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Environment

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Corey Watts John Girard Kathy Gilbeaux Maeryn Obley mdmcdonald Miles Marcotte

Email address for group

environment@m.resiliencesystem.org

'Cancer Alley' Residents Say Industry is Hurting Town: 'We're Collateral Damage'

           

In Louisiana’s industrial heart, the shadow of Trump’s deregulation push looms as St James residents fight chemical plants, pipelines and laissez-faire policies

theguardian.com - by Lauren Zanolli in St James, Louisiana. Main image by Julie Dermansky - June 6, 2017

We’re sick of being sick, we’re tired of being tired,” said Pastor Harry Joseph of Mount Triumph Baptist Church, which serves this sleepy riverside town of about 1,000 residents, mostly poor and African American. Once a bucolic village of pasturelands and sugarcane fields on the banks of the Mississippi, St James, Louisiana, is now a densely packed industrial zone in the heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor, commonly referred to as “Cancer Alley” . . . 

 . . . Fifteen large industrial sites – mainly oil storage facilities, pipelines and petrochemical plants – now fill the 13-mile stretch of road that defines the town of St James, also known as the fifth ward of St James parish.

Yet residents here say they’ve seen little economic benefit – either in jobs or tax revenues – from the industry that has taken over the town. Instead, they say, they’ve been saddled with a myriad of health issues, medical bills and environmental degradation.

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Why People Have to Learn to Live with Wildfires

           

REUTERS/Noah Berger

CLICK HERE - STUDY - PNAS - Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes

grist.org - by Bobby Magill - April 17, 2017

Communities across the Western U.S. and Canada may have to adapt to living with the ever-increasing threat of catastrophic wildfires as global warming heats up and dries out forests across the West, according to a University of Colorado study published Monday.

Residents living in neighborhoods adjacent to forests — known as “wildland-urban interface” zones — will have to accept that many wildfires may have to be allowed to burn and that building new homes in fire-prone forests should be discouraged, the study says.

Firefighters and policymakers will also have to adapt in new ways as catastrophic wildfires burn more land and destroy more homes than ever before.

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Polluted Environments Kill 1.7 Million Children a Year: WHO

           

Children look for plastic bottles at the polluted Bagmati River in Kathmandu March 22, 2013. REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar

CLICK HERE - WHO - News Release - The cost of a polluted environment: 1.7 million child deaths a year, says WHO

reuters.com - (Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Jeremy Gaunt) - March 5, 2017

A quarter of all global deaths of children under five are due to unhealthy or polluted environments including dirty water and air, second-hand smoke and a lack or adequate hygiene, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

Such unsanitary and polluted environments can lead to fatal cases of diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia, the WHO said in a report, and kill 1.7 million children a year.

"A polluted environment is a deadly one -– particularly for young children," WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in a statement. "Their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways, make them especially vulnerable to dirty air and water."

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Why Killer Viruses Are On The Rise

       

Once called the "Dutchmen" because of their large noses and large bellies, proboscis monkeys live only in Borneo. Ecosystems that have a lot of diverse animals, like this monkey, also tend to have a lot of diverse viruses.  Charles Ryan

npr.org - by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh - February 14, 2017

The next troubling outbreak could come from a rain forest . . . And a big reason why: all the crazy animals that live here.

. . . Wild animals are now refugees. They have no home. So they come live in our backyards. They pee on our crops. Share our parks and playgrounds. Giving their viruses a chance to jump into us and make us sick.

"So it's really the human impact on the environment that's causing these viruses to jump into people," Olival says.

And cause an outbreak? I ask. Or a pandemic, says Olival.

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Here’s How We Know Trump’s Cabinet Picks are Wrong on Human-Caused Global Warming

           

Summary of observational evidence that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing the climate to warm. Photograph: John Cook, SkepticalScience.com.

The research is clear – humans are responsible for all the global warming since 1950

CLICK HERE - IPCC - Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)

theguardian.com - by Dana Nuccitelli - January 30, 2017

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report – which summarizes the latest and greatest climate science research – was quite clear that humans are responsible for global warming . . . 

 . . . In fact, the report’s best estimate was that humans are responsible for all of the global warming since 1951, and greenhouse gases for about 140%. That’s because natural factors have had roughly zero net effect on temperatures during that time, and other human pollutants have had a significant cooling effect.

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U.S. Government Scientists Go 'Rogue' in Defiance of Trump

           

Badlands National Park in South Dakota is pictured in this July 16, 2014 handout photo.
Badlands National Park/Handout via REUTERS

reuters.com - by Steve Gorman - January 26, 2017

Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.

Seizing on Trump's favorite mode of discourse, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts - borrowing names and logos of their agencies - to protest restrictions they view as censorship and provide unfettered platforms for information the new administration has curtailed.

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A Message to President Donald J. Trump - EPA - Climate Change

An important message to President Donald J. Trump regarding his pending decision to remove the “Climate Change” page from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) website, as reported by Reuters on January 25, 2017  . . .

CLICK HERE - Reuters - Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources - (Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Dear Mr. President,

If you order the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the “Climate Change” page from its website in an effort to sideline scientific research on climate change, you will not succeed.  Thankfully, most of the important climate change research has already been archived within websites not under your control where scientists and interested citizens can easily access this important information (links to two such websites will be provided below).

As President, you should do your homework before making such crucial decisions, as the future of our children and grandchildren will depend on the decisions you make.  Please do not prioritize money and economic gain ahead of health and human security.

Respectfully yours,

Kathy Gilbeaux

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Hidden Data Suggests Fracking Created Widespread, Systemic Impact in Pennsylvania

           

Annual citizen complaints reported to PA DEP compared to the annual number of new unconventional oil and gas wells. © Public Herald

Trends Show Impacts Are Getting Worse

publicherald.org - by Melissa A. Troutman, Sierra Shamer and Joshua B. Pribanic

After a three-year investigation in Pennsylvania, Public Herald has uncovered evidence of widespread and systemic impacts related to “fracking,” a controversial oil and gas technology.

Ending over a decade of suppression by the state, this evidence is now available to the public for the first time.

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Cuba, United States Sign Oil Spill Deal

           

Cuba, United States sign oil spill deal before Trump inauguration

reuters.com - by Marc Frank - January 10, 2017

Cuba and the United States agreed on Monday to jointly prevent, contain and clean up oil and other toxic spills in the Gulf of Mexico . . .

 . . . U.S. Charge d'Affaires Jeffrey DeLaurentis, upon signing the agreement, said it was one of a series of deals to protect the shared marine environment of the two neighboring countries separated by just 90 miles (145 km) of water . . . 

 . . . Last week a deal was struck to export small amounts of charcoal to the United States and in December Google signed an agreement to place servers on the island to quicken access to its products.

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The Goose-Killing Lake and the Scientists Who Study It

The toxic lake left behind after the Berkeley Pit copper mine shut down.

Image: The toxic lake left behind after the Berkeley Pit copper mine shut down.

theatlantic.com - 13 December 2016 - Sarah Zhang

In late November, a flock of migrating snow geese landed in a lake in Butte, Montana. Soon, they began to die. Because what they landed in was the Berkeley Pit, a Superfund site filled with acidic and metal-laden toxic waste from copper mining. 

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