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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.
Stephan: Little by little, we are slowly beginning to recognize that life is interdependent and interconnected. It is essential that we do so because now science kind of blunders around understanding how the earth's matrix of consciousness works, if it thinks about it at all.
Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard. The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron’s vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit Avatar. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees.
What captured the public’s imagination was Simard’s findings that trees are social beings that exchange nutrients, help one another and communicate about insect pests and other environmental threats.
Previous ecologists had focused on what happens aboveground, but Simard used radioactive isotopes of carbon to trace how trees share resources and information with one another through an intricately interconnected network of mycorrhizal fungi that colonize trees’ roots. In more recent work, she has found evidence that trees recognize their own kin and favor them with the lion’s share of their bounty, especially when the saplings are most vulnerable.
Simard’s first book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, was released by Knopf this week. In it, she argues that forests are […]
Stephan: The current chemical industrial mono-culture agriculture is not working. The chemicals that make it possible kill the bacteria in the soil, harm the bees, and damage the health of the individuals working in the industry. Then there is the carbon monoxide released into the atmosphere as the food is shipped to places far distant from the fields where the plants were grown.
This is the future, and this is very good news.
The new greenhouse will accelerate Lufa’s mission to grow food. Credit: Lufa
The world’s largest rooftop greenhouse is in Montreal, Canada.
It measures more than 15,000m2 and produces more than 11,000kg of food per week.
The company behind it had to hire 200 new employees due to pandemic-driven demand.
Can you grow enough produce for an entire city in rooftop greenhouses? Two entrepreneurs in Montreal, Canada, believe it might be possible.
Lauren Rathmell and Mohamed Hage cofounded Lufa in 2009. The company has four urban gardens in the Canadian city, all in rooftop greenhouses. Lufa’s most recent sits on top of a former warehouse and measures more than 15,000m2 – larger than the other three greenhouses combined. Its main crops are tomatoes and aubergines, producing more than 11,000kg of food per week. It is, the company says, the largest rooftop greenhouse in the world.
An Ambitious Goal
Rathmell says the new greenhouse will accelerate Lufa’s mission to grow food where people live and help it to meet an “ever-growing demand for fresh, local, and responsible foods”.
Tony Romm, Senior Tech Policy Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: The stupidity of Republican officials, the simplistic thinking, and the utter lack of humanity that drives their decisions is breathtaking. On the basis of irrefutable social outcome data, you cannot be an ethical person and a Republican.
A shopper walks past a store displaying a hiring sign in Wheeling, Ill. Credit: Nam Y. Huh/AP
An unexpected slowdown in hiring nationwide has prompted some Republican governors to start slashing jobless benefits in their states, hoping that the loss of generous federal aid might force more people to try to return to work.
The new GOP cuts chiefly target the extra $300 in weekly payments that millions of Americans have received for months in addition to their usual unemployment checks. Arkansas on Friday became the latest to announce plans to cancel the extra benefits, joining Montana and South Carolina earlier in the week, in a move that signals a new effort on the part of Republicans to try to combat what they see as a national worker shortage.
Republican policymakers have long opposed these heightened unemployment payments and unanimously voted against extending them earlier this year. But party leaders nationwide have grown more emboldened in recent days, particularly as the U.S. government on Friday released new data showing the economy added only 266,000 jobs in […]
Stephan: I have been hanging on to this good news report for a week, unable to post it because there have been so many more pressing issues to cover.
This report will provide you with information on another act of intelligence and good governance on the part of Biden and his administration. Trump's border wall that Mexico was going to pay for was nothing more than a racist stunt from the beginning. Of course, Mexico never paid a penny of the estimated $15 billion we have spent to date on this embarrassing nonsense. Just imagine how many children could have been fed with that money, or elderly could have received home care. Nor did the wall stop immigration as Trump promised. And if you dig into this Trumpian incompetence you find his wall scheme not only didn't do what he said it would do, or get funded the way he said it would be funded, it was also very hurtful to the American families whose ranch lands lie along the border, and destructive to ecologically important territories. Ending this Trumpian fiasco is good news, indeed.
President Joe Biden halted progress on the border wall as one of his first acts in office. Credit: AP/Patrick Semansky
President Joe Biden is canceling further construction of the wall along the U.S. and Mexico border, the Department of Defense announced Friday.
“DoD has begun taking all necessary actions to cancel border barrier projects and to coordinate with interagency partners,” Pentagon spokesperson Jamal Brown said in a statement. “Today’s action reflects this Administration’s continued commitment to defending our nation and supporting our service members and their families.”
In one of his first acts in office, Biden halted progress on the border wall — a signature policy of former President Donald Trump —by freezing money for border wall construction projects and terminating Trump’s national emergency declaration along the border.
Friday’s action is another step toward ensuring those projects do not move forward and will free up that money to go to other construction projects within the military’s purview, according to Brown.
Stephan: The United States is in the midst of a dangerous pandemic that has nothing to do with Covid-19. We have a pandemic of hysterical White racism, and it is making life threatening and miserable for anyone who is non-White. I have been involved with racial and gender equality since I was a teenager, starting with the civil rights movement in the late 1950s, the transformation of the American military from a racist elitist conscription system to a racial and gender-blind all-volunteer armed forces and, for over 20 years now, through SR. I say this by way of giving context to my next statement: The United States is in the worst racism we have seen in the last half-century. Not just against Black Americans, or Hispanic Americans, but against Asian Americans. Suddenly, if you are of Japanese heritage, or Chinese, or Indian, or Indonesian, or Malaysian you may be fearful of physical violence against you or your family. It is a national sickness that is, in its own way, more destructive than Covid-19
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — In the wake of a rash of alarming hate crimes nationwide, more Californians are acknowledging that Asian Americans experience discrimination, and an overwhelming majority of Asian Americans report that they fear becoming victims of hate-based violence, a new survey says.
Tracy Wong, 19, makes a statement while attending a “Rally Against Anti-Asian Hate Crimes& Racism,” to raise awareness of anti-Asian violence, at Los Angeles State Historic Park on Feb. 20, 2021. – Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/TNS
The California Community Poll, which surveys Californians about politics, race and current events in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times, found that 70% of Californians agree that Asians are “frequently or sometimes” discriminated against.
That marks a “substantial shift” in perceptions and experiences of discrimination among the group, up from 55% last year, the poll’s sponsors said Friday. There has also been a dramatic shift among Asian American respondents, with about 79% saying their community experiences discrimination, as compared to just 63% last year.
“This increase in awareness — as horrible as the reason for the awareness is — it gives us the […]
Stephan: This is really serious good news. Humanity's wellbeing depends on bees, to a degree few people seem to realize. But that ignorance does not lessen the dependence. You have probably noticed over the past several years fewer and fewer bees. My wife and I certainly have, and we make an effort to attract and support bees. Well, the good news is that Bayer's appeal in the EU for the judgment against them, which I covered in SR a while ago, has been rejected on appeal. Now if we could just get the EPA to take a similar policy position. The corporations that make these poisons, of course, are spending huge sums on lobbyists so this doesn't happen. What can you do? You can never buy or use Roundup for one thing, and urge your neighbors to also never use any product that contains glyphosate.
Growing purple coneflowers will attract wild bees. Credit: Alamy
The European Union’s top court ruled Thursday in favor of the European Commission’s partial ban on three pesticides hazardous to bees, much to the chagrin of Bayer—the German pharmaceutical and biotech company that merged with agrochemical giant Monsanto in 2018.
Bayer attempted to overturn the ban and undermine the E.U.’s “precautionary principle” for the protection of environmental and human health, but the European Court of Justice dismissed the corporation’s appeal and backed a lower court’s 2018 decision to uphold restrictions on the use of some pesticides on certain crops. In 2013, the Commission banned the use of imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam—three bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides—on maize, rapseed, and some cereals.
“The Court of Justice has reaffirmed that protecting nature and people’s health takes precedence over the narrow economic interests of powerful multinationals and that the precautionary principle is a cornerstone of E.U. law,” Greenpeace E.U. legal strategist Andrea Carta said in response to the top court’s ratification of the ban.
“This means the E.U. has a responsibility and the power to ensure the safety of all pesticides, chemicals, GM crops, and other dangerous products and substances,” said Carta.
Stephan: South Carolina, a deeply Red value Republican-controlled state whose voters routinely send people to Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham is about to become even more infamous because the Republican legislature has just voted to allow death by firing squad. I am surprised they haven’t voted to bring back the rack for interrogation.
South Carolina “Death Row” Credit: Getty
South Carolina lawmakers have passed a bill to allow inmates on death row to be executed by firing squad in the absence of lethal injection drugs.
When signed into law, it will make South Carolina the fourth state in the country to offer the option as a method of capital punishment.
Opponents criticised the new measure as “medieval” but its supporters say it is about bringing closure to victims.
The southern state has not held an execution since 2011.
The legislation passed by the South Carolina House of Representatives aims to restart executions by bypassing the difficulties states face in procuring the drugs for a lethal injection cocktail.
It will go to the state’s Senate for a final vote before heading to Republican Governor Henry McMaster, who has vowed to sign the bill “as soon as it gets to my desk”.
“We are one step closer to providing victims’ families and loved ones with the justice and closure they are owed by law,” he wrote on Twitter.
Why do lawmakers want to legalise death by firing squad?
Stephan: Texas has a despicable history of trying to rig the election process in that state to be all White in order to assure "the purity of the election process." Yes, it is that racist. And last night, at 3 in the morning, the Texas House passed a draconian anti-democratic voting bill which in the second decade of the 21st century reads like something from the 19th century.
What is even worse this is one of 350 bills proposed in 47 states all with the purpose of sabotaging American democracy and preserving White supremacy. As a nation the Republicans are actually trying to take us back 150 years.
A poll worker talks to a line of voters on November 3, 2020 in Austin, Texas. (Photo: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty
In the wee hours of Friday morning, the GOP-controlled Texas House passed the nation’s most recent voter suppression bill, reigniting calls for U.S. Senate Democrats to abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act to nullify state-level attacks on the franchise.
“It’s old Jim Crow dressed up in what our colleagues are calling election integrity.” —State Rep. Jessica González
A version of the measure, Senate Bill 7, is expected to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Despite the opposition of voting rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers in Texas—who, according to the Austin American-Statesman, drew up more than 100 amendments to challenge provisions in S.B. 7 “they believed would make it more difficult to vote, particularly for nonwhite Texans and those with disabilities who require help to cast a ballot”—Republicans in the state House advanced the bill on an 81-64 party-line vote that took place just after 3 a.m. local time.
Nearly 20 amendments were successfully added to the bill, including ones that modified some racist language, […]
