Stephan: If you read me regularly you know my views on chemical industrial monoculture agriculture. Here is some good news that I hope is going to become the dominant trend replacing that failed system.
Transplanting melons in to high-residue beds on Full Belly Farm. (Photo courtesy of Full Belly Farm
Last summer, veteran organic farmer Scott Park was bewildered when he surveyed his vast tomato, corn, and sunflower fields. Before planting the crops on 350 acres he had radically cut down on tilling the soil, planted cover crops twice, and let goats graze the land. And he was sure he’d see excellent yields.
The undisturbed soil was loaded with earthworms, but the crops grew sluggishly and didn’t produce enough fruit. Park lost almost half of his yields—and over half a million dollars.
“We thought we were going to cut a fat hog,” said Park, whose farm lies 50 miles northwest of Sacramento in California’s Central Valley. “But the combination of no-till and grazing kicked me in the teeth.”
Though surprising, the result was part of a critical experiment that Park plans to replicate again—this time, on a smaller plot on his 1,700-acre farm: Because there’s more at stake than his own profit.
Park, who has been farming for 48 years and is well-known for his soil health practices, is […]
Stephan: For years I have been warning people in coastal cities to do the research they need to do to understand how their city will be affected, and that this was urgent and important, particularly in cities like Miami, Virginia Beach, or Norfolk. (See SR archives, just search on sea rise). The maps on sea rise in the future are available, and if you live in one of those cities you should calculate how much time you have before real estate values collapse.
Here is how extreme the thinking is in Miami.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building a seawall in Miami, part of which would run alongside the high rises of Brickell, the city’s financial district. Credit: Zack Wittman for The New York Times
MIAMI — Three years ago, not long after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government embarked on a study to find a way to protect the vulnerable South Florida coast from deadly and destructive storm surge.
Already, no one likes the answer.
Build a wall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed in its first draft of the study, now under review. Six miles of it, in fact, mostly inland, running parallel to the coast through neighborhoods — except for a one-mile stretch right on Biscayne Bay, past the gleaming sky-rises of Brickell, the city’s financial district.
The dramatic, $6 billion proposal remains tentative and at least five years off. But the startling suggestion of a massive sea wall up to 20 feet high cutting across beautiful Biscayne Bay was enough to jolt some Miamians to attention: The hard choices that will be necessary […]
Stephan: I find these reports so depressing because what they are saying is that humans are so stupid and greedy that they are literally destroying the ecosystem, the matrix of consciousness, upon which our own very existence depends. I think it is important to realize that there is nothing that guarantees the human species will survive climate change.
Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef outside Cairns Australia during a mass bleaching event, thought to have been caused by heat stress due to warmer water temperatures as a result of global climate change. Credit: Getty Images/Brett Monroe Garner
Roughly 66 million years ago, an asteroid or comet struck the planet and wiped out three-quarters of every animal and plant species alive. Known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (K–Pg), it has been immortalized in popular culture because of its association with the end of the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth.
That is why scientists are hopeful that a new study regarding the rate of extinction nowadays may hammer home the urgency of our pollution problems. In an international study led by the Justus Liebig University Giessen that included geologists, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists and many others, researchers found that in some cases, man-made factors are causing an extinction rate that surpasses that of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
The study, which was published last month in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, closely analyzed past extinction rates for freshwater […]
Stephan: Here is some wonderfully good news. President Biden is doing pretty well about responding meaningfully to remediating climate change. But it is going to take so much more.
President Biden announces suspension of oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a drilling program approved by the Trump administration and reviving a political fight over a remote region that is home to polar bears and other wildlife — and a rich reserve of oil.
The order by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland follows a temporary moratorium on oil and gas lease activities imposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office. Biden’s Jan. 20 executive order suggested a new environmental review was needed to address possible legal flaws in a drilling program approved by the Trump administration under a 2017 law enacted by Congress.
After conducting a required review, Interior said it “identified defects in the underlying record of decision supporting the leases, including the lack of analysis of a reasonable range of alternatives″ required under the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law.
The remote, 19.6 million-acre refuge is home to polar […]
Stephan: Republicans don't like public education, as Trumpian Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made explicit. But if there has to be public education they want to make sure students are indoctrinated with the right lies, not taught actual facts. The most dangerous force in America today is the Republican Party.
Texas Republican governor and White racist Greg Abbott. Credit: Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Wire
The absurdity of the Republican Party’s culture wars has reached new heights. A slew of GOP-led state legislatures are enacting new laws that ban teaching “critical race theory” an academic framework that has become the latest conservative boogeyman.
Do you want to learn about racism, discrimination and privilege? Well, Republicans are trying to make it really hard to do so with a slew of bills designed to muzzle educators. In Texas, House Bill 3979 would limit how teachers talk about current events and historic racism in their classrooms. It also bans schools from teaching the 1619 Project, a New York Times endeavor which investigates US history starting with the year the first slaves were brought to what would become the United States. After some political maneuvering, the controversial bill appears to be headed to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.
But in Oklahoma, where a critical race theory ban has taken place, the effects have already been chilling. Melissa Smith, an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College, recently learned her […]
