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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS Shiny object syndrome
“Recently, I’ve been turning off my iPhone — all the way off! — for 10 to 30 minutes at a time. I leave it somewhere in the house, while I try to live IRL (‘in real life’), washing dishes, hanging up laundry, or even going for a walk, phoneless. It often feels like an enormous act of self-deprivation — no podcasts, no long-distance communication with those I’m closest to, no social media, no para-social relationships, no steps of mine being counted, or micro-health-tracking going on. “I am what they call a late adopter. I didn’t get a cell phone until the fall of 2003. So I remember when it was normal to go about your business without a powerful computer attached to your person. Even with that perspective, I feel unsettled when I’m untethered from my digital leash. “As for new patterns, turning off my cellphone for a period of time every day means a small window of datalessness that offers a twenty-first-century version of rebellion. As I power down that ubiquitous device, I still know how to get places without a map app. I know the answers to the random trivia. I’ve realized that just because I have the urge to reach out to so-and-so, it doesn’t actually mean that it has to happen that very second. “It’s worth noting that many in the tech world take great pains to shield their children from this technology. As a parent, I think a lot about the kind of world I’m preparing my kids for. And I guess there’s an argument to be made for preparing them for a world lived largely online, since that’s where we are these days. But I’m going to try and hold the line. “I want my kids running, swimming, noticing the world around them, creating art, hearing bird songs, reading books — almost anything but playing video games and diving into the deep end of a cyber-cesspool of bullying, eating disorders, and a fixation on looks. “On Wednesdays, my kids walk to the library, where they can log onto public computers and watch unboxing videos. I tell them that they can have a smartphone when they can pay for it themselves. Because it’s not a value-neutral object, and the network it relies on is not value-neutral either. At every juncture, this technology that we take for granted has a high labor, material, and environmental cost. After all, the same technological framework powers DoorDash and the weaponized drones that are now raining terror down on children just like mine in Gaza. “What we see isn’t what is real. In these dystopian days, we know that. Trump rants about White genocide and radical-left judicial monsters, and tweets out AI-constructed images of himself as the Pope, a Jedi master, a golden statue in a renovated Gaza resort. What we see isn’t what’s real. I know it is trying to cleave my attention from the question of how we survive this violent present and make a different and far better future.” More at: As grows industrial society, so grows the Keeling Curve
“For the first time in millions of years, Earth’s atmosphere contained an average of 430.2 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, the result of humans burning fossil fuels. The number recorded in May at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii represents an increase of 3.5 ppm from May 2024. “In 1958, Scripps scientist Charles David Keeling started monitoring concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Keeling documented the fluctuations in the planet’s carbon dioxide levels in what is now known as the Keeling Curve. This record helped him recognize another pattern: Carbon levels were rising with each passing year. “Scientists are warning that carbon levels could reach 500 ppm in the next 30 years. The last time atmospheric carbon levels were so high was likely over 30 million years ago. There are monitoring stations in the Southern Hemisphere with a reverse cycle that have yet to cross 430 ppm.” More at: Colorado River aquifers declining faster than Lake Mead or Powell
“Declines of underground water supplies that are vital to cities and farming in the Colorado River Basin are outpacing the losses of the river’s water. Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming are engaged in tense negotiations overcuts to water supplies, but with losses to groundwater left out of the debate. “Across the basin, the rate of water storage decline increased by a factor of three between 2015 to 2024 compared to the previous decade. The Colorado River Basin has been in a drought for more than two decades. The river supplies water to 40 million people across seven states, 30 tribes and Mexico. The Bureau of Reclamation predicts steep declines in the levels of lakes Mead and Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs. “The total decline of groundwater is roughly the equivalent of the volume of Lake Mead. Losses to groundwater are far outpacing the losses to surface water such as that in lakes Mead and Powell. Cuts on the Colorado River will likely lead to states using more groundwater.” More at: Extreme drought stressing Florida Everglades
“The huge swath of wetlands known as The Everglades covers 7,800 square miles of southern Florida, an area about the size of New Jersey. With the state experiencing its worst drought in 13 years, parts of the Everglades are drying up completely. Most of the Everglades drought is labeled ‘extreme’ by the U.S. Drought Monitor. “Wildlife is overcrowding in remaining water pockets, CBS News says, with algae consuming all the oxygen, causing fish kills. Unfortunately, the drought will continue for at least another month in southern Florida, but conditions are improving in the northern half of the state.” More at: Drought expanding in normally moist Washington
“The Washington State Department of Ecology expanded its drought emergency to include watersheds in Snohomish, King, Pierce, Lewis, Thurston, Okanagan, Chelan, Clallam, Jefferson and Ferry counties — areas in the North and Central Cascade Mountains and parts of the Puget Sound area. “The warmer-than-normal April led to rapid snowmelt — two to four weeks earlier than normal across the Central and North Cascades. This means that less water will be available in summer and early fall when it’s needed most for farms and fish. Even in the Evergreen State, the water supply is now less reliable in the summer and early fall than it was historically. “Deputy State Climatologist Karin Bumbaco said ‘The two main drivers have been above-normal temperatures and below-normal April and May precipitation’. Bumbaco noted April was nearly two degrees Fahrenheit above normal temperatures, the 25th warmest April since records began in 1895. Total precipitation in April and May was less than 60% of the normal amounts for most of the state.” More at: Land back: Yurok Tribe’s stolen land returned, but for a price
“More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history. The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe [had] 90 percent of its territory [stolen]. “The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe. The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity. “The Western Rivers Conservancy nonprofit acquired the land in pieces from Green Diamond, a timber company, and paid for it using a combination of private funding, tax credits, carbon credit sales, low-interest loans, revolving loans, federal revolving loan programs, and settlement funds. The project was also partially funded by the state of California.” More at: Microplastics join lipids to cross the blood-brain barrier
“A new study has found a dramatic increase in levels of microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs) in human brains in recent years. Researchers took one tissue sample from the brain, kidney and liver of 80 people autopsied in 2016 and 2024. They also sampled the brains of 12 people who died with Alzheimer’s or dementia within that period. The researchers found that brain and liver samples from 2024 had considerably higher MNP concentrations compared with those in 2016. Brain samples showed a 50% increase during the eight years. “Since food packaging is a well-known source of microplastics, researchers expected to find the highest MNP concentrations in the liver, part of the digestive system. However, brain samples had 7-30 times more MNP than liver or kidney samples. Campen said they expected the brain would be protected by the blood-brain barrier, a membrane that prevents harmful substances in the blood from passing into the brain. ‘That didn’t seem to be the case’, said Matthew Campen of the University of New Mexico. “Campen hypothesized that plastics were likely ‘hitchhiking’ their way in with lipids, or fatty molecules that can cross the barrier. Plastics love fats; plasticizers are also very lipophilic so they like to move with fats too.” More at: The Superorganism on autopilot
“Most people narrowly believe money powers the world. But it’s really energy. Two centuries ago, we tapped the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil, and gas. The oil in a single barrel can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies. Incredibly cheap magic. “This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon of the carbon pulse, a one-time release of energy stored over geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions to form. This wasn’t a paycheck, it was a trust fund with which we’ve been throwing a planet wide party. We remain today energy blind. “In nature, complexity builds through flows of energy and materials. Forest, coral reefs, brains all emerge from this dynamic. The pursuit of energy and nature creates patterns. A single Starling follows, three simple rules — stay close to your neighbor, but not too close, and move towards the center. From these simple animal behaviors, a breathtaking shape, a murmuration, appears in the sky, fluid, unpredictable, and alive. “Emergence happens in the human world too. Zoom out far enough, and human civilization itself starts to look and act like a giant organism with its own metabolism. What has emerged is something new, something massive. A globally synchronized economic Superorganism built from energy machines and billions of human decisions driven both by biological and cultural incentives. “This Superorganism doesn’t care about equity, ecology, or human wellbeing. It just optimizes for throughput, for scale, for more — even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind at the wheel. Just billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption. We’ve inadvertently built a system that rewards material expansion, not wisdom, and we’ve outsourced our decision making to markets and algorithms.” More at: Agrarian localism as antidote to capitalist commodification
“The Root and Branch Collective (RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism. The RBC piece on Substack authored by Adam Calo and Alex Heffron begins by referring to a book called Agrarian Dreams in which they say, ‘The popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism’. We don’t in principle face a stark choice between the latest techno fads in corporate agriculture or miserable hand-to-mouth agrarian toil. A plethora of other options exists. “Anyone who sets themselves up as a commercial food or fibre producer in the Global North, with any pretensions toward ecological integrity and just rewards to labour, will inevitably be crushed in the capitalist maw of prices. The whole drift of agro-ecology is more people doing more work on the land. The whole drift of contemporary capitalism is less people doing less work on the land, with a range of unsustainable inputs substituting for their labour. The problem here is not localized organic production and the people involved in it. The problem is capitalism. “But let me move onto the core RBC principles included in Calo and Heffron’s piece. My paraphrases or direct quotes are in normal typeface, and my commentary is in italics, by the way). “First up, we need radical land reform. We’re in a time of ‘catastrophic crisis’. (Quite so). So we need some bloody action. Fast. The recent and not so recent history of land use has been one of colonialism, exploitation and expropriation — in respect of people, and in respect of nature. We consider the transformation of the way we feed and otherwise provision ourselves from the land towards abundance, justice, and liberation to be possible’. (I’d substitute ‘sufficiency’ for ‘abundance’ and I can’t honestly say whether it’s possible in this time of ‘catastrophic crisis’ – but I believe it’s worth aiming for.) ‘This involves political-economic transformation’ (Yes!).” More at: | 
