George Monbiot writes: One of the central tenets of environmentalism is that resources should be used as carefully and sparingly as possible. By and large we try to stick to this rule in our own lives, with varying degrees of success. But there is one resource whose use by this movement is sometimes astonishingly profligate: the time and energy deployed by campaigners.

This is a rare commodity. There are few enough people who are prepared to devote their free time to trying to make the world a happier place. There are fewer still who know how to run an effective campaign, and have the grit to stick with it. We should use this rare blessing as intelligently as possible, campaigning against the most pressing threats, ensuring that we are not distracted by issues that are either trivial or imaginary.

There is no shortage of large, demonstrable and urgent hazards to the environment and public health. Among them, to name just a few, are climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, overfishing, overuse of water, air pollution, dangerous roads and the obesity crisis. None of these attracts a sufficient number of dedicated campaigners; none of them, as a result, has the political attention it deserves. Faced with such issues, we cannot afford to squander precious time and energy chasing phantoms.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that if I were running a campaign highlighting the health effects of mobile phones and phone masts, I would see this as a good time to wind it up. [Continue reading…]

There seems to be something insolent about naming a single day as an occasion for raising global awareness about that upon which our life depends every day. Maybe Earth Day could better be called Not-Dead-Yet Day as a blunter reminder of the fragility of life on this planet.

We occupy this miniscule point in space around which nothing more than a gossamer-thin layer of life-sustaining gases separates us from an infinite lifeless void. There is surely nothing about our improbable existence we can take for granted. And yet, without even the faintest idea of what this might imply for either our future or that of the whole planet, we have taken over.

Like every other colonialist throughout the ages, we look out across our dominion having lost any understanding of what it means to have a sense of place.

Even so, strip away the blinding effect of claimed ownership and perhaps there remains a chance we can remember what we once all knew.

As Gary Snyder wrote: “We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit.”

Al Jazeera reports: “The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Sarah Leonard writes: Each generational wave of environmental concern seems to lap at Wendell Berry’s doorstep. He gave up teaching and writing in New York in the sixties to return to Kentucky, establishing a small farm at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, and dedicating himself to writing about the roots of the life he leads there. Readers have sought his inspiration to overcome the incessant churning of environmental destruction and industrial food production. Berry embodies a certain sort of alternative. When I arrived at Lanes Landing, I knew that many seekers had come before me to put a face to the writing, and to see this life for themselves.

Berry is best known for his attention to place—an insistence on community and an intimate knowledge of home, from the soil to the weather patterns to the human history. I initially came to his work through the Southern Agrarians, a group of twelve Southerners who in 1930 published I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto against Northern industrialism and the loss of a romanticized, rooted, agrarian life. Berry’s resistance to capitalist definitions of progress rhymes with a long intellectual tradition of skepticism of American urbanization, mechanization, and hypermobility. His 1973 “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” begins with the image of the uprooted, commercially oriented modern:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

Even as he subjects market society to a scathing critique, he seeks out the tensions that remained deeply unresolved in the writings of the Agrarians: how people might become more free—free from patriarchy, racism, and so on—without becoming deracinated. In The Hidden Wound, Berry explored race through his experience growing up on a Kentucky farm, and in essays like “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” he set freedom in relation to the productive household economy; feminism for him, and male freedom too, is full and free employment within an independent household, minimally reliant on commodities.

Berry’s influences can be traced beyond the Agrarians to ecological and religious conceptions of nature. He asks how we can develop our understanding of our environment so that we can respect its limits as we arrange our human lives. He therefore opposes the national-parks model of conservation: purity on this side, despoliation on the other. “Agriculture using nature,” he has written, “…would approach the world in the manner of a conversationalist….On all farms, farmers would undertake to know responsibly where they are and to ‘consult the genius of the place.’”

All of this raises serious questions about a sort of agrarian epistemology. If we can’t count on technocratic solutions, how can we determine our limits? How do we consult the genius of place? Berry approaches this question through discussions of the farming life, but through religion and poetry as well. His most recent book, The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, is a tribute to the poet whose work explored Paterson, New Jersey, with all the sensitivity and accompanying understanding that Berry brings to poetic explorations of his own place.

Lest this all sound too abstract, the first thing Berry placed in my hands, after a glass of water, was the 50-Year Farm Bill, a long-term proposal largely devised by his friend Wes Jackson of the Land Institute “for gradual systemic change in agriculture.” The proposal focuses on redeveloping the natural biodiversity of land, and Berry has been to Washington to lobby on its behalf. Berry has been active as well in opposition to the coal industry in Kentucky, and recently withdrew his papers from the University of Kentucky after it accepted coal money to build a dormitory for the basketball team.

Berry, now seventy-seven, has received many accolades for his work. This year he was chosen to give the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the federal government’s top honor in the humanities. The Michael Pollans of the world pay him tribute openly and often. But the state of ecological affairs in America and the world is now more dire than when he started writing.

Berry’s farmhouse sits on a steep hillside overlooking the Kentucky River and land about which he has long written, “a place I don’t remember not knowing.” It is heartening to see Berry honored and his works quoted, but Berry asks us to be concerned with the whole agricultural process, from the land to the workers, all the overlapping realms of economy discussed by the authors in this special section. This is not an easy thing to do in the face of impending environmental catastrophe, a situation that would seem to demand quick fixes. We began with Berry’s lamentation that food alone should so dominate public discussion. [Continue reading…]

Science News reports: A pair of recent papers indicted neonicotinoids, a widely used class of insecticides, for contributing to a catastrophic decline of honeybees, especially since 2006. Hives across North America have been hammered, many by a particularly mysterious syndrome known as colony collapse disorder, or CCD. Now an additional field trial strengthens even more the case arguing that these pollinators have been poisoned by these chemicals.

This latest research also points to a potentially novel source of the chemicals: corn syrup.

CCD tends to occur in winter or early spring, often when bees begin their first foraging trips of the year. In affected colonies, bees leave but fail to come home, despite their hives having adequate food. One suspicion, which is supported by studies released March 29, is that pesticides or some other poison might impair a forager’s memory or behavior.

But Chensheng Lu, an environmental scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, was puzzled as to when and where the critical exposures occured. After all, affected bees were disappearing after months without exposure to toxic agents outside the hive. Lu now argues that bees can undergo a chronic poisoning if their hives’ honey was tainted by insecticides that the pollinators encountered months earlier.

During winter, he charges, what looks just like colony collapse disorder largely emptied 15 of his team’s 16 test hives in central Massachusetts. Each had been exposed experimentally for 13 weeks during the summer to low doses of imidacloprid. Growers rely on this and related neonicotinoid insecticides to protect their crops.

Alyssa Battistoni writes: When President Obama announced his support for the southern half of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline last week in Cushing, Okla., it was a blow to the environmental groups that had worked to stop the pipeline from going forward and succeeded in delaying approval of its northern half. In particular, Obama’s statement that his administration had already approved “enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the earth” seemed intended to remind anti-pipeline campaigners that Keystone XL is just one of many pipelines with the potential to transport Canadian tar sands oil to the United States, and TransCanada just one of many players in the energy game.

Cushing was a particularly appropriate setting to convey that message: It’s the crossroads for much of the nation’s oil and gas infrastructure, and inadequate pipeline capacity has made the town a bottleneck for fossil fuels, particularly with the recent influx of oil coming from Alberta. At any given time, between 30 and 40 million gallons of oil sit there, awaiting transport to Midwestern or Gulf Coast refineries. This means that the chunk of the pipeline that connects Cushing’s surplus to refineries along the Gulf Coast — the chunk of the project that’s moving forward — is the one that TransCanada really cares about in the short term.

Other companies aren’t waiting around to see what happens with Keystone XL either: Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, has already purchased a stake in a pipeline that currently transports crude from the Gulf Coast to Cushing, with the intention of reversing the pipeline’s flow in order to carry tar sands oil south from Alberta. In conjunction with Houston-based company Enterprise, Enbridge is also planning to construct a new pipeline that would expand an existing route to bring tar sands oil to the Gulf; because the new pipeline would not cross international borders, it would not require State Department review. Those two projects combined would add the capacity to transport 850,000 barrels of tar sands oil each day by 2014, according to Enbridge’s CEO; by comparison, Keystone XL would transport around 700,000 barrels daily.

And there are plenty of other ways to get tar sands oil into the country: Other pipelines in the extensive network of fossil fuel infrastructure built to transport regular crude could begin carrying tar sands oil instead, while existing tar sands pipelines could ramp up the amount of oil they transport. Tar sands oil could also be transported by rail, though it’s less economical to do so; nevertheless, Canadian railroads have long been eyeing the fuel, and a report commissioned by the U.S. State Department estimated that railroads could transport up to 1.25 million barrels per day. In short, Obama’s announcement was a reminder that delaying, or even derailing, Keystone XL is a temporary victory, and one more important in symbolism than substance.

Pipeline protesters know this: As Bill McKibben, one of the most prominent leaders of the anti-Keystone movement, told Joe Nocera, “Keystone, by itself, won’t make or break the environment.” On the other hand, nor will it create jobs, reduce our reliance on foreign oil, or affect gas prices. In sum, the pipeline itself will have remarkably little effect on any of the issues it’s come to symbolize. Nocera and others have used that fact to argue that we might as well just go ahead and build it — that is, to shut down the debate over Keystone XL and tar sands instead of opening it up.

But anti-Keystone forces have always been upfront about the fact that they see the battle over the pipeline as a political one. McKibben has repeatedly described the pipeline protests as the start of a broader fight against climate change, and as a means to galvanize a public conversation about climate change, fossil fuels and carbon emissions — topics that American politicians have for the most part tried desperately to avoid.

Ars Technica reports: A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development paints a grim picture of the world in 2050 based on current global trends. It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today’s, requiring 80 percent more energy. And with a worldwide energy mix still 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels by that time, it will be coal, oil, and gas that make up most of the difference, the OECD predicts.

Should that prove the case, and without new policy, the report warns the result will be the “locking in” of global warming, with a rise of as much as 6° C (about 10.8° F) predicted by the end of the century. Combined with other knock-on effects of population growth on biodiversity, water and health; the report asserts that the ensuing environmental degradation will result in consequences “that could endanger two centuries of rising living standards.”
[…]
The report predicts that, as a direct result of increased energy consumption, there will be a 70-percent increase in energy-oriented carbon dioxide emissions, and an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions of 50 percent. This would correlate to a rise in global average temperature between 3° C and 6° C above preindustrial levels.

Air pollution will overtake contaminated water and lack of sanitation as the prime cause of premature mortality across the globe, potentially rising to 3.6 million deaths per year—mostly in China and India. Death rates caused by ground-level ozone among OECD countries are projected to be among the world’s highest, thanks in part to the aging, urbanized populations.

But population growth has more direct effects upon the environment. The world’s natural resources are set to undergo unprecedented strain. Water demand is projected to grow by 55 percent by 2050 (including a 400-percent rise in manufacturing water demand), when 40 percent of the global population will live in “water-stressed” areas. The report identifies groundwater depletion as the greatest threat to both agricultural and urban water supplies. Nutrient-pollution of water sources is projected to further deplete aquatic biodiversity. And though the number of people with access to an “improved” water source should increase, the report projects that by 2050, 1.4 billion people will be without basic sanitation.

ScienceNOW reports: About 3000 years ago, Central Africa was a landscape in transition. Lush evergreen forests were gradually giving way to savannas and grasslands as regional climate change pushed the formerly humid weather patterns toward drier, slightly warmer conditions. But climate was not the only factor at play. According to a new study, an influx of humans into the region at this time may have helped drive some of the original rainforests into oblivion.

The paper’s results, published online today in Science, came as a surprise to the researchers. “To be honest, at the beginning we were not at all aware of this human issue,” says lead author Germain Bayon, a geochemist at the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzané.

He and his colleagues originally set out to investigate the relationship between precipitation and chemical weathering, or the breakdown of soils and rocks. They analyzed marine sediment cores collected near the mouth of the Congo River, where thousands of years of runoff have accumulated. Because rocks are composed of different minerals, Bayon explains, those materials that are more susceptible to weathering will more readily erode away, eventually washing into the ocean and forming layers of clay on the bottom. By analyzing clay’s composition, scientists can reconstruct the intensity of past weathering and infer environmental conditions.

The researchers analyzed the cores for elements like hydrogen that leave distinctive signatures in sediment. These geochemical markers correspond with past precipitation levels, which influence weathering. They also examined ratios of aluminum and potassium, which indicate weathering intensity, because potassium is a highly mobile element whereas aluminum is one of the most immobile. As expected, the weathering patterns closely followed precipitation levels — that is, until about 3000 years ago. At that point, Bayon says, the pattern became completely different. The sediment appeared to have undergone intense chemical weathering, which the climate alone could not explain. So the team began suspecting another factor was responsible.

As it turns out, around this time Bantu farmers — an African ethnic group — had begun a large-scale expansion across Central Africa and settled in the rainforest. Linguistic studies and archeological evidence, such as stone tools and iron artifacts, support this event. Perhaps most importantly, archeologists have shown that the Bantu brought agriculture to the region, growing crops such as pearl millet and yams. But in order for pearl millet to grow, seasonality, or distinct wet and dry seasons, is necessary. In other words, climate shifts toward more pronounced seasonality paved the way for agriculture. To cultivate crops, the Bantu had to cut down stretches of forest, exposing the soil to weathering. Such intensive land use can lead to dramatically higher rates of chemical alteration, the researchers say, which would explain the sudden shift in weathering patterns 3000 years ago.

“Climate did play an important role in the arrival of agriculture,” Bayon says. “But what we show is that the impact of those people developing and introducing agriculture probably had a quite significant impact on soil erosion.”

“This is a very compelling study,” says Peter deMenocal, a marine geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, who was not involved in the work. Even when compared with the traces natural climate change leaves, he says, “the human footprint on the environment can be very large.”