Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The fires that burned wildlands and urban areas in Northern California this month now pose a threat to water quality, humans and wildlife as crews work to contain unstable hillsides and keep toxic debris from entering waterways.
It’s been five years since Superstorm Sandy devastated the Northeast. The monster storm — which killed more than 100 people, destroyed entire communities, and inflicted more than $70 billion in damages — should have completely changed the way we approach climate impacts, resilience, and global warming policy. But it didn’t.
Two days ago, on October 27th, Lancaster Against Pipelines in central Pa. organized their third action in the last two weeks at the site where the Williams Partners company is laying pipe for the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline. At the previous two actions a total of 29 people were arrested in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Jerry Brown, California’s governor, signed into law the Buy Clean California Act. The act requires that the state set a maximum “acceptable lifecycle global warming potential” for different building materials, specifying that only materials with embodied emissions below that level can be purchased by the state.
Last month one of the largest fracked gas projects in the Pacific Northwest was dealt a legal blow when its development permit was canceled for failing to fully account for the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions. The project, backed by Northwest Innovation Works (NWIW), would refine fracked gas into methanol, an industrial feedstock used in chemical production, that would be shipped in bulk from Kalama, Washington, to China, where backers say it will produce plastics.
Once trees catch fire, they unleash ash, sediments and various noxious chemicals. And heat from fires undermines soil stability. Then, when heavy rain falls, tainted water slides into rivers rather than seeping into underground aquifers. If it rains hard enough, flooding often follows, especially when there are no trees to take up what moisture is absorbed into the soil.
What happened this week in Portugal points toward the scariest aspects of the Anthropocene: We are changing the world around us so fast that, in many cases, adaptation will be near impossible. As a hurricane, Ophelia was literally off the charts, and meteorologists have no doubt that the storm made the fires worse, rapidly transforming the smallest flames into towering infernos.
As climate change intensifies weather events like the rainstorms that keep hitting New Orleans, the burden on cities’ infrastructure gets heavier. At the same time, the backlog of deferred maintenance in most of the country has weakened these systems’ resilience. Most municipal governments are ill-equipped to handle the increasingly urgent overhauls, especially if they’ve just been hit with a major disaster. That opens a window for private companies — so-called “disaster capitalists” — to make their pitch.
Southern West Virginia nonprofit Coalfield Development runs Refresh, Reclaim, and a family of three other social enterprises. In an environment where finding secure employment is hard, Coalfield offers low-income residents a two- to two-and-a-half-year contract to undergo training in sustainable construction, solar technology, and artisan-based entrepreneurship.
It’s now widely understood that a century of misguided – but well-intentioned – policies over the past 100 years produced forests that are too densely packed with small trees and too vulnerable to possibly catastrophic fires. Water supplies are also a concern, because the forests are nature’s water-storage sponges.
Ex-hurricane Ophelia smashed into Ireland Monday morning with record-breaking gusts of up to 119 mph. The powerful extra-tropical storm — which has already killed two people and blacked-out some 360,000 Irish homes and businesses — is what’s left of the most powerful Eastern Atlantic hurricane ever seen.
Perhaps one gift the Trump administration has given us is the final lifting of this veil — just in case there was any lingering faith that authority still meant something and could be depended on. Now we no longer need suspect. Benefit of the doubt is over — it’s all a façade, a sham, a bully’s blow-horn silencing a people’s wisdom. So now we know. What we do with this knowledge holds the key to the future.
