Thursday, April 10

ENVIRONMENT

Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads

Intense wildfires are raging in California, Oregon and Washington state, spurring mass evacuations and leaving charred towns in their wake. A regional heat wave is keeping temperatures high and humidity low, creating difficult conditions for firefighters. These five articles from The Conversation’s archive explain what’s driving Western fires and how they’re affecting residents. 1. Welcome to the Pyrocene Age Many factors have combined to create conditions for today’s epic wildfires, including climate change, land use patterns and decades of fire suppression. Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, argues that Earth may be “entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lak...
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Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial
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ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE

Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial

U.S. Christians, especially evangelical Christians, identify as environmentalists at very low rates compared to the general population. According to a Pew Research Center poll from May 2020, while 62% of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults agree that the Earth is warming primarily due to human action, only 35% of U.S. Protestants do – including just 24% of white evangelical Protestants. Politically powerful Christian interest groups publicly dispute the climate science consensus. A coalition of major evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, launched a movement opposing what they describe as “the false worldview” of environmentalism, which supposedly is “striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.” Studies show that bel...
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American environmentalism’s racist roots have shaped global thinking about conservation
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ENVIRONMENT, IN OTHER NEWS, VIDEO REELS

American environmentalism’s racist roots have shaped global thinking about conservation

The United States is having a long-overdue national reckoning with racism. From criminal justice to pro sports to pop culture, Americans increasingly are recognizing how racist ideas have influenced virtually every sphere of life in this country. John James Audubon relied on African Americans and Native Americans to collect some specimens for his ‘Birds of America’ prints (shown: Florida cormorant), but never credited them. National Audubon Society, CC BY This includes the environmental movement. Recently the Sierra Club – one of the oldest and largest U.S. conservation organizations – acknowledged racist views held by its founder, author and conservationist John Muir. In some of his writing, Muir described Native Americans and Black people as dirty, lazy and uncivilized. In an essay coll...
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Plants might be able to tell us about the location of dead bodies, helping families find missing people
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ENVIRONMENT

Plants might be able to tell us about the location of dead bodies, helping families find missing people

The notion of plants talking to us about dead people sounds like a bad horror movie. But that’s the theme of a recent scientific paper I co-authored. Each day, over 160,000 people die in the world. Most people die with family members present or nearby; their family and friends mourn their loss, which includes having the loved-one’s body present. Sometimes people die in the wilderness, in war and under questionable circumstances. In so many of these cases the body is never recovered and loved ones don’t get closure. In cases of murder or genocide, perpetrators go unpunished without a recovered body. I didn’t usually think about this topic, until recently. I am a plant biologist who uses biotechnology and synthetic biology approaches in research. Nearly 20 years ago, I coined the word “phy...
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A burning chemical plant may be just the tip of Hurricane Laura’s damage in this area of oil fields and industry
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ENVIRONMENT

A burning chemical plant may be just the tip of Hurricane Laura’s damage in this area of oil fields and industry

Hurricane Laura plowed through the heart of Louisiana’s oil and chemical industries as a powerful Category 4 storm, leaving a chlorine plant on fire and the potential for more hazardous damage in its wake. The burning BioLab facility sent dark smoke and chlorine gas into the air over the small community of Westlake, near Lake Charles, and shut down Interstate 10, officials said. The governor warned residents, already reeling from the hurricane’s damage, to stay in their homes, close their windows and doors, and turn off any air conditioning that might still be operating. While the full health impacts of the fire weren’t immediately known, a storm-driven chlorine gas release in a vulnerable community is the type of worst-case scenario that scientists and engineers like myself have warned ...
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Hurricanes and wildfires are colliding with the COVID-19 pandemic – and compounding the risks
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ENVIRONMENT

Hurricanes and wildfires are colliding with the COVID-19 pandemic – and compounding the risks

With a major hurricane hitting Louisiana and Texas and wildfires menacing the western U.S., millions of Americans are facing the complex risks of a natural disaster striking in the middle of a pandemic. The steps people normally take to prepare for a severe storm or to evacuate can contradict the public health recommendations for protecting themselves and others from COVID-19. That’s what millions of people were facing as Hurricane Laura intensified to a dangerous Category 4 storm on Aug. 26. More than half a million were under evacuation orders, including the cities Galveston, Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas. My urban resilience lab at Texas A&M University has been examining interactions between urban infrastructure, systems and people in disasters. At the onset of the COVID-19 pand...
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The risk of preterm birth rises near gas flaring, reflecting deep-rooted environmental injustices in rural America
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ENVIRONMENT

The risk of preterm birth rises near gas flaring, reflecting deep-rooted environmental injustices in rural America

Through the southern reaches of Texas, communities are scattered across a flat landscape of dry brush lands, ranches and agricultural fields. This large rural region near the U.S.-Mexico border is known for its persistent poverty. Over 25% of the families here live in poverty, and many lack access to basic services like water, sewer and primary health care. This is also home to the Eagle Ford shale, where domestic oil and gas production has boomed. The Eagle Ford is widely considered the most profitable U.S. shale play, producing more than 1.2 million barrels of oil daily in 2019, up from fewer than 350,000 barrels per day just a decade earlier. The rapid production growth here has not led to substantial shared economic benefits at the local level, however. Low-income communities and co...
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Honey bees can’t practice social distancing, so they stay healthy in close quarters by working together
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

Honey bees can’t practice social distancing, so they stay healthy in close quarters by working together

As many states and cities across the U.S. struggle to control COVID-19 transmission, one challenge is curbing the spread among people living in close quarters. Social distancing can be difficult in places such as nursing homes, apartments, college dormitories and migrant worker housing. The complex interactions that maintain group health inside a bee hive offer lessons for humanity during pandemics. Rachael Bonoan, CC BY-ND As behavioral ecologists who have studied social interactions in honey bees, we see parallels between life in the hive and efforts to manage COVID-19 in densely populated settings. Although honey bees live in conditions that aren’t conducive to social distancing, they have developed unique ways to deal with disease by collectively working to keep the colony healthy. Ra...
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Insect apocalypse? Not so fast, at least in North America
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

Insect apocalypse? Not so fast, at least in North America

In recent years, the notion of an insect apocalypse has become a hot topic in the conservation science community and has captured the public’s attention. Scientists who warn that this catastrophe is unfolding assert that arthropods – a large category of invertebrates that includes insects – are rapidly declining, perhaps signaling a general collapse of ecosystems across the world. The Texas frosted elfin (Callophrys irus hadros), a small butterfly subspecies found only in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, has lost most of its prairie habitat and is thought to have dramatically declined over the last century. Matthew D. Moran, CC BY-ND Starting around the year 2000, and more frequently since 2017, researchers have documented large population declines among moths, beetles, bees, butt...
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Marie Tharp pioneered mapping the bottom of the ocean 6 decades ago – scientists are still learning about Earth’s last frontier
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

Marie Tharp pioneered mapping the bottom of the ocean 6 decades ago – scientists are still learning about Earth’s last frontier

Despite all the deep-sea expeditions and samples taken from the seabed over the past 100 years, humans still know very little about the ocean’s deepest reaches. And there are good reasons to learn more. Most tsunamis start with earthquakes under or near the ocean floor. The seafloor provides habitat for fish, corals and complex communities of microbes, crustaceans and other organisms. Its topography controls currents that distribute heat, helping to regulate Earth’s climate. Hand-painted rendition of Heezen-Tharp 1977 ‘World ocean floor’ map, by Heinrich Berann. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, CC BY-ND July 30 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marie Tharp, a geologist and oceanographer who created maps that changed the way people imagine two-thirds of the world....
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