The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending
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Kollibri makes a convincing argument against farming and agriculture (and for wildtending). Kollibri effectively debunks myths about what he calls gatherer-hunters (he explains the reason for the reversal of the name). He points to not only their technical knowledge of plants, but argues that the all-knowing Western subject simply cannot grasp the feeling of what…
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A Lethal Industrial Farm Fungus Is Spreading Among Us
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Eighty percent of U.S. antibiotics are used to promote livestock and poultry growth and protect the animals from the bacterial consequences of the manure-laden environments in which they are grown. That’s 34 million pounds a year of antibiotics as of 2015. Fungicide and pesticide production at Sapec Crop Protection, Portugal The agricultural applications help generate…
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Silent Spring’s Encore
Rachel Carson’s famous and brilliant book Silent Spring (1962), which single-handedly ignited the environmental movement, has never been more relevant than it is today. A mimeo of Silent Spring is scheduled for publication by the UN as the most comprehensive study of life on the planet ever undertaken, an 1,800-page study by the world’s leading…
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When will Californians wake up to the risk to children from nuclear radiation?
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World Wars I and II destroyed cities in huge urban areas, yet many of these cities were rebuilt within 20 years. The difference between these catastrophes is due to the fact that while the environmental landscape in cities destroyed by conventional warfare stayed relatively healthy, cities which were impacted by nuclear radiation will remain partly…
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Bavarians Vote to Stop Extinction
The world is in the throes of an extinction crisis unlike any throughout paleoclimate history: the Sixth Mass Extinction, keeping in mind that the normal “background rate” for extinction is 1 to 5 species gone per year. But, what if it’s five every 24 hours? Answer: It’s a lot more than that. The current worldwide extinction…
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Nitrogen glut: Too much of a good thing is deadly for the biosphere
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The nitrogen glut (and the uneven distribution that causes shortages in some places, particularly sub-Saharan Africa) is damaging the biosphere in many ways. Recent studies show that its harmful effects will be intensified by climate change. It is painfully clear that any serious effort to prevent ecological catastrophes in this century must include reining in…
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The Downside of the World’s Love Affair with Shrimp
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More than half of imported shrimp is “farmed”—grown in huge industrial tanks or shallow, manmade ponds that can stretch for acres. At least 150 shrimp can be crowded into a single square meter, where they’re fed commercial pellets, sometimes laced with antibiotics to ward off disease. What isn’t eaten can sink to the bottom and…
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The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems
Sometime in the near future it is highly probable that the Arctic will no longer have sea ice, meaning zero ice for the first time in eons, aka: the Blue Ocean Event. Surely, the world is not prepared for the consequences of such an historic event, which likely turns the world topsy-turvy, negatively impacting agriculture…
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Mystery Killer Spans the Globe
Public health experts have been warning for decades that overuse of antibiotics reduces the effectiveness of drugs that cure bacterial infections. At least 2,000,000 Americans get antibiotic-resistant infections per year. Notably, gluttonous overuse of antimicrobial drugs to combat bacteria and fungi via hospitals, clinics, and farms is backfiring and producing superbugs or “Nightmare Bacteria,” which…