Molly Jahn, member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and joint faculty at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. - Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: The chemical industrial monoculture agriculture which dominates U.S. farming is killing not only the bees but the soil itself. This is a time bomb very close to exploding, as this report spells out.
At the height of the slave trade in 1785, an English divinity student, Thomas Clarkson, won a Latin essay contest considering the question, “Is it lawful to enslave the un-consenting?”
Few read it. Fewer took it seriously. But Clarkson, along with a small band of similarly inspired people, went to work, designing and executing a set of coordinated tactics to reveal the atrocities of legal slavery in the systems that brought sugar to British tables.
Wherever he went, Clarkson carried a wooden box filled with the slaver’s tools – iron handcuffs, shackles, thumb-screws, branding irons, and instruments for forcing open slaves’ jaws. Clarkson’s moment of grace changed his course. Clarkson’s box showed consumers the intolerable violence in their sugar bowls.
The violence that we do to our planet’s soils, while by no means a crime comparable to the brutality of chattel slavery, is inseparably tied to our modern economic system, just as slavery was. And the mounting evidence of the violence we are doing to our soils is as obvious as the shackles in Thomas Clarkson’s box.
The extractive farming methods that have been used since World War II to drive massive increases in agricultural yields and human population have brought our species and planet […]
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Timothy Gardner , Reporter - Reuters
Stephan: Trump and his Congressional Republican minions have no use for non-carbon energy as they tell us over and over. They support coal, oil and gas. But people who actually have to get things done in the real world, know how ignorant and benighted such views are, the military particularly. Here's the story.
U.S. Marine Corps Corporal Robert G. Sutton (L) and Corporal Moses E. Perez, field wireman with Combat Logistics Regiment 15 install new solar panels on Combat Outpost Shukvani, Helmand province, Afghanistan.
Credit: Quiles/Reuters
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his top advisors have often scoffed at government support of green energy. His chief strategist called it “madness.”
But the largest U.S. government agency – the Department of Defense – plans to forge ahead under the new administration with a decade-long effort to convert its fuel-hungry operations to renewable power, senior military officials told Reuters.
The reasons have nothing to do with the white-hot debate over climate change. In combat zones, green energy saves lives by, for instance, reducing the need for easily attacked convoys to deliver diesel fuel to generators at U.S. bases. Mobile solar-power units allow soldiers to prowl silently through enemy territory.
At sea, gas-electric hybrid battleships save fuel and allow for fewer stops – making them less vulnerable to attacks like the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, when al-Qaeda militants killed […]
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Steven Mufson, Jason Samenow and Brady Dennis, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: Donald Trump and his administration do not believe in the reality of climate change but, just in case it is real, they don't want you to know about it. To protect the carbon energy interests to whom they are beholden, they are blinding and deafening the scientists who study climate so that the truth about what is happening is not known to Americans. Am I making up something this stupid and destructive of the wellbeing of the U.S.? I am not, it is all too real, as this report spells out.
Weather satellite image
Credit: NOAA
The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.
NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from its current funding level.
The Office of Management and Budget also asked the Commerce Department to provide information about how much it would cost to lay off employees, while saying those employees who do remain with the department should get a 1.9 percent pay increase in January 2018. It requested estimates for terminating leases and government “property disposal.”
The OMB outline for the Commerce Department for fiscal 2018 proposed sharp reductions […]
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Jonathan Freedland, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I think it is very important that Americans realize and truly comprehend that what is happening to our country is not just the work of Donald Trump and the burlesque quislings who serve him. It is happening because the Republican Party leadership is made up of morally bankrupt pusillanimous little men, who put their own status and power above the wellbeing of their country. They are committing a kind of ethical treason.
American media seems unable to say this, so here is what they are saying in Great Britain.
2017 Republican leadership
Credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Who’s the villain here? Naturally our rage focuses on Donald Trump, a pantomime baddie drawn, as he would put it, from central casting. But behind him stand many others, and it’s about time they shared in the opprobrium.
Start with the unfolding scandal over Trumpworld’s links with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the increasingly close parallel with the Watergate affair that toppled Richard Nixon. Both episodes, then and now, began with an election-year break-in at Democratic party headquarters. In 1972, that involved burglars with torches. In 2016, it was hackers and passwords. But in each case, real and virtual, the apparent objective was the same: the acquisition of damaging political intelligence. In 1972, the culprits were taking their orders from the American president. In 2016, at least according to 17 US intelligence agencies, the orders came from the president of Russia.
Watergate spawned the now-cliched maxim that “it’s never the crime, it’s always the cover-up”. In the current case, it’s correct that had Trump’s associates told the truth immediately about […]
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Stephan: Stuff like this usually flies beneath the radar of the media. It shouldn't but it does, particularly now when every day brings a new litany of evil and stupidity. Millions of animals and birds will die from this ill-begotten decision by the new Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke but to him and his master that hardly matters. What matters to Trump and Zinke is that the NRA and the arms industry it serves are happy. Environmental wellbeing, who cares.
House Republican leadership and Vice President Pence
Six weeks ago, just a day before Donald Trump was sworn into office, the Obama administration ordered a five-year phase-out of the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on wildlife reserves and public lands where hunting and fishing are allowed. It was a prohibition long sought by environmental advocates and opposed by hunting and fishing groups, although not by all their members. On Thursday, the day after he was sworn into office as the 52nd secretary of the Department of Interior, Ryan Zinke overturned that phase-out as his first bit of business—an omen of things to come.
Studies estimate that ingested lead from shotgun pellets and bullet fragments hunters leave behind in the environment kill from 10 million to 20 million animals each year. Jonathan Evans, environmental health legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental organizations strongly behind the ammo phase-out, said:
“Switching to nontoxic ammunition should be a no-brainer to save the lives of thousands birds and other wildlife, prevent hunters and their families from being exposed […]
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