Indigenous food systems and traditional land management techniques are the best options for tackling ecological restoration. However, outdated scientific models and conservative views on environmentalism has led many researchers to overlook and discount traditional ecological knowledge held by Indigenous peoples. That’s according to a new study in Frontiers.

Researchers from the Indigenous Ecology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia and the Historical-Ecological Research Laboratory at Simon Fraser University looked at two restoration efforts in St’at’imc and Quw’utsun territories and outlined a method known as “pop-up restoration” employed by environmental NGOs, extraction industries, and government agencies that offers prescriptive techniques to restore and heal land without considering local, Indigenous scientific practices. Pop-up restoration, the authors suggest, comes from deeply rooted misconceptions of Indigenous livelihoods and knowledge due to long-standing, deeply ingrained prejudices and racist ideas.

According to the researchers, pop-up restoration, or restoration initiatives that don’t make their restoration goals and impose inequities on unceded and stolen lands, often overlooks traditional food systems and Indigenous histories.

In the report, the authors assessed two disturbance-restoration cycles and the ways Indigenous food systems approach restoration ecology and Indigenous land — especially when restoration erases longstanding land management and stewardship efforts.

“An Indigenous food systems lens provides a holistic approach to food production, distribution, and consumption, that centers humans’ coexistence with other living beings and prioritizes a cultural-ecological equilibrium over exploitation or fixed restoration goals,” wrote the authors.

The first example comes from St’at’imc territory in British Columbia, where St’at’imc voices were ignored by the government, hunters and ranchers while providing traditional knowledge for the restoration of lands devastated by a wildfire.

In June 2021 a heat dome in the region created record-breaking temperatures resulting in 619 heat related deaths and creating extreme fire conditions over much of the Pacific Northwest eventually leading to the McKay Creek Wildfire which burned about 85 miles of forest.

In response, a technical committee was created to facilitate communication between affected Indigenous and settler communities, the Canadian government and ranchers. The St’at’imc Nation were given the opportunity to take part in the committee, and share their ideas on the best ways to restore the land.

But during the restoration process, government-led wildfire recovery in the region was largely driven by the values, goals, and priorities of only a few interest groups. Ranchers wanted to reseed much of the landscape with crop species that would introduce non-native plants, reducing native vegetation needed for the survival of mammals, birds and other wildlife — many of which are relied on by the St’at’imc Nation.

“We observed how government policy and decision-making overlooked, and in some cases outright dismissed, St’at’imc voices, knowledge, and expertise at the table,” wrote the authors.

“Non-Indigenous hunter and rancher interests seemed to be given priority over St’at’imc values, goals, and priorities, especially when those interests were at odds.”

The authors highlight that the settler colonial history in the St’at’imc region began in the late 1850s with the Fraser River Gold Rush, which led to the establishment of cattle farming on the forests and grasslands in the area. The clearing of land for cattle, introduction of invasive species through fodder, wildfire suppression, the ownership of land by settlers and the removal St’at’imc peoples from their lands resulted in damage to the region, which helped the McKay Creek wildfire, the climate, and the St’at’imc people.

Overall, the authors of the study said acknowledging the effects of past and ongoing waves of colonialism, being genuinely open and flexible to evolving community needs, being familiar with past failures and wrongdoings, and understanding and having compassion for the varying levels of interest, knowledge, resources, and skills for supporting land healing initiatives are important to the redevelopment and maintenance of lands. 

“Results suggest that applying an Indigenous food systems lens to ecological restoration may provide a tangible framework for resolving some of the issues faced in top-down colonial policies common in pop-up restoration contexts,” the authors wrote.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: The best way to restore ecosystems is to listen to Indigenous peoples on Oct 12, 2023.

Blogger Donna DeForbes shares some new tips on how to get kids to recycle, from turning a stuffed animal into a recycling mascot to playing online games.

The post 6 Tips To Get Your Kids to Recycle appeared first on Earth911.

The people of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe of Washington State have lived in the Lower Elwha River Valley and its neighboring bluffs on the Olympic Peninsula since time immemorial.

The community is based around the Elwha River, which provides water and sustenance in the form of salmon fishing. More than a century ago, two dams were placed on the Elwha, blocking almost 90 miles of the river and its tributaries, reported The Seattle Times.

The dams were removed in August of 2014, but the tribe had to wait for a run of salmon that was healthy enough to be fished. Now, for the first time in more than a hundred years, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe are fishing for coho salmon on the free-flowing river.

“It’s been a long time coming. The laughs, the joy we all feel in our hearts, is just tremendous, it’s historic,” said Russell Hepfer, vice chairman of the tribe, to a crowd gathered before resuming the fishery earlier this week, as The Seattle Times reported.

Since 1911, more than 90 percent of the flow of the river had been blocked by the two dams. Removing them was the biggest dam removal in history.

There is still a broad moratorium on fishing the Elwha River, but the tribe can fish for subsistence and tribal use due to an agreement with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife and Olympic National Park.

The tribe is able to take 400 of the 7,000 coho run for now.

“It means everything to have that food security to know that I can catch a fish to feed my family,” said Vanessa Castle, the tribe’s natural resources technician, as reported by The Seattle Times. “I know my ancestors were standing with us.”

Coho salmon are most abundant along the coast of southeast Alaska down to Central California. They have also been introduced into the Great Lakes. The fish have beautiful shimmering greenish or blue backs and are commonly called silver salmon for their silver sides, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Coho begin their lives in freshwater streams and rivers, spending a year there before migrating to the ocean. Their migrations can be more than 1,000 miles. During the time coho salmon live in the ocean to feed, they develop small black spots on their tail and back. After about one-and-a-half years in the ocean, the salmon return to the river or stream where they were born, usually in the fall or early winter, to spawn.

So that everyone from the tribe who wants to can fish for the salmon, fishing poles are being used for now, with net fishing later in the month, according to The Seattle Times.

Last year, approximately 6,821 coho returned to the Elwha River, about 36 percent of which had spawned on their own rather than being born in the hatchery, the tribe said. The numbers were 10 percent higher than the year before, and it was the largest return of coho to the river in four years.

Now, relocation of the fish from the lower river hatchery is no longer needed to boost the fishery in the main part of the river and its tributaries.

“The fish are doing it on their own,” said Mike McHenry, the tribe’s fish habitat manager, The Seattle Times reported. McHenry has been working on the recovery of the Elwha River for 32 years.

Removing the dams allowed the flow of sediment, wood and gravel to begin again, which the river needs to create side channels and log jams that create the variety of environments fish need to thrive.

“It will be a great time to introduce our children to the river, and hopefully be able to revive some of those basic ceremonies around it,” said tribal member Wendy Sampson.

Restoration of the Elwha River is in its early stages, but has inspired dam removals in other places, like on North California’s Klamath River, which will supersede the Elwha to become the largest dam removal in history.

“I think the Elwha gives people hope for what might be possible,” said Matt Beirne, the tribe’s natural resources director, as reported by The Seattle Times.

Tribal member Mel Elofson, who is the tribe’s assistant habitat manager, had heard about the possibility of dam removal from his elders.

“Now I’m getting to witness it for my elders who were unable to see it,” Elofson said.

The post After Dam Removal, Washington State Tribe Fishes for Salmon on Elwha River for First Time in More Than a Century appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the “social cost of carbon,” one of the most important calculations in U.S. climate policy, on Tuesday. The controversial metric attempts to quantify the hidden price of emitting carbon dioxide, from flood damage to health effects. The court’s surprise decision sets the stage for the Biden administration to broaden the metric’s use across federal agencies when formulating climate-related regulations.

One of President Joe Biden’s very first executive orders in January 2021 directed agencies to recalculate the social cost of carbon — currently placed at $51 a ton while the government finalizes its revised estimate. In the meantime, Republican state attorneys general have been flinging lawsuits at the administration in an attempt to block its ability to use the metric in evaluating regulations.

But their plans were thwarted by Tuesday’s order from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Without any explanation, the justices declined to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case in which 12 states alleged that Biden’s executive order violated the constitutional separation of powers. A federal appeals court ruled last year that the states suing over the use of the estimate didn’t have legal standing because they couldn’t show they’d been harmed by the way agencies had applied the metric.

It’s the second time the Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge to the social cost of carbon. Last year, the justices blocked a similar request led by Louisiana.

The social cost of carbon is likely to have cascading effects on agriculture, power plants, oil and gas leases, and more. That’s because federal agencies have to weigh the costs and benefits of any regulation they adopt. If the government accounts for the true costs of emitting greenhouse gases — lost lives, dying crops, homes swallowed by rising seas — then decisions that result in more carbon emissions start to look a lot more expensive, while those that reduce emissions look like a smart deal.

The Obama administration, the first to require agencies to use this metric in assessing rules, placed the social cost of carbon at $43 a ton — a move that helped justify things like stronger emissions standards for vehicles. The Trump administration calculated the number differently and, in typical fashion, slashed the number down to a couple bucks per ton. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed $190 a ton, nearly four times higher than the estimate the Biden administration currently uses. (The EPA’s number is in line with estimates from independent experts.)

Because the social cost of carbon is so influential in developing climate policy, some Republicans consider it a paragon of the “radical climate agenda.” In response to the Supreme Court’s rejection of Missouri’s challenge, Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general, vowed to “continue to combat government overreach at every turn.” 

Analysts say the fight isn’t over yet. In a note to clients, the research firm ClearView Energy Partners said the ruling doesn’t preclude states — or anyone else — from suing over specific agency actions and rules that rely on the social cost of carbon, E&E News reported.

In recent months, the White House announced that it was considering applying the social cost of carbon more broadly across agencies, in everything from annual budgets and permitting decisions to fines for violating environmental regulations. It represents a sea change in how the government approaches climate policy: For decades, policies to reduce emissions had been cast as an economic burden, a narrative propelled by oil industry-backed studies that made legislation look prohibitively expensive. Now, the frame has switched: Carbon emissions are viewed as the economic harm, and climate policy is the balm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court rejected a Republican challenge to Biden’s climate math on Oct 11, 2023.

With the increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI), a researcher has found that this technology could have a massive energy footprint, requiring as much electricity as a small country.

Alex de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam School of Business and Economics and founder of the website Digiconomist, which has long reported on the energy demands of technology like Bitcoin, has published initial research in a commentary piece in the journal Joule on AI’s potential future energy demand.

Although AI has been around since the 1950s, the past two years have seen rapid growth of this technology with tools like ChatGPT making headlines. But de Vries warns that this technology requires a lot of electricity to train and run, and this is only going to go up as AI becomes more prevalent.

“Looking at the growing demand for AI service, it’s very likely that energy consumption related to AI will significantly increase in the coming years,” de Vries said, as reported by ScienceDaily.

According to de Vries, training AI is one of the most energy-consuming processes of using this technology. For instance, Hugging Face, an AI company, shared that one of its AI models alone, BigScience Large Open-Science Open-Access Multilingual (BLOOM), needed 433 MWh of electricity for training. That’s enough energy to power about 40 average U.S. households for a year, Euronews reported.

After training, AI goes through an inference phase, where users put in their questions and AI generates responses based on these new prompts. This also requires a lot of energy. De Vries wrote, “Research firm SemiAnalysis suggested that OpenAI required 3,617 of NVIDIA’s HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 graphics processing units (GPUs), to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day.”

Although some AI-developing companies have expressed plans to make their tools more energy-efficient, de Vries warned that this could just increase how frequently AI is used, ultimately negating any benefits from improved efficiency.

“By 2027 worldwide AI-related electricity consumption could increase by 85.4–134.0 TWh of annual electricity consumption from newly manufactured servers. This figure is comparable to the annual electricity consumption of countries such as the Netherlands, Argentina and Sweden,” de Vries said on Digiconomist. “While this would represent half a percent of worldwide electricity consumption, it would also represent a potential significant increase in worldwide data center electricity consumption. The latter has been estimated to represent one percent of worldwide electricity consumption.”

De Vries further warned that AI has limitations and shouldn’t be used for everything, especially considering its privacy concerns and high energy demand. Instead, he said companies should be mindful of how they utilize this technology, only using it when it is really necessary or so beneficial that the costs are outweighed. De Vries also recommended that policymakers consider requiring environmental disclosures for AI and AI supply chains.

The post AI Tech Could Require as Much Electricity as a Small Nation, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The spotlight

Last week, Grist published a special multimedia project exploring the many tools that cities have at their disposal to prepare for one of climate change’s deadliest impacts: extreme heat.

The topic has been a central focus for us throughout the summer, both here in Looking Forward and for the full Grist newsroom, with the launch of our Record High series. And it’s been a summer (or winter, in the Southern Hemisphere) of scary news, with records smashed and new studies about where humans may not be able to survive as the world continues to warm.

But as we’ve discussed in this newsletter, promising adaptations to extreme heat abound, and many cities and towns are already planning for a hotter future and implementing life-saving measures like cool roofs, green corridors, and tree-equity plans. Early on in Grist’s planning for a summer of extreme heat coverage, Jake Bittle was interested in taking a comprehensive look at the solutions that are out there. Meanwhile, Naveena Sadasivam wanted to explore how cities in the hottest parts of the world have harnessed clever design principles to keep cool.

“We were like, ‘What if we just did a thing about how to redesign an entire city for heat?’” Jake recalls. The result: a multimedia project that envisions a combination of heat-proofing strategies used together to build more resilient — and low-carbon — living spaces.

The pair teamed up and reached out to city planners, architects, and other experts to get a full picture of the landscape of heat solutions — and they and their editors quickly decided that the project should be a visual one. They collaborated with artist Florencia Fuertes to help bring the solutions into full view.

The finished product examines different heat-proofing measures grouped by the types of locations where they would be implemented: city centers, residential areas, or commercial zones. And for each, you can explore a futuristic rendering of what an area could look like if it were heat-proofed to the fullest extent.

Check out the project here.

Throughout the reporting, a few themes emerged. “People kept saying over and over again, ‘You don’t have to find a bespoke and crazy gizmo for each part of the urban environment,’” Jake says.

The principles of shade, green space, water, airflow, and good insulation and energy-efficiency in buildings were repeatedly mentioned — things that generally are not that hard or high-tech, and often come with additional benefits besides cooling. But while adding shade and plants and maximizing energy efficiency may seem straightforward, they’re still interventions that require planning and resources.

“The challenge is in the implementation,” Naveena says, adding that “a lot of these solutions have to be tailored to the geographic location — the specific city or community or neighborhood that you’re talking about.” For instance, in a desert city like Phoenix, relying on water to help keep cool wouldn’t make the most sense. Paris, on the other hand, found a cooling solution in a network of pipes that draw cold water from the Seine River to buildings throughout the city.

Although heat-proofing will take time — and money — Jake and Naveena found that the experts they spoke to shared a great amount of consensus around the solutions. Compared with other climate issues, like flooding, wildfires, or decarbonization, they didn’t find much debate or controversy about what needs to be done to better prepare cities for extreme heat, which they said was encouraging.

We’ve excerpted just a few of the solutions that Jake and Naveena found most interesting throughout their reporting. You can explore many more, along with 360-degree views of what they could look like all together, here.

— Claire Elise Thompson

Cooling towers stick up above a cluster of buildings, illustrated by Florencia Fuertes.

1. SHADED STRUCTURES: Waiting 20 minutes for the bus in triple-digit weather isn’t just unpleasant — it can be dangerous. Bus stops, train stations, and other outdoor transit facilities are some of the biggest heat pinch points in the urban environment. The easiest way to address this risk is to install shade structures. But urban planners told Grist communities need to make sure these are big enough to fit more than a person or two if they hope to increase ridership: Earlier this year, Los Angeles debuted a prototype called La Sombrita, which was designed to provide shade to people at bus stops in places where the city couldn’t build full shelters. But the structure was so skinny that it couldn’t block out the sun for more than one person at a time.
2. COOLING TOWERS: Wind catchers, tall chimney-like towers attached to the sides of homes and buildings, are great passive cooling systems and make use of pressure differences within a building to increase ventilation. These “Barjeel” towers are a common sight in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries. Air entering the building is cooled down through wet cloths; warmer air inside the structure rises and escapes through towers. The wind catchers are typically four-sided, although cylindrical, hexahedral, and tetrahedral towers also exist. A variation of this idea is the solar chimney, which has been around for centuries. A chimney structure made with heat-absorbing materials such as glass or metals is used to heat a specific section of air within a building. As the hot air rises, it creates a natural vertical ventilation flow that circulates cool air.
3. WASTE HEAT CAPTURE: In addition to creating a large buffer around industrial facilities, companies can also cut down on waste heat by investing in heat capture technology. A heat exchanger at a big factory can suck up leaking heat and cycle it back into the facility, which also cuts down on energy demand. This capture can make a building more energy-efficient by capturing the 20 to 50 percent of energy that gets wasted as heat. One estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that catching the usable waste heat in the U.S. could generate 7.6 gigawatts of power, enough juice for millions of homes.

Read more about heat solutions from Grist’s Jake Bittle and Naveena Sadasivam here.

More exposure

• Listen: to Jake share more about city heat solutions, and the barriers to implementing them (Here & Now)
• Read: the rest of the Record High series from Grist
• Read: the Vox guide to extreme heat, including solutions and tips for staying safe
• Read: an essay about the boredom that comes with staying indoors during hot summers, and how it could be a tool for mobilization (Zócalo Public Square)

A parting shot

Another solution that Jake and Naveena found was green walls — a concept similar to green roofs that involves covering the walls of tall buildings with ivy or other plants that block the sun’s rays and help to keep the outside air tool. They also add beautification. Here’s an example in Tokyo, Japan.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision & Spotlight: Florencia Fuertes

Parting shot: John S Lander / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What a heat-proof city could look like on Oct 11, 2023.

How can we sustainably harvest more energy and move it to where it is needed?…

The post Earth911 Podcast: Putting Solar Generation Everywhere With Ubiquitous Energy’s Veeral Hardev appeared first on Earth911.

Global fossil fuel emissions are expected to peak in the middle of the 2020s and…

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