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Shopping Local: A Berry Beneficial Choice

by AndreCulbertson Posted on August 13, 2018

You wake up on a lazy Saturday morning. The sun is shining, the grass is green and fresh produce is in season. It’s time to make your way over to your nearest farmers’ market to stock up on locally made and grown goods.

Farmers? markets are lively events during the warmer months. Shopping at farmers? markets is not only fun, it can also have a positive impact on the environment, your health and your community.

Environmental impact

Much of the food from a supermarket travels long distances before reaching the shelves (Photo by Gratisography, CC0)

Shopping for local produce can be a more environmentally friendly choice than heading to the supermarket.

The further food has to travel, the longer and more energy intensive the process becomes. From picking and sorting, to shipping and storing, these steps all require large amounts of energy in the form of electricity and oil. Products sold at farmers? markets are generally created or grown within a 160-kilometre radius of the places they?re sold, which can greatly help reduce the product?s total carbon footprint.

The use of fertilizers such as phosphorus are also commonplace on larger industrial farms. They are added to the soil to try and increase the quality and growing time of plants. Run-off from these products can accumulate in bodies of water, causing toxic algae blooms, a process called eutrophication. This unsustainable practice depletes the soil of its nutrients, rendering it unusable. Most small-scale farmers use these fertilizers more sparingly or don?t use them at all, which helps preserve the soil?s integrity for the next growing season.

Local products often tend to come with much less packaging. Products sold locally aren?t typically wrapped. This gives consumers a chance to bring their own reusable bags and reduce the amount of plastic and other garbage that ends up in landfills and waterways.

Healthy choices

Another bonus that comes from shopping locally is that the products purchased are generally better for your health. Products found on the shelves of grocery stores are usually picked days or weeks before, and they have sat ripening in fridges or on shelves before they hit the store. More traditional practices allow produce to ripen in the field, and they are picked right before being sold. When picked at its prime, produce tastes fresh and is packed with maximum nutrients.

Fresh strawberries at a farmers’ market (Photo by Alexandria Baldridge, Pexels)

Buying local also means buying what?s in season. In the summer months, you?ll see strawberries and raspberries starting to appear, while products like squash and pumpkins only appear in the fall. This is the way we traditionally ate before technology made it possible to store our food in fridges and ship food from warmer climates in the dead of winter.

The best part about farmers? markets is that if you have any questions about how products have been produced or made, you can just ask the farmer! It?s a rarity these days to be able to meet the people who grow our food and to have the answers to our questions right in front of us.

Community involvement

Finally, shopping for locally sourced products helps you become an active member in your community. Much of the food we eat is produced on large-scale single-crop farms. According to Statistics Canada, between 1931 and 2006, the total land being farmed increased, but the number of farms in operation decreased almost 70 per cent from over 700,000 farms to 229,373, as smaller farms were taken over or bought out by larger industrial farms. By purchasing local products, you are supporting farm families and keeping your money within your local economy.

Unique events such as farmers’ markets create vibrant communities where people come to meet up and connect with their friends, family and neighbors.

Have fun, eat fresh!

These are just some of the many benefits of shopping locally. Next time you?re looking for a relaxed weekend activity or a colorful vegetable to brighten your summer salad, be sure to look for a farmers? market near you. Feel good, have fun and make a difference!

This post was written by Jackie Bastianon and originally appeared on the Nature Conservancy of Canada?s blog, Land Lines.

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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Shopping Local: A Berry Beneficial Choice

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California’s fire tornado is what climate change looks like

by celemaiieftinebileteavion Posted on August 2, 2018

For weeks now, the world has been in the grips of a global heat wave — one of the most destructive and unusually hot summers in human history. And we know that a summer like this couldn’t have happened without climate change.

In California and in wildfire zones around the world, survivors are sharing the images and videos they captured while fleeing some of the most destructive fires in history.

From an on-the-ground, human perspective, July looked and felt like hell.

The video above is of the massive Carr Fire, still burning mostly uncontained near Redding, California. At last count, 1,555 homes have burned — one of the most destructive fires in California history. Six of the state’s 20 most destructive fires on record have occurred in the past 10 months.

If it looks to you like a giant fire tornado, you’d be right. And living through it was just as terrifying as you’d expect.

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Governor Jerry Brown said simply, “We are in uncharted territories.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why he’s right. July was the hottest month ever measured in Redding. Burnable vegetation in the area is at the 99th percentile. These are ideal conditions for a megafire. The Carr Fire alone is more than four times larger than the city of San Francisco; its smoke is setting records for the worst air quality in history as far away as 200 miles away in Reno, Nevada.

But perhaps the most unusual thing about the Carr Fire is the incredibly strong winds it created:

The heat from the fire was so intense that it created a towering, rotating cloud six miles high — meteorologists call them pyrocumulus, but this one effectively was a giant tornado. The wind damage from the Carr Fire is consistent with speeds in excess of 143 mph.*

Winds this strong over such a widespread area are exceedingly rare in wildfires, though they have been documented before. Fires need oxygen to burn, and the Carr Fire created its own weather to ensure a constant oxygen supply — to devastating effect.

Big fires, like the Carr Fire, are getting more common as more people live closer to forests and temperatures rise. But it’s that latter factor that’s most important in making fire size skyrocket in recent years. The heat we’re experiencing right now is unlike any previous generation has ever experienced. And it’s not just happening in California.

In northern Finland, sunbathers lounged with reindeer near the Arctic Circle while a wildfire burned in the distance.

In Greece, there is terrifying footage of people escaping July’s horrific fires.

With more than a dozen large fires burning throughout California, this year’s fire season is already starting to outstrip the state’s resources. Thousands of firefighters have flown in from across the country to help fight the blazes, and wildfire season is just getting started. August is the peak month for wildfires across the western U.S. According to the latest fire outlook released on Wednesday, nearly the entire region will remain at above normal risk until at least October.

In Europe, ideal wildfire conditions are set to return this weekend, with temperatures in Spain and Portugal forecast to challenge all-time European records.

If there’s one thing we should take away from this nightmarish weather, it’s this: As bad as these fires are, climate change isn’t going to let up until we work together to address its root causes. Warming-fueled megafires isn’t a new normal, it’s a new exceptional; a new extraordinary.

*This post has been updated with new information.

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California’s fire tornado is what climate change looks like

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

by LakeishU32 Posted on August 1, 2018

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

Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. The sour irony of that muttonheaded resistance to data is that, after four decades of being wrong, those people are almost right.

As of July 31, more than 25,000 firefighters are committed to 140 wildfires across the United States — over a million acres aflame. Eight people are dead in California, tens of thousands evacuated, smoke and pyroclastic clouds are visible from space. And all any fire scientist knows for sure is, it only gets worse from here. How much worse? Where? For whom? Experience can’t tell them. The scientists actually are uncertain.

Scientists who help policymakers plan for the future used to make an assumption. They called it stationarity, and the idea was that the extremes of environmental systems — rainfall, river levels, hurricane strength, wildfire damage — obeyed prior constraints. The past was prologue. Climate change has turned that assumption to ash. The fires burning across the western United States (and in Europe) prove that “stationarity is dead,” as a team of researchers (controversially) wrote in the journal Science a decade ago. They were talking about water; now it’s true for fire.

“We can no longer use the observed past as a guide. There’s no stable system that generates a measurable probability of events to use the past record to plan for the future,” says LeRoy Westerling, a management professor who studies wildfires at UC Merced. “Now we have to use physics and complex interactions to project how things could change.”

Wildfires were always part of a complex system. Climate change — carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases raising the overall temperature of the planet — added to the complexity. The implications of that will play out for millennia. “On top of that is interaction between the climate system, the ecosystem, and how we manage our land use,” Westerling says. “That intersection is very complex, and even more difficult to predict. When I say there’s no new normal, I mean it. The climate will be changing with probably an accelerating pace for the rest of the lives of everyone who is alive today.”

That’s not to say there’s nothing more to learn or do. To the contrary, more data on fire behavior will help researchers build models of what might happen. They’ll look at how best to handle “fuel management,” or the removal of flammable plant matter desiccated by climate change-powered heat waves and drought. More research will help with how to build less flammable buildings, and to identify places where buildings maybe shouldn’t be in the first place. Of course, that all presumes policymakers will listen and act. They haven’t yet. “People talk about ‘resilience,’ they talk about ‘hardening,’” Westerling says. “But we’ve been talking about climate change and risks like wildfire for decades now and haven’t made a whole lot of headway outside of the scientific and management communities.”

It’s true. At least two decades ago — perhaps as long as a century — fire researchers were warning that increasing atmospheric CO2 would mean bigger wildfires. History confirmed at least the latter hypothesis; using data like fire scars and tree ring sizes, researchers have shown that before Europeans came to North America, fires were relatively frequent but relatively small, and indigenous people like the Pueblo used lots of wood for fuel and small-diameter trees for construction. When the Spaniards arrived, spreading disease and forcing people out of their villages, the population crashed by perhaps as much as 90 percent and the forests went back to their natural fire pattern — less frequent, low intensity, and widespread. By the late 19th century, the land changed to livestock grazing and its users had no tolerance for fire at all.

“So in the late 20th and early 21st century, with these hot droughts, fires are ripping now with a severity and ferocity that’s unprecedented,” says Tom Swetnam, a dendrochronologist who did a lot of that tree-ring work. A fire in the Jemez Mountains Swetnam studies burned 40,000 acres in 12 hours, a “horizontal roll vortex fire” that had two wind-driven counter-rotating vortices of flame. “That thing left a canopy hole with no trees over 30,000 acres. A giant hole with no trees,” he says. “There’s no archaeological evidence of that happening in at least 500 years.”

Swetnam actually lives in a fire-prone landscape in New Mexico — right in the proverbial wildland-urban interface, as he says. He knows it’s more dangerous than ever. “It’s sad. It’s worrying. Many of us have been predicting that we were going to see these kinds of events if the temperature continued to rise,” Swetnam says. “We’re seeing our scariest predictions coming true.”

Fire researchers have been hollering about the potential consequences for fires of climate change combined with land use for at least as long as hurricane and flood researchers have been doing the same. It hasn’t kept people from building houses on the Houston floodplain and constructing poorly-planned levees along the Mississippi, and it hasn’t kept people from building houses up next to forests and letting undergrowth and small trees clump together — all while temperatures rise.

“Some of the fires are unusual, but the reason it seems more unusual is that there are people around to see it — fire whorls, large vortices, there are plenty of examples of those,” says Mark Finney, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “But some things are changing.” Drought and temperature are worse. Sprawl is worse. “The worst fires haven’t happened yet,” Finney says. “The Sierra Nevada is primed for this kind of thing, and those kinds of fires would be truly unprecedented for those kinds of ecosystems in the past thousands of years.”

So what happens next? The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests of the west burn, and then don’t come back? They convert to grassland? That hasn’t happened in thousands of years where the Giant Sequoia grow. So … install sprinklers in Sequoia National Forest? “I’m only the latest generation to be frustrated,” Finney says. “At least two, maybe three generations before me experienced exactly the same frustration.” Nobody listened to them, either. And now the latest generation isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next.

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

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With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Congress will likely gain a new climate champion

by VDCTraceeap Posted on June 27, 2018

On Tuesday night, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez toppled a 10-term Congressman from New York City in a landslide Democratic primary victory. The shocking result virtually assures that the U.S. Congress will welcome its youngest female member ever next year.

The upset win also essentially guarantees that Ocasio-Cortez will bring with her the boldest climate platform of any representative in history.

Ocasio-Cortez, who was without a Wikipedia page on Monday, unseated Joe Crowley, the 20-year representative of New York’s 14th Congressional District who was vying to become the next Speaker of the House. The New York Times, her hometown newspaper, didn’t even cover the race. CNN called the victory “a real wakeup call for Democrats.”

Ocasio-Cortez said her triumph was “the start of a movement.” As a millennial woman of color, she’s already been referred to as the future of the Democratic Party.

Since her district, which comprises parts of Queens and the Bronx, is among the most strongly Democratic in the country, the general election in November likely will not be competitive. Pending the results of other elections across the country, Ocasio-Cortez seems almost certain to join Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as one of the few socialists ever elected to Congress.

Among her many progressive bona fides, it’s really her plan for tackling climate change that deserves the most attention.

In one of her first campaign tweets on the topic of climate change, more than one year ago, Ocasio-Cortez framed the issue as an “existential threat” — one that young people should be taking the lead on.

Ocasio-Cortez is one of the first American politicians to put forward a climate change plan that would keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

To meet that goal while leaving space for developing countries to move at a slower pace, independent assessments suggest that the United States needs to reduce its emissions by approximately 75 to 125 percent or more — actually drawing carbon dioxide out of the air — by 2035. Ocasio-Cortez hopes to move the entire country to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Even Bernie Sanders’ climate plan didn’t set such an ambitious goal.

The crash carbon diet would require “the complete mobilization of the American workforce to combat climate change,” as Ocasio-Cortez told HuffPost reporter Alexander Kaufman.

On her campaign’s website, she summarizes the danger that climate change poses to the planet:

Climate change is the single biggest national security threat for the United States and the single biggest threat to worldwide industrialized civilization, and the effects of warming can be hard to predict and self-reinforcing. We need to avoid a worldwide refugee crisis by waging a war for climate justice through the mobilization of our population and our government. This starts with the United States being a leader on the actions we take both globally and locally.

According to Ocasio-Cortez, such an effort would cost “trillions of dollars,” but would “not only save our planet from the ravages of climate change but would also lift millions of Americans out of poverty.”

It’s an audacious plan that’s easy to dismiss as wishful thinking. But last night’s results just brought Ocasio-Cortez’s vision a step closer to reality.

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With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Congress will likely gain a new climate champion

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James Hansen’s legacy: Scientists reflect on climate change in 1988, 2018, and 2048

by VirgilioHam3 Posted on June 22, 2018

Thirty years ago this week, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that the age of climate change had arrived.

The announcement shook the political establishment in 1988. George H. W. Bush, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, vowed to use the “White House effect” to battle the “greenhouse effect.” Four years later, with then-President Bush in attendance, the United States became a founding member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — which still guides global climate action today.

Of course, it was not enough. Bush’s actions at the time were perceived as weakening the treaty — a missed opportunity. Since 1988, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen 68 percent. At the time of Hansen’s speech, fossil fuels provided about 79 percent of the world’s energy needs. Now, despite every wind turbine and solar panel that’s been installed since, it’s actually worse — 81 percent.

Hansen’s warning was prescient and his predictions were scarily accurate. Every county in every U.S. state has warmed significantly since then. Sea-level rise is accelerating, heavier rains are falling, countless species of plants and animals are struggling to adapt.

Thirty years after Hansen testified, the world still isn’t even close to solving the problem. In fact, for every year we wait, we are making the problem much, much harder.

On our current path, emissions will still be rising 30 years from now, and the world will have long ago left behind all reasonable chances of preventing the irreversible tipping points in the climate system that Hansen predicted.

If climate change was an urgent problem in 1988, it’s now an emergency.

Looking back on what’s happened in an interview with the Associated Press this week, Hansen expressed regret that his words weren’t “clear enough.” At times, Hansen and his colleagues have been down on themselves for not doing more, as if some perfectly worded sentence, or some arrestingly compelling chart would be enough to inspire a global mass-movement of action.

Thankfully, a new generation of climate scientists is starting to understand that perfect knowledge of the problem is no longer enough. Grounded in the missteps and failures of the past, scientists these days seem much more modest with their expectations for the next 30 years — but much more confident in their roles as citizens first, scientists second, just as Hansen has been.

This week, I asked 10 climate scientists to describe how Hansen’s work has affected them, and where they think the world’s response to climate change will go from here.

Ploy Achakulwisut, George Washington University
Suzana Camargo, Columbia University
Christine Chen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andrew Dessler, Texas A&M University
Peter Kalmus, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and Grist 50 member)
Kate Marvel, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Kimberly Nicholas, Lund University
Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University
Eric Rignot, University of California-Irvine
Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University

Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. What has James Hansen — the advocate — meant to you personally and professionally as you wrestle with how to respond to climate change?

Kalmus: Simply put, Hansen is a personal hero of mine. Not only was he a pioneer in recognizing the scientific reality of climate change, he also realized this knowledge carries an obligation to sound the alarm.

Achakulwisut: As a PhD student in climate science, I wasn’t taught or incentivized to engage in advocacy. But Hansen’s actions helped me realize that the climate crisis is far too serious and urgent for me to contribute solely by publishing peer-reviewed papers. He’s inspired me to challenge academic norms and engage in grassroots activism.

Chen: I was born in the early ‘90s, which means that James Hansen’s testimony happened literally a lifetime — my lifetime — ago. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel hopeless about the situation when a NASA scientist has been trying to convince the world to mobilize for longer than I’ve been alive.

Camargo: I admire his courage to be such a strong public advocate. Unfortunately, other scientists can be discouraged from doing this type of advocacy, given the level of public attack that they could suffer.

Marvel: I think it’s important to note that there are now many diverse voices speaking up about the implications of climate change, and that there’s no “right” way to engage the public with the science. I admire James Hansen immensely as a scientist, and I respect his advocacy choices. But he’s not the only role model out there.

Oppenheimer: Jim became a symbol for the movement to push governments to act on climate change. I disagree with him on some of his specific proposals – like supporting a revival of nuclear power, and sometimes I disagree with him on the science. But it’s good to see a scientist who can articulate his concerns to governments, to the media, and other people based on the facts. We need more scientists who do so.

Q. Looking back on how scientists responded to climate change over the past 30 years — what was the single biggest mistake, in your opinion?

Camargo: If scientists had worked on a communication strategy from the start, there could have been a better chance for support of climate change policies by the public. The media had a big role in our current issues as well — by trying to give equal weight to the small minorities of skeptics and the other 95 percent of scientists.

Oppenheimer: We never found a way to make the issue tangible to the average person. That’s changing now as the impacts become more apparent. But for this problem, action before impacts was necessary. Now we are stuck with the inevitability of some unpleasant climate changes as we play catch-up.

Achakulwisut: When climate change first emerged in public consciousness, it somehow got filed under “environmental issue” with far-off impacts. (Polar bears are still the face of climate change.) But its major culprit — fossil fuel combustion — also causes many immediate impacts to our health and well-being. I think we missed an opportunity to connect these dots.

Q. And the single biggest success?

Dessler: The only encouraging thing happening today is the staggering drop in the price of renewable energy. I consider this our main hope to avoid catastrophic climate change — prices drop so much that emissions decrease without government policies.

Rignot: The biggest success was the banning of [ozone-destroying] CFCs with the Montréal protocol in 1986. It was the single biggest event where science and policy came together to take action and literally save the world. Now it should serve as a reference in time, where the world demonstrated that environmental changes can be solved for the better, with no economic setback.

Nicholas: The climate leadership void at the federal level has inspired so many state, city, business, finance, university, neighborhood, household, faith, youth, civil society, and other leaders to step forward and find ways to cut their climate pollution. People want to create solutions that work for them and their communities. They want a future without relying on fossil fuels.

Sultana: A positive outcome is that today a number of young people understand and care about the impacts of climate change … with a greater focus on issues of equity and justice.

Q. Where do you hope we will be 30 years from now? Where do you think we will be realistically?

Marvel: I hope we will take this seriously. I like humans, and I think we’re capable of great things. We (mostly) fixed the ozone hole. We signed the Paris agreement. I have optimism that we can do more in the future. But I fear that we will respond to the adversity that climate change brings with hate, fear, and unreason.

Dessler: I don’t think a serious carbon tax or other policy will happen. The best-case I see is that renewables become cheap enough that the economy switches by itself. As for what should happen: As a citizen and father, I think we should get our asses in gear and start reducing emissions as fast as we can.

Kalmus: I hope that we reach a cultural tipping point, where people finally vote with climate urgency, and elect leaders who enact sensible policies like a revenue-neutral carbon fee. Emissions ramp down, innovation ramps up. This is also what I think will happen – it’s only a question of when, and how bad we’ll let things get.

Rignot: Most likely we will only take a slow course of action. We will experience the consequences of climate change in full swing in the later part of the century. At that point, we will have technologies in place to avoid the most disastrous consequences. But the world should take a much more aggressive course of action. We also need to bring morality into the debate. The most deprived people on the planet will suffer the most from climate change.

Oppenheimer: Human history suggest that we may eventually wise up and move to cut emissions deeply – but only after significant losses emerge in such a way that action can’t be avoided. We do this sort of thing repeatedly but never seem to learn. Sometimes the catastrophe actually happens (like World War I and World War II), but often it’s averted, just barely (like the Cuban missile crisis).

Governments shouldn’t move blindly toward the precipice, mindlessly continuing behavior that is bound to end badly for everyone. There’s still time if we get going immediately to reduce our looming losses and come out the other side more or less OK. There’s still time, just barely.

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James Hansen’s legacy: Scientists reflect on climate change in 1988, 2018, and 2048

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The government has been separating children from parents at the border. Now the border is flooding.

by GracielaFitzwate Posted on June 20, 2018

Torrential rains flooded south Texas on Wednesday morning, the latest danger in an escalating crisis for the hundreds of child migrants detained near the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to radar estimates, more than 10 inches of rain fell overnight as severe thunderstorms swept through the area. That was enough to cause widespread flooding, with water entering homes and flooding wide streets in Weslaco, a town between McAllen and Brownsville.

The Associated Press recently reported that young children separated from their families as a consequence of President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies were being housed in three shelters for infants and toddlers in the region. Trump announced Wednesday that he will sign an executive order to end the separations imminently. As the rain fell, hundreds of migrants were seeking entry into the United States at the border, according to CNN.

The town of Combes, site of one of the shelters, was included in severe thunderstorm warnings and flash flood emergencies issued by the local outpost of the National Weather Service. Local NWS guidelines say that a rainstorm of this magnitude over a 12-hour period has a less than a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year under a stable climate. The bulk of the rainfall Wednesday morning came in just an hour or two, according to radar.

The climate, of course, is not stable. Wednesday’s storm is the latest 100-year downpour in a state full of them in recent years. In Houston alone, there have been three 500-year rainstorms in the past three years. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, and increases the ability of routine thunderstorms to become downpours.

Wednesday is also World Refugee Day, so it’s worth mentioning that those who have crossed borders seeking a better life in the U.S. aren’t the only ones dealing with displacement and more extreme weather at the same time. There’s growing evidence that climate change is already leading to increased migration, and once migrants leave their homes, they are more vulnerable to the weather.

This is a global story. In April, for instance, heavy rains and flash flooding destroyed 750 homes and displaced thousands of people at a refugee camp in northern Kenya. And earlier this month, heavy monsoon rains hit the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, washing away makeshift shelters.

These are the escalating climate consequences for people with little means to withstand them, perpetuating a cycle of injustice that now defines our warming era: Those who contributed the least to climate change stand to lose the most.

Organizations like the Red Cross are already working to make better use of weather forecasts for humanitarian purposes. But with climate change expected to produce a four-fold increase in the number of migrants worldwide over the next 30 years, they’ll have their work cut out for them.

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The government has been separating children from parents at the border. Now the border is flooding.

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She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – Carl Zimmer

by Myrna Posted on May 30, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh
The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
Carl Zimmer

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $15.99

Publish Date: May 29, 2018

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


Award-winning, celebrated New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a history of our understanding of heredity in this sweeping, resonating overview of a force that shaped human society–a force set to shape our future even more radically. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people ordered genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, to distant ancestors, to ethnic identities… But, Zimmer writes, “Each of us carries an amalgam of fragments of DNA, stitched together from some of our many ancestors. Each piece has its own ancestry, traveling a different path back through human history. A particular fragment may sometimes be cause for worry, but most of our DNA influences who we are–our appearance, our height, our penchants–in inconceivably subtle ways.” Heredity isn’t just about genes that pass from parent to child. Heredity continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to trillions of cells that make up our bodies. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors–using a word that once referred to kingdoms and estates–but we inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer’s lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it. Weaving historical and current scientific research, his own experience with his two daughters, and the kind of original reporting expected of one of the world’s best science journalists, Zimmer ultimately unpacks urgent bioethical quandaries arising from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what we can pass on to future generations.

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She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – Carl Zimmer

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Hurricane Maria was so much worse than we thought

by XNYMelisajdeots Posted on May 29, 2018

People in Puerto Rico have endured the devastation left behind by Hurricane Maria since the storm hit 8 months ago, with many still struggling to get clean water and medical care. Now there’s evidence that the death toll from Maria and its aftermath has been far worse than previously thought

An independent analysis from public health experts at Harvard University estimates that 5,740 people likely died as a result of Hurricane Maria — 90 times higher than the official government estimate of 64 dead. The new estimate, published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, would make Maria the deadliest U.S. natural disaster in more than a century — more than twice as deadly as Hurricane Katrina.

The enormous distance between the new estimate and the government’s official count can be blamed on the persistence of horrific living conditions and government neglect following the hurricane. The new study was based on a household survey conducted in the weeks and months following the storm. The storm’s winds and floods account for just 10 percent of Maria’s total deaths, according to the study — most of the dead perished from lack of medical care long after the water receded.

As a storm, Maria achieved a lot of “worsts”. It was one of the strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States. It caused the largest blackout in U.S. history and the second largest in world history. The loss of power meant many Puerto Ricans had to struggle for basic necessities — the storm shuttered hospitals and restricted access to fresh food and clean water for millions of people. In some cases, people resorted to drinking water from streams contaminated with toxic waste and raw sewage — simply because there was no other option. The result was one of the worst humanitarian crises in U.S. history.

“Interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane,” wrote the study’s authors. Hundreds of thousands of people have left the island since the storm, one of the largest mass migrations in recent U.S. history — a possible preview of the kinds of shocks that might occur more frequently as climate change supercharges storms.

These conditions have been widely reported for months, but the federal government’s response has yet to match the scale of the challenge — leading to preventable deaths. The results of the new study “underscore the inattention of the U.S. government to the frail infrastructure of Puerto Rico,” according to its authors.

On his only visit to post-storm Puerto Rico back in October, President Donald Trump praised his administration’s response, saying that Puerto Ricans should be “proud” that the death toll wasn’t as large as “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

The new study means that Maria is now the deadliest hurricane since 1900 in the United States, when a hurricane killed 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas. Hurricane Katrina’s official death toll was 1,833 people, though follow-up surveys conducted in the years following the 2005 storm showed that hundreds more likely died. There have been previous efforts at estimating the true scale of Maria’s death toll, but the Harvard survey is the most comprehensive so far. The truth is, we’ll probably never know exactly how many people died because of Hurricane Maria.

In a series of tweets in Spanish and English, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, responded to the study’s findings. “It took too long to understand the need for an appropriate response was NOT about politics but about saving lives,” she wrote. “Now will the government believe it?”

Cruz has repeatedly called for more assistance for hurricane victims, but has been criticized directly by Trump for “poor leadership.”

The Harvard survey may still be an underestimate, in part because “mortality rates stayed high” through December, when its data collection process ended. Tens of thousands of people are still without clean water and electricity, according to the government’s latest numbers. By all accounts, the humanitarian crisis started by Hurricane Maria continues. It’s going on right now. And, more storms are on the way: a new hurricane season starts on Friday.

It’s a safe assumption that people are still dying because of a storm that hit in late September, last year.

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Hurricane Maria was so much worse than we thought

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10 Reasons to Support the MeatLess May Campaign (and How to Make a Success of It)

by CharmaiSpinks Posted on April 22, 2018

A lot of folks get that eating a plant-based diet is the most Earth-friendly and sustainable food choice. But as we all know, the chasm between knowledge and action can be huge.

In the case of eating less meat, it becomes even wider depending on where you grew up. In South Africa, for example, meat isn?t just something we eat, it?s woven into the fabric of our culture.

When you grow up eating meat, eggs and dairy, it can be hard to give those things up. Black coffee is gross and toast without scrambled eggs is, well, toast. And what about grilled cheese, how on earth are you supposed to survive without that childhood staple?

What is the MeatLess May Campaign?

If you?ve been toying with the idea of eating a plant-based diet, but haven?t been able to wrap your head around the idea of never eating another cheeseburger ever, the MeatLess May campaign is the perfect way to test the water.

Rather than have you quit all animal products outright for the month of May (gasp), it simply challenges you to commit to a more sustainable diet. You choose your ?dietary tribe? based on what you?re able to give up.

For example, meat lovers can opt for the Positive Pioneers tribe, which means you only give up meat, poultry and fish from Monday to Thursday. If you think you can do without meat, but not your morning cappuccino, then the Virtually Veggies tribe is for you.

For vegetarians, this is a great opportunity to quit eggs and dairy and eat 100 percent vegan. The Groovy Gardeners slogan says it all: if it grows in the ground, you can eat it.

10 Reasons to Try MeatLess May

Along with encouraging people to eat fewer animal products, the campaign also aims to raise awareness around the key issues affecting our planet. Ultimately, we are all responsible for the habitat we live in.

These are?10 compelling?reasons to support the MeatLess May campaign.

  1. Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and causes immense animal suffering.
  2. Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation.
  3. People under 65 who eat a lot of meat, eggs and dairy are four times as likely to die from cancer or diabetes.
  4. Pigs, cows, chickens, fish, and other animals raised at factory farms experience unimaginable cruelty.
  5. Humane meat is a contradiction in terms.
  6. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution and habitat destruction.
  7. For every pound of fish caught, five pounds of unintended marine species are caught and discarded as by-kill.
  8. Animal agriculture increases acid rain.
  9. Most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods.
  10. Eating organic meat will not help you avoid contaminants.

Resources to Keep You on Track during MeatLess May (and beyond!)

We?ve all been there. Something gets you all fired up and raring to go, and then a day or two later you?re flailing. Inspiration is a wonderful thing, but you also need motivation to keep going when things get tough. As they usually do.

If you feel your motivation?flagging, these talks, movies, and books can help you remember why you’re?trying to cut back on (or cut out) animal products.

Talks

A Vegan Bodybuilding Experiment by Joshua Knox
The Secrets of Food Marketing by Kate Cooper
Why I?m a Weekday Vegetarian by Graham Hill

Movies

Cowspiracy by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn
What The Health by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn
The Secret Reason We Eat Meat by Dr. Melanie Joy [animated]

Books

8 Weeks to Optimum Health by Dr. Andrew Weil
The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner
Esther the Wonder Pig by Steve Jenkins, Derek Walter and Caprice Crane
You?re also welcome to download a free, no strings attached copy of my e-book: Eating a Plant-Based Diet for Beginners (and Curious Omnivores).

Eliminating animal products from your diet benefits you, the planet and of course, the animals. May is a little over a week away, so you?ve got plenty of time to get your head in the game.

Make the commitment to eat less meat for the month. You?ll find plenty of support and inspiration on the MeatLess May Facebook page and by following #meatlessmay on Instagram.

Related at Care2

A Guide to Plant-Based Milks
Why do Vegans Eat Meat and Cheese Alternatives?
10 Reasons the Meat and Dairy Industries are Unsustainable

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

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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10 Reasons to Support the MeatLess May Campaign (and How to Make a Success of It)

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Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

by EtsukoBaracchi Posted on April 20, 2018

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

In the next few weeks, Detroit is set to start shutting off water to thousands of residents with unpaid bills. Since the shutoffs began four years ago, tens of thousands of Detroiters have had their water cut off, drawing sharp criticism from local anti-poverty activists as well as the United Nations.

Households are slated for shutoff once their water bill is 60 days or $150 past due. While more than 17,000 households are at risk, Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, told the Detroit Free Press that roughly 2,000 will actually be shut off as more residents enroll in repayment and assistance plans. The city’s Water Residential Assistance Program (WRAP), for instance, offers up to $1,000 a year to help customers catch up on their accounts.

According to Brown, the average home slated for shutoff this year is $663 past due, and most water connections are restored within 48 hours of being turned off. City records obtained by Bridge Magazine show that the number of yearly shutoffs went from 33,000 in 2014 to 17,500 last year. Overall, there have been more than 101,000 shutoffs in the past four years.

In late March, Mayor Mike Duggan’s office touted the $7 million that has been spent in the last two years to help Detroiters facing shutoffs. Just the week before, the city council approved a $7.8 million contract to Homrich Wrecking for conducting water shutoffs.

Advocates who work with the poor black and brown Detroiters who are most vulnerable to losing their water say the city’s financial assistance programs are inadequate. They are little more than “a marketing plan being framed as a compassionate solution,” says Monica Lewis Patrick, president and CEO of We the People of Detroit, a grassroots group fighting the water shutoffs. Many Detroiters who enroll in payment plans are at risk of falling back into cycles of nonpayment, says Mark Fancher, staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan. “Not because they’re lazy or just choosing to be poor,” but because “there are a whole lot of reasons why people are poor and there are lots of poor people in Detroit.”

Brown told the Free Press that the tricky part of conducting shutoffs is “separating the truly needy from those who are just not paying.” That line of thinking, says Fancher, presumes that those who aren’t paying are “deadbeats that have the money, but have chosen not to pay. This is completely contrary to the reality of most people who are dealing with these shutoffs.”

In a city that’s 80 percent black, more than 35 percent of residents live in poverty, the highest rate among the nation’s 20 largest cities. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent and the median income is around $28,000. Yet water rates have climbed as much as 400 percent in the last 20 years.

Large-scale water shutoffs began in 2014, just as the city was crawling out from the wreckage of the country’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, pegged at $18 billion. The shutoffs have been advertised as an unavoidable, if painful, treatment for restoring the city’s fiscal health. In 2014, the office of then-Emergency Manager Kevin Orr referred to the shutoffs as “a necessary part of Detroit’s restructuring.” Patrick isn’t buying it: “You can’t convince me that while you’re smiling at me and shutting my water off that this is good for me and you represent my interests. As my grandmother would say, ‘You can’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.’”

In 2014, two United Nations special rapporteurs declared the shutoff policy a “violation of the most basic human rights.” “I heard testimonies from poor African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices — to pay the water bill or to pay their rent,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the special rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation, said after visiting the city. Among the findings she recounted:

Ms. de Albuquerque cited the case of a woman whose water had been cut and whose teenage daughters had to wash themselves with a bottle of water during menstruation. In other instances, she continued, she heard mothers who feared losing their children because their water was shut off; heads of household who feared losing access to water without any prior notice; others who feared receiving unaffordable and arbitrary water bills.

Activists and researchers have pointed out that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department’s financial woes can’t be blamed entirely on the city, since it stretches far beyond the city itself, serving 40 percent of Michigan’s population. The progressive think tank Demos has described the decision to include the department’s $6 billion debt in the city’s bankruptcy filing as an accounting trick used to negotiate more favorable terms with lenders.

We the People of Detroit and other grassroots groups have been organizing to not only stop the shutoffs, but make water more affordable. Cities like Philadelphia are experimenting with tying residents’ water bills to their incomes to ensure that families don’t become trapped in a cycle of missed payments. We the People recommends that no family living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line ($25,100 for a family of four) pays more than roughly 3 percent of their income for water, the rate considered affordable under UN guidelines. (The Environmental Protection Agency pegs affordability at 4.5 percent of median household income.) In 2017, Michigan State University researchers found that the median household spends about $1,620 on water bills annually, roughly 6.5 percent of a poverty-line income. More alarmingly, they found that by 2022, water rates would climb to unaffordable levels for 35 percent of households nationally.

Under an income-based plan, Fancher says, many Detroiters would not be paying market rate for water, but they would be paying something, leaving the city in better financial shape than it is under the status quo: “You replace a whole lot of people who are paying nothing with a whole lot of people who are paying something. In the long run, the utility is far better off than it would be.”

However, the city has refused to alter water rates, insisting that its hands are tied by a state constitutional amendment that requires new taxes to be approved by voters. An affordability fee, Fancher argues, would not legally be a tax. The constitutional argument, he says, has been “a convenient excuse for not doing something that makes a whole lot of sense.”

Some water rights activists see the city’s intransigence as more evidence of a quiet campaign to push poor people of color out of the city. In a recent study, We the People found that many home foreclosures concentrated in Detroit’s black communities were driven in part by overdue water bills. “It’s about using water to displace residents in order bring in a younger, whiter population to dilute black political power in Detroit,” Patrick says. They are “weaponizing water as a tool of gentrification.”

Continued:

Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

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