Here is a very complex warning, that I had not previously read about. It makes the fact-based assertion that just making the earth greener in color is not going to solve our problems; it may make some of them worse. This shows how complex it is to effectively deal with climate change, and how poorly humans seem to understand what needs to be done. This is what our politicians ought to be working on, not whether Joe Biden misspoke.
Despite this destruction, scientists keep coming to an odd conclusion: The Earth is growing greener. Not green in the metaphorical “sustainable” sense, but in the literal color green.
In the last four decades, the extent of green vegetation — i.e., the amount of leaves in a given area — has substantially increased across the planet, according to a number of recent scientific studies based on satellite data. There’s actually more green space today, not less. And this “global greening” phenomenon is not just occurring on land. Large parts of the oceans are getting greener, too, research shows. Our blue planet, it seems, is increasingly a green planet.
Understanding Earth’s color is key to understanding Earth and our future on it. “Greenness” often corresponds to the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide, the […]
Here, amongst all the bad climate news, is some good news. A federal judge, as described in this report, has reversed a decision by criminal Trump and banned a weedkiller that has done terrible damage all over the United States. Never, ever buy a product manufactured by Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta, the makers of these weedkillers. These three companies knew very well how harmful their products were, but they put profit above wellbeing and made and sold them anyway.
A worker mixes herbicides, which will be sprayed on a field. Credit: David Bacon / Report Digital-REA / Redux)
Dealing a blow to three of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies, a US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market.
The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south.
This is the second time a federal court has banned these weedkillers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the ninth circuit court of appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration reapproved the weedkilling products, just one week before the presidential election at a press conference in the swing state of Georgia.
But a federal judge in Arizona ruled on Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in reapproving dicamba, […]
This is very alarming bad news, telling us, yet again, that our form of chemical industrial monoculture agriculture, augmented by climate change and the destruction of milkweed, their food source is destroying America’s ecosystem. The Monarch annual migration may seem a small thing, but it is not.
Monarch butterflies during overwintering season at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, Mexico Crsedit: Sylvain Cordier / Gamma-Rapho / Getty
The estimated number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico for winter has reached its second-lowest level ever for the 2023 to 2024 overwintering season. The estimate, based on the size of the butterflies’ hibernating forest area, has dropped by about 59% from the previous year, according to officials.
Experts are pointing to extensive heat and drought as well as climate change for the major decline.
Recent years have seen some hope for the migrating monarch butterflies, with a 35% increase in the number of butterflies observed overwintering in Mexico during the 2021 to 2022 season compared to the previous year.
But monarch butterflies face three primary threats, including habitat loss for their breeding and overwintering; the use of pesticides, which can be toxic to the butterflies or can kill their food source, milkweed; and climate change, which can shift their migratory patterns. By the 2022 to 2023 overwintering season, World Wildlife Fund reported a 22% drop in the amount of […]
JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE and JACK SCHNEIDER, Education Podcast Host | Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst - The Nation
Stephan:
The MAGAt Community, working through the Republican Party which they control, is trying to restructure or even eliminate public schools that students can attend without fees. Why? Because they don’t want fact-based education of children. They want right-wing indoctrination, and some of those advocating this want to make a profit from such a transition. That’s what many charter schools and private schools are about. Americans are already the least literate population amongst the developed democratic states. Nationwide, on average, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 79% of U.S. adults were literate to some degree, while 21% were illiterate in 2022. Sadly, the majority, 54% of those who had some measure of literacy only had it to below sixth-grade level. We are a country on a downward education spiral, particularly in Red states, as this article lays out.
Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, speaks out against income tax cuts and election law changes passed by the Arizona Legislature in Phoenix on September 28, 2017. Credit: Matt York / AP
Bait-and-switch is an old retail tactic. You lure customers in with promises of a deep discount, only to inform them that the deal has a catch. The real price tag, it turns out, is quite a bit more.
Though it took supporters of school vouchers a while to catch on, they’ve learned quickly that the trick works just as well in education policy as it does in retail sales. Pick a price that will get people in the door, and then break the news once you’ve got them where you want them.
In Arizona, taxpayers are now staring down a $400 million shortfall, with an even bigger bill coming due next year. How did the Grand Canyon State go from sitting on a huge cash reserve to facing a rising tide of red ink? Simple. Voucher proponents suggested that paying for private […]
This is the kind of thing that is going on in school districts around the country, and it is not a story that makes America look good. What all this says to me is that unless people who want education to be based on facts not indoctrination in falsehoods, and who support democracy get out and work for those values at their local level, we are not going to be a world leader in the future. We are not going to be a well-educated population, and we will probably not be a democracy. If you want your children and grandchildren to grow up in a country that resembles the country you knew, you better get involved at your local level and see that there is real fact-based education in your schools and that democracy survives.
School board meeting Credit: Steven M. Fale
Last spring, when the odds seemed far longer, Bob Cousineau, a social studies teacher at Pennridge High School, predicted that whatever happened in his embattled district would become a national “case study” one way or another. It would either create “the blueprint” for outside political interests to enact a complete takeover of local public schools, he said, or “the blueprint for how to stand up to it.”
For much of the past two years, Pennridge School District, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—one of Philadelphia’s suburban swing counties—has served as an experiment in how far conservatives can pull public schools right.
Until this past November, its nine school board members had all been elected as Republicans, including a five-member majority reportedly affiliated with the activist group Moms for Liberty. Policies introduced by the board and district administrators in recent years have been sweeping: Two separate groups focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues were shut down; LGBTQ+ “Pride” rainbows were banned alongside other “advocacy” symbols; curriculum was repeatedly changed […]
