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3 disturbing facts prove sexual harassment is a big freaking deal

3 disturbing facts prove sexual harassment is a big freaking deal

By on 16 Apr 2015commentsShare

Hello! On this spring-shiny day, are you thinking about street harassment? No? My guess is that that’s probably because you’re not a woman, but no big deal — I am here to make you think about it. Gotcha!

A new study from researchers at Cornell University, with the cooperation of Hollaback!, surveyed over 4,000 American women on their experience of sexual harassment in public spaces. This is, according to Hollaback!, the largest study conducted on street harassment. No big surprise here, but the results are pretty disturbing. These, in our opinion, are the three most arresting:

The majority of women surveyed reported having experienced some type of harassment, from verbal to physical, in the past year. Half (!) had been groped or fondled in the past year.
Eighty-five percent experienced their first instance of harassment before the age of 17. Let’s think about this: If you absorb at an early age — keep in mind that 12 percent of women reported experiencing harassment for the first time before the age of 11 — that your body is subject to the words and hands of strange men in public spaces, wouldn’t that potentially have an effect on how you understand your right to exist outdoors?
A full 70 percent of women have elected, at some point, not to go out at night based on an incidence of harassment, and 73 percent have opted out of public transportation to avoid harassment. Harassment has the power to keep women inside, and unwilling to interact with their streets and cities.

I’m tired of repeating myself when it comes to the need to change attitudes toward women, particularly in public spaces, so I’ll just let Janelle Monae say it (perfectly) for me:

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3 disturbing facts prove sexual harassment is a big freaking deal

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U.N. warns us to eat less meat and lay off biofuels, or we’re in for it

U.N. warns us to eat less meat and lay off biofuels, or we’re in for it

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We’re overconsuming ourselves into environmental oblivion.

Farming will eliminate forests, plains, and other wild areas nearly the size of Brazil by 2050 around the world if we can’t mend our agricultural, dietary, and biofuel-burning ways. This unsustainable drive for more growing land will result in rising hunger and more frequent riots as food prices increase.

That’s the salty prognosis in a new report by scientists working for the U.N.’s International Resource Panel.

The amount of farmland has increased 11 percent since the 1960s, as growers struggle to meet growing populations’ ballooning demands for food and biofuel, according to the report. About 1.5 billion hectares, or 3.7 billion acres, is now being used globally to produce crops, and that figure continues to grow. Making matters worse, about a quarter of the world’s soils are degraded, which reduces the amount of crops that can be grown in them.

“Growing demand for food and non-food biomass will lead to an expansion of global cropland; yield growth will not be able to compensate for the expected surge in global demand,” the report states. “Cropland expansion at the cost of tropical forests and savannahs induces severe changes in the living environment with uncertain repercussions.”

What may be hardest for some of the world’s poorest and hungriest residents to stomach is the vast amount of farmland that’s being dedicated to growing crops for biofuels and for animal feed.

“One of our key challenges is overusing agricultural land for growing meat,” said report lead author Robert Howarth of Cornell University. “We don’t need to become complete vegetarians, but to put this into context and to help sustain feeding a burgeoning global population, we need to reduce our meat consumption by 60 percent — which is about 1940s era levels.”

The report lays out the malnourishing consequences of the worldwide shift toward biofuels, which eat into the proportion of croplands that can be used to feed humans. “In light of global efforts to increase food security, markets for food and fuel should be decoupled,” the report says. “This implies, for instance, reducing biofuel quotas.”

If current trends continue, by 2050, when the world population is expected to be greater than 9 billion people, between 320 and 849 million hectares of natural land would have been converted to cropland, according to the report. The upper end of that estimate approaches the size of Brazil. The lower end is twice what the scientists behind the report consider to be safe.

But there is hope. Here are some highlights from the report:

[G]ross expansion of croplands by 2050 could be limited to somewhere between 8 per cent and 37 per cent, provided a multi-pronged strategy is followed for meeting the food, energy and other requirements of the global economy. …

The authors believe global net cropland area could safely increase to up to 1,640 million hectares by 2020. While they recognize there is still great potential in increasing yields in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors highlight new opportunities to steer consumption towards levels of sustainability, particularly in high-consuming regions.

[T]he improvement of diets to enhance efficiency in biomass use and its substitutes, delinking the biofuels and food markets, the reduction of food loss and waste, the control of biomaterials consumption; with improved land management and restoration of degraded land, may allow us to save 161 to 319 million hectares of land by 2050.

Oh, and one more big-ticket item: We need to stop wasting so much damned food! “Reducing unsustainable demand can be achieved in a number of innovative ways,” the report says. “This includes aiding consumers to cut out wasteful and excessive consumption behaviors, improving efficiency across the life-cycle of agricultural commodities, and increasing the efficiency with which land-based resources are used.”


Source
Assessing Global Land Use: Balancing Consumption with Sustainable Supply, International Resource Panel
U.N. report sounds alarm on farming land-use crisis, Cornell Chronicle

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Fracking waste deemed too radioactive for hazardous-waste dump

Fracking waste deemed too radioactive for hazardous-waste dump

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A truck carrying fracking waste was quarantined and then sent back to where it came from after its contents triggered a radiation alarm at a Pennsylvania hazardous-waste landfill. The truck’s load was nearly 10 times more radioactive than is permitted at the dump in South Huntingdon township.

The radiation came from radium 226, a naturally occurring material in the Marcellus Shale, which being fracked for natural gas in Pennsylvania and nearby states. “Radium is a well known contaminant in fracking operations,” writes Jeff McMahon at Forbes.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Township Supervisor Mel Cornell said the MAX Environmental Technologies truck was quarantined Friday after it set off a radiation alarm at MAX’s landfill near Yukon, a 159-acre site that accepts residual waste and hazardous waste.

[Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection] spokesman John Poister confirmed the drill cutting materials from Rice Energy’s Thunder II pad in Greene County had a radiation level of 96 microrem.

The landfill must reject any waste with a radiation level that reaches 10 microrem or higher.

“It’s low-level radiation, but we don’t want any radiation in South Huntingdon,” Cornell said.

Poister said DEP instructed MAX to return the materials to the well pad where it was extracted for subsequent disposal at an approved facility.

Pennsylvania is currently studying radiation issues associated with fracking of the shale and disposal of the industry’s waste.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

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