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

Fire in the Sky — More Than 330,000 Lightning Strikes Hit Europe in Just Eight Hours | robertscribbler

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“Whatever happened to normal weather? Earth has always experienced epic storms, debilitating drought, and biblical floods. But lately it seems the treadmill of disruptive weather has been set to fast-forward.” — Paul Douglas.

A cold, unstable air mass aloft. A record atmospheric moisture load due to human-caused climate change. Add in 80 degree or warmer surface temperatures and these three ingredients can spark some seriously epic thunderstorms. Such was the case across Europe today as towering thunderheads exploded into the skies, raining more than 330,000 bolts of lightning down upon the continent.

Source: Fire in the Sky — More Than 330,000 Lightning Strikes Hit Europe in Just Eight Hours | robertscribbler

Once-Wild West Disappearing Under Development | Californians For Population Stabilization

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Discussion of the principal cause of the loss of natural areas to development in the U.S.

…

“The natural landscape of the American West is gradually disappearing under a relentless march of new subdivisions, roads, oil and gas production, agricultural operations and other human development.”

Rogers is citing a new report at http://www.disappearingwest.org posted by Conservation Science Partners, a nongovernmental research group with offices in Truckee, California; Seattle, Washington; Flagstaff, Arizona; Fort Collins, Colorado and Bozeman, Montana. According to Disappearing West, an area of natural habitat the size of a football field is lost to concrete, asphalt, subdivisions, strip malls and drilling pads every two and a half minutes.

In the decade between 2001 and 2011, a combined area of 2.8 million acres (4,321 square miles) – 15 times the combined size of San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco – was developed in the 11 Western states. By far, California lost the most open space of all of them.

Yet there is a gaping hole large enough to drive a bulldozer through in both the Disappearing West website and Rogers’ article about it: the role of human population growth in driving all this development and loss of open space. Various wildlife population sizes are mentioned in the Disappearing West report, but there is not one mention of human population size and growth. Why this glaring omission?

Source: Once-Wild West Disappearing Under Development | Californians For Population Stabilization

Disappearing West

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Construction Eliminating Plants and Animals

Urban Sprawl--Los_Angeles

Every 2.5 minutes, the American West loses a football field worth of natural area to human development. This project maps a rapidly changing landscape, explores what is being lost, and profiles a new movement for conservation that is gaining ground.

Natural areas in the West are going fast. With each flight home, we get a bird’s eye view of sprawling new roads, oil wells, and pipelines. The Oregon woods we explored as kids are now stumps without songbirds. We see fewer stars through Santa Fe’s brightening lights.

Yet, from governors’ mansions to the halls of Congress, questions about land and wildlife conservation command relatively little attention today. The conventional wisdom seems to hold that the most consequential battles over America’s wild places are already settled. President Theodore Roosevelt, Sierra Club founder John Muir, and the environmental activists of the 1960s won protections for national parks, national forests, and wilderness areas. In the eyes of some politicians, the West’s open spaces are not only well protected, but too well protected. An anti-parks caucus in the U.S. Congress, for example, wants to block new national parks and sell off the West’s national forests to private owners.

Natural area loss, by state

State Total area modified by human development, in square miles Natural area lost, in square miles Percent change in area modified by human development
2001 2011 2001-2011 2001-2011
Wyoming 10,378 10,873 496 4.8%
Utah 8,248 8,624 376 4.6%
Oregon 12,431 12,843 412 3.3%
Washington 13,812 14,269 456 3.3%
Arizona 11,560 11,931 371 3.2%
Colorado 18,428 18,953 525 2.9%
California 29,856 30,641 785 2.6%
New Mexico 12,587 12,905 319 2.5%
Nevada 8,345 8,490 145 1.7%
Idaho 11,240 11,391 151 1.3%
Montana 23,485 23,770 285 1.2%
Source: Conservation Science Partners, “Description of the approach, data, and analytical methods used to estimate natural land loss in the western U.S.” (2016), unpublished technical report, available here. 
Source: Disappearing West

GR:  Go to the Source for more facts on the loss of natural areas to construction in the U.S.

Peace park proposed for Karen State, Myanmar- DVB Multimedia Group

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Proposed Nature Sanctuary/Park in Myanmar

KESAN hopes the introduction of the Salween Peace Park will also stop logging concessions in the area, which cause irreparable damage to wildlife and the environment.  Source: Peace park proposed for Karen State- DVB Multimedia Group

Salawin River

Salawin River

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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

Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat by Nicola Jones: Yale Environment 360

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Ninety-nine percent of the planet’s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the next, flooding many of the world’s populated coastal areas.

Last month in Greenland, more than a tenth of the ice sheet’s surface was melting in the unseasonably warm spring sun, smashing 2010’s record for a thaw so early in the year. In the Antarctic, warm water licking at the base of the continent’s western ice sheet is, in effect, dissolving the cork that holds back the flow of glaciers into the sea; ice is now seeping like wine from a toppled bottle.

The planet’s polar ice is melting fast, and recent satellite data, models, and fieldwork have left scientists sobered by the speed of the sea level rise we should expect over the coming decades. Although researchers have long projected that the planet’s biggest ice sheets and glaciers will wilt in the face of rising temperatures, estimates of the rate of that change keep going up. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out its last report in 2013, the consensus was for under a meter (3.3 feet) of sea level rise by 2100. In just the last few years, at least one modeling study suggests we might need to double that.

Source: Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat by Nicola Jones: Yale Environment 360

This Is The Side Of The Great Barrier Reef The Government Doesn’t Want You To See – BuzzFeed News

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Australia Coral Reef Deception:  BuzzFeed News:

Photos and text from: Rob Stott, BuzzFeed News Reporter, Australia

Take a quick look at the Tourism Australia website and social media channels and you’ll find all of the things you’d expect from the Great Barrier Reef: glossy photos of divers, happy turtles, and coral. Lots of coral. But the Australian government has been working hard to make sure you don’t see just how badly damaged by climate change the reef has become.

The Australian government has even been caught trying to censor a UN report.

Source: This Is The Side Of The Great Barrier Reef The Government Doesn’t Want You To See – BuzzFeed News

Electric aircraft Sun Flyer – Business Insider

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A small Denver, Colorado, manufacturer has rolled out the first prototype of a new all-electric aircraft, suggesting that the same revolution currently sweeping through the auto industry may soon become airborne.  Source: Electric aircraft Sun Flyer – Business Insider