Weekly Ingest: Newsletter
Each week I will curate a newsletter for all my listeners that is comprised of article that are of interest to the topics I talk about the podcast. This newsletter also brings national and international news about sustainability and climate change they may often get over looked, forgotten about, or is unheard of to the community I serve.
Intersectional Environmentalism
Demonstrators march on Pennsylvania Avenue NW during the People's Climate March in Washington, D.C., on April, 29, 2017.
Why 'I can't breathe' is resonating with environmental justice activists
From NBC News: Denise Chow
Elevating racial justice issues within the environmental movement has been a struggle even though black communities are the most at risk from climate change.
The death of George Floyd in police custody sparked a movement that has focused national attention on institutional racism that permeates nearly every aspect of society.
And that includes climate change.
Now, climate activists and scientists say a similar reckoning needs to happen in the environmental movement, which experts say has had a long, uneasy relationship with racial politics.
"There's a level of racism in the movement itself, where some folks think that talking about these issues is a distraction," said Jacqueline Patterson, director of the NAACP's Environmental and Climate Justice Program. "Nobody is donning a white hood, but the racism and implicit bias is evident."
Protestors in Foley Square, New York City | Photo by Mark Peterson/Pedux
Racism Is Killing the Planet
From The Sierra: Hop Hopkins
The ideology of white supremacy leads the way toward disposable people and a disposable natural world.
Last week, my family and I attended an interfaith rally in Los Angeles in defense of Black life. We performed a group ritual in which we made noise for nine minutes to mark the last moments of George Floyd’s life. My wife, my oldest daughter, and I played African drums to mark those nine minutes with the rhythm of a beating heart. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, over and over again.
While we drummed, I realized how difficult it is to keep up any physical activity for nine minutes straight. Most of us can’t even sit completely still on our butts for nine minutes; if you’ve ever meditated, you understand why they refer to sitting as practice.
As I struggled to maintain my posture and keep up the rhythm, I thought about the level of commitment it takes to hold someone down for nine minutes straight. The realization horrified me. The cop who has been charged with murdering George Floyd had to have been deeply committed to taking his life. The police officer had so many chances to let up the pressure, to let George live. Yet the officer made the choice not to.
Youth plaintiff Levi Draheim rides on the shoulders of co-plaintiff Aji Piper during the People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., in April 2017. The nonprofit Our Children’s Trust law firm of Eugene, Ore., spearheaded a lawsuit against the federal government over its climate policies, with young plaintiffs including Draheim and Piper.
(Robin Loznak / Our Children’s Trust)
Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice
From The LA Times: Sammy Roth
There were several topics I considered writing about this week, including the results of California’s latest cap-and-trade auction and a bill in Sacramento dealing with the proposed Eagle Mountain hydropower project.
But after a week of protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, I realized there was only one topic I could focus on in this newsletter: environmental injustice. It’s a term that describes how people of color and poor communities have borne disproportionate harm from pollution, and the discriminatory systems that have perpetuated those inequities.
Climate change activists from Extinction Rebellion standing in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on June 7, 2020 in St Ives, United Kingdom. Photo By Gav Goudler/ Getty Images
There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice
From Yes! Magazine: Judy Fahys
When New York Communities for Change helped lead a demonstration of 500 on Monday, June 1, in Brooklyn to protest George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, the grassroots group’s activism spoke to a long-standing link between police violence against African Americans and environmental justice.
Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, said she considers showing up to fight police brutality and racial violence integral to her climate change activism.
Bronx Climate Justice North, another grassroots group, says on its website: “Without a focus on correcting injustice, work on climate change addresses only symptoms, and not root causes.”
Agriculture
Yes! Illustrations by Jen Luxton
What’s in a Social Justice Diet?
From YES! Magazine: Ray Levy-Uyeda
You can make whatever diet you’re currently eating even healthier.
Billions of dollars are spent telling individuals how to eat healthy. But even if you follow EAT-Lancet’s planet-friendly diet to a T, and your dinner plate is filled with gluten-free nutrivore fare, vegan locavore leafy greens, and ovo-pescatarian (wild caught!) omega-3’s, it still might be missing something. America’s industrialized food production and the dire nature of our planetary health raise the question: How do we add climate and social justice to our diet?
This year, members of the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will convene to update their recommendations. But this effort to help guide Americans toward a “balanced” diet is also the product of lobbying by the dairy, grain, and meat industries, which have long been accused of pursuing dollars at the expense of health.
Michael Davoren with his cattle in the Burren, Co Clare. Photograph: Eamon Ward/Burrenbeo Trust
'Life attracts life': the Irish farmers filling their fields with bees and butterflies
From The Guardian: Ella McSweeney
Rewarding positive environmental impact has revitalised an area of west Ireland. Is this a solution to the country’s ‘acute’ nature crisis?
Michael Davoren shudders when he thinks of the 1990s. He’d been in charge of his 80-hectare farm in the Burren, Co Clare, since the 1970s, and the place was in his blood. The Davorens had worked these hills for 400 years.
But growing intensification fuelled by European subsidies meant that most farmers in this part of Ireland were having to decide between getting big or getting out. Hundreds were choosing the latter.
Photo: John Fedele (Getty Images)
A brief history of Black farming in America
From The Takeout: Jacob Dean
As COVID-19 closed restaurants around the country, many wholesalers and purveyors of cooking ingredients began to sell directly to consumers. In New York that includes Happy Valley Meat Company, a registered B Corporation that purchases humanely raised animals from small-scale farmers for fair prices and then butchers and portions them so that the entire animal is used. Happy Valley says its work “ensures better lives for farmers, a better ecosystem for animals, and better food for all,” and today, in that vein, it posted a blog entry discussing the history of Black farming in America.
Photography Rush Jagoe
Black Land Matters
From Modern Farmer: Brian Barth
Leah Penniman is an American anomaly: black, female, and a farmer. In 2016, Penniman hit the streets of Albany, New York, to protest the police brutality that killed Donald “Dontay” Ivy, 39, an unarmed local man. But her primary focus involves fighting what she considers a far more common, yet more subtly brutal, form of oppression. “Corporations, and white folks in particular, control the food system,” explains the 37-year-old. “If the means of production are in the hands of people outside our community, we are dependent on those who might not have our best interests in mind.”
Carbon Emissions
Huge queues of traffic blocked roads throughout Staines, Middlesex, when the McDonald’s drive-through restaurant reopened on 20 May. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Rex
'Surprisingly rapid' rebound in carbon emissions post-lockdown
From The Guardian: Fiona Harvey
Busier roads to blame, with fears of worse to come as workers shun public transport.
Carbon dioxide emissions have rebounded around the world as lockdown conditions have eased, raising fears that annual emissions of greenhouse gases could surge to higher than ever levels after the coronavirus pandemic, unless governments take swift action.
Emissions fell by a quarter when the lockdowns were at their peak, and in early April global daily carbon dioxide emissions were still down by 17% compared with the average figure for 2019, research published last month in the journal Nature Climate Change found.
Now daily carbon emissions are still down on 2019 levels, but by only 5% on average globally, according to an updated study.
“Things have happened very fast,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia and the lead author of the studies. “Very few countries still have stringent confinement. We expected emissions to come back, but that they have done so rapidly is the biggest surprise.”
Cloudy skies, viewed from space. How clouds will adjust to a warming climate is difficult to predict, but Williams et al.1 have used short-term weather forecasts to assess whether recent revisions to long-term climate models are getting us nearer to the truth.Credit: ESA/NASA
Short-term tests validate long-term estimates of climate change
From Nature: Tim Palmer
Six-hour weather forecasts have been used to validate estimates of climate change hundreds of years from now. Such tests have great potential — but only if our weather-forecasting and climate-prediction systems are unified.
How sensitive is climate to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels? For a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre-industrial levels, some models predict an alarming long-term warming of more than 5 °C. But are these estimates believable? Writing in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, Williams et al.1 have tested some of the revisions that have been made to one such model by assessing its accuracy for very short-term weather forecasts. The results are not reassuring — they support the estimates.
There is little doubt, at least among those who understand the science, that climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humans in the coming decades. However, the extent to which unchecked climate change would prove catastrophic rests on processes that are poorly understood. Perhaps the most important of these concern the way in which Earth’s hydrological cycle — which includes the evaporation, condensation and movement of water — will react to our planet.
One of the key problems is how clouds adjust to warming2 . If low-level cloud cover increases, and high-level cloud decreases, then clouds will offset the warming effect of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations and thereby act as a negative feedback, or damper, on climate change, buying us some breathing space. By contrast, if there is positive cloud feedback — that is, if low-level clouds decrease with warming and high-level clouds increase — then, short of rapid and complete cessation of fossil-fuel use, we might be heading for disaster.
Scott Olson/ Getty Images
Earth’s carbon dioxide levels hit record high, despite coronavirus-related emissions drop
From The Washington Post: Andrew Freedman and Chris Mooney
There probably is more carbon dioxide in the air now than at anytime in 3 million years.
The coronavirus pandemic’s economic downturn may have set off a sudden plunge in global greenhouse gas emissions, but another crucial metric for determining the severity of global warming — the amount of greenhouse gases actually in the air — just hit a record high.
According to readings from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the amount of CO2 in the air in May 2020 hit an average of slightly greater than 417 parts per million (ppm). This is the highest monthly average value ever recorded, and is up from 414.7 ppm in May of last year.
Photo by Nadine Rovner
The Tide is Nigh
From Grid: Francesca Furey
Bucks County museum to install all-female art exhibit on the effects of climate change on our waters.
With looming fears and anxieties brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak, concerns about climate change or the health of local watersheds might seem secondary. That is an illusion. As Thomas Fuller, a 17th-century physician, wrote, “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.”
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April, Laura Igoe, the Michener Museum’s curator of American Art, and her team gathered artists from the greater Philadelphia region to produce Rising Tides: Contemporary Art and the Ecology of Water, an exhibit designed to highlight the interconnectedness of water and humanity.
