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Scholar's Oath to the Future
by Jim Bendell
This is an apology and an oath of renewed commitment. It is an apology from me and my fellow scholars, to you, the younger generations whom we are meant to serve. It is also an oath to learn from our past mistakes as we seek to better contribute in future.
That future is bleak. You, amongst the younger generations, are clearer on that than most older people. You know that the total pollution and devastation has exceeded the planet's capacity to cope. You know that today's dominant economies compel that destruction to continue. You have a clearer sight on the situation than most people older than you because you are less compromised in how you assess the bad news. You are less likely to assume the future will be like the past. You are less likely to keep quiet about uncomfortable ideas for fear of hurting your income, reputation, or influence. You are less likely to try to believe something because it might numb your own pain. That is because you must live in the future that will exist, not one that many older people prefer to imagine when they dismiss 'negative thinking'.
Scholars from around the world in many disciplines have known for years that the trends are in the wrong direction for humanity and life on Earth. Whatever corner of the world we live in, we have seen how our efforts to reverse worrying trends have not been working. We ignored all of that to allow credible lies to be put to policy makers, senior leaders and the general public. We justified our complacency to ourselves with a variety of explanations that put our own needs, pleasures and fears first. We blamed powerful others, rather than our own part in the charade.
Today, the rich countries, large corporations, elite institutions and mainstream media all support the credible lies that subdue us so that we do not rebel against the global economic system. These lies form the modern face of processes of domination and exploitation that have existed for centuries. But from today we promise not to compromise any more. When there is unsettling analysis, we will share it. When there is injustice, we will name it. When there is distortion by national or corporate interest, we will challenge it. If we fear a backlash, then we will both name that fear and overcome it. Then, if you within younger generations are critical of our efforts, we will respond with curiosity and seek to make amends. Because we recognise that our role is to contribute to your future.
Myself and my fellow scholars are sorry for our own part in not helping enough in the past. We promise to learn with you about how to reduce harm, uphold universal values, and enable futures that may still be possible. Therefore, I will tell others of this apology and oath, and promote mutual support. Then every year I will publicly reconfirm this commitment to all of you.
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What Project 2025 will do to the military.
By VoteVets.org
7 minutes
https://youtu.be/eGhj2XRhWwI?feature=shared
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The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon
As miners ravage Yanomami lands, combat-trained environmentalists work to root them out.
By Jon Lee Anderson
April 1, 2024
...
For many viewers, the video was a rare document of an encounter with isolados—members of a Yanomami community living with no links to the outside world. For the armed men I was with, it was evidence: a potential lead in a high-profile initiative, sponsored by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to dislodge thousands of illicit miners from Yanomami territory.
The men—fighters with combat gear and assault rifles—belonged to a tiny special-forces unit known as the Specialized Inspection Group, or G.E.F. Most of them wore face coverings; mining in the rain forest is increasingly infiltrated by violent criminals, making it dangerous for them to reveal their identity. The G.E.F.’s leader and co-founder was Felipe Finger, a wiry man in his forties with a salt-and-pepper beard. Finger trained in forestry engineering, and his unit works under the Brazilian ministry for the environment. But he has spent much of his adult life in armed operations to protect the wilderness, and he talks like a soldier, with frequent references to operations and objectives and neutralizing threats. The current mission was known to national authorities as Operation Freedom. Finger and his men called it Operation Xapirí, from a Yanomami word for nature spirits.
The group formed a circle as Finger laid out the day’s targets. On a G.P.S., he pointed to a yellow circle showing where the isolados had been harassed in the TikTok video, and then red dots, representing the miners, in an irregular cluster around them. Miners had been detected roughly eight miles from the isolados—meaning that they had penetrated dangerously far into a protected ecosystem. “Wherever they go, the miners destroy everything, entire river systems,” Finger said indignantly. “And they do it at the expense of these highly vulnerable people.”
The Amazon faces many threats. The constant proliferation of road networks—both legal and illegal—brings new settlements, and growing human populations burn forests to clear land for cattle and crops. The rain forest is enduring an unprecedented drought, and in Roraima, the state where the Yanomami territory is situated, wildfires set off by such slash-and-burn efforts have spread out of control; more than four thousand square miles burned there this year, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But mining for gold and cassiterite, a mineral used in electronics, exacerbates the environmental problems with singular ferocity. Wildcat miners, using giant excavators, dredgers, and mercury, can devastate miles of river and forest in a matter of days. With the price of gold now above two thousand dollars an ounce on the global market, a rush is under way in the Amazon, and illegal prospecting accounts for more than half of Brazil’s supply.
Full article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240628092727/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/the-brazilian-special-forces-unit-fighting-to-save-the-amazon
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Will This Fog Last Forever?
An elegy for the future.
Jessica Wildfire
August 30, 2024
...
Imagine living in a world where a major comics convention can't guarantee that you won't leave with an airborne disease that ruins your life if it doesn't kill you, and they make a point of telling you that.
It's the stuff of dystopian literature.
Nobody wants to live in that kind of world.
Hence the denial.
And of course, deep widespread denial is a defining feature of dystopian literature and cinema. It's bad, but nobody wants to admit it. They just go on about their lives. That's what you see in everything from Fahrenheit 451 to Bladerunner. It's bad, but nobody really cares. Nobody wants to talk about it.
You can imagine how many people would find a future without Dragon Con almost unbearable, why they'd be willing to risk death or permanent disability because they're unwilling to give it up.
...
From an ecological standpoint, the planet could never afford the normal we'd gotten used to anyway. Those conventions and theme parks, the coffee shops and fast food restaurants, the palatial grocery stores with sushi bars, the giant shopping centers, the busy airports, the nice hotels, the stadium concerts, the idea of investing for retirement, it was all built on an endless growth destined to come crumbling down at some point. It was just easy to ignore. Now, every year, it gets less easy to ignore. It requires an upgrade to the denial and wishful thinking that keeps it all going. So it's going to get harder and harder for us to witness.
The desperate exuberance wrapped in lies that greets us from our screens is going to get harder to endure over the next few months. As the world gets worse, the smiles are going to get bigger, and the lies are going to get more brazen. The need will grow to shut it off altogether because it's too much.
More than anything, it's this surge of toxic positivity that gets us. We feel like that's never going to end, and it's probably not.
...There's two ways to look at the future now. You can cling to old expectations. That leads you to the empty hope and delirium we're seeing. Peel that off, and you find a yawning desperation and sadness. You find the real nihilism, that life is pointless unless you can distract yourself from things you can't hope to change. That's what the urgent normalizers are fighting for. They need their distractions.
Or...
You can change your expectations.
That's what we've done. I don't know about you, but I no longer look forward to simple pleasures from the last decade. That era has ended, along with all the amusing distractions it brought us in the form of poignant shows and superhero movies. We live in a new age now, with different priorities and values. Our real world Tony Stark turned out to be a giant fascist who can't even build a car.
...
It's good to think about how things used to be. It's important to remember. These days, memories of the old normal feel weird. It's weird that I used to go to a gym to exercise. It's weird that I used to walk into a classroom or a store without even thinking about pathogens floating in the air. It's weird that I could once take my child to a daycare and have a few hours to myself in the middle of the day. It's weird that relatives could babysit her for a few hours. It's weird that I used to just meet someone for a cup of coffee.
Full article:
https://www.okdoomer.io/will-this-fog-last-forever/
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I'm impressed and proud of young ppl's views on religion.
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Fritjof Capra: “The Physics of Connection: Understanding Relationships and Ecology
(Conversation recorded on May 8th, 2024)
Summary
Without a systems lens, the full reality of the human predicament will never be understood. It is only when we adopt this kind of holistic, wide-boundary thinking that we are able to see the complexity and nuance of how the biosphere, geopolitics, economics, energy, and many other systems interplay with and influence one another. But historically, the scientific community didn’t utilize the power of systems thinking until a few groundbreaking individuals advanced and popularized that way of looking at the world.
Today, Nate is joined by one of the great systems thinkers, physicist and deep ecologist Fritjof Capra, to explore how his worldview has been shaped by his decades of work in physics, ecology, and community development – and his conclusions that addressing our ecological and social crises will require a broader shift in our values and philosophies.
How are science and spirituality deeply entangled, despite often being falsely separated in modern culture? How would our ideas of consciousness change if we understood the interconnectedness of all life, and our place within it? What could our societies look like if we emphasized the importance of maintaining deeper relationships with the natural world, and prioritized human wellbeing over economic growth?
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/138-fritjof-capra
1 hour video
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Ppl are at times angry and/or puzzled when they find that I do not support "renewables" wind and solar farms, and most other so called climate "solutions".
"But every bit helps!", some proclaim.
No, it doesn't.
That's not a true statement, realistically or logically.
For the current climate "solutions and mitigations", most are doing more harm than good.
This article shows the main reasons of how and why - capitalism.
As consumers, we have the power to decide which companies succeed and which fail simply by using our pocketbooks.
There is no easier way to bring down a Corp than to starve it financially.
...
Article from the Irish Times
Capitalism is killing the planet – but curtailing it is the discussion nobody wants to have.
If life on our one and only planet is to be pulled back from the brink, the time for voluntary ecological measures from businesses has surely passed.
The sheer magnitude of the biodiversity crisis is laid bare in the biannual Living Planet Index compiled by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. Their latest report from 2022 showed there was a 69 per cent collapse in monitored wildlife populations since 1970.
In 2018, when the decline was “only” 60 per cent, their report lambasted “exploding human consumption” as “the driving force behind the unprecedented planetary change we are witnessing, through the increased demand for energy, land and water”.
However, these reports do not delve into why consumption of land and resources has exploded in this time. In an article for the Conversation website, Anna Pigott, who is a lecturer in human geography at Swansea University in Wales, criticised WWF/ZSL for failing to identify capitalism as the “crucial (and often causal) link” between the destruction of nature and galloping levels of consumption.
“By naming capitalism as a root cause,” wrote Pigott, “we identify a particular set of practices and ideas that are by no means permanent nor inherent to the condition of being human” and that “if we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it.
https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2024/08/08/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-but-curtailing-it-is-the-discussion-nobody-wants-to-have/
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[#]CatsOfMastodon
[#]Caturday
Dumped "pet" lions start new life in Africa.
Bought as cubs, the owners in Kuwait no longer wanted their living novelty 'items' when they grew up.
They were dumped.
Thankfully, Animal Defenders International rescued them and they now live in the peace and safety of a sanctuary in Africa.
(A great org. Support them if you can.)
https://youtu.be/bLvdzX8avZs?feature=shared
This is the best outcome for captive animals everywhere.
The optimal solution tho is to preserve and expand habitats for all wild plants and animals across the world to survive and thrive.
Habitats free from the presence and activities of humans.
They deserve to be wild and free, with an agency all their own; not as something as a side note to human existence.
Bc as a side note, we are losing more of them everyday.
[#]6th_Global_Mass_Extinction_Event
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Climate crisis is caused by human activity.
So - how is increasing our activity helping?
...
Watching the World Go Bye
Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog
Climate Change
Wind Power is Grotesque
June 6, 2024
You’ve got to know which side I’m on. I’m an old-school environmentalist, coming of age in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. More environmental f&%kery happened during my youth and more meaningful environmental policy was enacted in my youth than at any time or any place in modern industrial civilization’s history.
When I hear the youth of today complain about my generation and the actions we didn’t take, when they arrogantly utter “OK boomer” as if more should have been done back at some undefined moment when we knew better, I can only cite the anthropomorphic principle: but for what was accomplished they wouldn’t exist to complain about what wasn’t done. But for the policies, agencies, acts and laws we helped create through our protests and direct action, the environment would have already degraded into an unlivable hellscape. Rivers on fire. A massive hole in the ozone layer. Undrinkable water and unbreathable air. Oil spills and dead oceans. Nuclear waste and radiation from meltdowns. Toxic dumps spilling into waterways. Lead and DDT everywhere. The human population would be lower by billions.
Yeah, more could have been done, but here are just a few samples of what was accomplished in the 1970’s:
First Earth Day, April 22, 1970
Official Formation of NOAA, October 3, 1970
Official Formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), December 2, 1970
Clean Air Act of 1970, December 31, 1970
Lead-Based Paint Restrictions, January 13, 1971
EPA Bans DDT, June 14, 1972
Limits to Growth is Published, October 1, 1972
Clean Water Act, October 18, 1972
Ocean Dumping Act, October 23, 1972
Leaded Gasoline Phase-Out, December 28, 1973
Endangered Species Act, December 28, 1973
Safe Drinking Water Act, December 16, 1974
Toxic Substances Control Act, October 11, 1976
Phaseout of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), October 15, 1978
So what do we have today by way of new policy? The latest “accomplishment” is the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). At its core, the IRA is a money-dump to EV, solar and wind capitalists under the guise of speeding up the transition to renewable energy. The IRA is designed to facilitate the continued growth of industrial civilization, albeit with a shift in industries. Electric cars. Solar. Wind. Batteries. These are all products for sale by industries seeking growth and profit.
The most basic truth about the IRA is that it is emphatically not an environmental policy. The IRA is not fascilitating a choice between clean energy and fossil fuels. It is not either/or. The IRA is both/and. The more energy that the IRA helps create, the more our industries will find energy-hungry ways to use it. The latest energy scourges, crypto and AI, make this truth obvious to the casual observer. And like all new energy before it, the new energy we are creating with renewables will be sucked into the black hole created by Jevons paradox.
Today’s “environmentalists” are no longer the environmentalists of my youth. They want wind, solar, nuclear, so that they can have lives as comfortable as those of their parents and grandparents. But whenever the choice between the environment and humanity’s continued malignant growth is on the line, today’s environmentalists choose growth over the environment. Their choice is nowhere more clear than the green delusion of renewable “wind energy.”
...
And maybe worst of all, wind towers and blades are short-lived, with current lifespan estimates between 20 and 30 years, at which time the entire structure, all of it, steel, iron, copper, fiberglass and concrete, needs to be demolished, transported away as mostly unrecyclable trash, and replaced.
Drive by any large-scale wind farm that’s been in operation for five years or more and you will see a landscape littered with non-functioning towers.
...
Yes, fossil fuel use also suffers from a long list of tragic environmental impacts, many exceeding those of wind. Yes, fossil fuels are also grotesque. Our continued use of fossil fuels is powering the sixth great extinction. Yes, we should stop using fossil fuels. Yes, I am 100% behind groups like “Just Stop Oil” and the actions they take. But I am also 100% behind folks like Max Wilbert and other old-school environmentalists who are fighting new wind power developments.
The first step is to stop destroying the environment in a never-ending quest for more energy, believing that at some future time more energy will somehow help save the environment that same energy is destroying.
I often get asked for my solution, my answer to this predicament. I am an environmentalist. I love the environment. I love nature, life and biodiversity. I love this beautiful planet. And yes, I love it all more than global industrial civlization.
https://climatecasino.net/2024/06/this-is-grotesque/
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[#]WhatAreYouListeningTo
[#]WhatI'mListeningTo
[#]Music
Intro
by the xx
2020 Remastered
long version
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eRYjhOpLd_s&feature=shared
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B.C. fish farm slapped with hefty fine for illegal operations
By Rochelle Baker
August 23rd 2024
A West Coast fish farm was hit with a $350,000 fine for illegally operating a steelhead salmon farm in Lois Lake, near Powell River.
West Coast Fishculture (Lois Lake) Ltd pleaded guilty Thursday in Powell River Provincial Court to operating without a license under the Fisheries Act after knowingly operating its fish farm outside the bounds of its aquaculture tenure.
“What's really important here is the need for a deterrent effect on others in the industry, and it has to be more than the mere cost of doing business,” Federal Crown prosecutor Molly Greene told the court.
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The company must also remove any remaining infrastructure from the lake by Aug. 31, 2025, Judge Carmen Rogers ordered.
...
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) officers inspected the operation on June 3, 2021 and discovered the fish farm was 300 to 500 metres outside of its tenure, said Greene, referring to an agreed statement of facts submitted to court.
At that time, Lois Lake fish farm operators indicated they knew they were operating outside the tenure, Greene said.
When a second DFO inspection took place more than a year later on Sept. 27, 2022, the company had continued to stock fish in the illegal pens, she said.
...
The DFO inspection was prompted by two public complaints about the fish farm in January and April 2021, citing concerns about the fish escaping their pens. A fishery officer inspecting the operation noted five of six pens had no netting in place to prevent fish escapes, and only one pen had bird netting installed, according to the court’s statement of facts.
...
Full article:
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/08/23/news/bc-fish-farm-slapped-hefty-fine-illegal-operations
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Can Ecological Economics let us Survive and Reset: Adjusting to Abrupt Climate System Change
Paul Beckwith
3/10/23
...
Ref1: Our environment and economy are at a crossroads. This paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior, money, energy, economy and the environment fit together. Humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors. In a resource rich environment, we coordinate in groups, corporations and nations, to maximize financial surplus, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon. At global scales, the emergent result of this combination is a mindless, energy hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism.
Under this dynamic we are now behaviorally ‘growth constrained’ and will use any means possible to avoid facing this reality. The farther we kick the can, the larger the disconnect between our financial and physical reality becomes.
The moment of this recalibration will be a watershed time for our culture, but could also be the birth of a new ‘systems economics’. and resultant different ways of living. The next 30 years are the time to apply all we’ve learned during the past 30 years. We’ve arrived at a species level conversation.
...
Cleaner fuels for ships are bringing public health benefits, but are also unleashing huge climate risks that could lead to many more deaths in the long run. Dr.Hansen forecasts a bump in warming that will likely trigger feedbacks and take us to 4°C of warming by 2100. What to do? pic.twitter.com/0bZHaot7J3
— Let's Rewild a Billion Hectares 🇺🇦 🇺🇦 (@JustPlants4Life) March 7, 2023
Full article:
https://paulbeckwith.net/2023/03/10/can-ecological-economics-let-us-survive-and-reset-adjusting-to-abrupt-climate-system-change/
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Dear ministers, I am a climate crisis campaigner: nationalise me right now
George Monbiot
Why have politicians outsourced the most important issue of our time to private agencies and individuals? We can’t do it all - this way lies disaster
Wed 28 Aug 2024 01.00 EDT
There are several services and assets I would like to see nationalised. But at the top of my list is neither water, nor trains, nor development land, much as I’d like to see them brought under national or local public ownership. Above all, I want to see the nationalisation of my own business: environmental persuasion. I love my job. But I’m not very good at it. None of us is.
We face the greatest predicament humankind has confronted: the erosion and possible collapse of our life-support systems. Its speed and scale have taken even scientists by surprise. The potential impacts are greater than any recent pandemic, or any war we have suffered. Yet the effort to persuade people of the need for action has been left almost entirely to either the private or voluntary sectors. And it simply does not work.
Why? The first reason is that we are massively outgunned. For every pound or dollar spent on persuasion by an environmental charity or newspaper, the oil, chemicals, automotive, livestock and mining sectors will spend a thousand. They snap up the cleverest and most devious communicators to craft their messages, offering salaries no one else can afford. Among others, they pay a BBC in-house content studio to make their films. The BBC’s offer of “our century-long pedigree as the world’s most trusted storytellers” can be used to massage the reputations of the fossil fuel and pesticide companies it now works for.
The second is that, however inclusive we try to be, we will always be seen as a faction. Who are we to tell anyone else how to behave? We are, for many, antagonists, regardless of how we frame our messages. Business and the media see us as enemies of aspiration, seeking to limit the consumption they are trying to boost. Despite the best efforts of sincere organisations such as the Conservative Environmental Network, we will generally (in most cases, correctly) be perceived as leftwing. Our endorsement of a cause will automatically trigger some people’s rejection.
And our instruments are limited. Whenever environmental persuaders start making progress, their most eye-catching methods are prohibited: for instance, by the 1986 Public Order Act, the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, the 2000 Terrorism Act, the 2005 Serious Organised Crime Act, the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the 2023 Public Order Act. Between them, they criminalise even the tamest and most traditional attempts to generate public interest, such as marching slowly down a street or chaining yourself to the railings.
When we fail, we blame ourselves or are blamed by others. But we might as well chastise ourselves for an inability to levitate parliament. There are certain things the private sector does well, and certain things it cannot do. As a private trader in environmental persuasion, I feel obliged to state that my profession is, when it stands alone, futile.
...
Full article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/28/dear-ministers-i-am-a-climate-crisis-campaigner-nationalise-me-right-now
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Florida State Park development update.
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Aftermath of Reading music festival in the UK.
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Breaking free.
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Metastatic Modernity
Part 1
by Tom Murphy of the Do The Math blog/website.
Part 1 of a series of short videos on modernity.
What is it and what are it's implications for our future.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0cHW1EffCQM&feature=shared
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Cuts in air pollution increased pollution at ground level, research reveals
by John Sullivan , Princeton University
Aug. 23, 2024
...
Cuts in air pollution increased pollution at ground level, research reveals
Spatial distribution and trends of total reactive nitrogen and NH4T deposition. Credit: Nature Geoscience (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01455-9
The U.S. has slashed smog-causing pollutants like airborne sulfur dioxide in the past 20 years, but the cuts have unintentionally increased ground and water pollution in some local areas, according to research from Princeton and Colorado State University.
In an article, titled "Regime shift in secondary inorganic aerosol formation and nitrogen deposition in the rural United States," published June 20 in Nature Geoscience, researchers found that decreased atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide and a group of nitrogen oxide pollutants called NOx (including NO and NO2) have led to increased nitrogen deposits in forests and streams in various parts of the country.
These increased deposits, linked to environmental problems, are found in areas connected to high levels of ammonia emissions, which are generally from agriculture and have not been directly regulated in the U.S.
Researcher Da Pan, who performed the work as a doctoral student at Princeton, said ammonia gas reacts with gases including sulfur dioxide and NOx to form small particles that contribute to smog. With less sulfur dioxide and NOx in the atmosphere, more ammonia remains as gas. The ammonia gas, which contains a lot of nitrogen, returns to the surface and increases the nitrogen deposits on the ground and in water near emission sources.
"A larger fraction of ammonia remains in the gas phase, which deposits rapidly, rather than reacting with sulfur dioxide and NOx to form small particles that deposit relatively slowly," said Pan, who was recently appointed as an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
...
"However, reductions in sulfur dioxide and NOx have led to a greater fraction of ammonia emissions being deposited onto sensitive ecosystems near emission sources. Thus, to protect these ecosystems and reduce eutrophication resulting from excess nitrogen, future ammonia mitigation is warranted."
Full article:
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-air-pollution-ground-reveals.html
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How Monbiot Thinks Microbes Will Save the Planet
Reader’s Digest from Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
Jan 9, 2024
I started reading George Monbiot’s Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet thinking it would be about Regenerative Agriculture and how to minimize the environmental impact of our food by changing how we treat the soil and its symbioses. It is about the environment, the diet, and the role of microbes, but differently.
...
Damages Caused by Our Food System
As often occurs in such essays, the beginning is a gloomy observation of the damage our food production system inflicts on the environment. A university lecturer friend of the author said “I study insects because I love them. But the only funding I can get is to kill them.”
This heart-breaking statement shows how little the beauty and services of insects are understood. Between 75 and 98% of insect biomass has disappeared since the 1980s (Goulson, 2019), and insects are so important for many ecological roles, from pollination to soil structure to feeding birds, which themselves support soil fertility and seed dissemination… Yet, “the global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first 50 years of this century.” As life in the soil gets depleted, desertification and erosion accelerate.
“The global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first 50 years of this century.” — Monbiot.
Monbiot’s analysis of the food system’s impacts turns a lot around the disproportionate impact of animal products. “The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, he says, but the growth in livestock numbers” that have risen to 2.4 % a year while the human population grows at about 1.05% a year.
“The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.”
“Already, roughly half the calories farmers grow are used for raising livestock.” — Monbiot.
...
Seeking Land Efficiency
For Monbiot, land efficiency is the best environmental indicator, because the best way to restore biodiversity and sequester carbon is to release land from human activities.
“I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish.”
“The most secure and effective means of removing carbon from the atmosphere is to reduce the amount of land we need for farming, and rewild the land we spare, restoring wetlands and forests.” — Monbiot.
From this land use perspective, this book taught me two new concepts: ghost acres and soil obesity. The measurement of ghost acres, meaning land used in another place, on which a farm depends. For example, when organic growers use animal dung, this implies their produce is ghosted by an area about 2–3 times as big as the one they farm, according to Iain Tolhurst, one of the growers Monbiot interviews. It is a very important estimate of land efficiency. In a chicken farm, imported feed and pellets for warming should be accounted as ghost acres.
The second concept is soil obesity: a buildup of phosphate and potassium in the soil, that reduces the activity of fungi and bacteria. As an agronomist who studied Biology and the microbiome, and now the roles of the soil microbiome in soil structure, water retention capacity, and plant growth and resilience, I find this concept very interesting.
“Agricultural science has devoted a great deal of attention to soil chemistry. But the more we understand, the more important the biology appears to be.” — Monbiot.
In the second part of the book, Monbiot meets exceptional growers like Iain Tolhurst, Ian Wilkinson, Tim Ashton, and Paul Cawood, who dedicate incredible amounts of time, energy, and passion to their farms, developing complex culture rotations, building soil fertility and growing biodiversity.
...
This is the most elegant circular economy example, and it can offer humanity and wildlife its boons immediately.
Scaling microbial-based protein has the potential to reduce humankind’s reliance on other proteins requiring land use and impacting life on Earth. Liberating 15% of the land from destructive activity in some parts of the world could prevent 60% of the extinctions that would otherwise happen and could sequester 30% of all the carbon dioxide released since the Industrial Revolution, according to Monbiot and a study in Nature.
“For the first time since the Neolithic, thanks to the possibilities created by microbial protein and fat, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.” — Monbiot.
...
Full article:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/how-monbiot-thinks-microbes-will-save-the-planet-97264a26a758
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