Tag: environment

A Candle Has Gone Out: The Legacy of Jane Goodall

It’s with profound sadness I learned yesterday of primatologist Jane Goodall’s death at age 91.

Blessed with remarkable genes, she lived life with zest up to the very last, tirelessly traveling across international landscapes to raise funds for her Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania, founded in 1977.

I read her NY Times obituary, but it falls short in evaluating the plenitude of her achievement and its significance for all of us. I learned some time ago that the NYT composes many of its obituaries in advance, ready-to-go like a frozen pizza.

It doesn’t take into account her devotion to the Tanzanians among whom she worked for sixty years, as earnest for their welfare as she was for chimpanzees, humanity’s closest relatives, possessed like us with dual capacity for good and evil.

She gave early warning of climate change as an eyewitness of its exponential ravages in Africa, the front line of its advance.

You can learn much of what she accomplished through reading among her many books The Shadow of Man or A Reason for Hope of her work in Africa, breakthroughs in science, and personal beliefs, some of them controversial such as her advocacy of birth control availability to help African families limit their family size. Tanzania is second among Africa’s 54 nations in population growth. With a present population of 68 million, its projected 2100 population will swell to 283 million, imperiling its subsistence resources.

Goodall had faced an uphill climb in winning acceptance among male scientists, stubbornly suspicious of any woman’s achievement in investigative research. Initially, when setting out for Africa, she had been a waitress and secretary. A wealthy donor, however, recognizing her brilliance, provided the funding for a Ph.D. in ethology at Cambridge University, Goodall one of the rare individuals to directly achieve a Ph. D., not having been an undergraduate.

I confess to a personal attachment to Goodall who, like me, suffered from lifelong prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder inhibiting one’s ability to recognize faces.

Currently the fate of her African investment, employing thousands of Tanzanians, remains under unrelenting threat with population growth, agricultural expansion, deforestation, fragmented forest, habitat loss, logging, and lack of consistent government enforcement of land use laws; not least, the volatility of donor contributions on which the work depends, collectively posing a Sword of Damocles hovering over its future.

There remain just 2300 chimpanzees throughout Tanzania, with an estimated 90 to 100 in Gombe National Park, the site of her research. Those numbers are down from the original 150 as elsewhere in Tanzania, bush meat remains a frequent staple despite its health risks. AIDS had its origin in Africa, consequent with eating chimpanzees harboring the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV). Goodall was a committed vegan, ardently opposed to factory farming.

Also contributing to their demise is ever expanding human encroachment.

A friend of animals, champion of Mother Earth, always with passion and never without hope, Dr. Goodall is in my pantheon of heroes, her many awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (USA), the Steven Hawking Medal of Science for Communication, and designation as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

Acknowledging her advanced age, she approached death as her “next great adventure. When you die, there’s either nothing, it’s the end, or there’s something. And things have happened to me in my life that I feel there is something. And if there is, I can’t think of a greater adventure than dying.” 

I wish I lived in a world which lowered its flags in tribute to Dr. Goodall:

”Somehow we might keep hope alive—a hope we can find a way to alleviate poverty, assuage anger, and live in harmony with the environment, with animals, and with each other,” she wrote.

A candle has gone out and I feel lonely and in a dark place.

rj

Sheer Lunacy: Trump’s Assault on the Environment

The Trump administration’s assault on the environment in the context of exponential climate change exhibits all too well the earmarks of corporate denial in the pursuit of monetary gain that will reap catastrophic consequences.

When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in 1962, it moved two presidents to take action, Kennedy ordering an investigation of pesticide use and Nixon founding the Environmental Protection Agency.

Unfortunately, Trump’s EPA version bears little resemblance and to chart his myriad changes would try your patience.

I confess to being an environmental zealot. I read eco literature vividly, keep up with the latest happenings, donate regularly to environmental groups.

I support protecting endangered species like the whooping crane, manatee, blue and finback whales. I accept evolution’s tapestry of a variegated offspring, reaping the legacy of successful adaptation over vast aeons of time, our human presence but a wink by comparison.

I do not subscribe to the administration’s either/or assumption of jobs vs. environment. On the contrary, abundant studies show commitment to the Green New Deal would inaugurate new technologies and promote GNP growth. According to a University of Massachusetts study, commitment to a climate jobs program would generate 1.5-2 million net jobs annually for a decade (Pollin et al.).

Trump and his lackeys ignore such research. They are of a stubborn mindset, devotees of fossil industry interests,

Recently, this administration waived thirty environmental and public health studies in pursuit of building a wall through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, placing endangered species habitats and ecosystem corridors in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, they’ve slashed the EPA budget by 65%, cancelled or unenforced dozens of environmental rules, opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and US coastal waters to oil drilling, slated public lands with their indigenous monuments for auctioning, and severely reduced national park staffing.

As for the Endangered Species Act, this administration has compromised it to allow for economic considerations. Good-bye, my beloved manatees, the Everglades, Yosemite as we once knew it in its pristine beauty,

As Rachel Carson reminds us, “Beauty — and all the values that derive from beauty — are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.” (Lost Woods).

Addendum:

Yesterday, my heart quickened as Dee Dee and I drove into Lexington, honked our horn at several groups of Trump protestors gathered along the way, who exuberantly reciprocated our waves.

We learned we’re not alone.

Collectively, it is our duty to resist.

RJ

Nature Isn’t All Butterflies

I want to step back from writing about politics, at least for now. We all have our views, and too often—much like professing religious beliefs—we run headlong into barbed-wire intolerance.

Some find distraction, even intoxication, in endless hours of media; others in sports; still others in hobbies that bring both pleasure and mastery—or in the familiar solace of alcohol.

I prefer reading, not just any kind, but what helps me grow and be more aware I’m not alone. Lately, it’s been nature memoirs, especially like H is for Hawk. I want to get back to my beloved Thoreau and not least, Wendell Berry. I miss Tolstoy.

Of course, we shouldn’t extract from nature what really derives from our imposed views such as we find in Wordsworth’s poetry. Nature, as writer James Rebank reminds us, “isn’t all butterflies, sunshine and healing.”

Still, whenever I step outside the human world, there descends this quieting solace, and I think myself made whole again.

rj

An Owl’s Story: Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me

There exist those books you wish wouldn’t end. Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me: What Owls Know and Humans Think was that kind of book for me.

I had read Safina’s excellent View from Lazy Point several years ago, impressed with its detailed oberservations of wildlife and an arctic indigenous community across four seasons. That same concern for indigenous well-being and the plight of animals in a changing world continue with Alfie and Me.

Safina, a widely published ecological author and Endowed Professor of Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University, is an expert in marine biology and recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes dubbed “the genius grant.”

In all his writings, Safina’s focus is on how humans relate to nature, a theme manifestly central to Alfie and Me, chronicling the story of an orphaned Eastern screech owl found in Safina’s Long Island backyard in 2018. Over the course of eighteen months, Safina and his wife, Patricia, nurtured the owl—whom they named Alfie—until her eventual release, creating a rare, intimate portrait of interspecies connection and nature’s resilience.

Safina becomes nearly a helicopter parent, monitoring Alfie’s daily development, torn between fostering her independence and protecting her from the harsh realities of the wild: “… I knew—as she did not—the relative meaninglessness of a life without risks.” An estimated two thirds of young screech hours die shortly after leaving their parents’s nest.

I found myself anxious for Alfie’s survival. Would she learn to fly, to hunt, to mate? Could she survive storms, drought, and the many predators that lurk in her world?

Species survival today depends not only on healthy ecosystems, but increasingly on humans recognizing their relationship with nature as essential to mutual survival.

Safina criticizes Western philosophy for severing this connection, beginning with Plato’s split between the material and spiritual worlds—deeming the material inferior and ultimately fueling nature’s exploitation: “Plato and his followers were perhaps the first people to feel revulsion toward the world. By forever separating our material world from the realm of perfection, Plato propounded a stark dualist doctrine,” Safina says.

For Safina, “This might be the most consequential idea in the history of human thought, its implications almost literally Earth-shattering. Most fundamentally, we are left with: an existence at odds with itself.”

Descartes and Bacon subsequently embodied a modern mechanistic view of nature, oblivious to nature’s sanctity and evolutionary intelligence, leading to its objectification. “The great blindness of the West is to grope the world as inventory,” Safina writes.

In contrast, Safina draws richly from Eastern traditions, which emphasize the unity of all life and the reverence owed to the source from which we came. Although his book is replete with references to Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist thought, he finds Confucianism especially compelling for its focus on relationships.

Safina also turns to Indigenous cultures as contemporary models of living in harmony with nature. Their ways often involve mindful observation and sustainable stewardship rooted in mutual respect: “For most of human history, Native peoples, more intimate with their existence than we with ours, perceived that Life and the cosmos are mainly relational,” Safina says.

Reading Alfie and Me, I couldn’t help but think of the estimated one billion birds projected to die globally in 2025. According to the Audubon Society, North America alone has lost 25% of its bird population since 1970—about 3 billion birds. Contributing factors include climate change, deforestation, pesticides, habitat destruction, urban structures, insect decline, and free-roaming cats.

Safina’s book appeared in 2023, or before the current avian flu outbreak, which over the past 18 months has led to the confirmed deaths of millions of wild birds in North America—many of them common backyard visitors. The virus has now reached poultry as well, despite the culling of over 166 million birds. A future in which birds no longer sing at sunrise, once unthinkable, now feels disturbingly plausible.

This avian decline is largely human-made, driven by an economy that prioritizes profit over preservation

Why write about birds, some might ask. Shouldn’t human needs come first?

Safina answers with the words of Catholic monk Thomas Merton: “Someone will say you worry about birds: why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. … It is all part of the same sickness, and it all hangs together.”

Alfie and Me is not only a poignant narrative about an orphaned owl, but also a powerful meditation on our shared existence, affirming Safina’s truth: “that no isolated separation is possible. We are participant members in one existence—of life, of the cosmos, of time.”

–rj

Trump Environmental Rollbacks: Travesty in the Making

The Trump administration is accelerating its broad assault on environmental protections and climate change mitigation, putting both public health and the planet at risk. It began with the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, a pact signed by 200 nations.

Dismantling Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Trump has rolled back roughly 125 environmental policies in just two months, issuing executive orders to expand oil and gas drilling on public lands and increase logging in national forests.

Meanwhile, 1,600 workers have been cut from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), undermining critical weather forecasting and public safety.

Aid to developing countries for green initiatives, once provided through the International Partners Group, has been halted.

FEMA, responsible for disaster relief, is under review.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—established by Richard Nixon in response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—has pivoted to pro-fossil fuel advocacy. Forget about EVs, charging stations, or clean energy incentives.

It doesn’t stop there. Reuters reports today that the Department of Energy is considering slashing millions in funding for two major carbon capture projects in Louisiana and Texas. These projects, once fully operational, could remove an estimated two million metric tons of carbon annually.

Long standing congressional mandated legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Noise Reduction Act, and the Endangered Species Act face Trump’s bludgeoning. The courts must act to stop the carnage.

All of this comes as the world falls short of its pledge to limit warming to 3.6°F (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels.

Trump, of course, remains unbothered. He has long dismissed climate change as a “hoax.”

Unfortunately, we will all pay an incalculable price for electing a renegade despot, mindlessly sabotaging the public’s welfare and our children’s future.

—rj

Profits Over People: Trump’s Environmental Rollback

Multiple brown bear at McNeil River State Game Sanctuary fishing for salmon

This past week has been disastrous for the environment and public welfare. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, ramped up efforts to expand fossil fuel production, attacked clean energy initiatives, rescinded EV rebates, placed environmental justice employees on paid leave, and halted crucial environmental litigation.

Trump, who dismisses climate change as a hoax, prioritizes profits above all else. His actions will have dire consequences: higher cancer rates in cities like L.A., more asthma attacks, skyrocketing hospital bills, and increased deaths among Americans.

Meanwhile, Alaska, now opened to massive drilling, is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and threatening the survival of indigenous communities. —RJ

Crossing the Line: Humanity’s Reckoning with a Planet on the Brink

The Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Jan. 9,2024. Photo: Mark Terrill

As Los Angeles burns, news comes that 2024 was the hottest year since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Alarmingly, humanity has surpassed the critical 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming threshold—a limit meant to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The fallout is clear: rising seas, relentless heat waves, severe droughts, catastrophic fires, and violent storms.  Currently, atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 410 parts per million—the highest in 3 million years—and continue to rise at an unprecedented pace.

At the heart of this crisis lies human-induced CO2 emissions, fueled by our continued reliance on fossil energy.

A 1.5°C rise may sound modest, but even at this level, irreversible damage has been done: collapsing ecosystems, intensifying weather extremes, emerging diseases, species extinction, and widespread social and economic turmoil.

The UN’s latest IPCC report demands urgent reflection: each additional 0.1°C of warming exacerbates extreme weather, disrupts food systems, and threatens a human population set to exceed 10 billion.  Between 2010 and 2019, heat-related deaths worldwide totaled 489,000 (WMO). Factoring in climate-induced malnutrition, disease, and disasters like floods and droughts, that number swells to 4 million. 

In short, neither humans nor other species evolved to survive an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

As Guardian columnist George Monbiot reminds us, “With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important problems that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams, none of our plans and expectations can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse “ (The Guardian, 28 September 2022).

–rj

No Easy Fix: Climate Change is Coming for You!


I’ve always liked environment activist Bill McKibben, longtime prof at Middlebury College and prolific writer, though sometimes I disagree.

For example, he recently parried a reader’s hint that just maybe overpopulation poses our greatest challenge in mitigating the exponential fallout of climate change by saying he didn’t think so, given that where population is rising most, Africa, there’s little contribution to carbon discharge .

While that may presently hold true, the reason for this is Africa’s falling short on Western amenities that along with their comfort and convenience, foster carbon discharge.

The fact is Africa is incipiently engaged in catching-up to the follies of more advanced economies in adopting technologies promoting carbon discharge, especially with regard to excavating industries in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Africa’s clamor for meat likewise grows with surging population, more deforestation is occurring, and we know that spells diminished carbon sinks, fostering destabilization of weather patterns.

As I write, prolonged drought plagues Africa, creating a vast risk of starvation and malnutrition. What it doesn’t need are more mouths to feed.

In game refuges, elephants and even rhinos, seen as competitors for flora and landscape, are being slaughtered to feed a growing population in Angola, Zimbabwe and, yes, in Bechuanaland, Africa’s last great elephant sanctuary.

McKibben entangles himself similarly in joining the chorus advocating more wind turbines, despite emerging evidence of their dire consequences, at least for seabirds and whales, according to the recent 600 page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

On the other hand, he’s right about so much of our climate morass.

This year was the hottest on record, with next year unpromising. Phoenix, our fastest America growth city, endured 31 days of 110F temperatures, its emergency rooms overflowing with the burned and dying.

And he’s right—there’s no safe place to move. Vermont, where he lives, sheltered by its mountains, suffered an atmospheric river this past summer, resulting in unprecedented downpours inflicting catastrophic flooding.

Last night, I learned of America’s new housing crisis, this one weather related. It seems 30-year mortgages can’t withstand climate change, natural disasters occurring not only more frequently, but with accelerating violence.

Take Florida, for example, where home insurers are pulling out. Where they remain, and I mean across the nation, annual premiums increases are eroding many homeowners’ ability to pay.

Currently, 9% of the world’s population, or 600 million of us, lives outside what’s known as “the climate niche,” meaning safety zone. By century’s end, an estimated one third of us will fall into this doughnut hole.

Now comes the orange hair threat assuming office, January 20, 2025. Denying climate change as a hoax, he pledges “drill, baby, drill.”

Fasten your seatbelts everyone. Turbulence ahead!

–rj

I Altered My Routine Last Week


I altered my routine last week, signing up for an eight week edX course, The Living Amazon: Science, Cultures and Sustainability in Practice.

It’s all that I could hope for, an intense, but well-informed analysis of the Amazon’s plight, with 21% of its forest already harvested to make room for cattle ranches, mining and lumber interests.

The fallout for its 1 million indigenous, suddenly brought into contact with an entrenched, and growing profit-motive corporate presence, has been disastrous, violence not uncommon, indigenous lands degraded or appropriated, and cultures eroded.

Not only does the Amazon, so vital to mitigating climate change, need saving, but social justice must prevail.

The course, hosted by distinguished earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, is conducted in Portuguese, but subtitled in Spanish, and English.

Despite the Amazon’s plight, Nobre doesn’t lose hope that remedies can be found to halt the carnage while simultaneously offering a prosperous economic future, founded on eco-safeguards and beneficial for its indigenous peoples.

Frankly, if we don’t achieve solutions, the consequences will prove apocalyptic for all of us. As is, we’re nearing the tipping point of no return in the existential challenge of climate change.

In actuality, the Amazon transcends Brazil, the Amazon basin embracing portions of nine countries, housing the largest tropical forest on earth and, with its river system, 7 million square kilometers, or about 40% of South America.

50 diverse Andean-Amazonian ecosystems are within its traverse, collectively comprising 13% of the world’s biodiversity. 34% of the world’s birds and 20% of its mammals are endemic to the basin.

The Amazon biome functions as an important carbon sink, helping
to reduce the global heating rate. Unfortunately, its effect seems to be weakening, the basin experiencing diminished rainfall and forest fire occurrence.

I’m excited about this course and trust that informed, I can do my part in helping sustain the Amazon’s crucial contribution to earth’s welfare.

rj

America’s Fossil Fuel Addiction: A Call for Change

As another storm, Milton, churns its way in the Gulf toward FL, Americans continue their love affair with fossil fuels, reluctant to embrace habit change and the inconvenience it imposes. One of our candidates for the nation’s highest office, with PA in mind, now preaches fracking; the other wants to roll back all climate change regulation.

China puts us to shame, last year installing 57% of all new solar plants around the world.

Likewise, Singapore, its people on board, plans to be zero emissions free by 2050.

As is, expect more storms, more heat, more fires, more drought, more ecosystems on which our survival depends, compromised or destroyed. A recent Lancet Countdown analysis (2023) reports that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidizing fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019.

We are addicted, myopic about the myriad consequences of fossil fuel dependency we relegate to a remote future.

Presently, there’s not a single Earth System that doesn’t face collapse.

We need to be on a war footing, the environment our highest priority, if we’re to avoid apocalyptic scenarios like that of Appalachia emerging a salient headline of our daily lives.

If we stubbornly resist taking action to mitigate the situation, the ecological balance — a product of millions of years of evolution that sustains life on Earth — may soon collapse, leading to our eventual extinction.

—rjoly