How green are the clothes you are wearing? It can be challenging to discern this…
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We live in a world where it’s very easy to create waste but very hard…
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Recycling has been around almost as long as humans; it’s one of our signature activities….
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Birding is the act of observing and identifying birds in the wild as a form of recreation. This can range from taking note of all the birds who visit a backyard feeder, or traveling across the country to try to see more U.S. bird species than anyone else in a 12-month period, like the characters played by Jack Black, Owen Wilson and Steve Martin do in The Big Year. Birding is a popular pastime: More than 45 million people bird in the U.S., and they spend around $41 billion a year on equipment like binoculars or trips to see birds. In the UK, more people belong to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than all of the country’s political parties put together. While it’s historically been associated with older, wealthier, whiter adults, visible interest in the activity is widening alongside awareness of its many benefits for both birders and birds.
In the past, bird lovers would differentiate between birdwatching and birding, with birdwatching seen as a more amateur and passive observation of birds and birding — defined in this case as going out and tracking down different species — as more serious and active. But in recent years there has been a push to make the community more inclusive by leveling the hierarchy and applying the term “birder” to everyone, since it includes people who perceive birds through senses other than their eyes. Birdability coordinator Freya McGregor has proposed a new definition of birding: Simply, “The act of enjoying wild birds.”
Humans have probably been observing birds since the beginning of our history as a species. One of the images painted on the walls of the Lascaux Cave in France in 15,000 to 10,000 B.C. was a man with the head of a bird, and some prehistoric artists painted owls in other French caves. However, the hobby we recognize today as “birdwatching” or “birding” evolved over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Birding developed as an alternative to the 19th-century trend of collecting stuffed bird specimens for display or scientific study, as Tim Birkhead details in Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History From Cave Art to Conservation. One early birder, British ornithologist Edmund Selous, converted from stuffing to watching while observing two European nightjars in 1898. “Now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible,” he wrote. In 1901, he published a book called Bird Watching, which is believed to be the first use of that term. Another early proponent of observing over killing was U.S. ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, who published what is largely considered the first modern bird guide in 1889 titled Birds: Through an Opera-Glass, which is still in print! She was also distressed by the killing of birds to decorate hats with their plumage and recommended birdwatching as an antidote: “We’ll take the girls afield, and let them get acquainted with the birds,” she said. “Then of inborn necessity, they will wear feathers never more.”
Selous’ and Bailey’s models of compassionate and curious avian engagement took off on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 1900s, aided by improvements to the design of binoculars over the latter half of the 19th century. Birding saw a boost of popularity during and after World War II as well, driven in part by the publication of more field guides, including James Fisher’s Watching Birds, which sold more than a million copies. The hobby’s popularity continued to soar through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s through to today. Improvements in spotting technology and access to the internet have made it easier to identify birds and share that information with others. Guides have become more extensive, and more birders sharing more information means that people are actually seeing more birds now despite some decreases in populations.
The expansion of air travel and communication technology in the second half of the 20th century has made it easier for people to travel far and wide in search of rare birds. This type of birding has earned its own name: twitching. The term comes from British birder Howard Medhurst, who used to ride on the back of a friend’s motorcycle when their group went to spot birds in the 1950s. When the group reached their destination, he would dismount jerkily and shiver, or twitch, while lighting a cigarette. The rest of the group began to copy his movements and to refer to rare-bird chasing as “to go on a twitch.” Twitchers will often attempt Big Years, in which they try to spot as many different species as they can in a certain area. One innovator of the practice was U.S. businessman Guy Emerson, who spotted 497 species while traveling in North America in 1939. The current international record holder is Arjan Dwarshuis of the Netherlands, who logged 6,852 species in 2016 by traveling to 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica.
In the past several decades, birding has also gotten more diverse. When it first emerged, birdwatching was considered a hobby for the wealthy, especially men. But, as society changed over the 20th century, birding did too, with more women, minorities, and people of all economic classes getting involved. Black Birders Week was launched in 2020 to draw attention to African American bird lovers, and, as of 2023, the leaders of the National Audubon Society and the American Ornithological Society are both women. Molly Adams founded the Feminist Bird Club in 2016 to make birding and the outdoors more accessible to people who might not feel safe accessing it alone and to promote positive change. However, while birding has become more visibly diverse and inclusive in the last decades, if you take McGregor’s definition of “the act of enjoying wild birds,” it’s more likely than not that people of all genders, races, classes, nationalities and identities have been birding under the radar from the beginning. For example, in the early 1800s, rural working class poet John Clare penned detailed descriptions of the nests and habits of birds in the English fenlands based on careful observation. Clare is one of the rare working-class voices to enter the cannon relatively early, but doubtless there were many others whose observations stayed between them and the birds.
Birding has many benefits both for the people who do it and what they watch.
A growing body of research has shown that spending time in nature is good for your mental and physical health, and there is evidence that spending that time birding can be especially healing. One 2022 study found that hearing or seeing birds could boost mood for up to eight hours, both among healthy individuals and individuals with depression. The study controlled for seeing or hearing other natural elements like trees, plants or water and found that noticing birds still made a difference. Another, from 2013, found that participants associated birdsong more than any other natural sound with stress relief and improved attention span. A third, from 2021, found that living near more species of birds was correlated with increased happiness: Upping the number of species by 10 percent raised people’s contentment more than increasing their income by 10 percent. Birding is also good for physical health by encouraging people to spend more time outdoors and to walk or hike to better birding spots. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has even teamed up with doctors in Shetland to prescribe outdoor activities, including birdwatching.
Another way that birding can boost your mental health and overall well-being is by introducing you to a larger community that shares your interest. Most local wildlife refuges or parks, local bird groups, or local chapters of national bird groups will host outings that anyone can join and learn how to spot birds in that area. If you prefer to bird alone, you can also interact with other birders through social media or digital platforms like eBird, where you can both log your own sightings and read what birds others have spotted in your area.
From its origins as an alternative to specimen collections and a lure away from feathered hats, birdwatching has been closely linked with bird conservation. A 2015 study found that people who engage in wildlife-based recreation activities — including birdwatching — were four to five times more likely to actively participate in conservation activities like donating money, joining environmental groups, working to restore habitat on public lands and lobbying for more wildlife recreation. The three major birding organizations in the U.S. — The National Audubon Society, the American Birding Association (ABA) and the American Ornithological Society — consider conservation a key part of their work and missions. It turns out Bailey was right: When people begin to pay attention to birds, they often become more motivated to protect them and their habitats.
One important way that birders aid conservation efforts is by providing more information to scientists about birds and their numbers and habits. Determining population trends is essential for conservation, and bird data posted on eBird specifically now varies from official scientific surveys by only 0.4 percent per year. Birders also engage in annual surveys of bird numbers to aid in research. One example is the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. This was started by ornithologist Frank M. Chapman on Christmas Day, 1900, as an alternative to the tradition of hunting birds during the holidays. Now, tens of thousands of citizen scientists participate between December 14 and January 5 every year, and the data helps conservationists track the health of bird populations and determine priorities. Other annual surveys include The Big Sit and the Great Backyard Bird Count.
While birding can have many positives for nature and humans, like any activity, it has drawbacks when participants choose to be less than respectful of nature and other humans. None of these problems are necessarily inherent to the act of looking at birds; they are rather things that birders should be mindful to avoid.
While birding has many conservation benefits, it can also harm birds and their habitat if done improperly. For example, some birders will play a recording of a bird they are seeking in order to encourage a response in the wild. This practice has been shown to increase the time some birds spend singing, which could harm them by using up energy and distracting them from other activities. In the age of social media, postings of rare or vulnerable birds can draw large crowds that could disturb or harm them. To address situations like these, ABA has crafted a “code of birding ethics” that has three main sections: 1. “Respect and promote birds and their environment;” 2. “Respect and promote the birding community and its individual members;” and 3. “Respect and promote the law and the rights of others.” Section 1 includes minimizing playback, being careful around nests and roosts and reducing habitat disturbance by sticking to paths and trails.
Birding can turn competitive or obsessive, especially among people who attempt Big Years or travel in search of rare birds. People have missed important family events and put serious relationships in jeopardy. As sites like eBird have made it easier to share information, they have also increased the competitiveness, and sometimes people can be rude to birders who, for example, misidentify a bird in a public forum. The ABA code of ethics applies here too, encouraging birders to “respect the interests, rights, and skill levels of fellow birders” and be welcoming to newcomers.
Birding has historically been seen as a hobby for white and well-off people. Sometimes, people of color can even be harassed when they attempt to spend time in nature, such as the infamous incident in 2020 when a woman called the cops on African American birder Christian Cooper when he asked her to leash her dog in a leash-only area of Central Park. For lower-income people, both purchasing binoculars and finding leisure time can be barriers to birding. There is also a legacy of colonialism and racism in early ornithology. John James Audubon — a prominent 19th century bird artist and scientist who gave the National Audubon Society its name — also owned slaves and embraced scientific racism. In recent years, the birding world has made efforts to reconcile with this history and make the hobby more inclusive. The National Audubon Society considered changing its name, but ultimately decided against it. However, local chapters have abandoned the Audubon name. The American Ornithological Society announced in 2023 that it would change all the English names of birds in its jurisdiction named after people, since many of them were named after controversial figures who had a history of racism. “Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely — and birds need our help now more than ever,” AOS President Colleen Handel said of the change.
If you are interested in birding, there are many resources available to help you get started.
You can find birds everywhere, but the best place to start is somewhere near home with either green space, open water or both. Some birds, like gulls, crows or mallards, make their presence obvious. For others, you might have to look a little harder. The National Audubon Society recommends taking a moment to clear your head from other distractions, looking at places where birds might perch such as power lines or trees, scanning the landscape slowly, looking with your eyes before trying binoculars, listening for distinctive bird calls and moving on once you have seen a sizable number of birds in one area.
You don’t even have to leave home to bird. Backyard birding is the act of observing birds from your porch or window by enticing them to come to you. The best way to do this is by planting native plants in your yard. This will draw both birds and insects, which the birds can eat. If you decide to install feeders, smaller tubular feeders filled with thistle seed will attract finches, while a larger feeder filled with nuts, fruit and sunflower seeds will be a hit with cardinals, grackles and blue jays. Place your feeders within 12 feet of another feature the birds can fly to if predators approach. This will make them feel safer visiting your home. The most important times to feed birds are during extreme weather events, migration season and late winter or early spring. During the summer, most species can find plenty of food.
The exceptions are nectar-hungry hummingbirds. There are at least 53 species of North American birds that primarily drink nectar, including hummingbirds and orioles. Hummingbirds in particular must drink nectar every 10 to 15 minutes from 1,000 to 2,000 flowers per day. You can plant hummingbird-friendly flowers, but while you wait for them to grow, fill feeders with a mixture of one part white sugar to three parts water. It’s important to remove feeders if you learn of any avian disease outbreaks in your area that your feeders could spread.
There are many digital and paper resources that will help you identify birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app will give you an ID based on a photograph or audio recording of their song. There are also many field guides to birds in your area. Popular books for U.S. birders include The Sibley Guide to Birds, the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, the Golden Guide’s Birds of North America and National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. It’s better to choose a guide with drawings rather than photographs, as artists make sure to include all identifying features that might be obscured by lighting. When you are trying to match a wild bird to a potential ID, it’s important to consider what group it belongs to, i.e. is it a sparrow or an owl; its shape; its size; its behavior; where you are seeing it; when you are seeing it; any distinctive markings; and its song or call.
Bird enthusiasts participate in the National Audubon Society’s 117th annual Christmas Bird Count in Anne Arundel County, Maryland on Dec. 18, 2016. Will Parson / Chesapeake Bay Program
You do need a limited amount of gear for birding — most importantly, binoculars. The National Audubon Society offers recommendations for specific models based on how much you want to spend. In general, look for a power of seven or eight and lenses on the wider end that are between 30 and 42 millimeters. In addition to binoculars and a field guide, bring whatever outdoor gear you need to safely and comfortably bird your chosen area. You may also want a notebook to compile a life list of all the different species you see. The Merlin app also allows you to keep a digital record.
Chances are, there are other birders in your area. The National Audubon Society has a guide to its local chapters here, the ABA has a list of birding clubs and organizations by state here, and the Feminist Bird Club here. Many of these local groups will advertise bird outings on their websites or social media pages in local parks that you can attend to get started or meet other birders. You can also sign up for their email listservs. Many will share opportunities to advocate for birds in your town, city or state as well.
Conservation is so important to birding that the ABA’s ethics code calls on birders to “support the conservation of birds and their habitats” and “Engage in and promote bird-friendly practices whenever possible.”
Building strikes killed an estimated median of 599 million birds in the U.S. in 2017. You can prevent birds from crashing into your own home by identifying large windows or windows near feeders and decorating them with vertical markings two inches by two inches apart. Adding screens can also be an effective deterrent. At night, bright lights during migration season can pull birds from their route and make them more likely to crash into the illuminated buildings. In addition to switching off your own lights during peak migration, you can advocate for your city or town to participate in a Lights Out initiative to reduce urban light pollution in spring or fall.
One 2013 study found that domestic cats kill 1.3 to four billion birds in the U.S. every year. This makes them likely the leading human-related killer of birds in the country. While most of these deaths are caused by feral cats, there are things pet owners can do to protect birds. The most important thing is keeping your cats indoors. If that’s not possible, make sure your yard has lots of shrubs or bushes where smaller animals can hide. Place feeders or bird baths 10 to 12 feet from where cats could hide and take down your feeders if your cat is killing birds. If you want to get a cat, adopt a shelter animal to prevent it from ending up on the streets, and never abandon cats outside.
Pesticide poisoning killed a median 72 million U.S. birds in 2017. Anticoagulant rodenticides can harm or kill birds of prey when they eat rats that have ingested them. To avoid this, manage rodents in alternative ways by not leaving out food, dismantling potential nesting spots and using non-lethal trapping methods. Herbicides and insecticides, especially neonicotinoids, can also harm birds. Avoid using pesticides on your own garden, and, when possible, choose organic produce to support pesticide-free agriculture.
While numbers are difficult to ascertain, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes that habitat loss is the leading threat to birds. Human activity clears or disturbs forests or converts wild areas to farmland or human developments. In the U.S., 4.8 million acres of wild land were converted to agriculture between 2007 and 2018. This reduces the amount of land available for winter breeding and feeding for migratory birds. You can push back against habitat loss by planting native species; creating habitats like brush piles in your yard; avoiding raking; advocating for the protection or restoration of ecosystems on a local, state and national level; and choosing brands of coffee or beef that are grown in ways that don’t harm birds.
The National Audubon Society found that rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis put two-thirds of North American bird species at risk of extinction as their ranges shift due to changing conditions. However, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would improve the situation of 76 percent of vulnerable species and keep almost 150 species from extinction risk. The only way this will happen is if human societies and governments swiftly phase out fossil fuels and end the destruction of natural carbon sinks like forests. You can advocate for climate action on a global, national, regional and local level and take steps to reduce your own carbon footprint by, for example, reducing car and plane travel and cutting your home’s emissions by taking steps to improve its energy efficiency.
In North America alone, bird populations have declined by 29 percent, or nearly three billion birds, since 1970. The biodiversity and climate crises mean that birds are perhaps more threatened than ever. Yet more and more people are learning to appreciate them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people turned to birding as an infection-safe activity, and sales of bird seed and feeders took flight. The more people who take up birding, the more people who will grow aware of birds and the threats they face and have a strong personal motivation to protect them. So if you’re thinking of giving birding a try, go ahead and install a feeder or upload Merlin. At the least, you will make your own life more interesting. At the most, you may be inspired to help save the world.
The post Birding 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
The Arctic Ocean may be the planet’s smallest ocean, but it is an important carbon sink that absorbs up to 198 million tons of carbon annually, according to a press release from NASA.
However, a recent study has shown that thawing permafrost and runoff rich with carbon from the Mackenzie River in Canada is triggering part of Earth’s northernmost ocean to release a greater amount of carbon than it absorbs.
“Since the 1970s, the Arctic has warmed three time[s] faster than anywhere else on Earth, inducing large changes in its hydrological cycle. This warming has dramatically altered Arctic watersheds and rivers, which play an important role in shaping the physical and biogeochemical setting of the coastal AO [Arctic Ocean],” the authors of the study wrote. “Recent work shows that permafrost-driven carbon in the Mackenzie River mouth was observed even in early spring/summer, typically when only modern (i.e., young) organic matter has been observed, highlighting the ongoing, rapid Arctic warming.”
The study, “Biogeochemical River Runoff Drives Intense Coastal Arctic Ocean CO2 Outgassing,” was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The study looks at the ways in which scientists are using computer modeling to examine rivers like the Mackenzie, which empties into the Beaufort Sea, NASA said. In recent years, warmer temperatures have led to more thawing and melting of landscapes and waterways in the Mackenzie River system and its delta.
In this marshy part of the Northwest Territories of Canada, the Mackenzie River serves as a conveyor of minerals and inorganic and organic matter. The material then runs into the Beaufort Sea as dissolved sediment and carbon. Some of the carbon gets released — outgassed — into the atmosphere.
Scientists had previously seen the southeastern part of the Beaufort Sea as a “weak-to-moderate” carbon sink that absorbs more carbon than it releases, but this has been far from a certainty due to the remoteness of the region and a lack of data.
In order to make up for the scarcity of information, the researchers adapted ECCO-Darwin — an ocean biogeochemical model — developed in Southern California at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The model took almost all available ocean observations that had been collected for over two decades by satellite- and sea-based instruments.
Using the model, the international research team simulated freshwater discharge and its elements — including nitrogen, silica and carbon — from 2000 to 2019.
The team found that such intense outgassing was being triggered by river discharge in the Beaufort Sea that the carbon balance had tipped, causing a net release of 0.13 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually — about the same as the yearly emissions of 28,000 gas-powered automobiles. There were seasonal variations in the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, with a greater amount of outgassing in the warmer months when discharge from the river was high and there wasn’t as much sea ice covering and trapping the gas.
However, while some of the changes that have been happening in the warming Arctic since the 1970s have promoted increased regional outgassing of carbon, others have led to greater carbon absorption.
According to NASA, rivers are flowing faster due to more ice and snow melt and the thawing of Arctic lands. As they do so, they flush more organic matter from peatlands and permafrost into the ocean. However, microscopic phytoplankton near the surface of the ocean are also blooming in the expanding areas of open water bathed in sunlight as sea ice shrinks. Like plants, these tiny marine organisms use photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide, turn it into energy and release oxygen.
While the study was focused on one part of the Arctic Ocean, the findings can help illuminate greater environmental changes happening in the region.
“With our model, we are trying to explore the real contribution of the coastal peripheries and rivers to the Arctic carbon cycle,” said Clément Bertin, lead author of the study and a scientist at France’s Littoral Environnement et Sociétés, in the press release.
The post Arctic Waters Are Emitting More Carbon as They Warm, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.
On Friday, Indonesia said palm oil companies operating inside forested areas would be fined a total of $310 million, reported Reuters.
Indonesia and Malaysia are responsible for most of the world’s palm oil production — 85 percent — a major driver of deforestation, the Yale Center for Business and the Environment said. Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
“Clearing for oil palm plantations has been the largest single cause of deforestation in Indonesia over the past two decades,” a 2021 report by technology consultancy TheTreeMap and Greenpeace said. “It includes production forests, which are subject to limited economic activity, such as forest product extraction. It also covers forests for protecting watersheds and conservation forests, which include nature reserves and the country’s national parks.”
Firman Hidayat, deputy coordinating minister for maritime affairs and investment, said more than $30.7 million in fines had already been issued, but did not provide the names of the companies that had been sanctioned, Reuters reported.
“Much of the deforestation related to palm oil has occurred with companies and individuals setting fire to the landscape. In 2015, fires raged for months in Indonesia, severely impacting Indonesian and Singaporean air quality, displacing wildlife, and leading experts to assert that Indonesia was now a bigger contributor to climate change than the U.S. Palm oil development is also happening largely in biodiversity hotspots, threatening crucial species and habitats,” the Yale Center for Business and the Environment said.
Earlier, this year, the Indonesian Supreme Court upheld a fine of $61 million against oil palm company PT Rafi Kamajaya Abadi after massive plantation fires destroyed an area seven times bigger than New York’s Central Park, Mongabay reported.
In November, Indonesia said approximately 494,210 acres of oil palm plantations had been identified in forest-designated areas, according to Reuters. These forests are expected to be turned back over to the state for reconversion into forests.
“As palm oil production expands, companies, NGOs, governments, and local communities are all trying to navigate how to leverage the benefits of palm oil’s efficient yields with the consequences of its production. As with any major resource system, the picture is complex,” the Yale Center for Business and the Environment said.
In 2020, Indonesia issued rules regarding the legality of palm oil plantations being operated in forested areas in order to straighten out their governance. The measures were needed, officials said, since some companies had been managing the land for years.
According to the rules, companies had until November 2, 2023, to pay fines and submit paperwork in order to get the right to cultivate their plantations.
However, even though 8.1 million acres of Indonesia’s almost 42 million acres of oil palm plantations have been discovered to be in areas designated as forests, only owners of a total of 4.13 million acres have been identified.
“The story of Brazil after 2012 warns us that gains in forest protection are fragile, and easily lost,” said Helen Bellfield, deputy director of palm oil supply chain initiative Trase, as Mongabay reported separately last year. “This is the time to intensify both government and private sector efforts, such as strengthening the ISPO [Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil] standard and stepping up implementation of zero deforestation commitments, including more detailed traceability reporting.”
The post Indonesia to Fine Palm Oil Companies $310 Million for Destroying Forests appeared first on EcoWatch.
The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. Spanning eight countries, it has been called the “lungs of the planet” for its vital service of converting enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Now, Brazilian lawmakers have approved a bill to allow conservation funds to be used to pave a highway — BR-319 — that cuts through the middle of the Amazon; researchers say the road could threaten the rainforest’s existence, reported Reuters.
The bill would allow use of the funds for the “recovery, paving and increasing the capacity of the highway,” according to Reuters.
This means capital such as the Amazon Fund’s $1.3 billion — supported by European and United States allies to be used for conservation — could go toward the project.
“I don’t think it makes any sense. This project does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines,” Tasso Azevedo, one of the creators of the Amazon Fund, told Climate Home News in September.
BR-319 was built in the early 1970s by the country’s then-military dictatorship, but quickly deteriorated, and by 1988 had become impassable.
Preventing more access is one of the biggest defenses the Amazon has against deforestation. A new road opening up in the undisturbed rainforest provides a way in for loggers, farmers, miners and developers, who often conduct their activities illegally.
Since 1978, the Amazon has lost more than 185 million acres to deforestation, and the rate of destruction is accelerating, according to the Amazon Conservation website.
Nearly all Amazon deforestation — 95 percent — happens within 3.4 miles of a roadway, Leanderson Lima of Amazônia Real and Micael Pereira of Expresso reported in The Guardian in June.
“Deforestation follows a fairly predictable pattern,” NASA Earth Observatory said, referring to satellite images on its website. “The first clearings that appear in the forest are in a fishbone pattern, arrayed along the edges of roads. Over time, the fishbones collapse into a mixture of forest remnants, cleared areas, and settlements. This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture.”
The old BR-319 highway — which has become a dirt road full of potholes that is untraversable five months of the year, during the rainy season — stretches approximately 559 miles from Rondonia state’s Porto Velho to Manaus in Amazonas, reported Reuters.
Those defending the paving project say it is needed to connect Amazonas and Rondonia, as Manaus is frequently inaccessible except by air and river.
The bill to approve the paving of BR-319 refers to the highway as “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security, requiring the guarantee of its trafficability,” as Reuters reported.
The bill was approved by the lower house of Congress, but still needs approval by the Senate.
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What are we waiting for? The future is a picture each of us will contribute…
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A 16-month-old boy was playing in a splash pad at a country club in Little Rock, Arkansas, this summer when water containing a very rare and deadly brain-eating amoeba went up his nose. He died a few days later in the hospital. The toddler wasn’t the first person in the United States to contract the freshwater amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, this year. In February, a man in Florida died after rinsing his sinuses with unboiled water — the first Naegleria fowleri-linked death to occur in winter in the U.S.
2023 was also an active year for Vibrio vulnificus, a type of flesh-eating bacteria. There were 11 deaths connected to the bacteria in Florida, three deaths in North Carolina, and another three deaths in New York and Connecticut. Then there was the first-ever locally transmitted case of mosquito-borne dengue fever in Southern California in October, followed by another case a couple of weeks later.
Scientists have warned that climate change would alter the prevalence and spread of disease in the U.S., particularly those caused by pathogens that are sensitive to temperature. This year’s spate of rare illnesses may have come as a surprise to the uninitiated, but researchers who have been following the way climate change influences disease say 2023 represents the continuation of a trend they expect will become more pronounced over time: The geographic distribution of pathogens and the timing of their emergence are undergoing a shift.
“These are broadly the patterns that we would expect,” said Rachel Baker, assistant professor of epidemiology, environment, and society at Brown University. “Things start moving northward, expand outside the tropics.” The number of outbreaks Americans see each year, said Colin Carlson, a global change biologist studying the relationship between global climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging infectious diseases at Georgetown University, “is going to continue to increase.”
That’s because climate change can have a profound effect on the factors that drive disease, such as temperature, extreme weather, and even human behavior. A 2021 study found water temperature was among the top environmental factors affecting the distribution and abundance of Naegleria fowleri, which thrives in water temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit but can also survive frigid winters by forming cysts in lake or pond sediment. The amoeba infects people when it enters the nasal canal and, from there, the brain. “As surface water temperatures increase with climate change, it is likely that this amoeba will pose a greater threat to human health,” the study said.
Vibrio bacteria, which has been called the “microbial barometer of climate change,” is affected in a similar way. The ocean has absorbed the vast majority of human-caused warming over the past century and a half, and sea surface temperatures, especially along the nation’s coasts, are beginning to rise precipitously as a result. Studies that have mapped Vibrio vulnificus growth show the bacteria stretching northward along the eastern coastline of the U.S. in lockstep with rising temperatures. Hotter summers also lead to more people seeking bodies of water to cool off in, which may influence the number of human exposures to the bacteria, a study said. People get infected by consuming contaminated shellfish or exposing an open wound — no matter how small — to Vibrio-contaminated water.
Mosquitoes breed in warm, moist conditions and can spread diseases like dengue when they bite people. Studies show the species of mosquito that carries dengue, which is endemic in many parts of the Global South, is moving north into new territory as temperatures climb and flooding becomes more frequent and extreme. A study from 2019 warned that much of the southeastern U.S. is likely to become hospitable to dengue by 2050.
Other warmth-loving pathogens and carriers of pathogens are on the move, too — some of them affecting thousands of people a year. Valley fever, a fungal disease that can progress into a disfiguring and deadly illness, is spreading through a West that is drier and hotter than it used to be. The lone star tick, an aggressive hunter that often leaves the humans it bites with a life-long allergy to red meat, is expanding northward as winter temperatures grow milder and longer breeding seasons allow for a larger and more distributed tick population.
The effect that rising temperatures have on these diseases doesn’t necessarily signal that every death linked to a brain-eating amoeba or Vibrio that occurred this year wouldn’t have happened in the absence of climate change — rare pathogens were claiming lives long before anthropogenic warming began altering the planet’s dynamics. Future analyses may look at the outbreaks that took place in 2023 individually to determine whether rising temperatures or some other climate change-related factor played a role. What is clear is that climate change is creating more opportunities for rare infectious diseases to crop up. Daniel R. Brooks, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on climate change and emerging diseases, calls this “pathogen pollution,” or “the accumulation of a lot of little emergences.”
State and local health departments have few tools at their disposal for predicting anomalous disease outbreaks, and doctors often aren’t familiar with diseases that aren’t endemic to their region. But health institutions can take steps to limit the spread of rare climate-driven pathogens. Medical schools could incorporate climate-sensitive diseases into their curricula so their students know how to recognize these burgeoning threats no matter where in the U.S. they eventually land. A rapid test for Naegleria fowleri in water samples already exists and could be used by health departments to test pools and other summer-time hot spots for the amoeba. States could conduct real-time monitoring of beaches for Vibrio bacteria via satellite. Cities can monitor the larvae of the mosquito species that spreads dengue and other diseases and spray pesticides to reduce the numbers of adult mosquitoes.
“If we were looking proactively for pathogens before they caused disease, we could better anticipate local outbreaks,” Brooks said. In other words, he said, we should be “finding them before they find us.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The link between climate change and a spate of rare disease outbreaks in 2023 on Dec 22, 2023.
When salmon all but vanished from western Alaska in 2021, thousands of people in the region faced disaster. Rural families lost a critical food source. Commercial fisherfolk found themselves without a major stream of income. And Alaska Native children stopped learning how to catch, cut, dry, and smoke fish — a tradition passed down since the time of their ancestors.
Behind the scenes, the salmon shortage has also inflamed a long-simmering legal fight among Native stakeholders, the Biden administration, and the state over who gets to fish on Alaska’s vast federal lands.
At the heart of the dispute is a provision in a 1980 federal law called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which gives rural Alaskans priority over urban residents to fish and hunt on federal lands. Most rural families are Indigenous, so the law is considered by some lawyers and advocates as key to protecting the rights of Alaska Natives. State officials, however, believe the law has been misconstrued to infringe on the state’s rights by giving federal regulators authority over fisheries that belong to Alaskans.
Now, a lawsuit alleges the state has overstepped its reach. Federal officials argue that state regulators tried to usurp control of fishing along the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska, where salmon make up about half of all food produced in the region. The suit, originally filed in 2022 by the Biden administration against the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, escalated this fall when the state’s lawyers effectively called for the end of federal oversight of fishing across much of Alaska. Indigenous leaders say the state’s actions threaten Alaska Native people statewide.
“What’s at stake is our future,” said Vivian Korthuis, chief executive officer of the Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of more than 50 Indigenous nations in western Alaska that’s one of four Alaska Native groups backing the Biden administration in the case. “What’s at stake is our children. What’s at stake is our families, our communities, our tribes.”
The lawsuit is a microcosm of how climate change is raising the stakes of fishing disputes around the world. While tensions over salmon management in Alaska aren’t new, they’ve been exacerbated by recent marine heat waves in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska and rising temperatures in rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim, where king, chum, and coho salmon populations have plummeted. In warmer waters, salmon burn more calories. They’re more likely to become malnourished and less likely to make it to their freshwater spawning grounds. With fewer fish in places like western Alaska, the question of who should manage them — and who gets access to them — has become even more urgent.
The Alaska dispute erupted in 2021, when state regulators on the Kuskokwim issued fishing restrictions that conflicted with regulations set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. People along the river, who are predominantly Yup’ik, were forced to navigate contradictory rules about whether and when they could fish legally — adding to the pain and frustration of an already disastrous season shaped by the coronavirus pandemic and historic salmon shortages.
“We can face large penalties and fines if we make mistakes,” Ivan M. Ivan, an elder in the Yup’ik village of Akiak, said in an affidavit.
The conflict spilled into 2022, another year of abysmal salmon returns, when state and federal regulators again issued contradictory restrictions. Alaska officials blamed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for opening up fishing prematurely, before salmon had begun their migration upstream, and with an “apparent lack of concern” for the species’ conservation. The Biden administration sued, arguing that the state illegally imposed its own rules in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, a federal reserve of wetlands and spruce and birch forest that encircles more than 30 Indigenous communities.
The fight played out quietly for more than a year — until September, when the state’s attorneys filed a brief that explicitly asked the court to undo legal precedent widely viewed as a safeguard for rural, mostly Indigenous families who depend on salmon. That move caused Alaska’s biggest Indigenous organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives, to join three smaller Native groups that had intervened on behalf of the federal government.
Those organizations are concerned that the state wants to reverse a string of court decisions, known as the “Katie John” cases, which held that rural Alaskans have priority to fish for food in rivers that flow through federal conservation areas, including long sections of the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and Copper rivers. Alaska Native leaders fear that doing away with that priority would endanger salmon populations and limit access for locals by opening fishing up to more people.
“It really will put a lot of pressure on stocks,” said Erin Lynch, an Anchorage-based attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, which is representing the Association of Village Council Presidents.
That concern isn’t limited to western Alaska. Ahtna Inc., a corporation owned by Indigenous shareholders in the Copper River region — some 500 miles east of the Kuskokwim — has also sided with the Biden administration. Without federal protections on the Copper River, Ahtna anglers would risk getting “pushed out,” according to John Sky Starkey, a lawyer representing Ahtna.
“There are only so many fish. There are only so many places [to fish],” Starkey said. “It’s a significant danger.”
State officials see the issue differently. They say there would be no threat of overfishing or competition between urban and rural residents, partly because rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim are so hard to reach from cities like Anchorage. They note that state law explicitly protects the subsistence rights of all Alaskans, including Alaska Natives. And they blame the feds for picking the fight by taking the issue to court.
“We did not initiate this lawsuit,” said Doug Vincent-Lang, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “We provide for subsistence priority, and we take that seriously.”
The state’s lawyers also claim that federal policy is unfair for Alaska Natives who have moved to cities because it bars them from fishing with relatives in rural areas. Some Indigenous leaders see it as flawed, too, but they disagree with the state about the solution. Rather than do away with federal management, they have called on Congress to strengthen protections for Alaska Natives.
The case, now before the U.S. District Court for Alaska, is likely to heat up even more in the coming months. A ruling is expected in the spring.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As salmon disappear, a battle over Alaska Native fishing rights heats up on Dec 22, 2023.