The report also documents the growing burdens plastic pollution has put on the economies, resources and budgets of states and municipalities in the United States, a press release from CIEL said.
“States and cities are on the frontlines of the growing plastics crisis and the mounting costs it imposes on governments and economies. From increased waste management and infrastructure costs, to lost revenues for tourism and fisheries, as well as rapidly-growing health costs from pervasive plastic pollution, states and communities are sacrificing budgets, resources, and revenues to the plastics crisis,” said Carroll Muffett, co-author of the report and president of CIEL, in the press release. “This report not only highlights the key corporate drivers of that crisis, but equips governments with robust legal tools to seek remedies, recover costs, and hold polluters accountable.”
The endless production, use and disposal of plastics products damages recycling and waste management systems while clogging stormwater and drainage systems and disrupting water treatment facilities. It also demands increased infrastructure, operations and maintenance costs.
Local and state governments bear the cost burden of cleanups of waterways and public lands, as well as face repercussions in industries that depend on clean environments, like fisheries and tourism.
Increasingly, plastics end up in water, soil, air and food, as well as our bodies, driving up the costs of healthcare and illnesses associated with plastics and the toxic chemicals they carry.
The production of plastics is predicted to triple in the next 40 years.
The report said plastics producers may be breaching various U.S. laws, including those having to do with consumer protection, product liability and public nuisance, reported The Guardian.
“We’re in the midst of a population-scale human experiment on the impacts of multigenerational toxic exposures,” Muffett said, as The Guardian reported. “Plastics are at the epicenter of that.”
The report looks at the increasingly overwhelming evidence that plastics companies have known the risks of their products for a long time. It includes a guide for states and cities to identify companies that are the most responsible for impacts at the local level, evaluate their responsibilities and start to hold them accountable.
It discusses available legal pathways, building upon precedents established by earlier environmental lawsuits and ongoing climate litigation. It also provides a detailed exploration of how the legal tools can be implemented to tackle the ongoing problem of plastics.
“The plastics crisis has reached an inflection point and states like New York, California, and others are already taking action to hold the companies behind it accountable,” said Steven Feit, legal and research manager and senior attorney with CIEL’s Fossil Economy program, in the press release. “Despite decades of industry obstruction, obfuscation, and misdirection, there is still time to act. Our report is designed to equip local government officials with the knowledge to identify, quantify, and seek remedy for the diverse and detrimental impacts of plastic pollution.”
Alaska is known for its natural beauty and stunning landscapes teeming with vast wilderness and abundant wildlife.
But staining the landscape is a strange phenomenon: Dozens of the most remote rivers and streams in the Land of the Midnight Sun are turning from clear blue to cloudy orange. New research has found that the discoloration could be from the exposure of minerals from thawing permafrost.
“The more we flew around, we started noticing more and more orange rivers and streams,” said Jon O’Donnell, lead author of the study and an ecologist with the National Park Service (NPS)’s Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network, in a press release from University of California, Davis (UC Davis). “There are certain sites that look almost like a milky orange juice. Those orange streams can be problematic both in terms of being toxic but might also prevent migration of fish to spawning areas.”
For the first time, researchers have sampled and documented some of these degraded waterways, including 75 locations across part of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska.
The researchers said that, as the climate continues to be affected by global heating, these contaminated rivers and streams could seriously impact fisheries and drinking water in Arctic watersheds.
“When the permafrost thaw, sulfide mineral deposits are exposed to groundwater and chemical weathering processes. Through this process, acid, iron and trace metals are released to streams and rivers. Many of these trace metals (such as copper, cadmium, arsenic, and others) are considered toxic for drinking water or for aquatic life if they exceed certain thresholds. We are actively working to determine which metals may exceed thresholds for aquatic life determine[d] by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” O’Donnell told EcoWatch in an email.
O’Donnell first became aware of the problem in 2018 while visiting a river that looked rusty but had been clear a year earlier. O’Donnell compiled a list of locations and took water samples when possible. The region is so remote that the rivers and streams are usually only accessible by helicopter.
“The stained rivers are so big we can see them from space,” said Brett Poulin, one of the study’s primary investigators and a UC Davis assistant environmental toxicology professor, in the press release. “These have to be stained a lot to pick them up from space.”
Poulin is a water chemistry expert and thought the staining appeared similar to when water becomes contaminated by acid mine drainage, but there aren’t any mines near any of the degraded rivers.
“Rusting rivers tend to be more acidic and more turbid (due to iron particles). Evidence from the lower 48 has shown that migratory fish like salmon may not pass through river reaches affected by acid mine drainage. Our observations from the Arctic are similar to acid mine drainage, except there are no mines in the affected watersheds. The rivers are draining remote wilderness areas,” O’Donnell told EcoWatch.
One theory is that, as Earth’s climate has warmed, the thawing of frozen permafrost has exposed its minerals to water and oxygen, releasing acid and metals.
“Chemistry tells us minerals are weathering,” Poulin said in the press release. “Understanding what’s in the water is a fingerprint as to what occurred.”
The affected rivers are located on federal lands — including Kobuk Valley and Gates of the Arctic National Parks — managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and NPS.
“The Arctic is warming four times faster than the Earth as a whole. Model projections predict continued warming in the coming decades. As the climate warms, permafrost will continue to thaw, exposing previously frozen soils and rocks to chemical weathering. We are working to determine which watersheds in the Brooks Range will be vulnerable to rusting in the future. Not all rivers will turn orange. There needs to be sulfide minerals, such as pyrite, to drive the mobilization of trace metals, sulfate, iron, and acid into the streams,” O’Donnell told EcoWatch.
The river and stream-staining minerals can affect the health of fish and, in turn, the humans who consume them.
“Rusting rivers represent a loss of habitat for fish. Our observations showed a complete loss of resident fish from a stream that changed from clear to orange. Further, metals might accumulate in stream invertebrates, which fish eat, and further accumulate in fish. Thus, eating affected fish has implications for human health. We have not shown this yet, it’s just a concern,” O’Donnell said.
Initial samples were analyzed by Poulin and Taylor Evinger, a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural and environmental chemistry at UC Davis. Other scientists took samples in June and July of 2023, while Poulin and Evinger collected their own in August.
Some samples from the rusted waters had a pH of 2.3 — the average for the rivers is 8. This indicated that the sulfide minerals were weathering, leaving conditions that were highly acidic and corrosive and releasing additional metals. The team measured high or elevated levels of zinc, iron, nickel, cadmium and copper.
“We see a lot of different types of metals in these waters,” Evinger said in the press release. “One of the most dominant metals is iron. That’s what is causing the color change.”
O’Donnell first noted a change in 2018, but satellite images showed stained waters back in 2008.
“The issue is slowly propagating from small headwaters into bigger rivers over time,” Evinger said. “When emergent issues or threats come about, we need to be able to understand them.”
Orange circles indicate orange stream observations, red stars indicate sites where water samples were collected and blue circles are nearby villages. Hydrologic Unit Code-6 basins are shown as black outlines from the National Watershed Boundary dataset. The hill-shade layer utilizes the USGS National Elevation Dataset. Map generated in Esri ArcMap software. Map credit: Kenneth Hill, NPS
The problem of Alaska’s rusting rivers is increasing. Healthy areas are turning into degraded habitats with less fish and invertebrates. Rural communities that rely on the rivers for their drinking water may need to use treatment methods eventually, while fishing stocks could also be affected.
“As the climate continues to warm, we would expect permafrost to continue to thaw and so wherever there are these types of minerals, there’s potential for streams to be turning orange and becoming degraded in terms of water quality,” O’Donnell said in the press release.
However, many of these unsettlingly colorful rivers and streams are far from where people will encounter them.
“While permafrost can be directly impacted by human activity (e.g., roads, buildings, and other infrastructure), much of the permafrost in the Arctic is in remote spots away from towns and cities. Permafrost thaw is due to warming air temperatures which is largely a global issue. As scientists we need to work towards a solution to this problem,” O’Donnell told EcoWatch.
More investigation will be necessary to better comprehend the issues and whether rivers and streams will be able to rebound, possibly after the recovery of permafrost during cold weather.
“We are still working to understand how these rusting rivers change over time, both seasonally and year to year. For instance, streams become less orange during snowmelt, when flows are high and groundwater becomes diluted. Once we understand the mechanisms driving rusting rivers better, we’ll be better able to understand future change and trajectories,” O’Donnell told EcoWatch.
At a library in Dover, New Hampshire, earlier this year, the shelves of books and CDs typically available for lending were accompanied by something else — racks of clothes. Every Sunday and Monday from December through mid-January, community members could visit a lecture hall in the Dover Public Library to participate in the pilot of a new type of lending project: a clothing library. Visitors could check out up to five garments for two weeks at a time. The collection focused on “occasion wear,” the types of things people might buy for the purpose of wearing once: a holiday party dress, a wedding outfit, a ski trip ensemble.
But more than displacing those types of purchases, and the resulting waste, the real idea behind the project was to facilitate a shift in behavior, said Stella Martinez McShera, the clothing library’s creator. “How can we bridge the gap between people buying, whether that’s new or secondhand, to borrowing?”
McShera with the clothing library setup. Courtesy of Stella Martinez McShera
I met McShera while reporting another newsletter story on the world’s first degrowth master’s program, run by a university in Barcelona. She’s a recent graduate of the online master’s, and the clothing library was her thesis project. In that story, we explored what happens when the philosophical ideas of a new economic system meet the realities of the one we have. McShera’s project is one example of what that looks like in practice.
McShera started her career in fashion. In 2000, she launched the first fashion incubator in the U.S. But as much as she loved the essence of fashion, she knew that the industry was guilty of horrifying human rights abuses, pollution, and waste. She had long been interested in circular fashion, but she came to feel that even a circular approach was not enough to get to the root of all the ills associated with fast fashion. When she discovered degrowth and the master’s program, it became a proving ground for her ideas about replacing fast fashion and extraction with borrowing and being resourceful with what already exists.
McShera started building her clothing library pilot by collecting surplus garments from local thrift and vintage stores. It’s estimated that thrift stores sell only about 20 percent of the donated clothing they receive. Even vintage boutiques and curated consignment shops will end up getting rid of some garments they weren’t able to sell in a set time. “They have to cycle stuff in,” she said. “So even if it’s something really cute, maybe they overpriced it at the thrift store, or maybe it just didn’t sell in two weeks because it’s a sweater and it’s unseasonably warm.”
Just from local secondhand shops, McShera quickly gathered over 5,000 garments — even more than she could take, she said. She donated her own surplus to a housing shelter, winnowing the library collection down to about 1,500 items.
McShera kicked off the launch with a fashion show in the stacks. Professionally coiffed librarians modeled items from the collection for photographers and a crowd of over 160 attendees. “It was so much fun,” said Denise LaFrance, the Dover library’s director. The fashion show was the biggest indoor event at the library in her 25-year tenure. “I mean, seriously, people still are talking about it.”
Models walk the runway during the fashion show at the Dover Public Library. Jason Shamesman
During the pilot, McShera also hosted an eco-fashion panel and three workshops on mending and styling, intended to help people think differently about their relationship to their wardrobes. “Because it’s free, people were more willing to experiment with their style,” McShera said. There was no guilt or shame associated with returning something, because returning was an understood part of the process.
LaFrance borrowed, among other things, a pair of gray silk pants that she remembered loving, even though they weren’t the type of thing she would typically shop for. When she checked them out, they still had their original price tag attached. They retailed for about $400. “I would never buy $400 pants,” she said. “But they were fabulous.”
Over just 12 days of being open, McShera said, the library saw over a hundred people come through, and 65 borrowed something. And of the more than 100 garments that were checked out during the library’s pilot, all of them came back clean and in good condition.
“It’s the commoning of clothing,” McShera said. “It’s free access versus ownership.”
With the pilot concluded, and McShera’s thesis complete, she’s now looking toward the next steps of bringing clothing libraries to fruition in her community and beyond. She presented the concept at the 10th International Degrowth Conference last week in Spain, and plans to publish a manual that will empower community members all over the world to start their own projects, in partnership with their local libraries. Someday, she’d like to see a network of clothing libraries — sharing resources and knowledge, advocating for policy change, and possibly even swapping clothes to help keep their collections fresh.
Although she feels there’s more testing to be done, a few more local libraries in her area have already expressed interest in hosting a pilot, she noted.
“The most difficult thing about this was space and time,” said LaFrance. The library is in an old building, she said, “and we’re kind of bursting at the seams.” She suspects that most libraries would be similarly pressed to carve out space for a small shop’s worth of clothing racks. One thing she suggested to McShera was a setup more like a traveling bus.
But McShera’s ultimate vision is to integrate clothing into the normal functioning of a library. “The reason I wanted the model to be in partnership with the public libraries is because the behavior’s normal. People already know, I go in and I borrow,” she said. She added that libraries tend to be centrally located in cities and neighborhoods, highly visible and easily reachable by foot or transit. And many libraries — including Dover’s — already branch out from books, lending things like tools, games, and music.
“This just seems like a logical next step,” she said.
Rather than a pop-up in an event room, she envisions a future where clothing racks could find a permanent home in the library. There could even be regular staff members with fashion expertise who could steward the collections. “Just like if someone needs help using the photocopier or help researching something, you ask the librarian for help,” McShera said. “So if you wanted some help styling, you could say, ‘Hey, is there a clothing librarian on shift today?’”
It has become increasingly common for public libraries and other community-serving organizations to offer “libraries of things” — collections of functional stuff that people might want to borrow for a short time, like toys, gear, musical instruments, and more. Here’s a photo of one such offering in the corner of a library in Frankfurt, Germany.
IMAGE CREDITS
Vision: Grist
Spotlight: Courtesy of Stella Martinez McShera; Jason Shamesman
Parting shot: Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty Images
Claudia Sheinbaum won a commanding victory in last month’s Mexican presidential election, winning almost 60 percent of the vote and securing legislative majorities for her left-wing Morena party. A former climate scientist and mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum dominated the polls after emerging as the successor to the popular outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Even as Sheinbaum prepares to take office, the city she ran between 2018 and 2023 is making global headlines as it suffers through an historic water crisis. Millions of low-income residents across the city rely on intermittent deliveries of contaminated groundwater, and even wealthier neighborhoods have seen their taps shut off as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Not only that, but the city loses around 40 percent of its water supply to leaks in its underground pipes.
Sheinbaum tried to tackle these problems as mayor, pursuing projects to capture rainwater, restore depleted aquifers, and replace and upgrade aging pipes. But water experts and public officials who worked with Sheinbaum say she lacked the resources to turn around a crisis that has been decades in the making. The new power she will have as president, plus a wave of new leadership in the local and regional governments of Mexico City, could usher in a sweeping change in how one of the world’s most populous countries manages its water and adapts to climate-fueled drought.
“Water is her main concern,” said Armando Alonso Beltrán, the head of the water department for the state government in the Mexico City region and a friend of Sheinbaum’s. “It’s in her top priorities, and it always has been.”
Enrique Lomnitz, an engineer whose company, Isla Urbana, has built rainfall harvesting systems across the city, agreed that Sheinbaum made significant progress as mayor, but said the city still has a long way to go.
“She has a very good record, and she started a lot of paradigm-shifting programs that opened new possibilities for approaching the water crisis,” he told Grist. “But these are still very small things compared to the scale of the problem.”
That’s because Mexico’s water crisis is really several different crises. The shortage that captured global headlines this spring came about due to an extreme drought caused by the El Niño climate phenomenon. When spring rains failed to arrive, several key reservoirs that supply water to the city emptied out, forcing city officials to implement rotating water shutoffs in the wealthy neighborhoods that are fortunate enough to have consistent running water.
But these reservoirs only supply around 30 percent of Mexico City’s water, most of which goes to the wealthier neighborhoods in the city center. The rest of the metropolis draws water from underground aquifers that have been dwindling for decades, so much so that parts of the city have sunk by several feet. The water that does still come out of these aquifers is often contaminated with toxic chemicals.
A man carries a barrel for water in the Iztapalapa borough of Mexico City, which has seen a water crisis worsen for decades as underground aquifers run dry. Gerardo Vieyra / NurPhoto via Getty Images
The problem is not that there isn’t enough water to recharge these aquifers over time: Mexico City gets around 34 inches of rainfall a year, similar to Midwest states like Iowa. But the city has grown by millions of people in recent decades without investing in infrastructure to capture and distribute all that water. The critical forest that recharges the aquifer, known as the “Bosque del Agua” or “water forest,” has diminished over the past century due to logging and development. Meanwhile, the water authority has failed to maintain the residential water system, which has resulted in an astonishing amount of water being lost to leaks — more than 40 percent of the total water supply, one of the highest rates in the world.
Sheinbaum faced all these problems as mayor of Mexico City. In 2019, less than a year into her tenure, she announced a major effort to control these leaks, deploying dozens of “leak response brigades” that would locate and plug holes in the water grid. It’s hard to gauge how successful she’s been, said Lomnitz, because fixing a leak in one part of the system can increase water pressure in another part of the system and thus cause more leaks. And as the city sinks thanks to aquifer subsidence, more leaks appear.
“There’s like a Whac-a-Mole kind of thing happening,” said Lomnitz. “You fix the leaks here and they increase over there.” Despite Sheinbaum’s investment, the city is likely billions of dollars away from meaningful water savings from leak reduction.
“There were mixed results, mostly positive, from her time as mayor,” said Alonso. “But it’s hard to tell the final results, because the drought came last year and there was less water.”
Making the city “spongy” enough to catch and store falling rain is even harder given Mexico City’s idiosyncratic history. The city lies on a former lakebed that early Spanish colonists drained in the seventeenth century, and as a result it is prone to frequent flooding. The city’s leaders have spent the equivalent of billions of dollars over the past hundred years to build tunnels that can drain this floodwater away from the metropolis, including a massive 38-mile tunnel project that opened in 2019.
“Our issue has always been how to take out water from the city, and as we had this very rich aquifer and this amount of rain which is quite good, we never had this problem of scarcity,” said Loreta Castro Reguera, an architect who has worked on a number of water projects in Mexico City. The city also has a problem of “technological inertia” as it seeks to capture and harvest rainwater, added Castro Reguera: It uses the same tunnel system to flush out stormwater and sewage, which makes it almost impossible to treat and reroute rainwater for residential usage.
Since building a parallel pipe system for stormwater would be almost unthinkably expensive, the city’s best option is to start smaller, capturing rainwater at the household or neighborhood level. Sheinbaum started doing this as mayor through a number of innovative nature-based projects. For instance, the city transformed a former landfill near the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant into a restored wetland that filters and treats captured stormwater, yielding a new high-quality water supply. She also worked with Lomnitz’s Isla Urbana to install thousands of household catchment systems and boosted the budget for infrastructure repairs.
Another model comes from Sheinbaum’s incoming successor as the mayor of Mexico City, fellow Morena member Clara Brugada, who has her own record tackling water issues. Brugada, who will take office later this year, has served for almost a decade as the mayor of Iztapalapa, a large impoverished borough in the eastern part of the city. Iztapalapa has struggled for decades with crime and water shortages, but Brugada took major steps to replace faulty infrastructure and created several community spaces known as “utopias” that combine green space with free public services and recreational areas.
One of the banner projects in the borough was La Quebradora, a “hydraulic park” designed by Castro Reguera’s firm with support from the local government. The park captures stormwater to reduce flooding in nearby areas and funnels that water down into the aquifer, recharging groundwater and easing the local water shortage.
“The impulse needs to come from the government,” said Castro Reguera, describing the need for more projects like the one in Iztapalapa. “This might be a chance to put more of these projects in place.”
Incoming Mexico City mayor Clara Brugada, left, stands with Mexico’s president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum during an election celebration. Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images
Sheinbaum, however, will have to worry about water issues in areas far from Mexico City, because the country’s northern states are facing a very different water problem than the capital. In these states, which are much drier than the region around Mexico City, the problem is less poor management than it is a lack of supply. The vast majority of water in these areas goes to irrigate crops such as avocados and alfalfa, and another share supplies numerous mining operations, leaving very little leftover for residential use.
Sheinbaum and her predecessor López Obrador have tried to tackle this problem by curbing so-called water concessions, which grant farms and mines the exclusive right to tap rivers and aquifers. Before the election, López Obrador pushed a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the government to cut off water to mines during a drought, and Sheinbaum has signaled she too will support that measure. She has also reportedly called for a revamp of the national water law that would limit water use by farms, though this effort will likely face opposition from powerful agricultural interests. (Neither the president’s office nor the campaign offices of Sheinbaum and Brugada responded to Grist’s interview requests.)
In these northern states as well as in Mexico City, the water crisis is as much a problem of governance as it is one of physical shortage. The country’s national water authority has faced accusations of bribery and corruption for years, and the local authority in Mexico City has faced criticism as well for a lack of transparency about water quality. These are the same utilities that Lomnitz says have underinvested in infrastructure for decades.
But the conditions are ripe for a surge of investment. Sheinbaum holds the presidency, which will give her access to a much larger budget to invest in water storage and treatment projects. Brugada has promised to continue her focus on rainwater harvesting and environmental justice as the mayor of Mexico City. The new head of Mexico City’s regional government is also a member of the Morena party, and which means all the levels of government are aligned for the first time in decades.
Victor Magaña Rueda, an environmental scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied climate impacts in Mexico City, told Grist that he believes Sheinbaum has the political will to turn around the trend of disinvestment and delay.
“She has a very profound knowledge of what the water crisis in Mexico is,” said Magaña. “She is more interested in environmental problems I would say than our president right now. But the important thing is that she knows that we cannot go on in a situation like we lived in for the past few years.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up a case challenging how Georgia elects its powerful energy regulators, clearing the way for delayed Public Service Commission elections in the state to resume. The elections had previously been impugned by voting rights and clean energy advocates, who argued the existing system diluted Black votes. The case could affect future legal challenges based on the Voting Rights Act.
“The court has spoken,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, said in a statement. “We are on track to resume elections for the Public Service Commission in 2025.”
The advocates who sued said they’re considering how to proceed — the commission’s decisions, which include everything from energy rates and discounts to building new power plants, remain as important as ever, they told Grist and WABE.
“People are not able to pay rent, they’re not able to feed their families,” said James Woodall, a public policy associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights and one of the plaintiffs in the case. “So when I think about the decision, or lack thereof, to take on this case, I thought about those people.”
Each of Georgia’s Public Service Commissioners has to live in a specific district, but unlike members of congress they’re elected by statewide vote. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, all Black voters in Atlanta, argued this system dilutes their votes and therefore violates the Voting Rights Act. While a federal judge agreed, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees courts in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, overturned that decision. With the announcement that the U.S. Supreme Court will not consider the case, the 11th Circuit ruling will stand, leaving the system as-is.
Public Service Commission, or PSC, elections in Georgia, meanwhile, have been on hold since 2022, when the original judge issued a stay blocking any election until a new system could be devised — a decision the Supreme Court upheld. Two elections were canceled that year, and those commissioners were allowed to continue to serve and vote; a third commissioner who was up for reelection this year will also continue to serve without facing voters.
“We have had these commissioners sitting in their seats pretty much unelected,” said Brionté McCorkle, another plaintiff and the executive director of the nonprofit Georgia Conservation Voters. “They’re making incredibly important decisions that are impacting the lives of Georgians and also impacting the climate crisis.”
The five-member Public Service Commission has final approval over most steps taken by Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, including how much the company charges for energy and how it makes that power. Since the cancellation of the 2022 elections, the commissioners have approved the construction of new natural gas turbines as well as bill increases to cover natural gas costs and construction of the newest nuclear reactor at Plant Vogtle. Next year, they’ll make all-important decisions about Georgia Power’s future energy plans, including possible expansions of renewable energy and closure of coal plants, and the next several years of power rates — all before voters have the chance to send new representatives to the commission.
Under a state law passed this year, PSC elections would resume in 2025 with votes for two seats. The law lays out an election schedule for all five seats that would leave the current commissioners in power beyond their original six-year terms.
The plaintiffs are considering a challenge to that law, McCorkle said, though they’ve made no final decisions.
“We definitely feel like that is all very problematic,” she said of the law’s election schedule. “We’re gonna keep fighting for the people of Georgia.”
While McCorkle called the Supreme Court’s decision “a bummer,” she said she also felt “a little bit of relief” because there was no guarantee the high court would side with the plaintiffs.
Voting rights advocates are concerned about the implications of the 11th Circuit’s ruling, which didn’t weigh in on whether the plaintiffs had proven their votes were unfairly diluted. Rather, the appeals court argued a federal court can’t overrule the state’s choice to hold at-large elections because it would violate the “principles of federalism.”
“They endorsed the notion that the state has a vested interest in disenfranchising Black Georgians,” Woodall said. “For me, it is an endorsement that reflects over generations and generations of discrimination.”
Woodall, McCorkle, and others said they plan to continue educating Georgians about the PSC, as well as holding commissioners accountable.
“We’re gonna make sure people know who you are and what you do and that they can call you, call the commissioners, and make sure their voices are heard and represented in the decisions that they’re making,” McCorkle said of the commissioners.
An aerial survey conducted by wildlife NGO African Parks has revealed the largest land mammal migration on Earth.
The Great Nile Migration of six million antelope from the Boma-Badingilo Jonglei Landscape (BBJL) in South Sudan to Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park is more than twice the size of the annual “great migration” of two million zebras, wildebeest and gazelle from Tanzania’s Serengeti to Kenya, reported The Guardian.
“The migration in South Sudan blows any other migration we know of out the water,” said David Simpson, park manager for Boma and Badingilo national parks with African Parks, as The Guardian reported. “The estimates indicate the vast herds of antelope species… are almost three times larger than east Africa’s great migration. The scale is truly awe-inspiring.”
African Parks used two aircraft equipped with cameras that gathered detailed documentation of the migration by taking a picture every two seconds, producing 330,000 total images. Graduates of University of Juba then examined the photos and counted the wildlife using computer software.
“Seeing these animals here at such scale is something I could have never fathomed still existed on the planet,” said Mike Fay, African Parks’ landscape coordinator for Boma and Badingilo, as reported by The Guardian. “From the air, it felt like I was watching what Earth might have been like millennia ago, when nature and humans still existed together in balance.”
The region’s animal species have survived alongside decades of instability and civil war in South Sudan.
From April 28 to May 15 of last year, the pilots flew the researchers over the entire 122,774 square kilometers of known antelope range in the BBJL. Some of the landscape they covered had never been surveyed before. In addition to antelope, they also documented lions, giraffes, buffalo, elephants and other species.
“The BBJL aerial survey is the first comprehensive survey of this region. This historic survey has highlighted the scale of the migration, and aided in informing strategic conservation efforts to ensure sustainability for both the wildlife and people who depend on the landscape,” a press release from African Parks said. “A comparison with surveys done in the 1980s shows that there have been declines in most sedentary species — such as elephant and giraffe — which need year-round access to water and which do not exhibit a migratory pattern, further highlighting the need for proper protection of the landscape outside Boma and Badingilo national parks.”
The animals in the Great Nile Migration are on the move year-round, likely driven by the availability of quality grazing conditions, The Guardian reported. The survey estimates included four species of antelope: five million white-eared kob, 350,000 Mongalla gazelle, a little less than 300,000 tiang and 160,000 bohor reedbuck.
The results surprised scientists, since despite wildlife decreasing in many parts of the planet due to climate change and human development, the Great Nile Migration has endured and expanded, reported CNN.
“If the numbers are right with these species, it looks like they’ve increased since 2007. It looks like they’ve increased since the 1980s even,” Fay said, as CNN reported.
Simpson said the findings of the survey are “a gamechanger for conservation efforts in South Sudan” and have the potential to be “one of the greatest conservation opportunities on the planet,” as reported by The Guardian.
Currently, South Sudan is not considered a safe destination for international tourists, but Simpson believes it has great potential.
“Having the world’s largest land mammal migration could put South Sudan on the map as a must-visit ecotourism destination. But the migration’s current critical value is food security for local communities,” Simpson said, as The Guardian reported.
Simpson pointed out that, in addition to demonstrating the vast numbers of wildlife in the world’s largest land mammal migration, the survey also exposed threats to the animals, including “the expansion of roads, agriculture, charcoal production, commercialisation.”
“These activities can lead to habitat loss, resource depletion and disruption of migration routes, ultimately threatening the survival of the migration and the livelihoods of local people,” Simpson said. “By ensuring the health of the ecosystems the migration depends on, the livelihoods of people across the migration landscape can be secured.”
For more than four decades, Fay has been exposed to magnificent wildlife while working on conservation projects in Africa, but when he saw the incredible display of antelope galloping together across the Nile floodplain, he was stunned, reported CNN.
“How is it even possible that there can be this many wild animals?” Fay said. “It’s not so much a sentimental thing for me, it’s more about the biological and ecological capacity of this land to produce so much wildlife. It’s truly phenomenal.”
The coalition of experts identified 16,825 potential conservation sites that need to be prioritized in the next five years in order to save thousands of rare species.
“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Dr. Eric Dinerstein, the study’s lead author and senior biodiversity expert at NGO RESOLVE, in a press release from Frontiers in Science. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, we found that we need only about 1.2% of the Earth’s surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.”
Between 2018 and 2023, an additional 1.2 million square kilometers were protected to meet the world’s conservation targets. However, the research team asked whether the new conservation areas were adequately protecting essential biodiversity.
The scientists estimated that the new protected lands only covered a small portion of the habitat of threatened and range-limited species — 0.11 million square kilometers. They emphasized the importance of planning protected areas so that resources and conservation efforts are targeted as effectively as possible.
The team mapped the entire planet using six levels of biodiversity data. They identified the remaining rare and threatened species habitat using satellite images and combined them with maps of existing conservation areas. They termed current unprotected biodiversity hotspots Conservation Imperatives. These serve as the world’s blueprint to assist regions and countries with planning locally based conservation efforts.
If adequately protected, the sites they identified — covering roughly 405.25 million acres — could prevent all projected extinctions. Protecting only sites located in the tropics could avert most of them.
The research team found that 38 percent of Conservation Imperatives are near areas that are already protected, making it easier to make them part of current conservation sites or find additional means of protecting them.
“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” said co-author of the study Andy Lee, a senior program associate and enterprise development manager at RESOLVE, in the press release. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi, Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”
In calculating the cost of these protections, the scientists used data from 14 years of land protection projects, as well as accounted for the amount and type of land acquired and country-specific economic factors.
Professor Neil Burgess, head of the science program at the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, said the paper was a reminder “that achieving 30% coverage by protected and conserved areas on its own is not enough, and that it is the location, quality and effectiveness of these protected and conserved areas that will determine whether they fulfil their role in contributing to halting biodiversity loss,” as The Guardian reported.
Indigenous Peoples and communities with jurisdiction over the Conservation Imperative sites, along with worldwide stakeholders and other civil society members, will need to give their input on what is most effective for them.
“Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years,” Lee said. “This represents less than 0.2% of the United States’ GDP, less than 9% of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”
Protecting biodiversity is essential to tackling the climate crisis. In order to do so, the scientists underscored the importance of keeping the planet’s forests intact, as they are not only home to abundant wildlife, but act as vital carbon sinks.
“What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on,” Dinerstein said. “So we’ve got to get going. We’ve got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that.”
Scientists from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), along with professionals in the chocolate industry, have found a way to make better use of cocoa fruit to produce not only more sustainable, but also healthier chocolate.
Currently, to make chocolate, producers use the beans found inside the cocoa fruit, but not the pulp or endocarp, an outer shell inside the exterior husk of the cocoa fruit.
However, the ETH researchers, along with experts from the cocoa-recycling company Koa and the confectionery company Max Felchlin AG, realized that they could also use the pulp, its juice and even the endocarp to create chocolate with less waste. The exterior husk could then be composted or reused for fuel.
According to the study, published in the journal Nature Food, the endocarp is rich in pectin. As such, the team was able to produce a gel from the endocarp by making this material into powder and mixing it with the fruit’s pulp and juice.
The resulting gel can be used as an alternative to powdered sugar in chocolate production and results in chocolate that still tastes like a sweet treat, but comes with around 30% less saturated fat and a 20% boost of fiber compared to conventional European dark chocolate.
“Fiber is valuable from a physiological perspective because it naturally regulates intestinal activity and prevents blood sugar levels from rising too rapidly when consuming chocolate,” Kim Mishra, lead author of the study, explained in a statement. “Saturated fat can also pose a health risk when too much is consumed. There’s a relationship between increased consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.”
The scientists found that it was difficult to achieve the right texture for their chocolate made with the entirety of the cocoa fruit, since it could become too clumpy if it had too much of the juice from the flesh. In tests with less of the cocoa fruit juice, the resulting chocolate wasn’t sweet enough to compete with conventional chocolate.
Eventually, the researchers found that adding around 20% of their cocoa-based gel provided the right texture and taste for the resulting chocolate. As Food & Wine reported, trained panelists from the Bern University of Applied Sciences were tasked with tasting the chocolates from the study experiments to help find the right balance.
The experiments worked, as evidenced by the team filing for a patent for their chocolate recipe made from cocoa fruit. According to the scientists, the resulting recipe will allow farmers to increase their income and offer more products by using more parts of the cocoa fruit.
“This means that farmers can not only sell the beans, but also dry out the juice from the pulp and the endocarp, grind it into powder and sell that as well,” Mishra said. “This would allow them to generate income from three value-creation streams. And more value creation for the cocoa fruit makes it more sustainable.”
As Food & Wine reported, if this approach to chocolate production scales up, it could reduce the amount of land needed for producing dark chocolate. But it will require updated tools and infrastructure for farmers, like drying facilities, that will need more time and money to develop before the scientists’ chocolate can become widely available.
“Although we’ve shown that our chocolate is attractive and has a comparable sensory experience to normal chocolate, the entire value creation chain will need to be adapted, starting with the cocoa farmers, who will require drying facilities,” Mishra said. “Cocoa-fruit chocolate can only be produced and sold on a large scale by chocolate producers once enough powder is produced by food processing companies.”
