Topic: Biodiversity / Biodevastation
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Killing the Messengers: Rising Violence Against Journalists and Indigenous Leaders Defending the Amazon
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In February 2005, the body of 73-year-old Sister Dorothy Stang was found on the side of a remote dirt road 33 miles from Anapu, Pará, in Brazil’s AmazonBasin. Seven bullets pierced her body. The first hit her in the abdomen, then after she fell face down, the killers fired bullets to the back and four…
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Genetically Engineered Golden Rice: A Silver Bullet that Misses the Target
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Promoters of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture have long argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves…
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The Rumbling ESAS Methane Enigma
The northern continental shelves of Russia, inclusive of the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea (ESAS) are some of the least researched yet most controversial subjects in climate science today. It’s the one region that has the biggest potential to trigger runaway global warming because of sizeable subsea methane deposits, thereby…
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As the Birds Vanish
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Technology may have given us a greater vision, but it has muted our ability to act because we have become so numbed by its conveniences. The dismal documentation of dramatic bird losses proves that as the machine world offers endless data about this and that, we become less and less able to do anything about…
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Mega Droughts Engulf Countries
Throughout the world, mega droughts are hitting hard with a ferocity not seen in decades and in some cases not seen in centuries. It’s not merely coincidental that as global warming accelerates droughts turn more vicious than ever before. All of which begs the logical question of when will world leaders wake up with a…
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The Amazon at a Tipping Point
The Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its wondrous strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its miraculous life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization would cease to exist beyond scattered tribes, here and there. Sad to say, a recent…
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To address hunger, most low- and middle-income countries have to increase carbon footprint
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Most low- and middle-income countries will require a substantial increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water use due to their efforts to increase food production as these countries try to fight hunger, finds a new research from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public…
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Biosphere Collapse?
Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut! Fossil fuel usage must be cut! Today: Following Paris ’15, global banks have invested $1.9…
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O Christmas Tree, Toxic Christmas Tree!
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"166","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"319","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]] Christmas tree farm in Iowa (public domain photo from USDA) In early December in Portland I saw my first live Christmas tree of the season strapped to the top of a car. I was saddened. Not because I don’t celebrate Christmas (even though I don’t) but because the Christmas tree industry is so harmful.…
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Climate: from Catastrophe to Cataclysm
Please watch the 23-minute video, linked below, to completion. It shows an interview of Dr. Peter Carter (Director Climate Emergency Institute, IPCC expert reviewer, Co-author in 2018 of Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival). This interview was conducted at COP25 (“this is set up to fail”) currently underway in Madrid, Spain,…