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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Spending time in forests and wilderness has been a very big part of my life, for exactly the reasons this article describes. Do yourself a favor. Find some wooded trails in a park and a couple times a week go for a walk in the woods. It will change your perspective and your sense of wellbeing.
Korean scientists have confirmed that walking through forest areas improved older women’s blood pressure, lung capacity and elasticity in their arteries. Walking in an urban park with trees, or an arboretum, or a rural forest reduces blood pressure, improves cardiac-pulmonary parameters, bolsters mental health, reduces negative thoughts, lifts people’s moods, and restores our brain’s ability to focus – all findings of recent studies. Park RX America (PRA), a nonprofit founded in 2017 by the public health pediatrician Dr. Robert Zarr, has established a large network of health care professionals who use nature prescriptions as part of their health care treatment for patients. A sample prescription: “walk along a trail near a pond or in a park with a friend, without earbuds, for ½ hour, twice a week.”
As I began this piece on trees in forests, woods and parks, a friend asked, why in January in New England? Why didn’t I wait until the deciduous trees were a palette of new spring green crowning the stark brown trunks and branches of winter? The next day, January 7, nature provided the answer: a 10” snowstorm. Trees after a winter snowstorm – their upstretched dark deciduous branches shouldered with snow and their downreaching […]
ANDREW S. LEWIS, Contributing Writer - Yale Environment 360
Stephan:
Here is some good news, an early report on a critically important emerging coastal trend. American coastal cities are beginning to learn something the Dutch have long recognized and practiced. What is now called “living with water.” The sea is rising, and it is too late to do much about that. But while many politicians babbled on about climate denial and such nonsense, the Dutch took it seriously and began to build the seawall systems necessary to protect themselves. Now New York City, Norfolk, Virginia and, as this article describes, some other cities and coastal regions — but not all — are literally learning from the Dutch and beginning to do what is necessary for their survival. Not a moment too soon.
Workers complete a floodwall at Stuyvesant Cove Park in 2021 as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project. Credit: NYC Department of Design and Construction
On a recent morning in Asser Levy Playground, on Manhattan’s East Side, a group of retirees traded serves on a handball court adjacent to a recently completed 10-foot-high floodwall. Had a sudden storm caused the East River to start overtopping this barrier, a 79-foot-long floodgate would have begun gliding along a track, closing off the playground and keeping the handball players dry. In its small way, this 2.4-acre waterfront park is a major proof of concept for a city at the forefront of flood resilience planning — a city working toward living with, and not against, water.
The Asser Levy renovation, completed in 2022, is part of East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR), the largest urban resiliency project currently underway in the United States. Over the next three years, at a total cost of $1.8 billion, ESCR will reshape two-and-a-half miles of Lower Manhattan’s shoreline. But ESCR is just one link in […]
Jonathan Watts, Global Environment Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
As I have been telling readers for decades, all life is interconnected and interdependent. Here finally is data proving this, and giving humanity an alternative to industrial chemical monoculture agriculture. When you interact with anyone in Congress, ask them what they are doing to support this transition. You will find most of them won’t know what you are talking about, but if enough people ask them, and demand they support this trend, they will listen.
Credit: The Guardian
A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10 tillion (£7.9tn) of benefits a year, improve human health and ease the climate crisis, according to the most comprehensive economic study of its type.
It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today.
Food systems drive a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, putting the world on course for 2.7C of warming by the end of the century. This creates a vicious cycle, as higher temperatures bring more extreme weather and greater damage to harvests.
Food insecurity also puts a burden on medical systems. The study predicted a business-as-usual approach would leave 640 million people underweight by 2050, while obesity would increase by 70%.
Redirecting the food system would be politically challenging but bring huge economic and welfare benefits, said the international team of authors behind the study, which aims to be the food equivalent of the Stern review, […]
Although it still has millions of followers, with the exception of Pope John XXIII, I have always thought of the Roman Catholic Church as a deeply corrupt, and sexually perverted institution. Now the Church has a new enlightened leader in Pope Francis who is trying to bring the institution he leads into the 21st Century. Not surprisingly, as this report describes, the far-right hierarchy of the Church, especially the American hierarchy, is in growing opposition to what Francis is doing. The same men who for decades looked the other way as thousands of priests reached into the underwear of little boys find the idea of treating LGBTQ Catholics with some respect as offensive to their morals. It is interesting to watch what is happening because those who oppose Pope Francis can’t just vote him out of office.
Pope Francis speaking during the weekly general audience on January 31, 2024 at Paul-VI hall in The Vatican. In December, Francis approved Fiducia Supplicans, a document allowing priests to bless same-sex unions, sparking fury from Catholic traditionalists. Credit: Alberto Pizzoli / AFP / Getty
A group of 90 Catholic clergymen, scholars and authors have published a joint letter to “all Cardinals and Bishops of the Catholic Church,” urging them to oppose a Vatican document approved by Pope Francis that allows priests to bless same-sex unions for the first time.
In the letter, the Catholic conservatives say that Fiducia Supplicans, a Vatican doctrine released on December 18 and signed by the Pope, would lead to the blessing of “objectively sinful” relationships. They add that the cardinals and bishops should “forbid immediately the application of this document in your diocese” and “ask directly the Pope to urgently withdraw this unfortunate document, which is in contradiction with both Scripture and the universal and uninterrupted Tradition of the Church.”
The Fiducia Supplicans permits the blessing of those couples not […]
Abha Bhattarai and Jeff Stein, Economic Correspondent | White House Economics Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
Most Americans as the polls indicate have very little understanding of how the government works, or what drives the economy. Large numbers can’t even name the three branches of the government, many can’t read or do math above a 5th or 6th grade level. What they do know is grocery prices are higher than they were before the pandemic, and they blame President Biden. To my amazement, these voters think Trump would do better. We are pathetically ignorant as a population. If Biden is going to win in November he, and the Democratic Party, better find a way to effectively inform the populace that Biden cannot control most of the reasons groceries are still so expensive, that he is doing everything he can to bring prices down, and that Trump would, by his own words, be a disaster.
Americans are finally getting a break from inflation, with prices for gasoline, used cars and health insurance all falling over the past year, relieving families and buoying President Biden’s 2024 reelection bid. But prices painfully remain high for one particularly frequent purchase: groceries.
Grocery prices have jumped by 25 percent over the past four years, outpacing overall inflation of 19 percent during the same period. And while prices of appliances, smartphones and a smattering of other goods have declined, groceries got slightly more expensive last year, with particularly sharp jumps for beef, sugar and juice, among other items.
Stubbornly high grocery prices represent a critical drain on the finances of tens of millions of people and remain, along with housing, perhaps the most persistent economic challenge for the Biden administration as it tries to convince Americans the economy is back on solid footing. For all the attention on gas prices and housing, more than two-thirds of voters say inflation has hit them hardest through higher food prices, according to a November 2023 survey by
There is a major negative trend, the falsification of research studies, going on in science, particularly in medicine, that has the potential to sabotage and disrupt a wide range of disciplines, particularly fields where large sums of research funding or profit from sales are involved. As someone who regularly publishes in peer-reviewed scientific journals I first noticed this when the early Ivermectin studies about its effects on Covid were suddenly withdrawn and notices appeared that they were fake. However, I had no idea that more than 10,000 research papers were identified as fraudulent in just one year, 2023. This is a huge problem, as this report describes, and it hinges on journal editors and peer reviewers. Ultimately, of course, it gets down to the two things that are increasingly defining the cultures of the world, lack of integrity and personal profit.
Fake research papers could jeopardize drug development, warn academics. Credit: Westend61 / Getty
Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.
Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.
“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”
The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published […]
Mia Maldonado, Reporter - Idaho Capital Sun / The Guardiand
Stephan:
Idaho, like many Republican-controlled states, is a state whose social wellbeing is in decline. Female medical care is greatly diminished. In some areas there are no longer any OB/GYN specialists. In one city, Sandypoint, the only hospital in town no longer offers Obstetrical care. The libraries are under such virulent MAGAt attacks by the Republican legislators and MAGAt citizens that, as this article describes, many librarians are leaving their jobs and, sometimes, the state itself. If one looks across the United States this same diminishment pattern is playing out in all the Red states. Those are just facts, not political partisanship.
Attendees hold books in support of Idaho libraries at the “Idaho Freedom to Read-in” event held at the Idaho Capitol Building on Jan. 13, 2024. The event was organized by the Idaho Library Association, alongside the Meridian Library Alliance, the North Central Idaho Alliance, the Community Library Network Alliance, and Rediscovered Books. Credit: Mia Maldonado / Idaho Capital Sun
Maegan Hanson became a librarian because of her love of reading. Her favorite part of her job is helping people discover their next favorite book.
Hanson is the Buhl Public Library director, doubling as its children’s librarian. She has worked in libraries for more than 15 years, and her library serves rural Idahoans in a region where only 40% of the population has access to Wi-Fi.
But in her one year serving as library director, she said she regularly considers leaving the profession because of the stress and exhaustion she feels from the state’s increasingly antagonistic rhetoric against librarians.
Hanson is not alone in this feeling. Through an informal survey, interviews and rallies, many Idaho librarians have voiced a […]
Josephine Lee, David McHam Investigative Reporting Fellow - Texas Observer
Stephan:
MAGAt Republicans are purposely and deliberatively willfully ignorant. They do not want children to be taught factual history, they want them to be indoctrinated into the pseudo-history they want Americans to believe. Texas, with its MAGAt Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is one of the strongest examples of this willful stupidity. As a result, children in the Red states are growing up believing all kinds of false information to be true. America is losing whole chapters of its past.
Credit: David Zalubowski / AP
According to Texas’ fourth-grade social studies standards, Indigenous peoples from Texas, including the Lipan Apache, Comanches, and Caddo, exist only in the past tense. Students study their way of life when the tribal nations “lived” in the different regions of the state before Europeans arrived to “explore” the land.
These are but a few of the many misconceptions about American Indians that Kelly Tudor, a Lipan Apache, has found in Texas’ curricular standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
“What’s taught about us is not from a cultural insider perspective, but from an outsider perspective, and it’s usually very biased. I’ve learned that I’ve had to break down all those false ideas first before students can hear you,” Tudor said.
Growing up, Tudor and her family had been called “Prairie N—.” School teachers called her family “stupid” when her sister attempted to correct false information about American Indians being taught from the textbook. Even after she became a curriculum consultant and Indigenous educator, teaching both young students and other teachers about […]
