Claire O'Neill, Matt McCann and Umi Syam, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan:
American greed time after time trumps any planning for long term wellbeing, particularly in Red states, and water is perhaps the most primary example of this stupidity, as this report spells out in great detail. I predict these Red states are going to become largely uninhabitable. If you own property in these states I would start thinking about moving to a Blue state somewhere.
Nevada’s largest gold mine. Credit: Kim Raff / The New York Times
From a small brick building in Garden City, Kan., 13 men manage the use of groundwater across five million acres in the southwest corner of the state, some of the most productive farmland in America for corn, wheat and sorghum.
They serve on the board of Groundwater Management District 3, which since 1996 has overseen the pumping of 16.2 trillion gallons of groundwater — enough to fill Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, twice over.
The board is elected, but not by everyone: The only people eligible to vote are large landowners, a group of less than 12,000 people in an area of roughly 130,000. And in some years, fewer than 100 people actually vote. Others — cashiers at Walmart, teachers at the community college, workers at the local St. Catherine Hospital — have no say in the management of the aquifer on which they, too, rely.
The aquifer is running out of water, fast. But the board hasn’t slowed down the pumping.
Here is yet another aspect of the Red Blue schism. Doctors, nurses, professors, teachers,librarians are emigrating out of Red states to Blue ones, as this report details. The result is that like water in the preceding article, a growing brain drain is yet another aspect of the increasing inferiority of the quality of life in states controlled by Republicans. We are increasingly becoming two countries in a single nation and, I predict, the difference is only going to get greater as time goes on.
Credit: Illustration by Alex Nabaum / The New Republic
As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags.
On Memorial Day weekend in 2022, Kate Arnold and her wife, Caroline Flint, flew from Oklahoma City to Cabo San Lucas for a little R&R. They had five kids, the youngest of them five-year-old twin girls, and demanding jobs as obstetrician-gynecologists. The stresses of all this were mounting. That they were a gay married couple living in a red, socially conservative state was the least of it. Caroline was born in Tulsa, spent much of her childhood in Oklahoma, and was educated at the University of Oklahoma. She cast her first presidential vote for George W. Bush. Kate, the more political of the two, was from Northern California and a lifelong Democrat. But her mother was born in Oklahoma City, and she felt at home there; she’d even given some thought to running for the state legislature.
Kate and Caroline flew down with the twins and their 16-year-old daughter. It […]
I have been wondering for some time whether the whole migrant southern border business is as the MAGAts describe it, or yet another racist hate lie begun by criminal Trump and used by MAGAt governors DeSantis and Abbott to stoke racism and fear. Well, here is what seems the real answer.
A Texas National Guard soldier stands vigil at a makeshift migrant camp near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on May 11, 2023, in El Paso, Texas. JOHN MOORE / GETTY
El Paso, Texas, has increasingly become the subject of an intense national conversation.
TheNew York Times, TheWashington Post and Wall Street Journalreport that migrant surges are straining the city, the country and the economy. These are just three headlines from a barrage of coverage of the “crisis” at the border.
Nastassia Artalejo, an El Paso resident whose family has lived in the city for generations, is sick of hearing her home described this way.
“It’s really frustrating to be here and see and hear so many polarizing opinions,” Artalejo said. “So much of what is talked about in the media is from a third-party or outsider perspective, as opposed to the opinion being from someone that actually lives here.”
Ivonne Diaz, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and immigrant rights activist, expressed similar frustration.
“When I meet with people that don’t live here and are visiting for the […]
Nina Lakhani, Climate Justice Reporter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Here is an aspect of the damage coal burning does to humans that you may never have ever heard of. This is the first story in the media I have seen. Four hundred and sixty thousand people, think about all those lives destroyed, how many families left in grief. Why can our society not seem to understand why fostering wellbeing should be our first priority.
Smoke from a coal-fired power plant in Romeoville, Illinois, on 1 February 2019. Credit: Scott Olson / Getty
Coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 Americans during the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, new research has found.
Cars, factories, fire smoke and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers.
Researchers analyzed Medicare and emissions data from 1999 and 2020, and for the first time found that coal PM2.5 is twice as deadly as fine particle pollutants from other sources. Previous studies quantifying the death toll from air pollution assumed all PM2.5 sources posed the same risk, and therefore probably underestimated the dangers of coal plants.
Government regulations save lives, according to the research, which is published in Science, as most deaths happened when environmental standards were weakest and PM2.5 levels from coal-fired power stations highest.
This, in my opinion, is the attitude and approach we must adopt to survive as a functioning society as climate change fundamentally alters earth’s ecosystems. If we fail to learn this lesson we are going to experience much misery and death that could have been avoided.
Tom Lee Park along the Mississippi River in Memphis, a project co-designed by Kate Orff’s firm. Once a city dump, the site now supports native trees and other vegetation. Credit: SCAPE
When people think of landscape architecture, small-scale recreational spaces like urban parks, gardens, and golf courses may come to mind. MacArthur “Genius Award” winner Kate Orff has a grander and more ecologically ambitious vision.
Orff, director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program, believes that architects should do more than just create beautiful spaces: They also need to work with nature to create resilient living environments that both help to knit human communities together and protect them against the ravages of climate change.
SCAPE, the New York City-based design firm that Orff founded in 2007, is currently working in Louisiana on a project that will counter sea level rise and land loss in the Mississippi River Delta. SCAPE has also partnered with the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a 125-mile-long trail and greenway along the Chattahoochee River, which aims to bring racially diverse communities along […]
