Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
A federal judge late Tuesday temporarily blocked fracking on over 300,000 acres in Wyoming, ruling the Interior Department illegally failed to consider the climate impact of leasing public land to oil and gas developers.
Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: BIRD HOSPITAL.
On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby released a statement on Tuesday saying that her office would stop prosecuting marijuana possession cases. Mosby framed the decision as a public safety and trust issue, explaining that prosecuting these cases served no public safety purpose. In fact, Mosby’s office explained, the prosecution of these kinds of cases “disproportionately impacts communities of color and erodes public trust.” Mosby also pointed out that, since they serve no real public safety purpose, these cases are a waste of resources and taxpayer dollars. The statement also reported that Mosby’s office was looking into vacating convictions for possession dating back eight years.
Read more at The Daily Kos.
At around 1 p.m. ET in Midtown Manhattan on Saturday, protest puppeteer Elliot Crown twirled a paper mache planet over a bed of flames, playing a silent violin. Around him, a neon-dotted crowd gathered next to the Plaza Hotel to protest the collapse of life on Earth. Numbers soon swelled to around 300, a solid local turnout for the Extinction Rebellion’s first national day of action in the United States. A marching band began to play, and activist performance group Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir hopped around the perimeter of the crowd, harmonizing about the end of the world. “Only so many beautiful days… are le-e-eft!”
Year Zero is the future date when all wild animals are gone.
Words by Dr. Sailesh Rao.
In 2015, I was visiting India on a project field trip when the main news in New Delhi was the spate of farmer suicides occurring on a daily basis. And I was shocked to discover that the farmers were committing suicide because they had harvested a bumper crop of potatoes! The price of potatoes plummeted and many farmers were dumping their potatoes by the side of the road instead of taking them to market in New Delhi. They were then drinking pesticides and killing themselves because they couldn’t repay their debts. Read more.
By McKinley Corbley for Good News Network. Jan 11, 2019.
Though most people might be afraid of a giant crocodile, this particular reptile has always been considered a beloved part of his village. So when he finally passed away of natural causes earlier this week at the age of 130, the village gave him a funeral fit for a king. Read more.
By McKinley Corbley for Good News Network. Jan 8, 2019.
It has been almost 200 years since land iguanas were seen on this region of the Galapagos Islands – but thanks to an intensive park restoration project, the reptile has just been reintroduced to its natural habitat once more. Read more.
By McKinley Corbley for Good News Network. Nov 9, 2018.
These two beluga whales have been performing for spectators at a water park in China for the last 7 years – but soon, they will be the residents of the world’s first retirement home for oceanic animals in show business. Read more.
Remineralizing the earth’s soil, which Hieronimus & Co. has profiled since the 1980’s, has finally gotten on to a mainstream forum — TED TALKS.
“It’s all of us together, or it’s all of us, together” I often say with a chuckle. Aren’t we all archetypally guided by the same dream of paradise, our soul’s native home? Despite our thinking we are separate from each other, aren’t we unitary in our origin and purpose, born not for ourselves alone but for the world? The Order of the Sacred Earth celebrates these truths and its formation is literally the fulfillment of an experience I had in 1984. I share in profound gratitude for this opportunity, a true story. Read more.
Local Futures September 18, 2018 by Jason Hickel
Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse.
Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition.
It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There’s just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.
By Good News Network – Jul 28, 2018
Roman McConn may only be 7 years old, but he has rescued over 1,000 dogs from a fatal end.
The youngster is the mastermind behind Project Freedom Ride, a charity that saves dogs from euthanasia and pairs them with loving families across the country.
Roman and his mother first got the idea for the project after they adopted their own dog in 2015. Troubled by the high rates of euthanasia in Texas, Roman started making videos for shelter dogs as a means of helping them get adopted.
Roman’s mom also started advocating for no-kill policies to state legislators.
Finally, out of a desire to create a kind of “underground railroad” for pups, they launched Project Freedom Ride in 2016 and completed their first transport mission of 31 dogs from Texas to Washington. Now, the mother-son duo rescues an average of over 50 dogs each month.
The charity is not technically a transportation-based rescue effort – they say that PFR is mostly a community effort that is “connecting unwanted, abandoned dogs (and a few cats) who may otherwise be bound for euthanasia in Texas with families, rescues and Humane Societies in the Pacific Northwest.”
“It makes me feel happy saving all these dogs,” Roman told Inside Edition. “But it doesn’t just make me happy, I’m sure it makes all the dogs happy.”
By Tatiana Schlossberg for The New York Times July 11, 2017
From the common barn swallow to the exotic giraffe, thousands of animal species are in precipitous decline, a sign that an irreversible era of mass extinction is underway, new research finds.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls the current decline in animal populations a “global epidemic” and part of the “ongoing sixth mass extinction” caused in large measure by human destruction of animal habitats. The previous five extinctions were caused by natural phenomena.
Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, acknowledged that the study is written in unusually alarming tones for an academic research paper. “It wouldn’t be ethical right now not to speak in this strong language to call attention to the severity of the problem,” he said.
Dr. Ceballos emphasized that he and his co-authors, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo, both professors at Stanford University, are not alarmists, but are using scientific data to back up their assertions that significant population decline and possible mass extinction of species all over the world may be imminent, and that both have been underestimated by many other scientists.
The study’s authors looked at reductions in a species’ range — a result of factors like habitat degradation, pollution and climate change, among others — and extrapolated from that how many populations have been lost or are in decline, a method that they said is used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Updated Jul 24; Posted Jul 24
An Oregon woman who found a mountain lion in her living room says she relied on “frequency and attunement,” “feline-speak eye blinking,” and telepathy to calm the animal and safely guide it out after it took a six-hour nap behind the couch.
“This is wild,” Lauren Taylor of Ashland posted on Facebook at the beginning of July.
Taylor, who was not immediately available for comment, wrote about her encounter with the wild animal on the social media platform, saying the animal entered the household after drinking from a fountain/pond near the back door. Taylor said the cougar entered through the open door, and said it was likely unaware it was walking indoors at first because of plants and stairs built around tree branches.
A housemate shouted after seeing the animal, and Taylor said the cougar was agitated and tried to leave through a closed window before hiding behind the sofa. When Taylor went to check on the animal a bit later, she found it asleep.
“When I made noise, she woke up and looked startled so I consciously raised my frequency, gazed lovingly into her eyes, and communicated using feline-speak eye blinking to calm her,” Taylor wrote on Facebook. “It was amazing to realize that this worked. I gazed lovingly then blinked hard and then she did it back! Then, she went back to sleep.”
Taylor explained in her post that cats are “extremely psychic” and “perceptive of energy.”
Before dawn, Taylor said, she sent the animal telepathic pictures of routes out of the house and up into the hills, then woke the animal up with drumming. A video posted to her Facebook shows the mountain lion leaving its place behind the couch and appearing to exit the house as drumming echoes in the background.
Terry Lawson BuzzFeed Contributor
Posted on June 22, 2018, at 2:19 p.m. ET
One August morning in 2017, I walk up the staircase to Yoli’s apartment in the North Bronx, the steps creaking beneath me, as I have for the prior three days, not knowing what to expect. Yoli opens the door and smiles, her natural warmth radiating, and my breath catches.
“No,” I blurt out. “You can’t wear that. You have to change,” I say in Spanish.
Beneath her swollen belly, its half-moon covered by an emerald green tank top, Yoli wears deconstructed jeans, which, though on trend, are of the particularly torn variety, with 20 designer rips per leg. Yoli and I stand eye to eye, both at 5 feet tall, her pregnant belly between us. Her red-tinted hair grazes her shoulders. Yoli, in her raspy voice, responds in Spanish, deflated, “But I don’t have anything else to wear.”
“Well, you can’t wear that to court,” I say, my voice lowering an octave. Having worked with abused women for the past 10 years, I know it is wrong to tell her what to wear, and to do it so brazenly. Yoli, a woman who left Honduras to escape her son’s father, does not need someone telling her what to do. She does not need someone telling her how to look, judging her appearance, failing to acknowledge her choices. But the thought of the judge peering down at Yoli from his perch above us, and the weight of our task, to convince him to give Yoli asylum, bears down heavily on me. (Yoli has given me permission to share the details of her story, but I have changed her name, her son’s name, and her abuser’s name, for her protection.)
By Andy Corbley July 17, 2018
Have you ever been so happy that you began to celebrate with total strangers? Well, in the wake of a historic peace agreement in East Africa, the people of the region have every cause to do so.
Ethiopia and Eritrea – two East African countries that have been at odds since 1993 when Eritrea voted with a super majority to separate from Ethiopia – have just agreed to end the conflict which saw many families split apart as the borders shut down and phone lines were cut off.
Now, however, as telecommunications reboot between the two East African neighbors, people are celebrating in a very unusual fashion. Selehadin Eshetu, an Ethiopian, spent 3 days dialing random phone numbers before someone from Eritrea picked up.
By Good News Network – Jul 17, 2018
As a means of boosting bee populations, Virginia has launched a new program that distributes beehives and beekeeping equipment directly to state beekeepers.
The Beehive Distribution Program, which is being administered by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), provides beehive equipment directly to eligible beekeepers.
Residents of Virginia who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to receive up to three beehive units per year. Individuals who receive a beehive unit will be registered as beekeepers with VDACS, allowing for periodic inspection of beehives by the agency.
Staff will review applications for the Beehive Distribution Program in the order in which they are received. If all available beehive units are distributed before the fiscal year ends on June 30, 2019, VDACS will stop accepting applications and notify applicants that the program has ceased processing applications for the fiscal year. Applications will not carry forward to the next fiscal year.
To apply for the program as a beekeeper, click here.
When we think about climate change, the main sources of carbon emissions that come to mind for most of us are heavy industries like petroleum, mining and transportation.
Rarely do we point the finger at computer technologies.
In fact, many experts view the cyber-world of information and computer technologies (ICT) as our potential savior, replacing many of our physical activities with a lower-carbon virtual alternative.
That is not what our study, recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, suggests.
Having conducted a meticulous and fairly exhaustive inventory of the contribution of ICT — including devices like PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones and tablets, and infrastructure like data centers and communication networks — we found that the relative contribution of ICT to the total global footprint is expected to grow from about one per cent in 2007 to 3.5 per cent by 2020 and reaching 14 per cent by 2040.
A group of female activists in Oaxaca, Mexico, held a mass marriage ceremony where they each wed their own splintery groom to draw attention to illegal logging – a serious and devastating problem in the country.
Around a third of Mexico’s land is covered by forest. Oaxaca is one of five states hit hardest by deforestation, mostly caused by criminal groups, Metro reports.
The women are trying to take a stand against the practice and are hoping the mass marriage will get people more involved with saving the woodlands.
