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Gloria Huerta remembers the day she spent hours hopping between Chevy Bolts, messing with SIM cards and software while following instructions sent by a German tech firm. She was trying to fix a glitch that kept members of Miocar, the car-share program she helps lead, from unlocking the cars before the service’s formal launch. Troubles like these would make it difficult for her organization to fulfill its mission of providing equitable access to electric vehicles in rural California.
Much has changed since that frustrating day four years ago. Back then, it wasn’t unusual for Huerta, who is now the nonprofit’s chief operating officer, to spend hours driving across the state’s San Joaquin Valley servicing vehicles and solving members’ problems. Today, Miocar has a dedicated team to service its fleet of three Nissan Leafs and 34 Bolts spread across 10 locations (it plans to add more cars and locations by the end of the year) while offering guidance to anyone interested in establishing a community-based car share.
Zero-emissions vehicles are essential to achieving global climate goals. But climate policy experts warn that a one-to-one shift from gas to electric cars could exacerbate other forms of social injustice. Such a change could, for example, fuel environmental degradation and worker exploitation in the Global South, where most of the metals needed for batteries are mined. Here at home, people with low incomes struggle to afford EVs, even with ample incentives. Others are often unfamiliar with technology that’s typically targeted at the affluent. Those who can afford the cars often have precious few places to plug them in.
“I think it’s great that we’re moving towards zero-emissions vehicles,” Huerta said, “but the communities that are continuously left behind are still being left behind.”
To avoid such potholes, a growing number of programs like Miocar are forging an equitable path to zero-emissions transportation by making battery-powered cars accessible to everyone. (Huerta says Miocar is a play on “the Spanglish of the San Joaquin Valley” that tags the Spanish word for “mine” to the word “car.”) Such efforts have emerged in locations as diverse as Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Los Angeles, bolstered in part by state and local assistance. Earlier this year, for example, the Washington state Department of Transportation awarded $2.8 million to spur EV car-share efforts in low-income communities statewide.
Beyond enabling a just transition and reducing the number of vehicles — and resources — needed to electrify transportation, electric car sharing represents a shift away from an economy of ownership to one of access, allowing people to embrace environmentally conscious mobility without the burden of buying a car.
What sets community-based nonprofits like Miocar apart from international for-profits like ZipCar is its focus on offering zero emissions vehicles to income-qualified users at reduced rates — often just $4 to $10 an hour. Cars are reserved online, charged up, and can be used for as long as 24 or even 48 hours, depending on the program. For some folks, it’s an easy way of running an errand, taking a pet to the vet, or simply getting somewhere beyond the bus line. For others, it’s an opportunity to get comfortable with an EV before buying one of their own.
With most of Miocar’s users having never so much as sat in an EV before signing up, some are uncertain, even intimidated, at first. Huerta says the most common concern is that the battery might die. But Miocar, like other EV car shares, ensures its cars are charged, and provides dedicated parking spaces with chargers. People are expected to plug in when they drop off. If they forget, there’s a warning, and repeated offenses result in small fines. To further alleviate the anxiety of exhausting the battery, Miocar employees, when orienting newcomers to the program, explain how to plan a trip and find chargers that accept the free charge cards provided with each vehicle.
Once they start driving, users tend to love the vehicles for their ease, quiet, and comfort. “I’ve had conversations with a few that are like, ‘Oh my God, I never knew how much I would enjoy driving this,’” Herta said. When that happens, Miocar connects users to organizations that can explain the tax credits and other incentives that defray the cost of buying an EV, which can go for an average of $61,488 new.
Of course, when people rely on car-share programs instead of purchasing a vehicle of their own, traffic and street congestion drops. In 2016, researchers at the University of California-Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center found that for every car-share vehicle deployed, 7 to 11 others were taken off the road or never put there in the first place. Such findings have been repeatedly supported as these programs have grown.
That said, not everyone can ditch their car. A personal vehicle isn’t so much a luxury as a necessity in rural areas, Huerta said. That’s why Miocar’s mission is guided by the question, “How are we going to be able to do this in an equitable manner where everyone is able to get the same access to resources?”
These programs bridge an essential gap. Low-income communities are not only supermarket and pharmacy deserts; they’re charging deserts, too. Although there is a great need for equitable charging infrastructure, Susan Buchan, the executive director of Good2Go, Boston’s EV car share, said building chargers in frontline communities solves just half the problem. The communities need easy and affordable access to electric vehicles to make the chargers more than just harbingers of green gentrification.
“I’ve heard folks say that it’s kind of a slap in the face to watch somebody pull up in a Tesla, charge, and take off,” she said.
Still, bringing equity-focused car shares online can be a bumpy road. Beyond the technical hassles and occasional vehicle recalls, the economic challenges are formidable. “For public-backed car sharing, one of the biggest barriers is funding,” said Lauren McCarthy, a program director at the nonprofit Shared Use Mobility Center. “They’re not usually profitable operations.” Buchan concurred: “Achieving your mission makes you have a more negative balance sheet in this gig.”
Typically, public funding is available only during the pilot and lasts just a few years. That’s why McCarthy — who oversees a state-backed program in California that provides voucher funding to support shared-mobility initiatives — and the Shared Use Mobility Center offer a year of assistance after initial funding ends to help programs achieve financial sustainability.
Insuring the vehicles is a major hurdle on that path: “Our number one line item,” Buchan said. Despite requiring that drivers be over 21 and possess a clean driving record, Massachusetts places car shares like Good2Go in the highest risk category, driving up premiums. Other states, including California and Minnesota, have more relaxed policies, but McCarthy considers insurance requirements an obstacle to the expansion of shared mobility.
Outreach can be another challenge. In 2021, when Good2Go launched, it struggled with enrollment. The program revamped its efforts the following year, organizing catered events at affordable housing complexes to give residents an opportunity to drive their cars. Membership jumped 300 percent to 160 people, ensuring its fleet of six vehicles gets ample use. Buchan expects the growth to continue as long as the program can continue providing enough vehicles to meet demand.
As more programs like these appear, grow, and become self-sustaining, they have the potential to shift the default means of mobility. “The premise of private car ownership doesn’t need to define our society,” McCarthy said. “There should be multiple options available to you.” In a world of shared transportation, picking up a community-owned car would be one of these options, as would busing, walking, or grabbing a bike or scooter from the sidewalk. As long as our cities are designed to support these programs, an equitable future for clean mobility would look like one in which access takes priority over ownership, and in which we share to show how much we care.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A simple way to make electric cars more accessible: Share them on Sep 14, 2023.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Security guards and tourism guides at the Parthenon in Athens made headlines this summer when they went on strike during the scorching afternoons of a July heat wave that reached up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit in Greece.
“The extreme weather conditions continue to plague the country, despite this the Ministry of Culture did not take drastic measures — as it should have — to protect workers and visitors,” said the Panhellenic Union of Employees for the Guarding of Antiquities in a press release. The union stated that multiple people were seen fainting and suffering from heatstroke at the Acropolis, the complex of monuments that includes the Parthenon, prompting them to strike.
In fact, when the guards and guides refused to work during the hottest hours of the day, they essentially revived an old tradition in warm Mediterranean countries: the siesta.
A siesta consists of a midday break that usually includes a large meal and a nap and is most common in Southern European countries like Greece, Spain, and Italy. The siesta used to be sacred, but modern times have seen the decline of the practice.
“The siesta is as old as humanity, and in fact, it goes beyond humanity. And you can see a lot of other species just simply being sensible with hot weather,” said Dr. Simon Quilty, a physician and researcher at Australian National University in Canberra. Quilty is lead author on a paper that examines cultural responses to extreme heat.
Quilty also pointed out that the siesta has faced pushback in recent years, notably in 2016, when the Spanish prime minister proposed banning the practice.
“There’s a strong push back on that cultural institution,” said Quilty. “That reflects our values and our values over the last 15 to 20 years, and certainly over the last 50 years, [which] has increasingly become about money and material gain. And that is the culture that is destroying the environment.”
The word “siesta” evolved from the Latin phrase sexta hora, which means the sixth hour after dawn, a time when the sun is high and it’s best to take a break from extreme heat with a hearty meal and a nap.
Climate change was a key force behind a summer that made history as the hottest on record. A new analysis from the nonprofit organization Climate Central found that 98 percent of people on Earth experienced hotter temperatures that were more likely because of climate change.
Even places that have not typically practiced the midday break are now looking to it after unflinching heat. In Germany, a famously efficient country, a public health group suggested that employers and workers get comfortable with the idea of preventing heat-related illnesses, including taking a siesta.
It could also be an effective option to avoid extreme heat in the United States, according to José María Martín Olalla, a professor of physics at the University of Seville in Spain.
“Practicing siesta in the United States is meaningful in the sense that you will be avoiding exposure to the central [hottest] hours of the day,” said Olalla.
But there are numerous cultural differences between Spain and the U.S., especially when it comes to the workday. Olalla pointed out that the labor cycle differs immensely and so do mealtimes. Siestas function not only as a rest for what used to be mostly manual labor, but also exist as a designated time for a large family meal.
“For instance, in Spain, lunch is usually the main meal of the day,” said Olalla. “In [the] United States, lunch is kind of a smaller meal.”
The siesta is ubiquitous with the culture in Spain, even as urbanization has meant changes for how people take siestas. Siestas have recently declined in popularity: “Not every single Spaniard is practicing siesta,” said Olalla. Still, he said that extreme heat caused by climate change could spur a revival.
Temperatures globally are expected to keep rising, and so are heat deaths, according to a study from researchers at Texas A&M University. Researchers found that deaths could top 200,000 annually by the end of the century, a fivefold increase. A siesta could help curb some of those effects, particularly for outdoor workers, according to Mayra Reiter, program director of occupational safety and health at Farmworker Justice, an advocacy organization based in Washington D.C.
“Whether it’s a siesta or a cooldown break, workers need regular rest periods when they are working in the heat,” said Reiter. “Because otherwise, they face higher risk of accidents on the job, kidney damage from dehydration and overheating, and heatstroke, which can be deadly.”
In the U.S., employers are already experimenting with different solutions to extreme heat. In the wake of the hottest summer on record, companies are deploying ice-filled vests, sweat stickers, and paid cooling breaks to offset the hotter temperatures that workers are exposed to. In the agriculture industry, which often requires hours of labor-intensive work to plant, grow, and harvest crops, farmworkers are harvesting plants at night to avoid high daytime temperatures.
Dr. Brenda Jacklitsch, a health scientist and heat expert at the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the Centers for Disease Control, backs the idea of a siesta for outdoor workers, especially those who are more exposed to extreme heat.
Construction workers are also at risk for mortality due to heat, and one mother of a construction worker who died last summer in Texas is suing his employer for $1 million. The mother believes the company could have providfed more safeguards against the heat and prevented his death.
“Hotter times of the day very often are, you know, middle of the afternoon, when the sun is right overhead,” said Jacklitsch. “And so being able to schedule some of the maybe most intense or the hardest work tasks for maybe the early morning hours or possibly even later in the evening or after it starts to cool down might be appropriate.”
One of the main ways that siestas could benefit outdoor workers is by helping regulate the core body temperature of workers. Siestas can help by reducing both internal and external sources of heat, according to Nathan Morris, an environmental physiologist and professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
The idea of working with, and not against, extreme heat might run counter to the culture of the United States, but Quilty brings up that Indigenous traditions and cultures in tropical regions have always understood the danger of extreme heat.
“People just simply understand that it’s dangerous to be in the hot weather,” he said.
One of Quilty’s co-authors is Norman Frank Jurrurla, a Warumungu elder, who wrote about how traditional Indigenous practices are responsive to the environment. Siesta is one example of these environmentally sensitive practices; another is to pay attention to emerging drought conditions and shift to where more consistent water sources are.
One constraint of the study, though, is using historical data, which is limited in its reach, especially as climate change is pushing the world to temperatures too hot to survive.
It could be good to revive the tradition in the U.S., says Olalla, where overwork and sleep loss are regular parts of American culture that degrade people’s overall health.
“It’s pretty clear from our standard knowledge that siesta is good,” said Olalla.
So good that despite recent declines in Spaniards practicing siesta, Olalla still makes it a regular part of his schedule.
“By the way, your email finds me practicing siesta,” said Olalla in a video interview, in a testament to siesta’s enduring power.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is it time for the world to take a siesta? on Sep 14, 2023.
Though the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is best known for disaster response, it has emerged as perhaps the federal government’s most robust resource for preparing the country for the effects of a warming world. The agency has pumped billions of dollars into climate adaptation projects over the past few years, helping states and cities relocate flood-prone homes and harden infrastructure against wildfires. But the agency’s infrastructure programs have drawn criticism for disproportionately funneling money toward larger, wealthier, and whiter communities, leaving smaller and poorer jurisdictions without the money they need to adapt to worsening climate-driven disasters.
There are two big reasons for this funding gap. The first is that FEMA doles out adaptation money through competitive grant programs, which means that a local government needs significant funding and staff to put together an application that stands a chance of attracting federal dollars. The second is that federal law requires the agency to fund only those adaptation projects that pass what it calls a “benefit-cost analysis.” In other words, a city must prove that its proposed project prevents more damage than it costs to build. Big infrastructure projects like sea walls and stormwater pipes are much more likely to pencil out in dense cities with high property values than in smaller, low-income towns.
“We know we have work to do in this area,” said David Maurstad, a senior FEMA official, when he acknowledged the funding gap during congressional testimony on the subject last year.
This week, FEMA finally moved toward narrowing that gap. The agency announced a new loan program that will give states a total of $500 million to dole out to local governments in the form of low-interest loans for small-scale adaptation projects. This way, not only can local officials representing small towns, minor cities, and tribes skip the extensive application process associated with federal grants, but they also don’t have to justify their projects in cost-benefit terms.
“There’s large infrastructure projects that communities need to fund in order to adapt to the changing climate, but there’s often many small projects that need to get done as well,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s associate administrator for resilience, in a press conference announcing the program on Tuesday. “The burden of getting a smaller project done that actually has a major impact on reducing human suffering is very high.”
The agency is piloting the program by sending $50 million in “seed capital” to seven states — Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia — as well as Washington, D.C. The states will get about $6 million each, and they’ll be able to loan that money out to smaller governments at interest rates of less than 1 percent. (The benchmark interest rate for mortgage and credit card lending in the U.S. is currently around 5.5 percent.) The local governments can use that money to buy out homes that are in the path of fire or flood, elevate streets, or repair water infrastructure. States will decide how long local governments will have to pay the loans back.
In Washington, D.C., officials are planning to loan money to pay for storm drain upgrades in a public housing complex that has faced frequent flooding. The District of Columbia has already received money to upgrade a stormwater pump station through FEMA’s other climate adaptation initiative, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, but the new loan will help officials pursue projects that wouldn’t qualify for that grant money.
Because states themselves will be running the loan programs, rather than the federal government, borrowers won’t have to worry about following the extensive federal spending guidelines that often hamper adaptation projects, or about passing a strict cost-benefit analysis. Experts have criticized federal benefit-cost regulations for placing too much emphasis on property values and neglecting to consider intangible assets like community cohesion and cultural heritage.
Furthermore, the program is a “revolving” loan fund, meaning states can reuse FEMA’s seed capital over and over again. If a state gives a city a loan of $1 million and the city pays the loan back after five years, the state will then have just over $1 million to lend out somewhere else. The program doesn’t have an expiration date, which Salinas said makes it “a more durable source of financing” than the agency’s other grant programs. The loan interest rates are far lower than cities tend to pay for standard municipal bonds, so the risk of default is low.
Anna Weber, an adaptation policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the program could help fill the gaps in FEMA’s still-nascent effort to finance climate adaptation.
“The underlying way that we distribute funding for hazard mitigation currently serves to drive resources to places that already have resources,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential for this program to slot into this patchwork of funding in a way that fills in some gaps.”
Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA rolls out climate adaptation loans for small and overlooked communities on Sep 14, 2023.
First aid kits typically contain single-use, disposable medical supplies that inevitably end up in landfills…
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How can we improve the carbon footprint of our yards and gardens? The traditional tools…
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More than 80 percent of the world is affected by light pollution. Humans have become so accustomed to not seeing stars in the city that, following a blackout caused by a 1984 earthquake in Los Angeles, people reported seeing a “giant silvery cloud,” which was in fact our own Milky Way galaxy showing up in the absence of artificial light.
It is well known that artificial light at night (ALAN) affects terrestrial lifeforms, from birds and moths to humans and their sleeping patterns. Now, a new study explores how light pollution affects entire coastal marine ecosystems, from corals and fish to whales and the plankton they eat.
“[L]ittle is known about effects of light on broad groups of marine taxa such as cetaceans, ecosystem-level effects, or interactive impacts of light and other anthropogenic stressors. Light is a key structuring factor of the marine environment and can therefore elicit immense downstream effects on marine organisms individually, at the population- or ecosystem-level,” the study said.
The study highlights important knowledge gaps in marine light pollution ecology and makes recommendations for management and research going forward.
“Sea creatures have evolved over millions of years to adapt to natural light intensity and patterns,” said lead author of the study Colleen Miller, who conducted the research as a doctoral student working in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, reported the Cornell Chronicle. “But now they face an ever-increasing flood of light from human development along the coasts and, except for a few case studies, we have a limited understanding about how it affects many species and entire ecosystems.”
The study, “A synthesis of the risks of marine light pollution across organismal and ecological scales,” was published in the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems.
Natural light from the moon and stars, which is important to marine creatures and affects their behavior, feeding, hormonal cycles and reproduction, is easily obscured or even entirely blocked by artificial light.
“Artificial light at night is harmful to sea turtles in two ways,” Miller said, as the Cornell Chronicle reported. “Females trying to find a quiet dark spot to lay their eggs avoid light and may end up not coming ashore at all. Hatchlings head toward inland lights instead of moonlight on the water and then die of dehydration or starvation.”
LED lights make matters worse. Their usually shorter light wavelengths penetrate the water more deeply than older types of lighting.
“The blue light can actually penetrate right down to the seafloor,” said professor Tim Smyth, head of science for marine biogeochemistry and observations at the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory and lead author of another study on ALAN’s disruption of marine habitats, as reported by Mongabay. “Certainly, when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, the cities were much more of an orange glow… I think if we go towards that kind of coloring of that spectrum again, that would be a positive step.”
Campaigns on the local state and regional levels to keep skies darker in order to help migrating birds have been helpful to coastal marine ecosystems near cities.
“We also need to look at artificial light at night on a broader scale,” Miller said, as the Cornell Chronicle reported. “We need much more data from a larger geographic area and over a broader range of organisms. We should be urgently concerned about how artificial light at night is affecting marine ecosystems.”
The use of more red light is another viable possibility, as it penetrates less deeply into the water. Barriers could also be placed along coastlines to block artificial light from cities.
“Light pollution is an urgent concern for marine ecosystems because marine organisms have tight relationships with their natural light environment. As the world moves deeper into the Anthropocene, assessing and mitigating the risks of this pollutant to key environmental and economic marine systems is critical to maintaining a healthy ocean,” the study said.
The post Light Pollution Threatens Entire Coastal Ecosystems, Study Suggests appeared first on EcoWatch.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced grants of more than $100 million to expand the country’s recycling and waste management infrastructure. It is the largest investment in recycling by the EPA in three decades.
Funding for the grants will come from President Joe Biden’s Investing in America agenda. Under the new funding opportunity, Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling, 25 communities have been selected by the EPA to receive grants of more than $73 million, a press release from the EPA said.
Approximately $32 million in additional funding will be made available for states and territories to upgrade their solid waste management planning, for the implementation of plans and for data collection.
“President Biden’s Investing in America agenda tackles our most pressing environmental challenges including climate change and lead in drinking water, and today we add another historic investment to better manage waste in communities across America,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan in the press release. “By investing in better recycling, EPA is deploying resources to provide recycling services across the country, including in disadvantaged communities, while preventing waste that contributes to the climate crisis, supporting local economies and creating good-paying jobs.”
The grants will support the implementation of the National Recycling Strategy, an EPA initiative to build a circular economy committed to keeping products, materials and services in circulation as long as possible.
“Recycling helps us protect our environment while creating jobs and promoting economic growth,” said Senator Tom Carper, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, in the press release. “Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this unprecedented investment will provide communities across our country with the opportunity to improve their recycling programs and implement more sustainable waste-management practices. I applaud EPA for the hard work in getting this funding out the door, and I look forward to working together to advance policies that strengthen our nation’s recycling infrastructure.”
The Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grant Program is part of the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which has a goal of ensuring 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal investments go to disadvantaged communities that have been and continue to be overburdened by pollution, underserved and marginalized. About 76 percent — $56 of the $73 million — of the total community-allotted funding will be put toward projects benefitting disadvantaged communities.
The Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grants for Communities will provide support for waste management systems improvements throughout the country, with grants of $500,000 to $4 million each. Projects that have been selected include bins for curbside recycling in communities currently without access; new recycling collection vehicles; reduction of contamination through material recovery facility upgrades; enhancements to organic and composting infrastructure and programs; and construction of facilities that improve reuse infrastructure for materials like food waste and plastics and improve recycling and composting.
The Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grants for States and Territories will provide grants from $360,000 to $750,000 to all 56 territories, states and the District of Columbia. The biggest grant amounts will go to the states and territories with the most need. The grants will help achieve the EPA’s Food Loss and Waste Reduction Goal, as well as its National Recycling Goal. Activities funded by these grants include the improvement of programs for managing post-consumer materials through updating or developing solid waste management plans, as well as bolstering data collection efforts.
Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $275 million total will be provided from 2022 to 2026 in grants under the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act, which is the biggest recycling investment in 30 years. Additional funding for the grants comes from EPA’s annual appropriations.
“Today’s announcement for states, territories, and communities is the first round of funding from this new grant program,” the press release said. “In the coming months, EPA will announce the selected recipients of the recycling grants for Tribes and intertribal consortia, as well as the recipients of EPA’s new Recycling Education and Outreach grant program.”
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Over the last decade, nearly 2,000 land and environment defenders have been killed around the world, and in 2022, a land defender was killed every other day, according to a report released Tuesday.
The study from Global Witness, a nonprofit human rights environmental watchdog, shows that the killings of Indigenous peoples defending their territories and resources represented nearly 34 percent of all lethal attacks despite making up about 5 percent of the world’s population.
“Governments where these violations are happening are not acting properly to create a safe environment for defenders and a civic space proper for them to thrive,” said Gabriella Bianchini, senior advisor for the land and environmental defenders team at Global Witness. “They are not reporting or investigating and seeking accountability for reprisals against defenders. And most importantly, they are not promoting legal accountability in the proper manner.”
Latin America has consistently ranked as the deadliest region for land defenders overall and saw almost 9 in every 10 recorded killings in 2022. More than a third of those fatal attacks took place in Colombia. In 2021, Brazil was named the deadliest country for land defenders by Global Witness and now sits at second; In July, activist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips were murdered in the Brazilian Amazon.
Growing tensions from agribusiness, mining, and logging have led to consistent lethal attacks in the region. Between 2011 and 2021, for instance, more than 10,000 conflicts related to land rights and territories were recorded in Latin America alone.
“The worsening climate crisis and the ever-increasing demand for agricultural commodities, fuel, and minerals will only intensify the pressure on the environment — and those who risk their lives to defend it,” wrote the authors.
Earlier this year, Frontline Defenders, an international human rights organization, released a similar report to Global Witness’ with corresponding findings — including that Colombia was the most dangerous country for land defenders. While Frontline Defenders reported that there were 186 land defender deaths in Colombia and Global Witness reported 60, Bianchini said differences in statistics are the result of different methodologies, which vary by organization. However, both organizations’ reports were united in findings: Indigenous people make up a disproportionate amount of the deaths among land and environment defenders, Latin America sees the highest rates of violence, and the number of killings is likely underreported.
“I am incredibly grateful and impressed to see the fight of all of these communities who are there living in these areas and who have been acting for thousands of years to protect the array of life,” said Bianchini. “I cannot believe that humanity right now is living in a moment where we are killing those who are protecting their own lands and civil rights.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In 2022, a land defender was killed every two days on Sep 13, 2023.
A lost hiker in Alaska’s Katmai National Park was rescued after being spotted on a livestream camera that viewers were observing to catch glimpses of brown bears.
Viewers were tuning into Explore.org’s Dumpling Mountain livestream, which comes from one of many of the organization’s cameras placed within the park. During this time of year, many people tune into Explore.org’s Katmai National Park livestreams to watch brown bears as they prepare for hibernation.
But on Sept. 5, viewers spotted a man who appeared in distress and was speaking, appearing to mouth “help me” and “lost.” He then returned to face the camera and give a thumbs down, NPR reported. However, the camera didn’t capture the sound, so users deciphered what they could.
User Call_Me_Maeby called attention to the hiker, writing in the livestream comments, “There is someone distressed on the camera 3:30pm – 3:43.”
Shortly after, a moderator for the livestream commented, “Thanks viewers for letting us know. Explore is aware and able to get in touch with Katmai. They are also reviewing the footage.”
Cynthia Hernandez, a spokesperson for the National Park Service, told BBC that the park sent a search and rescue team, which was able to rescue the hiker unharmed.
Later that evening, the moderator shared an update in the chat: “Good News – Two Rangers hiked up, have found the man and are escorting him back down the mountain!”
User Call_Me_Maeby responded, “Aaaand I’m crying because I’m so relieved. I first noticed that hiker about 3.5 hrs ago. Those rangers made it up there fast!”
While millions of people tune into the Katmai National Park livestreams in advance of Fat Bear Week, when users vote on which bear has grown the most in preparation of hibernation, the Dumpling Mountain camera doesn’t get as much attention as other livestreams, such as the Brooks Falls livestream.
Mike Fitz, a naturalist with Explore.org and former ranger at Katmai National Park, told NPR that the Dumpling Mountain camera isn’t as likely to capture wildlife and operates more as a scenery camera.
The Dumpling Mountain livestream camera is also a couple miles from any trail, in a particularly rough landscape and an area that can have low visibility from fog, wind and rain, as was the case on Sept. 5. The Explore.org team is still unsure how the hiker found the camera in the wilderness, but Fitz said, “Our webcam viewers, collectively, are very sharp-eyed and they don’t miss much.”
The post Nature Livestream Camera Leads to Lost Hiker, Rescue appeared first on EcoWatch.