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‘A threat multiplier’: The hidden factors contributing to New York City’s coronavirus disparities

by Aracely82H Posted on April 21, 2020

Earlier this month, the New York City health department released a map showing confirmed COVID-19 cases by zip code. The highest case counts were concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The same week, the city released preliminary data highlighting higher rates of death among black and Latino New Yorkers.

Environmental advocates say that hazardous environmental conditions have contributed substantially to the coronavirus outbreak’s severity in New York City’s low-income communities of color.

The city’s data shows that a higher volume of cases are concentrated in neighborhoods with more environmental health hazards, according to Rachel Spector, director of the environmental justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights law firm. Major arterial highways, waste transfer facilities, power plants, and other polluting infrastructure create daily air quality challenges for residents of these neighborhoods — challenges that can take a cumulative toll on residents’ health, leading them to become more vulnerable in the face of a respiratory illness.

Three zip codes in Queens, for instance, have seen roughly 30 documented COVID-19 cases per thousand residents, which is double the citywide average. These neighborhoods — among them Astoria Heights, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights — are criss crossed by traffic-clogged highways like Interstate 278 and the Grand Central Parkway. Nearby sources of fine particulate matter — or PM 2.5, a pollutant particularly harmful to respiratory health — include LaGuardia Airport and several of the city’s power plants.

“It’s a classic environmental justice issue,” Spector told Grist. “You have a concentration of polluting infrastructure located in black and brown communities that are often high-poverty neighborhoods — people living in poor and crowded housing conditions, who continue to work and take public transportation because many of them are low-wage essential workers. So they’re disproportionately and continuously exposed.”

The coronavirus is not the only thing they’re exposed to, Spector added. Many of these communities disproportionately experience underlying health conditions as a result of years of chronic exposure to air pollution. The South Bronx, a predominantly low-income neighborhood of color, sees an annual average of 11 to 13 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter, compared to the World Health Organization’s air quality guideline of 10. The same area sees the city’s highest rate of emergency care visits for asthma as well as respiratory hospitalizations. It has also been among the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19.

“The coronavirus is exposing the inequities that have been around for so long in our society,” Spector said.

The link between coronavirus deaths and pollution exposure is coming into focus. Earlier this month, Harvard researchers released a nationwide study that links long-term exposure to air pollution to increases in the exposed area’s COVID-19 death rate. They found that every additional microgram of PM 2.5 per cubic meter is associated with a 15 percent increase in the death rate from COVID-19.

Nevertheless, the EPA announced last week that it will not tighten or change the nation’s ambient air quality standards. Democratic lawmakers subsequently sent a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler criticizing the decision. The senators cited evidence that air pollution in the form of fine particulate matter is detrimental to human health and could increase COVID-19 vulnerability, using New York City as an example.

Spector says that the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus — parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx — also face acute challenges posed by particulate matter pollution. Although levels of PM 2.5 across the city aren’t as bad as those in areas near large-scale oil, gas, and chemical infrastructure, the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and mapping tool indicates that these New York City neighborhoods still have higher risks of cancer and respiratory illnesses from inhaling diesel emissions — conditions that could make them more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 complications.

Priya Mulgaonkar, a resiliency planner for the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, co-wrote a 2016 report that analyzes the impact of truck traffic on the city’s air quality and the communities that host waste transfer facilities. One of the report’s key findings is that commercial waste trucks accounted for a significant amount of truck traffic, worsening the air quality of nearby communities, particularly in the South Bronx. These same communities ended up being among the hardest hit by COVID-19.

“The disparities for COVID-19 really mirror the disparities that New York City’s environmental justice communities have faced for decades,” Mulgaonkar told Grist. “Similarly to climate change, COVID-19 is really acting as a threat multiplier: exacerbating a lot of these inequalities that are due to environmental racism in New York City.”

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‘A threat multiplier’: The hidden factors contributing to New York City’s coronavirus disparities

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Inconspicuous Consumption – Tatiana Schlossberg

by Myrna Posted on August 28, 2019

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Inconspicuous Consumption

The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have

Tatiana Schlossberg

Genre: Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 27, 2019

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


From a former New York Times science writer, this urgent call to action will empower you to stand up to climate change and environmental pollution by making simple but impactful everyday choices. With urgency and wit, Tatiana Schlossberg explains that far from being only a distant problem of the natural world created by the fossil fuel industry, climate change is all around us, all the time, lurking everywhere in our convenience-driven society, all without our realizing it. By examining the unseen and unconscious environmental impacts in four areas-the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel – Schlossberg helps readers better understand why climate change is such a complicated issue, and how it connects all of us: How streaming a movie on Netflix in New York burns coal in Virginia; how eating a hamburger in California might contribute to pollution in the Gulf of Mexico; how buying an inexpensive cashmere sweater in Chicago expands the Mongolian desert; how destroying forests from North Carolina is necessary to generate electricity in England. Cataloging the complexities and frustrations of our carbon-intensive society with a dry sense of humor, Schlossberg makes the climate crisis and its solutions interesting and relevant to everyone who cares, even a little, about the planet. She empowers readers to think about their stuff and the environment in a new way, helping them make more informed choices when it comes to the future of our world. Most importantly, this is a book about the power we have as voters and consumers to make sure that the fight against climate change includes all of us and all of our stuff, not just industry groups and politicians. If we have any hope of solving the problem, we all have to do it together.

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Inconspicuous Consumption – Tatiana Schlossberg

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States cut water use as Colorado River runs low. That’s actually good news.

by juliannsterrett Posted on August 16, 2019

For the first time in history, low water levels on the Colorado River have forced Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to cut back the amount of water they use. It’s the latest example of climate change affecting daily life, but also an encouraging sign that people can handle a world with less: These orderly cutbacks are only happening because seven U.S. states and Mexico had agreed to abide by conservation rules when flows subside, rather than fight for the last drops.

“It is a new era of limits,” said Kevin Moran, who directs the Environmental Defense Fund’s Colorado River efforts.

The Colorado River is a vital source of water for the American West, sustaining some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland. And it’s been under enormous stress. Since 2000, the watershed has been, to put it mildly, dry. The region is suffering the worst 20-year drought in modern times.

A Bureau of Reclamation study of Colorado River levels, released Thursday, triggered the cutbacks. The Rocky Mountains finally turned white with heavy snow last winter, but despite a galloping spring runoff, drought persists and bathtub-ringed reservoirs in the Grand Canyon are low. In its study, the Bureau highlighted the unique circumstances: “This 20-year period is also one of the driest in the 1,200-year paleo record.”

Rising temperatures brought on by rising carbon emissions are partly to blame. “Approximately one‐third of the [Colorado River] flow loss is due to high temperatures now common in the basin, a result of human caused climate change,” wrote scientists Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck in a study published in 2017 that anticipated water will only become scarcer in the future.

But these water-use reductions are also an example of people binding themselves to rules to deal with scarce resources, rather than going to court, or war. The cutbacks come from an agreement hammered out by the Southwestern states and Mexico to impose limits on themselves.

“It’s not necessarily well known or talked about, but this collaboration between the states and Mexico is one of the most successful cross-border water management stories in the world,” Moran said.

Over the long course of history, the various parties have fought each other over water, but found that cooperation simply works better, Moran said. By working together, they’ve already managed to reduce the amount of water drawn for the last five years from the lower Colorado River Basin. In fact, they’ve cut back more in each of those years more than required by their agreement in 2020, said John Fleck, the director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, who wrote the book Water is for Fighting Over, on the history of conflicts over the Colorado River.

“It puts the lie to the idea that water use is just going up and up and up: It’s been on a downward trend for a decade and a half at a time when population is increasing and agriculture is as productive as ever,” Fleck said. “We’re beyond the Malthusian math that suggests we’re going to run out of water and die.”

The region will need to go further to keep up with climate change and refill reservoirs, Fleck said. But the progress so far leaves him hopeful that people can resolve conflicts over scarce resources in this new era of limits.

“The key, I think, is for the water users to realize that you can have healthy, successful communities with declining water,” Fleck said. That opens up the space for collaboration, and allow them to get beyond the old myth that water is for fighting over.”

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States cut water use as Colorado River runs low. That’s actually good news.

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The climate-inspired detente on the Colorado

by JIYKelle8195347 Posted on August 16, 2019

For the first time in history, low water levels on the Colorado River have forced Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to cut back the amount of water they use. It’s the latest example of climate change affecting daily life, but also an encouraging sign that people can handle a world with less: These orderly cutbacks are only happening because seven U.S. states and Mexico had agreed to abide by conservation rules when flows subside, rather than fight for the last drops.

“It is a new era of limits,” said Kevin Moran, who directs the Environmental Defense Fund’s Colorado River efforts.

The Colorado River is a vital source of water for the American West, sustaining some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland. And it’s been under enormous stress. Since 2000, the watershed has been, to put it mildly, dry. The region is suffering the worst 20-year drought in modern times.

A Bureau of Reclamation study of Colorado River levels, released Thursday, triggered the cutbacks. The Rocky Mountains finally turned white with heavy snow last winter, but despite a galloping spring runoff, drought persists and bathtub-ringed reservoirs in the Grand Canyon are low. In its study, the Bureau highlighted the unique circumstances: “This 20-year period is also one of the driest in the 1,200-year paleo record.”

Rising temperatures brought on by rising carbon emissions are partly to blame. “Approximately one‐third of the [Colorado River] flow loss is due to high temperatures now common in the basin, a result of human caused climate change,” wrote scientists Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck in a study published in 2017 that anticipated water will only become scarcer in the future.

But these water-use reductions are also an example of people binding themselves to rules to deal with scarce resources, rather than going to court, or war. The cutbacks come from an agreement hammered out by the Southwestern states and Mexico to impose limits on themselves.

“It’s not necessarily well known or talked about, but this collaboration between the states and Mexico is one of the most successful cross-border water management stories in the world,” Moran said.

Over the long course of history, the various parties have fought each other over water, but found that cooperation simply works better, Moran said. By working together, they’ve already managed to reduce the amount of water drawn for the last five years from the lower Colorado River Basin. In fact, they’ve cut back more in each of those years more than required by their agreement in 2020, said John Fleck, the director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, who wrote the book Water is for Fighting Over, on the history of conflicts over the Colorado River.

“It puts the lie to the idea that water use is just going up and up and up: It’s been on a downward trend for a decade and a half at a time when population is increasing and agriculture is as productive as ever,” Fleck said. “We’re beyond the Malthusian math that suggests we’re going to run out of water and die.”

The region will need to go further to keep up with climate change and refill reservoirs, Fleck said. But the progress so far leaves him hopeful that people can resolve conflicts over scarce resources in this new era of limits.

“The key, I think, is for the water users to realize that you can have healthy, successful communities with declining water,” Fleck said. That opens up the space for collaboration, and allow them to get beyond the old myth that water is for fighting over.”

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The climate-inspired detente on the Colorado

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Bureau of Land Management scrubs stewardship language from news releases

by Robert Michaels Posted on May 16, 2019

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that oversees more than 245 million acres of public land, has stripped its conservation-focused mission statement from agency news releases.

Boilerplate language — the bureau’s longstanding mission statement — was printed at the end of BLM press releases throughout President Donald Trump’s tenure: “The BLM’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of America’s public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”

That language was recently cut from all agency releases, including those that predate the Trump administration. The text now exclusively highlights the economic value of America’s public lands:

The BLM manages more than 245 million acres of public land located primarily in 12 Western states, including Alaska. The BLM also administers 700 million acres of sub-surface mineral estate throughout the nation. Diverse activities authorized on these lands generated $96 billion in sales of goods and services throughout the American economy in fiscal year 2017. These activities supported more than 468,000 jobs.

The text highlighted in blue was removed from the boilerplate.

The change appears to have occurred this week, according to records from the Wayback Machine, an online archive that caches screenshots of websites. This BLM release related to a coal lease application in Oklahoma, for example, featured the mission statement when it was issued on Monday. As of Wednesday morning, the language was missing.

The BLM, a bureau of the Department of the Interior, did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Aaron Weiss, media director at Colorado-based conservation group Center for Western Priorities, called the change “a perfect representation” of how Trump and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt view America’s public lands.

“In their world, our lands are only here for exploitation and financial gain, not protection and preservation,” Weiss told HuffPost. “Bernhardt’s clients profit; our kids and grandkids pay the price.”

Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist with a slew of potential conflicts of interest, served as Interior’s deputy secretary before being confirmed to the top post last month. He replaced former secretary Ryan Zinke, who stepped down in January amid mounting ethics scandals.

Together, Zinke and Bernhardt gutted numerous Obama-era policies aimed at tackling climate change and have worked to boost fossil fuel and mineral production on federal lands. They also led the largest reduction of national monuments in American history,  carving a collective 2 million acres from a pair of protected sites in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments — a move that opened the door for oil, mining, and other development.

The Trump administration has on numerous occasions come under fire for scrubbing climate change language from agency websites. And, in its quest for so-called energy dominance, the Interior Department has prioritized development over conservation, at times celebrating its role in governing the exploitation of natural resources from public lands.

In April 2017, a few months after Trump took office, BLM caused a stir when it changed the banner on its homepage from two boys hiking on public land to a giant coal seam in Wyoming. That image is one of several rotating photos that “reflect the many uses our public lands have to offer,” an agency spokeswoman said at the time.

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Bureau of Land Management scrubs stewardship language from news releases

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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

by IsmaelWicks Posted on March 16, 2019

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “loyalty freak,” found a loyal friend and unwavering supporter in former Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah.

So when Hatch’s office sent a letter in mid-March 2017 requesting that the Interior Department shrink the boundary of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to free up fossil fuel-rich lands, as the New York Times revealed, the Trump administration sprang into action.

A little more than a month later, Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of more than two dozen recent national monument designations. It was clear that Bears Ears was the primary target. At the signing ceremony, Trump said he’d “heard a lot about” the 1.35 million-acre site in southeastern Utah and how “beautiful” the area is. He painted the Obama administration designation as a massive federal land grab. And he boasted that it “should never have happened” and was made “over the profound objections” of the state’s citizens, and that he was opening the land up to “tremendously positive things.”

He made no mention of the five Native American tribes that consider the area sacred and jointly petitioned for the monument’s creation. Instead, he thanked Hatch for his “never-ending prodding.”

“[Hatch] would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this,’” Trump said. “Is that right, Orrin? You didn’t stop. He doesn’t give up. He’s shocked that I’m doing it, but I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Again, this was before former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke launched what he promised would be an objective, thorough review of recent monument designations; one he said would give all stakeholders a voice. In the end, Trump signed a pair of proclamations to cut more than 2 million acres from Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history. Seemingly every action leading to that decision suggested the outcome was predetermined.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing to examine what they described in a news release as Trump’s “illegal decision to shrink” the Utah sites. The event, titled “Forgotten Voices: The Inadequate Review and Improper Alteration of Our National Monuments,” featured testimony from several tribal leaders, the Utah state director of the Bureau of Land Management and other stakeholders. Zinke turned down an invitation to testify through his attorney, according to a committee spokesperson.

Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and the committee’s chair, told HuffPost in a recent interview that Zinke created a culture at the Department of the Interior centered on “making life easier” for oil, gas, and mining interests at the expense of conservation and environmental stewardship. The monument rollbacks, he added, “epitomizes” that culture.

Grijalva echoed that sentiment during the committee’s hearing. He said the administration’s review was “hollow and improper” and gave industry “special consideration.”

“It is my firm belief that this was a predestined outcome and that everything that has occurred since then has been to justify that outcome,” Grijalva said. “I don’t think it’s justifiable.”

BLM directed to free up coal deposits

One of the biggest revelations about the administration’s motives came during Wednesday’s hearing, when Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, cited testimony from a BLM employee who said he was directed to redraw the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante to exclude coal-rich areas and to be no more than 1 million acres.

“The first area I was told to exclude from the boundary, with no discussion, was the coal leases from 1996,” the BLM mapping specialist told investigators at Interior’s Office of Inspector General, according to Huffman.

Huffman went on to reveal that the expert was told to carve out areas rich in fossils, the very resources the monument was established to protect.

“The big one was the paleontological resources — huge dinosaur area,” the BLM expert told investigators, according to Huffman. “These coal areas are all pretty high dinosaur resources areas. We were told they are out regardless.”

This testimony is included in an unredacted version of an OIG report release in January that concluded there is “no evidence” that Zinke gave retired Utah state Representative Mike Noel preferential treatment when he redrew the monument’s boundary.

Ed Roberson, BLM’s Utah state director, told lawmakers Wednesday that the review was open, fair, and thorough. Huffman told Roberson that the order given to the BLM mapping specialist “does not sound like an honest and exhausted process,” but rather “a pre-cooked decision to allow coal companies to mine this coal.”

In his final report to the White House, Zinke acknowledged the potential for mining coal in Grand Staircase-Escalante, noting that the site contains “an estimated several billion tons of coal.” Downey Magallanes, the daughter of a former executive of coal giant Peabody Energy, was a top Interior official who oversaw the Trump administration’s monument review. She left the agency last year for a job at oil giant BP.

Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke during a visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Zinke cozied up to monument opponents

In the week after Trump signed the orders threatening the future of 27 national monuments, Zinke met with Utah’s Republican delegation and the San Juan County Commission — staunch critics of Bears Ears — to discuss next steps. He sat down with members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of five area tribes that petitioned for monument status, only after they traveled to Washington to demand a meeting, claiming that neither Trump nor anyone on his team had consulted with them.

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A week later, Zinke traveled to Utah as part of a monuments “listening tour,” when he spent four days visiting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Monument opponents, including Utah Governor Gary Herbert (a Republican) and members of the San Juan County Commission, joined him on the tour of Bears Ears. Representatives of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition were given a one-hour meeting with the agency chief.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the coalition, one of several groups now suing the administration, called Trump’s rollback of Bears Ears “devastating” and said the administration “failed to meaningfully engage our sovereign nations.”

“The upcoming hearing will uncover the bias, the outsized influence of the mining and drilling industries and the political motivations of the administration that led them to their illegal decision,” the coalition wrote.

Cherry-picked data

In launching its review, the Interior Department claimed that the size of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906 “exploded from an average of 422 acres per monument” early on and that “now it’s not uncommon for a monument to be more than a million acres.”

The figure formed the foundation of the administration’s argument that Trump’s predecessors abused the century-old law. But a look at early monument designations upends the agency’s math. In 1908, two years after the Antiquities Act became law, Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument. Only a few Obama-era land monuments are larger. Roosevelt also designated the 610,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument and the 20,629-acre Chaco Canyon National Monument. Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover both designated monuments of over a million acres. Coolidge set aside Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 1925, and Hoover designated California’s Death Valley in 1933.

The Interior Department has never substantiated the 422-acre figure, despite HuffPost’s numerous requests.

Not about extraction, they said

Throughout the process, Zinke maintained that the review and subsequent rollbacks were not aimed at boosting energy and mineral development on once-protected lands.

“I’m a geologist,” Zinke, who is not a geologist, said at a congressional budget hearing last year. “I can assure you that oil and gas in Bears Ears was not part of my decision matrix.”

Media reporting over the last year suggests otherwise. The New York Times obtained emails via a public records request that show potential future oil extraction played a central role in the decision. The Washington Post uncovered a lobbying campaign from uranium company Energy Fuels to shrink Bears Ears. And Roll Call reported this month that Energy Fuels, which owns a uranium mill adjacent to the original Bears Ears boundary, met with a top Interior Department official to discuss Bears Ears even before the agency launched its review.

The Washington Post also reported on agency emails that show Interior Department officials dismissed information about the benefits of establishing protected monuments, including increased tourism and archeological discoveries, instead choosing to play up the value of energy development, logging, and ranching.

A man holds a sign in protest, during Ryan Zinke’s visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Nothing to learn from the public

Early in the review process, Interior announced a comment period to give the public a chance to weigh in. It was a move that Zinke said “finally gives a voice to local communities and states” that the Trump administration claimed previous administrations had ignored.

That invitation appears to have mostly been for show. As HuffPost first reported, the agency conducted its review of Bears Ears assuming it had nothing to learn from the public.

“Essentially, barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted,” Randal Bowman, an agency official who played a key role in the review, told colleagues during a May 2017 webinar to train a dozen agency staffers on how to read and catalog public comments. And in a May 2017 email exchange with Downey Magallanes, a former top aide of Zinke’s who played a key role in the review, Bowman said he expected the comments to be “99-1 against any changes.”

The support for keeping monuments intact was indeed overwhelming. An analysis by the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities found that 99 percent of the more than 685,000 public comments submitted during a 15-day comment period voiced support for Bears Ears.

In a report summary made public in August 2017, Zinke acknowledged that the vast majority of the 2.8 million public comments the department received as part of its sweeping review favored maintaining national monuments, which he chalked up to “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

He didn’t appear to consider that the comments were the honest opinions of individual Americans.

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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

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The Botany of Desire – Michael Pollan

by Myrna Posted on March 19, 2018

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The Botany of Desire

A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

Michael Pollan

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: May 8, 2001

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the  New York Times  bestselling author of  Cooked  and  The Omnivore’s Dilemma,  one of the most trusted food experts in America In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant—though this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds’s most basic yearnings—and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we’ve benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom? Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature. From the Hardcover edition.

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The Botany of Desire – Michael Pollan

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Energy Transfer Partners has until April to develop an oil-spill response plan for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

by AmberMsq38 Posted on December 5, 2017

Today, the president signed two proclamations drastically cutting land from two federal monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by 80 percent and 45 percent, respectively.

When President Obama designated Bears Ears a national monument last year, it was a huge victory for five Utah tribes — the Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Hopi, and the Pueblo of Zuni — who came together in 2015 to push for the preservation of what they estimate are 100,000 cultural and ancestral sites, some dating back to 1300 AD, in the region.

“More than 150 years ago, the federal government removed our ancestors from Bears Ears at gunpoint and sent them on the Long Walk,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Davis Filfred said in statement. “But we came back.”

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president authority to establish national monuments, largely to thwart looting of archaeological sites. Trump is the first president to shrink a monument in decades.

The five tribes have said they will bring a legal case against the administration — the outcome could redefine the president’s powers to use the Antiquities Act. “We know how to fight and we will fight to defend Bears Ears,” Filfred said.

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Energy Transfer Partners has until April to develop an oil-spill response plan for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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Harvey’s record rains just triggered Houston dams to overflow

by caringk63 Posted on August 29, 2017

In 1935, a storm swept through Houston, turning parts of the city into a lake. It was a wake-up call to city officials; they needed to get serious about flood control. About a decade later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished building two massive reservoirs west and upstream of the city. For the better part of a century, the Addicks and Barker dams have held back water that would have otherwise surged through Buffalo Bayou, the flood-prone waterway that snakes through downtown Houston before dumping into the Ship Channel.

This week, for the second time in as many years, a storm has pushed the Addicks and Barker dams to their limit. Early Monday morning, as Tropical Storm Harvey lingered over Houston and drowned whole swaths of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers began controlled releases from the dams, the first time they’ve done so during a major storm. By Monday afternoon, several neighborhoods near the reservoirs were under voluntary or mandatory evacuation as officials announced that releases from Addicks and Barker would continue for the foreseeable future. By early Tuesday morning, Addicks had topped the dam’s 108-foot spillway, leading to what officials call “uncontrolled releases” from the reservoir. Some homes could be inundated for a month.

Harris County Flood Control District meteorologist Jeff Linder called the releases the least-worst decision officials could make in light of floodwaters that continue to fill the reservoirs faster than they can safely drain. “If you are upstream of the reservoir, the worst is not over,” Linder said at a Monday afternoon press conference, warning that “water is going to be inundating areas that have currently not been inundated.” When someone asked him, via Twitter, whether the dams could break and trigger a Katrina-like disaster, Linder offered a one-word response: “No.”

That assurance comes despite the Corps of Engineers labeling the dams an “extremely high risk of catastrophic failure” after a 2009 storm that saw only a fraction of the rain Harvey poured on Houston this week. Officials insist that the hair-raising label has more to do with the breathtaking consequences of any major dam failure upstream of the country’s fourth-largest city than the actual likelihood of such a breach. In 2012, they detailed how a dam failure during a major storm would cause a multi-billion dollar disaster that turns the city into Waterworld.

Still, the Corps in recent years has implemented only piecemeal fixes to the earthen dams, including a $75 million upgrade that was underway before Harvey hit this weekend. Officials are barely even discussing how to fund a third reservoir that some experts say the region desperately needs.

This is the second year in a row that severe floodwaters have tested Addicks and Barker. Just last year, during 2016’s so-called Tax Day Flood, for the first time, the reservoirs hit and surpassed the level of a 100-year flood. That happened again this weekend, meaning the dams have seen two extremely rare flood events (at least one-in-a-100-year events) in just as many years. Last year was also the first time the National Weather Service ever issued a flood warning for the Addicks and Barker watersheds.

The dams are in some ways emblematic of how flood planning in the Bayou City hasn’t kept up with the region’s booming population and development, even as experts predict that climate change will dump increasingly severe storms on Houston’s doorstep with greater frequency. They were built in a region of water-absorbing prairie grasses that have in recent years been paved over by water-impermeable parking lots, driveways and suburban streets. The Sierra Club even sued the Corps in a failed attempt to stop construction on a nearby stretch of the Grand Parkway, a major toll road project that some opposed fearing it would coax development in an area that’s critical to the region’s flood control efforts.

Still, as the Texas Tribune and ProPublica pointed out in this 2016 investigation, Houston-area flood officials refuse to connect the region’s flooding problems to poorly planned development. As a result, every year people will keep building hundreds, if not thousands, of additional structures in Harris County’s 100-year floodplains, even as those “rare” storms start to hit year after year.

In a Monday press conference, Edmond Russo, an engineer with the Corps’ Galveston district, said officials wanted to keep high water from building up and going over the Addicks and Barker spillways, “because in that case, we do not have control over the water.” He’d hoped releases would stay low enough so that the already overtaxed Buffalo Bayou stays at the same level in the short term. In the long term, officials say it could take one to three months to totally drain the reservoirs.

Of course, that all depends on what happens in the coming days. Updating reporters on the reservoirs’ status Monday evening, Linder said more heavy rainfall or levee breaches upstream could change how fast the dams must release water downstream.

“Our infrastructure is certainly being tested to its limits,” Linder said.

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Harvey’s record rains just triggered Houston dams to overflow

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God help us, Donald Trump tried to dispense energy facts again.

by Kailey A. Aitkin Posted on August 23, 2017

And pretty much nobody is happy about it, except maybe Nestlé.

Since 2011, 23 national parks had ended the sale of plastic water bottles to cut down on trash and litter. Before the ban took effect at the Grand Canyon, for example, water bottles made up 20 percent of the park’s total waste. But on Aug. 16, the Trump administration ended the six-year-old policy that enabled the ban, welcoming plastic bottles back to the Grand Canyon, Zion, and other national parks.

Bottled water companies had lobbied against the Obama-era policy for years. Coincidentally, the National Park Service’s statement on the reversal echoes the industry’s arguments: “It should be up to our visitors to decide how best to keep themselves and their families hydrated during a visit to a national park.”

Lauren Derusha Florez, Corporate Accountability International* campaign director, is calling for park superintendents to resist. “We know that many of our parks want to do away with bottled water,” she wrote in a blog post. “Let’s make sure they know that we support them in that move, even if the current administration doesn’t.”

*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Florez as the campaign director at the Sierra Club.

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God help us, Donald Trump tried to dispense energy facts again.

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