, - Elko Daily Free Press
Stephan: Several readers in the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas have written to tell me that the temperatures there have reached sustained levels they have never seen before. I wrote my first book in Tucson and Flagstaff, Arizona, and worked in the Libyan/Egyptian desert for some months, so I have at least a sense of what 114ºF is like. But 119º, it must be like going out into a oven. The impact this will have on both agriculture and water is going to be profound. And two SR readers who are also climatologists wrote to tell me this is just the beginning.
A record-breaking heat wave intensified drought conditions in much of the West during the past week, with 72 percent of the land area in the 10 Western states now in drought conditions, according to the latest update to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The worst impacts of the drought are concentrated in the Southwest: New Mexico, Texas, Southern Colorado and the western parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska all contain land that is under extreme or exceptional drought. The hot weather – Denver had its earliest 100-degree day on June 12 – served to exacerbate existing drought conditions and helped fuel deadly wildfires in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oregon. In California, 2013 has been the driest year on record to date, and the lack of rainfall is making the state more vulnerable to wildfires.
‘The overall pattern of hot and dry conditions, combined with year-to-date below normal precipitation, led to continued deterioration of pasture and rangeland conditions across Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico,
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REBECCA FORAND, - South Jersey Times
Stephan: This is the latest on the collapse of the bees. The loss of these little beings is beginning to impact humanity, as this report shows. Part of the problem may be a particular mite. But as I read the literature the overwhelming cause is pesticides and herbicides.
Yet still the Obama Administration, its Department of Agriculture, the EPA, even the State Department, are supporting and protecting Monsanto, Dow, and the four other companies who produce and promote these poisons, in their quest for profit. If this continues, in my view, within the next decade we are going to have a world food crisis.
New Jersey’s most popular crops could be in jeopardy because one of the smallest but most important parts of the growing process is in danger.
Honey bees pollinate crops across New Jersey, including blueberries, cantaloupes, cranberries, cucumbers and pumpkins, but parasites and pesticides are decimating the bee population.
About 32 percent of the state’s honey bees died last winter, according to the New Jersey Department of Agriculture citing a trend occurring across the country. On a national level, almost a third of the honey bees also died according to preliminary results of the 2012-2013 winter loss survey conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership.
‘Honey bees are responsible for pollinating about a third of the food humans use. It can severely impact the fruits and vegetables people consume,’ said Tim Schuler, New Jersey’s state apiarist and chief of the state’s bee inspection operation.
A previously undiagnosed condition called colony decline first affected the bee population about 10 years ago. Since, bees were widely thought to have recovered.
‘We still have a lot of problems when we talk about colony decline,
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CHRISTOPHER JOHNSTON, - Scientific American/Salon
Stephan: Once again we see the sad saga of a product brought to market without the proper testing to see what its impact on the environment will be. This is yet another failure of the corrupted regulatory agencies.
Three of the five Great Lakes-Huron, Superior and Erie-are awash in plastic. But it’s not the work of a Christo-like landscape artist covering the waterfront. Rather, small plastic beads, known as micro plastic, are the offenders, according to survey results to be published this summer in Marine Pollution Bulletin. ‘The highest counts were in the micro plastic category, less than a millimeter in diameter,
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DAVID DALEY, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Here is yet a different facet of the great geopolitical trend that is changing our world; in this case the rise of what amounts to a new global hereditary elite. What continues to amaze me is how passive populations around the world have been about this.
Let me also note the references to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, who I think are the best socially progressive intellects on cable television. They actually understand what data is, and how to interpret it. In the media today this is almost as rare as a white crow.
Twenty years ago, William Greider’s ‘Who Will Tell the People?
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Saturday, June 29th, 2013
Stephan: The foundation upon which our democracy is based is the vote of the citizens. The Republican Party, recognizing that it is increasingly a party defined by race, religion, and region, has two options if they wish to survive at the national level. One, adopt policies which attract the widest group of voters. Two, restrict access to voting and gerrymander voting districts so that only Republicans have easy access to voting. We all know which choice they have made, but I don't think people fully appreciate how cynical and pervasive this policy really is. Here is a report that will give you some sense of what is happening. It also shows just how partisan the conservative activist Supreme Court has become, and how truly damaging their gutting of the Voting Right Act obviously is to a healthy democracy.
Like gleeful children released from detention, officials in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and other states vowed to enact new voting restrictions just hours after the Supreme Court did their bidding and neutered the Voting Rights Act (pdf).
Free at last, they might as well have said.
‘[Attorney General] Eric Holder can no longer deny Voter ID in Texas,’ tweeted Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott soon after Tuesday’s decision.
Indeed, states like Texas and hundreds of communities nationwide now have unfettered authority to impose the kitchen sink of conservative-bred election changes that potentially disenfranchise minority voters, which is why the measures had been blocked by the Voting Rights Act before the court stripped the law of its key enforcement tool on Tuesday.
New voter-identification requirements, cuts in early balloting, the end of same-day registration and Sunday voting before Election Day (‘souls to the polls’), gerrymandered districts, relocated polling places and more are now all in play.It’s all happening in this open season on minority voting power.
How did America’s greatest civil rights achievement, a law that had never lost a court challenge in 48 years, become vulnerable?
It began in June 2009. While many of us were still distracted by the wonderment of America’s first black president, […]
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