From Nature Video: It’s a simple question: how many trees are there on Earth? The answer required 421,529 measurements from fifty countries on six continents. Their findings? The earth is losing 10 billion trees every year. Now this data has been combined to produce a stunning visualisation of earth as you’ve never seen it before….
Read More about How scientists counted every tree on Earth—and the startling resultsScroll.in reports: These timelapse videos were created with images of Landsat Satellite showing massive global transformations from 1984 to 2012 via Google Earth. Timelapse events include transformations such as the coastal expansion of Dubai, the retreat of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, Saudi Arabian desert, Amazonian forest land in Brazil and Las Vegas urban growth….
Read More about Watch: 10 extraordinary timelapse videos show earth’s transformation in 30 yearsSet in the world of a spoofed prescription drug commercial, Nature Rx offers a hearty dose of laughs and the outdoors – two timeless prescriptions for whatever ails you. This award-winning comedy series is a friendly reminder to us Earthly inhabitants what feels good and what is worth protecting once we take an adventure outdoors….
Read More about Warning: this prescription may lead to spontaneous euphoriaWe face awesome global environmental challenges. Climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity… Now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together….
Read More about Stephen Hawking: This is the most dangerous time for our planet
Please don’t read this unless you are feeling strong. This is a list of 13 major crises that, I believe, confront us. From Trump to climate change, this multi-headed crisis presages collapse. And there’s no hope of exiting the ‘other side’ if political alternatives are shut down. Sorry to say that it’s not happy reading….
Read More about George Monbiot: The 13 impossible crises we are facing now
Andreas Malm writes: Mainstream climate discourse is positively drenched in references to humanity as such, human nature, the human enterprise, humankind as one big villain driving the train. Enter Naomi Klein, who in ‘This Changes Everything’ lays bare the myriad ways in which capital accumulation pour fuel on the fire now consuming the earth system….
Read More about The Anthropocene myth: Blaming all of humanity for climate change lets capitalism off the hook
Bramble Cay melomys’ is the first recorded extinction of a mammal due to human-caused climate change
Growing numbers of scientists have asserted that our planet might soon see a sixth massive extinction— driven by the escalating impacts of humanity. Others, such as the Swedish economist Bjørn Lomborg, have characterised such claims as ill-informed. We argue that the jury is in and the debate is over: Earth’s sixth great extinction has arrived….
Read More about Paul Ehrlich: Radical overhaul needed to halt earth’s sixth great extinction
Image from an IISc study showing sharp (88%) decline in Bangalore's vegetation
Samar Halarnkar writes: In Nature in the City, her evocative exploration of Bangalore’s natural history, Harini Nagendra, says, “… residents engaged in practices such as placing a plate of warm rice (often with ghee added) outside to feed crows, leaving water baths for birds in the summer, and sugar and milk for ants and reptiles.”…
Read More about The end of nature: Why India is becoming a drier, hotter and angrier country
On the eve of the American presidential election, where the two leading candidates offer little hope for climate action, it’s worth revisiting this hard-hitting 2006 article by Chad Harbach, who warned, “(Other countries) will do nothing until the United States demonstrates that a grand-scale transition to renewable energy can be achieved by big industrial countries.”…
Read More about Flashback: On global warming
The White Rhino - one of many endangered large animals
The Guardian reports: The number of wild animals on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, which a new report attributes to an ongoing mass extinction. The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020….
Read More about Report: World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020
The Bramble Cay melomys is the first mammal recorded extinct due to climate change.
Aaron M. Ellison writes in Nature: Better data will not save elephants, rhinos or any other species. Countless individuals, institutions, governments, and multinational and non-governmental organizations have been collecting, assimilating and organizing such data for decades, essentially fiddling while our biological heritage burns… I suggest three crucial actions that scientists can take, beginning right now….
Read More about Ecologists are fiddling while our natural heritage burns, says Harvard scientist
Coral bleaching and death at Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
XL Catlin Seaview Survey via Associated Press
“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.” So begins Rowan Jacobsen’s moving obituary for the world’s largest living structure. With 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands, it’s larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined….
Read More about Obituary: The Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)
Actress Dia Mirza with forest rangers at the Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand
Dia Mirza writes: We cannot call this devastation of ecology and livelihoods ‘natural calamities’ anymore; it’s evident that there is a nexus of powerful people who are ignorant to the ramifications of their idea of “development” and “progress” that is gutting our forests, polluting our rivers and leading many states to a state of drought….
Read More about Dia Mirza on the Uttarakhand fires and how we fail our forests
To fight climate change, a war-like mobilization a la McKibben is not necessary. Actually we are not at war at all. If we are, then it is we who are the aggressors, we are the enemy of nature. Then the first task for the transition is to end our aggression. We need only to withdraw….
Read More about Saving the planet, American style: A critical review, and some thoughts and ideas
Jason Hickel writes: The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals recognise the inherent tension between economic development and the planet’s ecology. It signals awareness that something about our economic system has gone terribly awry–that we cannot continue chewing through the living planet without gravely endangering our security and prosperity, and indeed the future viability of our species….
Read More about Time for degrowth: to save the planet, we must shrink the economyYesterday, with protests over the Cauvery water dispute bringing Bangalore to its knees, many of the city’s techno-optimists found themselves stranded on its burning roads, like bunnies caught in headlights. It might just be another sign that ‘life as we know it’ is about to change forever, both in India and the world, writes Vijay Kundaji….
Read More about A ‘time-lapse’ view of the water wars, in Bangalore (and soon, the world)
The Guardian reports: The oceans have already sucked up an enormous amount of heat due to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, affecting marine species from microbes to whales, according to a report involving the work of 80 scientists from a dozen countries. The profound changes underway in the oceans are starting to impact people, it states….
Read More about Report: Soaring ocean temperature is ‘greatest hidden challenge of our generation’
The Guardian reports: Planet Earth has entered a new geological epoch dubbed the Anthropocene because of the extent of humanity’s impact on the planet, according to a group of scientists. An international working group set up to consider the question voted by 30 to three, with two abstentions, that the Anthropocene was real in a geological sense….
Read More about The Anthropocene is here: Scientists declare dawn of human-influenced era
The White Rhino - one of many endangered large animals
40 scientists from across the world have recently announced that megafauna – large animals like elephants, lions, tigers, cheetahs, rhinoceroses – will not survive much longer if we don’t act fast. Examining population trends, the scientists said that human activities like deforestation and hunting can wipe out their populations by the end of this century….
Read More about Warning from 40 top scientists: Tigers, elephants may go extinct by 2100
Sukanta Chaudhari writes: Today, a great threat looms over wetlands. Under a new environmental regime, each state will be free to form its own guidelines. Bengal’s new environment minister, has declared his intention of ‘developing’ the wetlands and even having their Ramsar status annulled. The truth is that Kolkata’s wetlands are ‘real estate in waiting’….
Read More about Development vs environmental security: How to kill an ecosystem
