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Why Recycled Jewelry Matters for a Green Valentine’s Day

by MarlaTranter Posted on February 8, 2016

As beautiful as jewelry can be to wear, it sure can have an ugly impact on people and the planet:

* Irresponsible mining practices, often in developing countries, have caused terrible human suffering and environmental devastation. I personally witnessed gold being panned along the banks of the Amazon in Peru; the workers were just dumping the arsenic-tainted slurry they used to separate the gold from the rock directly back into the river.

* Diamond mining has fueled civil wars in many African countries, where governments use “horrific violence” to maintain control of people and resources in mining regions, reports Brilliant Earth, a company devoted to producing jewelry ethically. A fictional portrayal of this issue was poignantly told in the Academy Award-nominated movie Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo di Caprio.

* Mining can take a heartbreakinghuman toll. Children as well as adults may be forced into dangerous jobs mining gold and diamonds. More than 200,000 women have been raped in Congo since a civil war began there over access to the country’s mineral resources. Workers die when tunnels collapse, rocks fall and underground mines catch fire.

* In addition to arsenic, mercury is used to separate gold from other materials. Brilliant Earth reports that gold mining is responsible for 30 to 40 percent of man-made mercury pollution each year. Mercury is a powerful toxin that’s known to cause brain damage, impair the ability of the heart and lungs to function and wreak neurological havoc in developing fetuses. When it gets dumped into a river or stream, it ends up in drinking and bathing water and becomes unavoidable.

* Gold mining is not just a problem in far-away countries. The U.S. is the third-largest gold-producing nationin the world, after China and Australia. Most U.S. gold comes from large open-pit heap leach mines in Nevada. “This type of mining is particularly damaging to the environment,” reports MIT. “Environmental hazards are present during every step of the open-pit mining process,” including exposing radioactive rocks, asbestos-like minerals and metallic dust. Rock slurries, which are mixtures of pulverized rock and liquid, are produced as tailings. Toxic and radioactive elements from these liquids can leak into bedrock and get into groundwater. If their containment ponds break, the slurries can be sent coursing into streams and rivers.

* Jewelry made from the body parts of endangered species threatens those animals even more. The Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) prohibits trading in shells, bones, skeletons and other parts of animals that are threatened or endangered. That means that shouldn’t buy jewelry made from those animals, either.

The Benefits of Buying Recycled Jewelry

Buying recycled jewelry offers a sharp contrast to buying it brand new. Choosing recycled saves energy, water and the mineral resources themselves. Eighty percent of all gold mined is made into jewelry, reports TheWorldWomenWant.com. There is already so much gold availablein old jewelry, coins and furnishingsthat we could satisfy our gold demands for the next 50 years just by getting access to old gold.

Making jewelry from recycled materials also helps reduce environmental degradation. It’s easy to see how much better it is to create a new ring out of an old one instead of needing to mine and process the gold from scratch.

Plus, there’s something inspiring about creating new and beautiful jewelry out of what otherwise might be thrown away.

And remember, your jewelry doesn’t need to be made from gold, sapphires, diamonds or rubies to be exquisite. I have a beautiful necklace made from an antique button, a gorgeous pendant fashioned from a piece of Chinese pottery and lovely earrings that used to be beach glass.

Where Can You Buy Recycled Jewelry?

Here is a list of the many places to find jewelry made from recycled gemstones, metals and everyday items.

Antique stores and estate sales – For high-quality rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants and broaches, browse antique stores and estate sales. Here’s another advantage: Prices may be somewhat better than buying the equivalent item new.

Craft fairs – Look for artisans who work with locally available materials, including beads, glass, stones, stainless steel and wood. Locate craft fairs by date and state here.

Family heirlooms – Jewelry is lovely to pass down from one generation to the next. My wedding ring, a combination of diamonds set into a gold band, originally belonged to my favorite aunt.My father gave his gold watch to one of my brothers. Perhaps your mother has a uniquenecklace she’ll pass on to you. Jewelry like this may not necessarily be more valuable, but it probably holds more sentimental meaning.

Etsy – Etsy artistsoften make jewelry out of recycled materials, including unusual items like buttons, typewriter keys, silverware, pop tops from soda and beer cans, sea glass and pottery. Plus on Etsy, you’re likely to find one-of-a-kind designs, since the artists don’t usually mass produce their wares.

Brilliant Earth – This company makes gorgeous wedding and engagement rings from recycled gemstones, recycled gold anddiamonds mined from countries committed to ethical mining practices, including Canada, Namibia and Botswana. Leber Jeweler and Hume Atelier are two other jewelers that have made a commitment to ethical sourcing.

Do What Oscar Nominees Do: Borrow It! The next time you watch the Academy Awards, listen closely when the starlets are asked about their stunning jewelry. They almost always say they’re wearing it on loan from a famous jewelry designer.And that’s a smart idea. Why not borrow a stand-out necklace or pair of earrings for your next big event rather than purchase it new. Check with family and friends to see what they’d be willing to loan you. Or visit BorrowedBling.com, an online emporium that, for a fee, lets you borrow rings, bracelets, necklaces, broaches, pins and earrings. You pay a monthly fee, browse their selections, place your order and return the items using their padded envelope and postage-paid shipping label.

Do you have a favorite piece of recycled jewelry? Please share!

Related:
Fashion Gone Bad: Rhino Horn Jewelry
Toxic Jewelry: Cadmium Found in Ardene, Aldo Products

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Why Recycled Jewelry Matters for a Green Valentine’s Day

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Almonds Are Getting Cheaper, But Here’s the Catch

by SalvadoJ36 Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ye almond-loving hipsters, rejoice! The revered—and lately quite expensive—nut is likely to get cheaper soon. The wholesale price for almonds—the one paid by supermarkets to stock their bulk bins, or by processors to make their trail mixes—has fallen from a high of $4.70 last August down to $2.60, reports the Financial Times.

And the reason has nothing to do with a viral screed against almond milk penned by a certain wag in 2014. Rather, it’s the same set of forces that triggered California’s massive almond boom in the first place: the vagaries of global demand.

The state’s growers, who churn out 99 percent of almonds grown in the United States, have rapidly expanded their almond groves over the past decade and a half.

But that expansion didn’t happen just to satisfy your trendy almond-milk latte habit. California farmers are almond growers to the world: They supply about 80 percent of the almonds consumed globally, and export demand has risen steadily for most of the past 15 years. About 70 percent of California’s almonds are exported. According to the Almond Board of California, the great bulk of this massive outflow goes to Asia, the destination of 44 percent of California’s almond exports, and Western Europe, which gets about 40 percent.

As a result of that booming global demand, the price farmers get for almonds has risen dramatically despite the big acreage expansion.

But in recent months, the global appetite for almonds has plunged. Here’s the Financial Times:

Last year’s surge in prices depressed demand, and buyers in China, the Middle East and India, who have led consumption over the past three to four years, have disappeared. Trading has ground to a halt as prices continue to decline and the number of rejected containers by buyers refusing to honor contracts has jumped.

“It’s a bloodbath,” one California-based nut trader told the Financial Times. What happened was that California’s multiyear drought took a bite out of crop yields, making almonds more scarce and pushing up their price. And then, in 2014, the US dollar began to rise in value against major Asian currencies and the euro, making US exports, including almonds, even more expensive in those regions.

To make matters worse, the European economy stagnated, and China—the globe’s biggest almond importer—saw its economic growth slow and its stock market tumble. Snack makers in Asia and Europe began to balk at pricey almonds, putting fewer in nut mixes and reducing the portion size of almond offerings, the FT reports. In 2015, almond exports to Asia and Western Europe fell 12 percent and 7 percent, respectively, according to the Almond Board of California.

And now, with a historic El Niño triggering a wet and snowy winter in California, the market expects a big harvest in 2016. Econ 101 tells us that abundant supply and weak demand means lower prices going forward. That likely means you’ll soon be getting at least a slight break on that bag of salty roasted almonds you keep at your desk. But what does it mean for California’s almond boom?

In previous posts, I’ve questioned whether the state has the water resources—or access to sufficient bee hives for pollination—to continue devoting ever more land to the crunchy treat. Unlike, say, vegetables or cotton, which can be fallowed during dry years, planting an almond grove requires farmers to commit to finding a steady water source for about 20 years, or risk losing a very expensive investment. (According to the Almond Board of California, establishing an almond grove—paying for land, saplings, an irrigation system, etc.—costs about $8,700 per acre, or about $2.6 million for a new 300-acre grove.)

During the drought, water from California’s massive irrigation projects, which deliver melted Sierra Nevada snow to the state’s farms, was largely cut off. Farmers responded by fallowing a portion of annual crops like cotton and vegetables and irrigating the rest—including their ever-expanding almond groves—with water drawn from finite underground aquifers. While the current El Niño might spell the end of a drought that has haunted California since 2012, California agriculture has gotten so ravenous for water that aquifers in its largest (and most almond-centered) growing region, the Central Valley, have been declining steadily for decades.

For my deep dive into the almond boom last year, I asked David Doll, an orchard adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension, how long growers could keep devoting ever more land to almonds despite the long-term water crunch. He told me it would only stop “when the crop stops making money.”

I checked back in with him to see what he thought about the current price drop. He said under normal conditions, when water is flowing from the state’s irrigation projects, the break-even farmer price for almonds is about $1.45 per pound—at that price, farmers neither lose nor make money. But when water is scarce, farmers face higher irrigation costs, and the break-even price rises to somewhere between $2.60 and $2.85—roughly where prices are now. So even with the current price drop, most almond growers are breaking even. But if we get another wet winter this year, water prices could drop by 2017 and almond farmers will be right back to profitability.

If the Asian and European appetite for almonds returns to normal growth rates, Doll added, the almond expansion will likely continue unabated, which will in turn limit large upward price swings as supply rises to meet demand. The limiting factor, of course, is water. Back in 2014, California shook off a history of Wild West aquifer stewardship and passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires that by 2025, the state’s aquifers can’t be drawn down faster than they’re recharged—a dramatic reversal of the status quo. “From my observations, there are many almond operations that are not planning for this policy,” Doll said, meaning they’re not prepared for a future when aquifers can’t be tapped at will.

But 2025 is nearly a decade away. Enjoy those relatively inexpensive almonds, you ignorant hipsters.

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Almonds Are Getting Cheaper, But Here’s the Catch

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The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

by GeorginStreetma Posted on January 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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On January 2, a band of armed militants—led by Cliven Bundy‘s son Ammon—stormed Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, seizing the visitor center both to protest the tangled legal plight of two local ranchers convicted of arson on public land, and to defy the federal government’s oversight of vast landholdings in the West. (You might remember that Cliven launched his own successful revolt against federal authorities in 2014 to avoid paying grazing fees on public land in Nevada.)

For all the slapstick comedy on display at the still-occupied government complex—rival militias arriving to “deescalate” the situation, public pleas for donated supplies including “French Vanilla Creamer”—the armed-and-angry men behind the fiasco are pointing their rifles at a real problem. In short, the ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative, profit margins.

It’s not hard to see why grazing rights are an issue. Ranchers’ struggle for profitability gives them strong incentive to expand their operations to increase overall volume and gain economies of scale. A 2011 USDA paper found that the average cost per cow for small (20-49 head) operations exceeded $1,600, while for large ranches (500 or more head), the average cost stood at less than $400. Large operations are more efficient at deploying investments in labor and infrastructure (think fencing), the USDA reported.

To scale up, ranchers need access to sufficient land. And in the West, land access often means obtaining grazing rights to public land through the Bureau of Land Management. Hence the bitter dispute playing out in Burns, Oregon: The ranchers accuse the federal government of ruining their businesses through overzealous environmental regulation of that public land.

Now, t’s clear that what the Malheur militiamen appear to be demanding—essentially laissez-faire land management based on private ownership, overseen by local politicians—is a recipe for ecological ruin. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the environmental historian Nancy Langston described what happened last time such a policy regime prevailed in the area: “By the 1930s, after four decades of overgrazing, irrigation withdrawals, grain agriculture, dredging and channelization, followed by several years of drought, Malheur had become a dust bowl.”

But the real beef struggling ranchers should take up with the federal government involves not zealous federal regulation, but rather its opposite: the way the feds have watched idly as giant meat-packing companies came to dominate the US beef production chain. Ranchers run what are known as cow-calf operations—they raise cows up to a certain weight on pasture, sell them to a feedlots to be fattened on corn and soybeans (and other stuff), which then sell them to companies known as beef packers that slaughter and prep the meat for consumers. As the University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson points out, after a decade of mergers and acquisitions, just four companies slaughtered and packed 69 percent of US-grown cows in 1990. By 2011—after another spasm of mergers—the four-company market share had risen to 82 percent, Hendrickson reports.

Such consolidation at the top of the value chain gives farmers less leverage to get a decent price for their cows. A market dominated by a few buyers is a buyer’s market. The Kansas rancher and rural advocate Mike Callicrate has been making this point tirelessly for years. Callicrate thinks the BLM has been overly burdensome for ranchers in the West, he tells me, but there’s a bigger problem that is “rarely mentioned” either by the gun-toting ranchers or the media covering them: “the historically low, below break-even, market prices for livestock.”

As the big beef packers scaled up and consolidated their market share in the 1980s and ’90s, giant retailers led by Walmart did the same. The result has been steady downward pressure on the beef supply chain: The retail giants pressured the beef packers to deliver lower prices, and the beef packers in turn pressured ranchers. The result has been a big squeeze.

In the chart below that Callicrate created for a 2013 blog post, drawn from USDA data, the trend is clear: Compared to 40 years ago, nearly a third less of every dollar you spend on beef goes into the pocket of the rancher who raised the cow.

Chart by Mike Callicrate

Under pressure from this squeeze, ranchers have had little choice but to scale up, or exit the business altogether—as tens of thousands have done:

Chart: USDA

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants. As the New America Foundation’s Barry C. Lynn has shown repeatedly, since the age of Reagan, US antitrust regulators have focused almost exclusively on whether large companies use their market power to harm consumers by unfairly raising retail prices. Those regulators have looked the other way when companies deploy their girth to harm their suppliers by squeezing them on price. So antitrust authorities okayed merger after merger, even when deals left just a few giant companies towering over particular markets. As a result, writes Lynn, “In sector after sector, control is now more tightly concentrated than at any time in a century.” The meat industry is a classic example.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama vowed to challenge the big meat packers and defend independent farmers and ranchers from their heft. As Lina Khan showed in a 2012 Washington Monthly piece, President Obama actually made a valiant effort to do just that—before surrendering to a harsh counterattack from the industry’s friends in Congress.

The current presidential election would be an ideal time for beleaguered ranchers to bring corporate domination of meat markets back into the public conversation. Armed occupations of bird-refuge visitor centers won’t help with that struggle.

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The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

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Armed Militia Occupies National Wildlife Refuge

by ArlethaHibbs Posted on January 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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As many as 100 armed militia members seized control of a Fish and Wildlife Services building in a remote part of eastern Oregon on Saturday and threatened to shoot law enforcement officers who attempt to kick them out.

Led by Ammon Bundy, the son of the Nevada rancher whose standoff with the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing fees made national headlines in 2015, the group took over the headquarters of Malheur National Wildlife Refugee shortly after a peaceful march in the nearby town of Burns. The militia’s latest cause celebre is that of Dwight and Stephen Hammond, father-son ranchers who face prison time under an anti-terrorism statute for setting fires on federal lands. Both Hammonds already served short sentences for the crime, but after they got out, they were re-sentenced to the mandatory minumum of five years.

In addition to freedom for the Hammonds, the Bundy group is demanding that the federal government give up control of nearby Malheur National Forest.

The Malheur occupation is only the latest in a long line of armed confrontations between conservative land rights activists and the federal government on public lands. But the clearest historical precedent for Saturday’s takeover came in 1966, when Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a group founded by Chicano land rights activist Reies Lopes Tijerina, occupied a part of Carson National Forest north of Santa Fe and declared it New Pueblo Republic of San Joaquin del Rio de Chama. They even arrested two Forest Rangers who come to confront them, and charged them with trespassing. Tijerina’s occupation lasted all of one day. Ammon Bundy told the Oregonian on Saturday that his group might hold their position for years.

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Armed Militia Occupies National Wildlife Refuge

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Did a Republican Megadonor Just Secretly Buy Nevada’s Biggest Newspaper?

by Michell11X Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Conventional wisdom holds that you do not want to buy a newspaper because newspapers are terrible investments. Yet late last week, someone did buy the largest newspaper in Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and paid a premium for it. Even stranger, nobody knows who it was, and the new owners seem to be actively working to keep it that way.

The sale has created a controversy because, while there is no rule requiring a newspaper to disclose its owners, the Journal-Review will be, by far, the largest newspaper in America whose owners are secret. The intrigue is not just journalistic: For a well-heeled person interested in influencing an election, owning the largest paper in the state that in a few short months will hold one of the first nominating events of the primary season (third for Democrats and fourth for Republicans) is a good place to start.

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Did a Republican Megadonor Just Secretly Buy Nevada’s Biggest Newspaper?

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The Raging Future of American Wildfires

by Myrna Posted on August 27, 2015

The risk of major blazes could increase 600 percent by mid-century, say scientists. Tom Reichner/Shutterstock On the one hand, the warming atmosphere is predicted to drench many parts of the U.S. with extreme rain. On the other, for much of the year it’ll likely desiccate vast areas into brittle tinder, setting the stage for more frequent and powerful wildfires. Increasingly balmy temperatures and a steady lengthening of the wildfire season (peep what’s happening this year in Alaska and Canada) will light a flame under America’s fire potential. By mid-century, large hunks of the country—including the West, the Gulf Coast, and the forested Great Lakes—could see a sixfold increase in weeks with a threat of major fires, according to researchers at the University of Idaho, the U.S. Forest Service, and elsewhere. Using climate models, the scientists project a future where “very large fires” have ample opportunity to explode, according to a paper in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. This class of conflagration is responsible for charring most of the land in many parts of the nation. Aside for the above-mentioned places, the researchers say, the risk of large fires could intensify in Northern California’s Klamath Mountains and Sierra Nevada and from Florida up the East Coast. Read the rest at CityLab. See more here:  The Raging Future of American Wildfires ; ; ;

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The Raging Future of American Wildfires

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California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

by BillBelgrave Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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In normal years, California residents get about 30 percent of their drinking water from underground aquifers. And in droughts like the current one—with sources like snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains virtually non-existent—groundwater supplies two-thirds of our most populous state’s water needs. So it’s sobering news that about 20 percent of the groundwater that Californians rely on to keep their taps flowing carries high concentrations of contaminants like arsenic, uranium, and nitrate.

That’s the conclusion of a ten-year US Geological Survey study of 11,000 public-water wells across the state. The researchers tested the wells for a variety of contaminants, looking for levels above thresholds set by the Environmental Protection Agency and/or the California State Water Resources Board.

Interestingly, naturally occurring trace elements like arsenic, manganese, and uranium turned up at high levels much more commonly agriculture-related chemicals like nitrate.

In the ag-heavy San Joaquin Valley (the Central Valley’s Southern half), for example, you might expect plenty of nitrate in the water, because of heavy reliance on nitrogen fertilizers. Over the limit of 10 parts per million in water, nitrate can impede the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and has been linked to elevated rates of birth defects and cancers of the ovaries and thyroid. But while 4.9 percent of wells in the San Joaquin turned up over legal nitrate thresholds, arsenic (over legal limits in 11.2 percent of wells) and uranium (7.4 percent)—neither of which are used in farming—were more common.

But in the case of uranium—which heightens the risk of kidney trouble and cancer when consumed in water over long periods—agriculture isn’t off the hook. Kenneth Belitz, the study’s lead author and chief of the USGS’s National Water Quality Assessment Program, explains that before irrigation, the arid San Joaquin landscape supported very little vegetation, and the naturally occurring uranium in the landscape was relatively stable. But as farms sprouted up, irrigation water reacted with carbon dioxide from now-abundant plant roots to “mobilize” the uranium, pushing it downward at the rate of 5 to ten feet per year and eventually into the water table.

Conversely, some of the regions with highest nitrate levels are former ag areas that are now suburban, Belitz says: northern California’s Livermore Valley and southern California’s Santa Ana basin. That’s because nitrates, too, move through the soil strata at a rate of five to ten feet per year, and take years to accumulate in underground aquifers.

And that means that today’s ag-centric areas, including the San Joaquin Valley, could be slowly building up nitrate levels year by year that could lead to much higher nitrate levels in well water in coming decades, Belitz says.

For California residents and policymakers, the reports adds another distressing data point to the current water crisis. The fossil record and climate models suggests that precipitation levels will likely drop significantly compared to 20th century norms going forward, according to UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram—meaning an ever-growing reliance on groundwater for both farms and residents. Meanwhile, NASA research shows that this increasingly important resource is being drawn down at a much faster pace than it’s being replenished. And this latest USGS study suggests that the state’s precious, vanishing groundwater supply is widely contaminated. It’s enough to make you want to open a bottle of the state’s famous wine.

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California Drinking Water: Not Just Vanishing, But Also Widely Contaminated

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2014 Was the Biggest Year For Solar Power Ever

by SherryMartino Posted on March 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’ve noted here before the many ways in which solar power is blowing up in the United States: Adding tons of jobs, driving progressive policies, and attracting millions of dollars in investment from major corporations. It’s not slowing down anytime soon: New data from market analysis firm GTM Research finds that 2014 was solar’s biggest year ever, with 30 percent more photovoltaic installations installed than in 2013. Check it out:

GTM

Those numbers are even more impressive when you compare them to other types of energy sources. Even though solar still accounts for a small share of US electricity generation (less than 1 percent), last year it added nearly as many new megawatts to the grid as natural gas, which is quickly catching up on coal as the country’s primary energy source. (Coal, you can see, added almost nothing new in 2014.)

GTM

The report points to three chief reasons for the boom. First, costs are falling, not just for the panels themselves but for ancillary expenses like installation and financing, such that overall prices fell by 10 percent compared to 2013. Second, falling costs have allowed both large utility companies and small third-party solar installers to pursue new ways to bring solar to customers, including leasing panels and improved on-site energy storage. Third, federal incentives and regulations have been relatively stable in the last few years, while state incentives are generally improving, particularly in states like California and Nevada that have been leading the charge.

One more chart worth pointing out: Rooftop solar tends to get the most press because that’s where homeowners and solar companies get into tussles with big incumbent power companies and the state regulators that often side with them. And it’s true that a new home gets solar more often than a giant solar farm gets constructed. But on a sheer megawatt basis, utility-scale solar is still far and away the leading source, with a few notable projects coming online in 2014, like the Topaz Solar project in the California desert, the largest solar installation in the world.

GTM

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2014 Was the Biggest Year For Solar Power Ever

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Evil Cannibal Squirrels Could Make California’s Drought Less Terrible

by CharmaiMcNess Posted on January 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared at Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Among alfalfa farmers in Northern California, Public Enemy No. 1 is a promiscuous, photogenic fur ball that weighs only half a pound and spends most of its life asleep. But with the critter helping the state weather its worst drought in 1,200 years, that perception may soon be a thing of the past.

The diminutive Belding’s ground squirrel, an important link in the food chain for coyotes, bobcats, foxes, weasels, and raptors, has a long and troubled history as a major agricultural pest.

Blame the squirrel’s voracious appetite for alfalfa. Blame its fleas, which can carry plague. Above all, blame the complex network of burrows it digs, which trip up livestock and damage farm machinery.

All told, there are few animals in greater need of an image makeover than the rodent known to biologists as Urocitellus beldingi, and to detractors as pot gut, sage rat, and picket pin.

But now, courtesy of climate change and California’s record-setting drought, Belding’s ground squirrels may be on the brink of a reversal of fortune. The same rodents responsible for millions of dollars’ worth of lost crops and damaged equipment might just turn out to be highly valuable ecosystem engineers, a designation reserved for organisms that modify their habitats, improving ecosystem stability and health.

In this case, the same burrowing behavior that wreaks havoc on cultivated land can be of enormous benefit to the high-altitude meadows that are the Belding’s ground squirrels’ natural habitat. These meadows play a key role in storing and filtering the parched Golden State’s water supply.

“Belding’s are beneficial to the meadows if, as we suspect, they act as ecosystem engineers and help aerate and otherwise affect the soils of the meadows they specialize in,” says Toni Lyn Morelli, adjunct assistant professor and program manager with the Department of Interior Northeast Climate Science Center based at the University of Massachusetts.

“These meadows are then more effective at filtering and holding the water that eventually trickles down, so to speak, to be the water that is drunk and used by the majority of the state of California,” says Morelli.

Unfortunately, the prospect of newfound favor comes at a time when Belding’s ground squirrels may be scampering toward extinction. While few farmers would mourn their demise, scientists see it as part of a disturbing pattern clearly driven by climate change.

When biologist Joseph Grinnell set out a century ago to document it, California’s natural diversity was already diminishing. The founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley believed human activity—irrigation, cultivation, and deforestation—was to blame.

Along with setting the standard for modern biological field work, Grinnell’s detailed field journals, photographs, and specimens provide an unrivaled basis for modern biological comparison.

A research team led by Morelli revisited some of the sites documented by Grinnell in search of the Belding’s ground squirrel. Their findings were most unexpected: The animal had disappeared from nearly half of the sites where Grinnell had reported them.

“We were surprised to see such a dramatic decline in this species, which is well-known to Sierran hikers and was thought to be fairly common,” Morelli says. “In fact, the rate of decline is much greater than that seen in the same region for the pika, a small mountain-dwelling cousin of the rabbit that has become the poster child for the effects of global warming in the contiguous United States.”

Morelli saw a clear connection between the Belding’s disappearance and climate change. The areas where the squirrels could no longer be found were the ones that had gotten hotter. They were also the areas where precipitation patterns had markedly changed.

There was one exception, however: The squirrels had made themselves at home on lower-lying cultivated land such as alfalfa fields and other irrigated areas that serve as an oasis amid hotter, drier conditions.

In some of these human-modified habitats, the squirrels have not only survived, but thrived. To the chagrin of farmers, Belding’s have achieved a density of more than 100 per acre while feasting on crops of alfalfa, rye, wheat, barley, and oats.

Besides California, Belding’s ground squirrels can be found in parts of Oregon, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Like the much larger prairie dogs they resemble, they’re highly social creatures that depend on their numbers for survival and their burrows for safety.

They’re among few species that engage in altruistic behavior, standing upright and whistling to alert others to impending danger even as the whistle-blower becomes an easy target for predators.

While a single squirrel will sacrifice itself to warn others of danger, the disappearance of the species is a warning humanity would be wise to heed. The Sierra Nevada’s approximately 17,000 high altitude meadows are drying out, which exacerbates California’s ongoing water crisis while making survival harder for the Belding’s squirrel.

Normally, the annual winter snowpack protects the soil from degradation caused by fluctuations in temperature and precipitation. But after years of excessive variations in both, the soil is becoming less porous. This makes it less able to trap moisture and slowly release it into the streams.

The Belding’s ground squirrel also relies on an insulating blanket of snow to protect it during a hibernation that can last up to nine months, the longest of any mammal. Without consistent snow cover, Morelli suspects, the squirrels froze in their burrows. Others likely drowned, she says, since rain and snow that fall on dry soil are poorly absorbed and therefore more apt to cause flooding.

Early thaws followed by more winter weather can be equally deadly, as researchers discovered in the 1970s when a Sierra Nevada snowstorm hit eight days after the Belding’s ground squirrels had begun to emerge from hibernation.

The squirrels stopped mating, their weight dropped sharply, and they became more susceptible to predators. Some depleted their fat reserves and starved. Similar scenarios may have played out in other sites from which the squirrels have vanished. With climate change expected to bring greater swings in temperature and extreme weather, these patterns are likely to continue.

Even apart from the challenges of extreme weather and shrinking habitat, Belding’s ground squirrels face precarious odds in their struggle for survival. Hibernation takes an enormous toll. Biologists who tracked a population of Belding’s ground squirrels in the central Sierra Nevada for 11 consecutive seasons found that more than one-third of adults and two-thirds of young never re-emerge from their long winter’s nap.

Those that do can live four or five years, relatively long for a rodent. But on average, males live only half as long as females, partly because they severely injure one another fighting for the right to mate on the one day a year when the female is fertile. On that day, the female mates with multiple males, producing an average litter of eight a month later.

During their active period in the summer, they gorge on leaves, stems, bulbs, fruits, and occasionally each other, doubling their body weight. In the cultivated fields where squirrels have taken up residence, “there are areas that have been chewed to the soil,” Morelli says. “They look like crop circles, like aliens have landed.”

In one study by the University of California Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program, an estimated 123 squirrels removed 1,800 pounds of crop per acre in 44 days.

By treating farm fields as a free buffet, the squirrels have curried no favor with their human landlords who rely on those fields for their livelihoods.

“I’ve talked to locals and been told, ‘I hire high school kids, give them a box of 22’s, and a dollar a tail for their efforts,'” says James Patton, emeritus professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, and curator of mammals at the museum founded by Joseph Grinnell.

“Burrowing animals provide tremendous positive benefit that is completely ignored by everyone,” says Patton, who places soil restoration at the top of the list. “In addition, they eat grasses, which keeps grass on the landscape. Because of that, they keep more water in the landscape. And that also prevents erosion.”

With climate change and the California drought throwing its ecosystem services into sharp relief, the crop-eating pest may be recast from reviled rodent to high elevation hero—provided the species survives.

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Evil Cannibal Squirrels Could Make California’s Drought Less Terrible

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What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?

by Shayna9349 Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
The lighter the shade of blue, the higher the chance of a White Christmas. NOAA/NCDC

This story originally appeared in CityLab and is published here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Those determined to have a White Christmas should grab crampons and a bottle of scotch and prepare for a tough slog. Many places in the lower 48 with a lock on holiday snow are located in rugged, altitudinous climes—the bony ridge of the Sierra Nevada, for instance, and the wind-burned peaks of the Rockies.

That much is clear in this delightful NOAA map plotting probabilities across the US for a White Christmas, defined here as a December 25 with more than an inch of snow on the ground. Based on three decades of climate normals from the National Climatic Data Center, the graphic shows a stark geographic divide when it comes to unwrapping presents in snow-globe conditions: A region of zero to 10 percent probability curves from Washington State through coastal California and then explodes in the deep South and Southeast. Parts of the Midwest also are likely to be snowless, with places like Kansas, Missouri, and lower Illinois having only an 11 to 25 percent chance of a White Christmas.

New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., have piddling shots at this charming weather, though their brethren higher on the East Coast fare better: Boston and Providence each have a 41 to 50 percent chance. Chicago racks a (considering its frosty reputation) low-sounding 41 to 50 percent chance, and Buffalo, home to sudden crashing currents of lake-effect snow, takes it up to 51 to 60 percent.

Aside from the West’s mountain ranges, NOAA says the best-performing powder points for December 25 are Maine, upstate New York, Minnesota, the highlands of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and almost “anywhere in Idaho.” But even these crystal-crusted locales could shake off the holiday snow this year, the agency says: “While the map shows the climatological probability that a snow depth of at least one inch will be observed on December 25, the actual conditions this year may vary widely from these probabilities because the weather patterns present will determine the snow on the ground or snowfall on Christmas day.”

Here’s another version of the map that’s less smooth, but clearer at delineating regional probabilities:

NOAA/NCDC

View the original here:

What Are the Odds Your City Will Have a White Christmas?

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