A Voice from the Eastern Door
A Voice from the Eastern Door
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By Andrea Germanos. Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday brought back its climate change website — a resource the former Trump administration had yanked. Climate facts are back on EPA’s website where they should be,” newly confirmed EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Thursday. “Considering the urgency of this crisis, it’s critical that Americans have access to information and resources so that we can all play a role in protecting our environment, our health, a...
By Lynsey Grosfield. Forests are not only complex ecosystems and habitats for wildlife, they are also central to the livelihoods of around 2 billion people. The critical role they have in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere has led to many international reforestation projects. To help this global effort we’ve listed 10 key ways to improve tree planting. There are around 60,000 tree species in the world, spread out across myriad ecosystems. Within these ecosystems, and around these trees, are countless other organisms ranging from the t...
By Olivia Rosane As bitcoin’s fortunes and prominence rise, so do concerns about its environmental impact. The process of mining the cryptocurrency is enormously energy intensive, so much so that it consumes more electricity in a year than Argentina or the Ukraine, according to the latest data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. Its energy hunger even led to a warning from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week, as CNBC reported. “It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions,” Yellen said, “and the amoun...
By Beverly Law and William Moomaw. Reprinted with permission from EcoWatch Protecting forests is an essential strategy in the fight against climate change that has not received the attention it deserves. Trees capture and store massive amounts of carbon. And unlike some strategies for cooling the climate, they don’t require costly and complicated technology. Yet although tree-planting initiatives are popular, protecting and restoring existing forests rarely attracts the same level of support. As an example, forest protection was notably missing...
Reprinted with permission from EcoWatch. Let's not waste time. You will need: warm clothes, plenty of firewood and enough supplies (flour, yeast, toilet paper - the usual) to not have to leave the house for the next week or two. No, just kidding. For pandemic control, it would be helpful if we all stayed home, but as a precautionary measure against the approaching polar vortex, this would really be over the top. It's probably indeed going to be bitterly cold in much of the Northern Hemisphere,...
Reprinted with permission from EcoWatch In an effort to aid North American bumblebee conservation, a group of California researchers has identified which flowers certain bee species prefer. There are nearly 20,000 known bee species in the world, 4,000 of which are native to the U.S., according to the U.S. Geological Society. Bees pollinate roughly three-quarters of all fruits, nuts and vegetables grown across the country and one of every four bites of food can be credited to bee pollination. But bees are in major decline as nearly 40 percent...
Long before former President Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument — and former President Donald Trump nearly destroyed it — these geographically stunning southern Utah canyons were the setting of countless battles over who belongs to this land and whose history is worth saving. In the first weeks, if not days, of his administration, President Joe Biden is expected to restore the boundaries of two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. But tribal leaders say that returning millions of acres sho...
By Brett Wilkins, EcoWatch A report published December 29, 2020 by the eco-advocacy group Environment America urges President-elect Joe Biden to immediately restore critical environmental protections gutted by Trump administration regulatory rollbacks. The report, First Things to Fix, notes that President Donald Trump has overseen the reversal or weakening of around 100 environmental regulations during his nearly four years in office. “His administration has steadily loosened oversight of polluting industries, eroded protections for endangered...
In 2020, wildfires raged through Australia and the American West, hurricanes battered Central America and the Gulf Coast, dark clouds of locusts descended on the Horn of Africa, and a new, deadly disease jumped from its wild animal host to humans, upending life as we knew it. With end-of-world motifs dominating headlines, you wouldn’t be blamed for feeling like the natural world had turned a little hostile, even as scientists continued to warn of the dangerous harm we’re doing to it. Biodiversity is still in freefall, deforestation in the Ama...
Reprinted with permission from Earthjustice Plastics are everywhere: in couches, televisions, makeup, toys, costumes, and even children’s bodies. New reports show the dangers synthetic chemicals in plastics pose to children’s health. Two recent reports released by the EU-based groups, Health and Environmental Alliance (HEAL) and the Regional Activity Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP/RAC), are among the first large-scale efforts to illustrate plastic pollution not only as an environmental threat, but also as a problem of...
By Jessica Corbett. Common Dreams/Ecowatch Environmental and Indigenous leaders on Thursday, November 12, 2020 responded with alarm after Minnesota regulators approved key permits for Enbridge Energy’s planned Line 3 Pipeline replacement and called on Democratic Gov. Tim Walz to block any construction for the Canadian company’s long-delayed multibillion-dollar project. “Gov. Walz has apparently decided that if Washington won’t lead on climate, Minnesota won’t either,” said Andy Pearson, MN350’s Midwest tar sands coordinator, in a statement abo...
By Tara Lohan. Reprinted with permission from Ecowatch Election Day 2020 - the day before the United States officially left the Paris climate agreement - didn’t deliver an immediate rebuke to President Trump or relief for environmentalists. That would have to wait. “The election hasn’t produced the outcome that the planet badly needed,” Bill McKibben of 350.org summed up in The New Yorker the following day. But as the votes continued to be counted in battleground states, the mood shifted from despair to hope, and finally, on Nov. 7, to celebra...
By Kolby KickingWoman. Reprinted with permission from Indian Country Today. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved the state of Oklahoma’s request to administer environmental regulatory programs in Indian Country. Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, Cherokee, made the initial request to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler near the end of July, 13 days after the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma. That decision stated Congress never explicitly disestablished the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation and much of eastern Oklahom...
By Joaqlin Estus. Reprinted with permission from Indian Country Today The U.S. Forest Service has released a report laying the groundwork to open more than 9 million acres in the nation’s largest national forest to logging. The preferred alternative in its environmental study, released Friday, would exempt southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from a rule prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting. That would remove 9.37 million acres from roadless designation and provide the most possible timber harvest opportunities of six opt...
Reprinted with permission from the Guardian On winter nights for the past six years, a group of 20 people have rustled through dark, coniferous woods to emerge on a Canadian beach at the lowest possible tide, illuminated by a correspondingly full moon. An elder offers a greeting to the place and a prayer, then the team of researchers, volunteers, and First Nations “knowledge holders” lights a warming fire and begins its work. At sites outlined by stones placed hundreds or even thousands of years ago, some begin raking, or “fluffing”, the top...
Reprinted with permission from IQAir Washington Wildfires Several wildfires erupted through the state of Washington on Monday, September 8. Fanned by 50 mile-per-hour winds and fueled by an abundance of dry timber, the fires burned through more than 580,000 acres, in less than 72 hours.1 That number is significant. Before this, 2015 was the state’s most destructive wildfire season, with 500,000 burned acres. 2020 bested this record in three days. Of the 37 active fires burning in Washington on Tuesday, September 9, the two largest are the 1...
Reprinted with permission from Ecowatch The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, thanks to protections put in place 60 years ago, has remained a pristine oasis in the most remote section of Alaska. Now, the Trump administration is finalizing plans to end those protections and to lease the federal lands to oil and gas exploration, according to The New York Times. The maneuver will allow oil and gas companies to exploit the vast reserves that sit under what environmentalists’ call “the last great wilderness,” according to The Guardian. The Arcti...
Reprinted with permission from Ecowatch A federal judge ruled Monday that the controversial Dakota Access pipeline must be shut down and drained of oil until a full environmental review of the project is completed. The decision is a major victory for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Indian Country Today reported. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe fears the pipeline will pollute their drinking water and sacred lands if it leaks from where it flows beneath the Missouri River, and the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation...
CHARLOTTE, N.C. Duke Energy and Dominion Energy announced the cancellation of the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) citing “ongoing delays and increasing cost uncertainty.” In a joint statement released on Sunday afternoon, Duke Energy of Charlotte and Dominion Energy of Richmond, Virginia announced the cancellation of the 600-mile pipeline project that was slated to run natural gas from the Ohio Valley, to West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. “Dominion Energy (NYSE: D) and Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) today announced the cance...
Reprinted with permission by Ecowatch Friday, June 5, 2020. In a move that environmentalists warned could further imperil hundreds of endangered species and a protected habitat for the sake of profit, President Donald Trump on Friday signed a proclamation rolling back an Obama-era order and opening nearly 5,000 square miles off the coast of New England to commercial fishing. “We’re opening it today,” Trump said during a roundtable talk in Maine with commercial fishermen and the state’s former governor Paul LePage. “What reason did he have for...
Reprinted with permission from Ecowatch Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline spilled as many as 190,000 liters (approximately 50,193 gallons) of crude oil in Abbotsford, British Columbia (BC) Saturday, reinforcing concerns about the safety of the pipeline’s planned expansion. Chief Dalton Silver of the Sumas First Nation told CTV News that the spill occurred on his reserve on fields over an aquifer that supplies his nation with drinking water. It marks the fourth time in 15 years that the pipeline has spilled on his community’s land.”We cannot cont...
Reprinted with permission from Ecowatch Earlier this month, health care experts from across the United States gathered to address hundreds of journalists and policymakers by webinar. But their focus was not testing, nor vaccines, nor “herd immunity.” It was not even COVID-19, really. Instead, their focus was climate change. “While many see issues like climate change and biodiversity loss as far from what’s going on right now … I see this as the time to talk about it,” said Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and a prof...
Reprinted with permission from Ecowatch As many Americans fight for their lives in the midst of a respiratory pandemic, the Trump administration Thursday axed the justification for a mercury pollution rule that saves more than 10,000 lives and prevents as many as 130,000 asthma attacks each year. The new rollback leaves mercury emission standards in place for now, but changes how their benefits are calculated so that the economic cost takes precedence over public health gains, The New York Times reported. The move provides a legal opening to...
Reprinted with permission from Earthjustice (March 25, 2020) Washington, D.C. A federal court granted a request by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to strike down federal permits for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The Court found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it affirmed federal permits for the pipeline originally issued in 2016. Specifically, the Court found significant unresolved concerns about the potential impacts of oil spills...
On Earth Day April 22, 2019, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo signed legislation that bans the sale of single-use plastic bags in New York State. This ban goes into effect on March 1, 2020. This ia a significant step to reduce pollution and protect fish and wildlife. "Single-use" plastic bags do not degrade and often wind up as litter on lands and in waters, harming birds or wildlife that ingest the plastic. It is estimated that New Yorkers use 23 billion plastic bags annually, and nationwide studies...
