Category Archives: Pollution

Voluntary family planning to minimise and mitigate climate change | The BMJ

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What is the relation between population and environmental impact?

During 1971-72, Ehrlich and Holdren identified three factors that create humanity’s environmental (including climatic) impact, related by a simple equation2:Environmental impact, I =P×A×T.  in which A is affluence (material consumption and the concomitant “effluence” of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2) per person); T is technology impact per person (in which fossil fuels measure more highly than solar based energy); and P is population (the number of people).

Population’s effect on the other two factors is multiplicative. Reducing P can reduce environmental impact if the other factors are constant. In fig 1⇓, for example, fewer people requiring food would manifestly reduce the startling 30% of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and meat production combined (including CO2 from deforestation, methane from livestock, and nitrous oxide from fertilisers).3 That said, other contributory factors, including the worldwide trend towards higher meat consumption, must also be reversed.

Source: Voluntary family planning to minimise and mitigate climate change | The BMJ

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Pharmaceutical pollution widespread in Southeast U.S. streams | Summit County Citizens Voice

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GR:  We have known about this for at least 20 years, but nothing has been done because of the high cost of filtering urban waste water.  Large corporations and stock holders avoid taxes, and what the rest of us pay is insufficient for more than a tot-lot or two and more roads to support further develpment and “progress.”

Bob Berwin:  “Traces of pain-relieving substances, diabetes drugs and allergy medicines are widespread in small streams across the Southeast, especially in urban zones like Raleigh, North Carolina, the U.S. Geological Survey found in a new study.

“The USGS in 2014 sampled 59 small streams in portions of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia for 108 different pharmaceutical compounds and detected one or more pharmaceuticals in all 59 streams. The average number of pharmaceuticals detected in the streams was six.

“The EPA is currently developing rules for regulating pharmaceutical pollution, but government watchdogs say the agency’s proposal is much to weak. Other studies have shown that the toxic cocktail of pharmaceutical remnants is already affecting basic stream health. From there, the chemicals are making their way up the food chain and have even turned up in remote Mexican cenotes.  Source: Pharmaceutical pollution widespread in Southeast U.S. streams | Summit County Citizens Voice

The number one thing we can do to protect Earth’s oceans | Ensia

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Protecting Earth’s Oceans

By Liza Gross

When New England fishers complained of working harder and harder to catch fewer and fewer fish, Spencer Baird assembled a scientific team to investigate. Though a fishery failure would once have seemed inconceivable, Baird wrote in his report, “an alarming decrease of the shore-fisheries has been thoroughly established by my own investigations, as well as by evidence of those whose testimony was taken.”The report was Baird’s first as head of the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries. The year was 1872.Baird recognized the ocean’s limits. A decade later, however, his British counterpart, Thomas Huxley, took a decidedly different view. Calling the sea fisheries “inexhaustible,” Huxley deemed regulations useless, since “nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish.”

Source: The number one thing we can do to protect Earth’s oceans | Ensia

Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever

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We are living in the Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound – and terrifying – it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis?

From: www.theguardian.com

Nitrogen is a neglected threat to biodiversity

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Habitat destruction and the direct exploitation of species often occupy center stage in discussions of biodiversity perils. However, indirect harms, such as that posed by nitrogen pollution, remain underappreciated and poorly …From: phys.org

GR:  Nitrates from farm fertilizers have polluted freshwater in many regions across the Earth.  Nitrogen is particularly dangerous for babies and for the eldery of all species.  Where I live, downstream from a farm, we have always filtered the water.  Sadly, the fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals that live here must drink the polluted water to live.  We understand the toxic effects of nitrogen, but we can only guess at how much this one human waste has changed and shortened wildlife lives.

‘Frightening’ findings foretell ills for ecosystems

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“When it comes to determining the causes negatively affecting the biodiversity of our ecosystems, a new interdisciplinary study at Western is putting numbers behind the devastation. And it’s not good.

“The study’s lead author, recent PhD graduate Beth Hundey (Geography), showed, for the first time, that 70 per cent of nitrates in high mountain lakes in Utah are from human-caused sources – with fertilizers having, by far, the most impact at 60 per cent, along with another 10 per cent caused by fossil fuels. The research suggests these findings could apply to other mountain ranges in western North America.”   phys.org

GR:  Putting fine points on specific human impacts is truly important, but we also need to search for ways to pierce the polluters’ political armor. We need to act, and we need to do it now.

Nuclear history – theme for January 2016

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GR:  People react slowly or not at all to the chronic action of toxic pollutants that escape our control or, more often, are simply cast away. It’s easy for the polluters to deny the danger. One day, there will be statistics to show how Earth’s plants and animals were harmed and what this did to their health and life span. Will people say, “Why didn’t someone do something?”

Christina Macpherson's avatarAntinuclear

The start was America’s Manhattan project – developing the atomic bomb. Then came the horror of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then came – the shock and guilt, and the attempt to turn the nuclear project into something good – “atoms for peace’ “electricity too cheap to meter”.

Of course the costing for “cheap” nuclear energy did not include the health and environmental toll of uranium mining, which, as always, was to be paid by indigenous people. Costing also did not include the virtually eternal toll of the cleaup of radioactive trash. And of course, there would be no accidents, (no Chalk River, Rocky Flats, Windscale, Mayak, Lenin icebreaker, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Tomsk, Hanford, Fukushima Daiichi)

Meanwhile, the military-industrial complex continued its production of nuclear weapons. Other countries adopted the “peaceful nuke”, so that they could develop nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race was underway.

skull nuclear world

FROM THE…

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Deforestation and Drought

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LIKE California, much of Brazil is gripped by one of the worst droughts in its history. Huge reservoirs are bone dry and water has been rationed in São Paulo, a megacity of 20 million people; in Rio; and in many other places.

Drought is usually thought of as a natural disaster beyond human control. But as researchers peer deeper into the Earth’s changing bioclimate — the vastly complex global interplay between living organisms and climatic forces — they are better appreciating the crucial role that deforestation plays.

Cutting down forests releases stored carbon dioxide, which traps heat and contributes to atmospheric warming. But forests also affect climate in other ways, by absorbing more solar energy than grasslands, for example, or releasing vast amounts of water vapor. Many experts believe that deforestation is taking place on such a large scale, especially in South America, that it has already significantly altered the world’s climate — even though its dynamics are not well understood.  www.nytimes.com

GR:  We need to start cutting our populations.  Nature cannot survive our impact.  Who would want to survive without nature?  Can’t we adopt, help raise the sister’s child, play with the neighbor’s child?  Why do people claim that reproduction is a right?  It’s the reason for our spreading cities and roads, and our massive release of CO2, pesticides, and other pollutants.

See on Scoop.it – GarryRogers NatCon News

Study documents high rate of reproductive failure in dolphins hit by Deepwater Horizon oil spill

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There’s already a wealth of research showing that the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was very bad for coastal dolphins. One study, for example, showed dolphins in Barataria Bay exposed to BP’s oil suffered lung disease and hormone deficiencies.

In a report released this week, a team of researchers led by National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration scientists is reporting a high rate of reproductive failure in dolphins exposed to the 2010 spill. The biologists monitored bottlenose dolphins in heavily-oiled Barataria Bay for five years following the spill.  More at:  summitcountyvoice.com

GR:  Apparently, the clean-up was incomplete.  Neither the abusers (BP in this case) or the politicians really care about the impact of extractive industries on nature.  As this report shows, BP was allowed to do a partial job.  Then the company continued on drilling, pumping, and polluting as usual.