Introduction to Environment & Sustainability

For centuries, diggers have tromped into the woods in this part of the country to pull up ginseng roots and sell them for $500 to $1,000 per pound to middleman buyers, who in turn sell them to China, where ginseng is prized as a curative.

But both this storied plant and this practice are imperiled by overharvesting, an issue that could worsen this year thanks to Covid-19. Ginseng has long been prized in folk medicine for its purported health benefits, which have been borne out by scientific studies on the plant’s antiviral and antibacterial properties, and some researchers are worried that the pandemic could heighten Chinese demand for this plant. But even before this potentially tumultuous year, stakeholders in Appalachia, like Gao, have been racing to preserve ginseng and its economic potential.

A key component of their strategy is forest farming—intentionally planting seeds in forestland and harvesting them responsibly, instead of either growing them in cultivated plots that may require pesticides and fertilizers or randomly yanking them from the woods. There are plenty of landowners in Appalachia with forested properties, and scientists believe that encouraging those landowners to plant ginseng could create economic opportunity while reducing pressure on the overharvested wild stock.

Source: Wired

Some pleasant information on the suits used by entomologists hunting giant Asian wasps on the West Coast of the US

Previous outfits were found to be lacking and the wasp hunters did not have a huge budget:

Normal beekeeping outfits won’t cut it. Last year, when a Canadian team tackled an Asian giant hornet nest in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where the hornet first turned up in North America, the person tasked with the extraction wore two pairs of pants as well as a Kevlar vest under his regular apiarist attire. Despite all that, he described the seven stings he suffered as “similar to having red-hot thumb tacks driven into the flesh.” So what’s an Asian giant hornet hunter to do? Head to Amazon, of course.

The agency ended up ordering about 15 of the $170 suits, which, according to the Amazon listing, are made by a company called Vevin. They’re advertised as professional anti-wasp, -hornet, and –yellow jacket protective apparel—though not specifically as being protective against Asian giant hornets. The one-piece suits are constructed of three layers: a 20-millimeter-thick slab of foam sandwiched between an inner and outer coating of soft plastic mesh. Black nylon taping reinforces the seams, zipper, and the top of the attached hood, where a battery-powered fan moves air around and keeps the wearer cool.

Source: What to wear when you’re battling giant, venomous hornets

 

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA: 

The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries.

That is according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020.

 

The Politics of Power – Renewable Energy and the Fallacy of the Red/Blue Divide

In July 2020, three Republican states (TX, OK, IA) generated more wind & solar electricity generation on a trailing-12-month basis than all 20 Democratic states, plus Washington, D.C. combined

Nearly 30% of the Democratic state power stack is generated from renewable power vs 15% for the Republican state power stack, but Red states generate more renewable power than Blue states

Republican states generate just over 50% of all renewable power in the US currently, but 2/3 of all wind and solar power

Texas dominates U.S. wind and solar renewable scene at nearly 25% of U.S. generation, an amount totaling over 70% of all wind and solar generation from Blue states

 

Climate Change Is Forcing the Insurance Industry to Recalculate

Insurers are at the vanguard of a movement to put a value today on the unpredictable future of a warming planet

 

Business Roundtable endorses market-based climate policy

The Business Roundtable, a major trade association that includes the heads of some of the largest and most influential companies in the U.S. as members, is endorsing a “market-based mechanism” as part of a plan to sharply curb greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change,

The move, which was first reported by POLITICO on Tuesday, throws the lobbying voice of those executives from companies with $7 trillion in annual revenues behind efforts to combat climate change, reflecting a stark division between the business community and the Trump administration.

City ordinances that require a well-manicured lawn and ban most kinds of gardening +  bitchy neighbors + probably some racial crap = you can’t grow your own food in your own yard. My solution: don’t live in places that have such laws.

Nicole and Dan Virgil, who live in Elmhurst, a suburb of Chicago, are dedicated vegetable gardeners.

A few weeks after their hoop house went up, Nicole found a violation notice from the city taped to it. “I thought it had to be some kind of misunderstanding, that it couldn’t possibly be serious,” recalls Nicole. She had assumed that the hoop house, a lightweight temporary structure akin to a tent, wouldn’t be subject to city regulations.

After several discussions with city officials, 16 public meetings over two years, a lawsuit filed by the Virgils, and a subsequent appeal, the city remained unmoved, siding with the neighbor who had filed the original complaint. The Virgils found themselves stuck in a catch-22 of having an unpermitted temporary structure while having no way to get a permit for a temporary structure. Facing a daily fine, they took down their hoop house.

Inside the Virgil’s hoop house.

Why would a backyard hoop house be so contentious? The Virgils are among many home gardeners around the country who have triggered a city or county ordinance that restricts edible gardening. It’s fairly common for local governments to have a broadly written landscape ordinance, which may not explicitly prohibit vegetable gardening but requires grass or similar vegetation and calls for plants within a certain height.

The neatly manicured yard has long been a status symbol; lawns first appeared in the 1700s on European estates, whose owners could afford to have high-maintenance living carpets. And the suburbs have historically differentiated themselves from “ag land.” “A lot of rural land was developed into suburban municipalities, and the zoning code was changed to prohibit agricultural uses—people didn’t want a pig farm to move in,” says Laura Calvert, the former executive director of Chicago-based nonprofit Advocates for Urban Agriculture.

Given the context, it’s easy to see how the neighbors might look down on home gardening as a form of subsistence farming. “People think that it’s beneath them,” says Nicole, who documented her struggle in a recent op-ed for the Chicago Tribune.

The goal of these ordinances, whether they’re about landscaping or temporary structures, is to maintain property values. (The racist practice of redlining, which kept African Americans out of the suburbs, was rationalized in the same way.) However, the perception that growing vegetables will drive down home values is “not rooted in any evidence,” as Calvert points out.

Source

I hate glitter. Screw fun.

And it’s terrible for the environment too. Studies of traditional plastic glitter (and natural glitter – made from the mineral mica) were both bad for the environment, by testing plant growth in water in the presence of the glitters:

The research found that after 36 days, the presence of glitter halved the root length of common duckweed (Lemna minor), while levels of chlorophyll in the water were three times lower than in control conditions, indicating reduced levels of phytoplankton, or microalgae.

Glitter is used in a variety of decorative ways, including on clothing, in arts and crafts, and in cosmetics and body paint. Traditional glitter is a form of microplastic consisting of a plastic core made of polyester PET film, which is coated with aluminum and then covered with another thin plastic layer.

Along with other forms of single-use microplastics, such as microbeads, there have been efforts to phase out PET glitter with the introduction of more biodegradable alternatives.

One version has a core of modified regenerated cellulose (MRC), sourced mainly from eucalyptus trees, but this is still coated with aluminum for reflectivity and then topped with a thin plastic layer. Another form is mica glitter, which is increasingly used in cosmetics.

However, this new study found that the effects of MRC and mica glitters on root length and chlorophyll levels were almost identical to those of traditional glitter.

Source: Glitter litter could be damaging rivers: Research finds biodegradable alternatives are no better for the environment

SOME OF NORTH America’s big predators—wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, and the like— are now getting nearly half their food from people. It’s a big shift away from eating foods found in nature and could put them in conflict with one another, or lead to more human-carnivore encounters on running trails or suburban backyards.

The complete list of these carnivores studied in the report includes foxes, coyotes, fishers, and martens.

How did they know this? The team used chemical isotopes of carbon taken from the animals’ fur and bone samples to distinguish between human-grown and naturally occurring foods. “Human foods look like corn, because we give corn to everything,” Manlick says. Corn syrup can be found in many processed foods, while corn grain is fed to beef, chicken, and pork that humans eat. But corn looks very different than natural foods when analyzed in the lab.

Source: Wired