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Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist, has devoted his career to finding ways to capture carbon from the air and store it in soil. Ken Chamberlain/OSU/CFAES hide caption

Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist, has devoted his career to finding ways to capture carbon from the air and store it in soil.

More than 40 years ago, in Nigeria, a young scientist named Rattan Lal encountered an idea that changed his life and led, eventually, to global recognition and a worldwide movement to protect the planet's soil.

Lal was fresh out of graduate school, recruited to join the newly established International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, and given an assignment that, in hindsight, seems ridiculous in its ambition. "I was 25 years old, in charge of a lab, given the mandate of improving quality and quantity of food production in the tropics!" Lal says.

He struggled. The problem was the soil. Because of climate and geological history, it was more fragile than what he'd seen in India, where he grew up, or Ohio, where he'd received his Ph.D. Lal cleared parts of the forest for his research plots, but when the soil lost its vegetation and was exposed to sun and rain, it quickly deteriorated. What Lal calls the "life blood of the soil" the so-called organic matter, made of microbes and decomposing roots, which holds moisture in the soil and provides a fertile bed for growing seeds vaporized or washed away, leaving behind gravelly dirt as hot and hard as a road.

One day, a famous scientist named Roger Revelle came to visit. Revelle was one of the pioneers in the field now known as climate science. Lal told Revelle about his problems; about how the organic matter kept disappearing. Revelle pointed out that it was escaping into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Then Revelle asked a question: "Can you put it back?"

"That simple statement, 'Can you put it back?' was my introduction to climate and soil," Lal says.

Rattan Lal was awarded the World Food Prize this year. He previously won the Japan Prize. John Rice/OSU/CFAES hide caption

Rattan Lal was awarded the World Food Prize this year. He previously won the Japan Prize.

Lal, now a professor at Ohio State University, is courteous, polite and soft-spoken. But that can be misleading. "I am by nature competitive," he says. "You're either going to be in the top one, two, three, four or you are not going to survive."

It's a lesson from childhood. He grew up poor, in a village in India. He and his family were refugees from present-day Pakistan. His ticket out of poverty was a government stipend a few dollars each month to study at university. To earn that money, his grades had to be in the top five in the class, and he was haunted by fear that he'd lose it. "That insecurity never really left me," he says.

Soybeans growing at Ohio State's Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory. It's part of an experiment aimed at measuring the effects of farming practices on soil quality. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

Soybeans growing at Ohio State's Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory. It's part of an experiment aimed at measuring the effects of farming practices on soil quality.

When Lal returned to Ohio State as a professor of soil science in the late 1980s, the insight from that conversation with Revelle became his calling card. He pushed a new view of soil, arguing that it's more than a simply a place where farmers grow crops. It's also a vast global reservoir of carbon that has been a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. Until the mid-20th century, cultivating the soil released more carbon dioxide than burning fossil fuels. Even today, farming and clearing forests for agriculture is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse emissions.

Farmers control that reservoir; they can continue to mine the soil by tilling it, spilling carbon into the air, or they can refill it, restoring some of the carbon that was previously lost. Soil that's rich in organic matter also is healthier in many other ways. It acts like a sponge, holding water, and it also contains nutrients like nitrogen.

In the American Midwest, for instance, the undisturbed soil of the prairie once was incredibly rich in carbon. Much of it was lost after settlers began plowing it to plant grain. Deforestation and land clearing continues in parts of Latin America and Africa.

Lal began experimenting with farming practices to see how they affect the level of carbon in that reservoir, and he discovered that it's actually possible to refill it at least partially by capturing carbon from the air. Some of those experiments are still ongoing. Nall Moonilall, a Ph.D. student at Ohio State, shows me one of them, an array of square plots at the university's research farm. For the past 30 years, Lal has been monitoring the effects of covering the soil with mulch. Some of the plots have been covered with different amounts of straw mulch every year. Others remained bare. Those bare soil plots now contain less than 1% carbon, but "the carbon content in plots that receive the maximum amount of mulch is probably upwards of 4%," Moonilall says. That's a healthy amount of soil carbon, close to what Midwestern soils contained before they were first plowed.

It also adds up to to tons of carbon in a single acre of soil, simply from adding mulch to the surface each year. Researchers also have found that farmers can enrich soil by leaving it undisturbed. Instead of tilling the soil before planting, which releases stored carbon into the air, farmers can deploy equipment that opens up a narrow slice in the soil and inserts the seeds. Such "no-till" practices have been widely adopted by American farmers in recent decades. Even better, at least from an environmental point of view, farmers can stop growing crops altogether, returning the land to permanent pasture or wetlands.

Soon after he returned to Ohio State University in the late 1980s, Rattan Lal laid out these research plots to study the capacity of soil to store carbon. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

Soon after he returned to Ohio State University in the late 1980s, Rattan Lal laid out these research plots to study the capacity of soil to store carbon.

Lal was not the only scientist exploring this field. In fact, some of his colleagues and rivals in soil science privately criticize him for spreading himself too thin, publishing articles at a ferocious pace yet not always breaking much new ground. Few of them, though, were the equal of Lal when it came to bringing soil to the attention of policymakers and the general public.

Just in the past few years, dirt has turned trendy. Books have appeared, many of them featuring Lal. There's a TED talk about soil health. Agricultural industry giants like General Mills and Bayer are offering to pay farmers to adopt practices that restore carbon to the soil. There's a catchy new name for it: regenerative agriculture. A startup company called Indigo Carbon released a video calling this "the most promising technology we have to address climate change."

Last year, Lal received the Japan Prize, which many consider second only to the Nobel in scientific prestige. In June, he won the World Food Prize, and former Vice President Al Gore and Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, both called to congratulate him.

There are critics of regenerative agriculture who say the movement has become a fad, promising more than it can possibly deliver. According to the World Resources Institute, no-till farming is unlikely to capture enough carbon to make much of a difference for the climate. And more dramatic changes, such at converting fields back into permanent grasslands, aren't likely to happen on a large scale because there's a growing demand for food, and farmers probably won't stop growing profitable crops.

Lal agrees that rebuilding soil won't stop global warming, but insists that it can make a difference for carbon emissions and for a variety of other environmental problems, from reducing water pollution and expanding habitat for wildlife. He's mostly happy that soil is finally getting the respect it deserves. He even wants it written into law. The U.S. has a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act, he says; there should be a Healthy Soils Act, too.

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The Ideas Of A Pioneer In The Environmental Movement Are Finally Recognized : Goats and Soda - NPR

Bees pollinate about one-third of the worlds food supply, according to Sustain, a nonprofit agriculture policy organization. Bees pollinate all manner of fruits, vegetables, crops, and even some of the wild grasses used to feed cattle and other livestock.

Their impact to the U.S. economy are valued at about $15 billion per year, according to Scientific American. During the winter of 2018-19 bee keepers across the country lost an estimated 38% of their honeybee colonies mostly due to an Asian parasitic mite that is resistant to some pesticides that kill mites.

The bee population in Arkansas is in decline and it could have a devastating impact on the states agriculture industry. Neelendra Joshi, assistant professor of entomology for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, uses the research tools of his discipline to understand the greatest threats to the states hundreds of bee species and learn how to protect them.

There are an estimated 25,000 species of bees that provide pollination services to the world, Joshi said. Our research has identified more than 100 species in Arkansas, and we estimate that there may be as many as 300 to 400 native bee species in the state.

Using various sampling techniques, Joshi has determined that different species of bees are distributed to different areas of the state, mainly based on local resources like habitat and food sources.

Bee populations, both managed and wild, are in decline everywhere, Joshi said. Extensive research is underway nationwide to fully understand the causes, but the known threats are many.

Interactions among many stressors have created colossal maladies hitting bees at one time, Joshi said, and in many cases, the combinations have caused additive impacts. Also, he said, the factors causing distress in wild bee populations tend to be different from those harming domesticated honeybees.

Managed bee populations often suffer from restricted diets when they are moved from location to location to pollinate specific monoculture crops, where they forage on only one kind of flowering plant. Joshi said these bees are not getting the balanced nutrition necessary to maintain good health.

Also, the breeding and handling practices for managed beehives tend to make the bees vulnerable to rapid spread of disease pathogens or parasites and other pests.

The biggest threats to wild bee populations are loss of nesting habitat and loss of native flora that are primary food sources, Joshi said.

Most people think of bees living in hives, either in managed, human made hives or wild hives in trees or, on occasion, attics. But wild bees live in many different kinds of nesting sites, most of which are vulnerable to loss because of human development.

Seventy percent of bees are ground-nesting, Joshi said. Many others live in tunnels and cavities.

Bees can be quite industrious, rivaling human developers in creating living space. Joshi said they may occupy or even build cavities in the ground, tunnels in trees either moving into abandoned beetle galleries or, as in the case of carpenter bees, creating their own or live on the ground. Mason bees use mud, sand, leaf particles and other materials to build nests.

Bees lose habitat to human development like urban expansion, road building, logging, land clearing and tilling for agriculture, forest fires, and other natural or human-made reduction in wild land and forests.

Urban spread and monoculture agriculture contribute to loss of wildflower food sources for wild bees, Joshi said.

Bees require nectar and pollen from diverse floral resources to meet their nutritional needs, he said. Popular garden plants and the sameness of monoculture farming systems do not provide dietary balance.

Many other things also contribute to population decline, Joshi said, including pesticide use.

Joshi and his lab have conducted studies to measure the effects of common pesticides and biological alternatives on bee species. The studies included determining what levels of exposure are fatal, and those from which bees of different species can recover.

While its easy to point the finger at agriculture for pesticide use, Joshi said homeowners and gardeners use precisely the same pesticide chemicals, and often with less restraint.

Global climate change also is likely contributing to bee decline, though scientists are still collecting data. While Joshi said he had not seen evidence of it in Arkansas, there is much concern that rising temperatures may cause flowering cycles and the beginning of seasonal bee activity to get out of sync.

Solitary wild bees could emerge early and not find any food, he said.

Managed bees and wild bee populations have to compete for ever-shrinking resources, compounding the problem.

Beekeepers who maintain managed populations for breeding, honey or pollination services are already looking to researchers for the answers they need to restore health and stability for their hives.

Joshi said everyone can make changes to help wild bee populations recover.Homeowners and gardeners should be careful about pesticide use, he said. Farmers use the least amount necessary to protect their crops for economic reasons. Homeowners use pesticides for comfort to keep insects out of their homes and gardeners use them for aesthetic purposes, to keep their gardens pretty. Joshi recommends using pesticides that are less toxic to bees or natural alternatives, if possible, and to time their use for when bees are not active or present.

Maintaining non-compacted, well-drained soils offers suitable nesting substrates for ground-nesting bees, Joshi said. He suggested drilling holes in scrap pieces of wood and hanging them in trees at least 5 to 6 feet off the ground for tunnel-dwellers.

To provide food sources, Joshi recommended planting a variety of native wildflowers.

Many exotic garden plants will not be suitable, Joshi said. Its best to use a mix of colors and plant heights, as well as a sequence of plants that bloom at different times of the year while bees are active, usually from April through about mid-October, he said.

Joshi is conducting a study now to correlate specific pairings of bee species to plant species in Arkansas. Were looking at different flowers to identify which bee species are using them, he said.

Different species have different preferences, Joshi said. We want to learn what those are.

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Scientists try to stem the tide of bee losses - talkbusiness.net

Image via Peter Parks / AFP (L) and Flickr user Harley Kingston,CC licence 2.0 (R)

Conservationists and wildlife experts have expressed grave concern that Australian state governments are continuing to log unburned forests that are home to vulnerable koala populations.

Estimates suggest that at least 5,000 koalas were killed and over 2 million hectares of habitat was destroyed in the state of New South Wales during the 2019/20 bushfiresa devastating blow to a species that is already facing the compounding risks of climate change, urban development and deforestation.

In light of these threats, a recent government inquiry found that the states koalas could become extinct by 2050 unless there is urgent government intervention to prevent habitat loss.

Yet despite a number of clear recommendations from that same inquirythat the NSW government urgently prioritise the protection of koala habitat in urban planning, for example, and that they ban the opening up of old growth forests to loggingthe state-owned logging agency Forestry Corporation is continuing to cut down trees in increasingly rare koala habitats.

Its a scandal that the government isnt doing whats required to prevent the extinction of one of our most iconic species, James Tremain, from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, told Vice News over the phone. Theyre schizophrenic on the issue. They say they have a koala strategy and an ambition to increase the population of koalas, but theyve introduced laws that have made it much easier to destroy koala habitat.

The recent bushfires destroyed millions of hectares of native bushland, but the NSW government has largely maintained the intensity of its logging operations: pledging to maintain wood supply at the same rate as before the disaster. As Tremain explained, that effectively means more intense logging operations across the state as corporations try to yield the same volume of timber from a significantly reduced area of bushland.

Forestry Corporation documents released through parliamentary processes showed that 85 percent of forest previously designated for logging on NSWs south coast was burned in the bushfires, along with about 44 percent on the north coast. In response, the Forestry Corporation increased its logging intensity to keep up with the demand for timber.

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW previously asked the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to investigate the logging, but was told that operations could not be halted when Forestry Corporation was not in breach of its approvals.

Unfortunately for koalas, they tend to like the same kinds of trees that loggers likeso theyre in direct competition, he said. The main extinction pressure thats placed on koalas is habitat loss, primarily from logging for timber production or land clearing for agriculture. And although there is a desire for the government to do the right thing, there are powerful industry interests to prevent it from doing what has to be done.

Video footage recorded by arborist and conservationist Kailas Wild reveals that logging operations are continuing in some of the last remaining koala habitats in NSW, in the Lower Bucca State Forest on the states north coast. Wild, whos worked in koala conservation since 2010, understands the ramifications that deforestation can inflict on biodiverse ecosystemsand he fears the governments business as usual approach could be devastating to already vulnerable wildlife populations.

The fact that theres just been no pause or stocktake from the NSW Government to be like lets just see whether this is going to cause impact is worrying, he told Vice News. These bushfires completely changed the game. I've seen with my own eyes the old growth forest that fires completely obliterated, and the habitat that no longer exists, and its really shifted and increased the value of these native forests.

Wild further noted that hes worried the remaining koala populations in NSW and Australia are even less than we thinkand that if the NSW government and state premier Gladys Berejiklian continue to neglect meaningful action on wildlife protection and habitat preservation, the extinction of koalas in the state could come even sooner than current projections suggest.

The fear is that 2050 is an optimistic estimate, he said.

Associate Professor Mathew Crowther, from the University of Sydneys School of Life and Environmental Sciences, said that although it is unlikely the whole koala species will go extinct in the near future, continued logging, habitat loss and fragmentation in areas where koalas live could increase the probability of localised extinctionthat is, the loss of koalas from certain areas.

It all depends on the amount of koala habitat that is to be logged, and what appropriate mitigation has been applied to maintain koalas in the area, he told Vice News over email. The Berejiklian government unfortunately has a very poor record regarding habitat and threatened species protection, and weakening of environmental legislation has led to greatly increased land clearing.

Professor Crowther said that in order to effectively mitigate risks to koala populations, governments need to stop the fragmentation of their habitats, reduce developments near areas of koala populations, invest in research addressing threats to koalas, and implement policies to target some of those other threats, such as climate change.

In the short-term, though, with Australia still reeling in the aftermath of the most devastating fire season on record, he suggested that logging corporations should refrain from wading into potentially fragile ecosystems.

Any logging of koala habitat at this time, when the full extent of the bushfires on koala and other species populations has yet to be ascertained, is short-sighted and potentially very damaging to the species, he said.

Vice News approached the NSW Forestry Corporation for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

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Koala Habitats that Survived Australias Bushfires are Now Being Logged - VICE

In a remote slice of Triunfo do Xingu, deep in Brazils northern Par state, swaths of lush forest have been engulfed by flames in recent days. In another stretch to the north, a patch of untouched jungle has been almost entirely cleared this year. In countless other parts of this vast protected region, the Amazon is being cut down and burned at a dizzying speed.

The rea de Proteo Ambiental (APA) Triunfo do Xingu spans some 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) across the municipalities of So Flix do Xingu and Altamira, long strongholds of Brazilian cattle ranching. It encompasses thousands of hectares of dense jungle and boasts a rich diversity of plant and animal species. It is also home to Indigenous groups and traditional peoples, who rely on the forest to survive.

Under federal protection since 2006, the territory is supposed to be used only for sustainable development, with landowners required to keep some 80% of the forest intact. When it was created more than a decade ago, Triunfo do Xingu was intended as a buffer that would protect vulnerable areas beyond its boundaries, like the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory and the Terra do Meio Ecological Station. The ecologically-rich Xingu Basin within which it is nestled is made up of some 28 conservation areas and 18 Indigenous territories.

But the area has come under pressure, becoming one of the most deforested regions in the Amazon in recent years. It lost some 436,000 hectares of forest between 2006 and 2019, with some 5% cleared last year alone, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland (UMD). Overall, the territory has lost nearly 30% of its forest cover, according to Francisco Fonseca, who works for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a nonprofit focused on environmental conservation.

The problem is that a lack of land oversight led to this area being more and more occupied, more and more threatened, Fonseca said in an interview in late July. And this will now only worsen going forward.

The incursion into Triunfo do Xingu has only intensified this year, amid a wider surge in deforestation and burning across the Brazilian Amazon. In May and June, some 6,973 hectares of forest were cleared in APA accounting for two-thirds of deforestation in protected areas within the Xingu Basin, according to data from Rede Xingu+, a network of environmental and Indigenous groups working in the region.

These are areas where there definitely should not be any burning, said one advocacy source who asked to remain anonymous due to security concerns. And they are in flames.

With Triunfo do Xingu under attack, the surrounding territories it was meant to protect have also come under pressure. To the northeast, the deforestation is now chipping away at the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, local sources say. To the southeast, the clearing is edging into the Kayapo Indigenous Territory something we had never seen before, Fonseca said. In the Trincheira Bacaj Indigenous Territory, further north, deforestation rose tenfold in May and June, according to Rede Xingu+.

With this weakening of APA, it has become easier to reach conservation parks, indigenous territories beyond, Fonseca said. It ultimately didnt end up becoming the buffer it was supposed to become.

The destruction in Triunfo do Xingu is emblematic of a wider assault on the Amazon that is picking up speed this year. While large-scale burning captured international headlines in 2019, there are already signs it could worsen this year: in July, fires surged 28% over the same period last year, according to data from INPE, Brazils National Institute for Space Research.

The number of fires has soared in Triunfo do Xingu too. Over the last two months, NASA satellites picked up 3,842 fire alerts in the territory. August and September when Brazils fire season is normally at its peak are expected to bring even more intense burning.

In some cases, perpetrators had previously invested in deforesting the land and are now back to finish clearing it by setting it ablaze, according to Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). The bulk of the deforestation and burning across the Amazon is taking place on public lands that are directly the responsibility of the government, Alencar said. She added that many of the areas under attack have not yet been demarcated or are shielded by weak environmental protection.

Were seeing a huge volume of deforestation, it signals there are people investing in deforesting the Amazon, she said during a press briefing in late July.

Like in much of the Amazon, the drivers of deforestation in Triunfo do Xingu are diverse and complex. About two-thirds of the protected area lies within So Flix do Xingu, Brazils largest cattle-producing municipality and home to nearly 20 times more livestock than people. Up until recently, the biggest threat to the conservation area was cattle ranching, as more and more of its forests gave way to sprawling pastures.

But environmentalists warn that new threats are gaining ground. More recently, the area has emerged as an epicenter of land-grabbing and illegal mining, amid a surge in invaders who are betting that protections on the land they are occupying will eventually be loosened or scrapped altogether.

We have seen a wave of land-grabbing, Fonseca said. The pattern has changed many of these openings are now for speculation only, not for planting or pastures.

Environmentalists say invaders have been emboldened by President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been a vocal opponent of environmental protections and has repeatedly threatened to open up protected areas to wildcat mining. He blamed the current wave of fires engulfing the Amazon on Indigenous and traditional peoples.

The main driver is the total lack of environmental policy from this government, said Romulo Batista, Greenpeace Brazils Amazon campaigner.People who are disposed to invading are feeling emboldened.

Under Bolsonaros leadership, environmental enforcement has also taken a hit. The far-right president has repeatedly slashed budgets for environmental enforcement agencies like Ibama and ICMBio, while also attempting to stop their agents from destroying equipment found during raids on illegal operations in the Amazon.

The government has also been mulling a law allowing squatters to self-declare as the rightful owners of land, although the process was put on hold following an international outcry over the message it would send to landgrabbers. Environment minister Ricardo Salles, meanwhile, came under fire in May after urging the government to take advantage of the distraction of the coronavirus crisis to quietly weaken protections of the Amazon.

In the Xingu Basin, speculators have become bolder, feeling that the government is on their side, local sources said. Invaders have increasingly been razing small lots of land in patterns typical of land-grabbing, the advocacy source noted, in the hopes that this activity will eventually be legalized.

They arrive there and start clearing its completely illegal, the source said. And there is, behind this, a rejection of these indigenous territories and an expectation that the land they claim will eventually be legalized, that it will become theirs.

Local sources say weaker enforcement is already having a tangible impact in the Xingu Basin. Earlier this year, Ibama agents carried out a mass crackdown on illegal mines in several Indigenous territories including Apyterewa and Trincheira Bacaj, setting the equipment they seized on fire. Just weeks later, three high-ranking Ibama officials were fired. Emboldened, the miners have resumed operations in both of these territories recently, according to local sources.

People see this as an incentive to begin invading again, the advocacy source said. They feel a certain degree of security, they return knowing that nothing will happen to them.

Faced with mounting pressure to respond to the latest wave of deforestation, the government launched a highly-publicized military operation in early May aimed at cracking down on deforestation and burning in the Amazon. Initially meant to last a month, Operation Brasil Verde 2 was recently extended until November.

In July, the federal government also imposed a moratorium on burning across the Amazon and Pantanal for 120 days, in a bid to curb illegal fires that have been spreading out of control. Across the Amazon, ranchers often burn degraded pastures to renew them and small producers prepare their plots for planting agricultural crops by setting them ablaze. Oftentimes, these blazes spread further than intended and add more pressure on forests.

But these government measures appear to have had little impact on deterring illegal deforestation and criminal burning. In June when the federal governments crackdown on forest clearing was in full swing Brazil registered its highest level of deforestation in 13 years for that month. Meanwhile, satellites recorded some 1,314 fire alerts across the Amazon between July 15 and July 21, even though the moratorium on burning had already been in place for two weeks. Some 46% of these alerts were registered in the state of Par, according to Batista.

Combating deforestation has to be done year-round, Batista said. Combatting burning doesnt happen only in the moment when the forest is already on fire.

Meanwhile, the invasion of Indigenous lands carries even more risk now, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages Brazil. Because of their relative isolation, Indigenous peoples tend to be more vulnerable to even common diseases. With a highly infectious virus like COVID-19, the risks are even greater for these communities, which have a history of being decimated by disease brought in from the outside.

There have already been 22,021 confirmed cases and 625 deaths among Indigenous people due to the novel coronavirus, with 148 communities affected across Brazil. The Kayapo Indigenous Territory, which is being invaded by illegal miners, has the highest number of COVID-19 cases of any Indigenous territory, according to Rede Xingu+.

Meanwhile, as the pandemic spreads into rural parts of Brazil, worries are also mounting that underfunded health networks that are already struggling to cope with COVID-19 may be further strained by patients sickened by ash and smoke. Last year, the plumes of smoke darkened the skies of Sao Paulo, thousands of kilometers away from the Amazon.

We already have hospitals overflowing with people, Batista said. Now, they could end up even more overwhelmed.

Banner image of a White-nosed saki (Chiropotes albinasus) by Valdir Hobus via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SE 2.0).

Editors note:This story was powered byPlaces to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time satellite data, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data.

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Brazilian Amazon protected areas 'in flames' as land-grabbers invade - Mongabay.com

In late 2015, I arrived for the second time at a place called Orokolo Bay on Papua New Guineas south coast. The bay is a long grey-black beach, densely forested with hibiscus and coconut trees. As we approached by dinghy from the east, clusters of houses could be glimpsed fleetingly through the bush.

I had arrived with colleagues from PNGs National Museum and Art Gallery to commence an archaeological project in partnership with two village communities, called Larihairu and Kaivakovu. Working alongside local experts in Oral Tradition, I hoped to use Western archaeological techniquessurveys, excavations, carbon dating, and analyses of material cultureto unravel new aspects of the human history of Papua New Guineas south coast.

But in the weeks that followed, I became aware that we were covering old ground. Our archaeological surveys were not revealing previously unknown archaeological sites. Rather, locals introduced us to their ancestral places.

Many of these places bore surface traces of their ancestors lives, such as scatters of earthenware pottery sherds and shell middens, making it obvious how and why people were aware of them. To my surprise, though, the locals also had an intimate knowledge of what lay beneath the ground. Through the daily activities of cultivating crops (called gardening in the Pacific) and building structures, people in Orokolo Bay have been continually digging up and interpreting evidence of their ancestral past for generations.

This kind of unique archaeologyhistorical meaning-making by non-academic Indigenous peoples and conducted as part of daily lifecontinually breathes life into and sustains local Oral Traditions. The locals told us about how these cultural deposits, along with distinctive layers of dark sediment in the ground, spoke of the actions of their ancestors in recent generations and of a time when the Earth itself was formed in the cosmological past. All this gave me a new appreciation for the Oral Traditions of Indigenous peoples and how they may incorporate not just memories but also physical evidence of the past.

In Orokolo Bay and other parts of the south coast of PNG, people are in the business of working with the land. When locals want to establish a new garden, they find a location where the sandy soil is well-drained and fertile. Whether the garden is new or being remade, areas of vegetation and undergrowth are cut down and burned. Then holes are dug to plant the varied and colorful crops that grow so abundantly in the tropics, such as taro, yams, pineapple, sweet potato, and corn. In this process, the ground surface is laid bare and the subsurface exposed. Activities such as housebuilding have similar effects: Surface vegetation is cleared, and foundation posts are dug deep into the ground.

Some archaeological sites, like Popo, lie where the coastline used to be. Catherine Gilman/SAPIENS

Today the people of Orokolo Bay build their gardens in cleared forest patches a couple of kilometers inlandan area that was once situated on the coastline. Throughout the human history of coastal occupation in this part of the world, beaches have been growing rapidly southward at a rate of around 3 meters per year as river sediments pile up and extend the coast. Previous archaeological studies in the region have shown that people moved their villages with the changing coastline, preferring to live near the sea to access marine food and trade routes. For many years, the old inland sites have been overgrown with dense tropical forest. But within the past five generations, people have cleared areas of this forest to establish gardens.

On a Wednesday morning in September 2015, our archaeological team had just finished the technical drawings of a site we had excavated. Kaivakovu village elderswho had been busy with community meetingsarrived to take us on a survey of their ancestral sites. Each at least 40 years my senior, the elders took off at a startling pace; they threaded a trail through numerous named and storied places situated on ancient beach plains and hillsides. Wherever we saw evidence of recent gardening activity, there were physical remains of the past spilling out of the ground. At one site (called Maivipi), one of the elders had just dug scores of banana plants into the ground. Each plant was now surrounded by dozens of recently disturbed pottery sherds. At another site, we saw once-buried shells and animal bones strewn across a large communal garden area.

For locals, these materials signify two things. The pottery sherds are reminders of close social relationships with Motu people who live approximately 400 kilometers to the east. Up until the mid-1950s, the Motu (from todays Port Moresby region) would annually sail into villages such as those in Orokolo Bay, bringing with them tens of thousands of earthenware pots. They would return to their families months later with tons of food in the form of sago palm starch, along with new canoe hulls made from giant hardwood logs.

Women from Larihairu village use Hiri-traded pottery to make a porridge. Chris Urwin

Second, the remains of pots and food are reminders of the large, thriving villages that the locals forebears established. Women used their pots to cook food for daily sustenance and for communal feasts. Fragments of the pots are reminders of work and life in the village, and their presence indicates where centers of domestic activity might have been located.

Of the ancient villages, a 1.3-kilometer-long place called Popo looms large in local and regional Oral Traditions.

Popo is a legendary migration site for Orokolo Bay residents and for many other clan (biraipi) and village groups living in coastal locations up to 125 kilometers farther to the east. According to local Oral Traditions, the village was inhabited by ancestors between 16 and seven generations ago, or roughly 400175 years ago. (Western dating techniques put it at 700 to 200 years ago.) Clan-based social structures, 15-meter-tall cathedral-like buildings called longhouses, and ceremonies were all developed there. Locals recount that the site was divided into estates or suburbs, which belonged to the different clans that today occupy the coastal villages. The place known as Maivipi is one of these estates. Popo is also a cosmological origin place; their stories tell how the entire world was made there.

Interestingly, there is a strong correlation between the intensiveness of contemporary agricultural activity in various spots throughout Popo and the perceived antiquity of those sites. Estates where more land has been cleared and where people regularly encounter pottery sherds or shell middens are generally perceived to be more ancient. The remains have also helped locals to determine where the center of the village or the longhouse might have been located.

This process can be seen across the globe. Archaeological remains are most often found incidentally during land clearing or excavation for development, including in well-studied cities like London and Rome. Where there are concentrations of sites or finds, western archaeologists tend to view these places as especially ancient.

During our excavations at clan suburbs called Miruka and Koavaipi, we found thin layers of jet-black sand. According to Western geomorphology, these are layers of iron-rich magnetite sand: sediment that was transported by rivers from PNGs volcanic mountains into the Coral Sea.

But locals see their ancestors actions in the sand. Paul Mahiroson of the famed Orokolo Bay historian Morea Pekorotold me that the black sand was laid by his ancestors when they were creating the land. Mahiro said that two ancestor beings traveled from the west in a magical sky-borne canoe sometime in the deep, cosmological past. In their hand, they had black sand, he recounts, which they left at Popo and many other nearby coastal locations. When gardeners unearth these thin layers, they are reminded of their ancestors travels and actions.

Of course, Western scientific and local ways of reading the past do not always agree. For example, our excavations and radiocarbon-dating program provide a different order of suburb establishment at Popo than the Oral Traditions. Some of the youngest suburbs, according to Oral Tradition, are the oldest in our radiocarbon sequence. Likewise, according to Western science, the black sand layers formed in two relatively recent events: one dating to around 650 years ago and the other just before 200 years ago.

These temporal contradictions dont necessarily cause conflict. One night, while socializing in a house in Larihairu village, a younger community member asked me what I knew of the past. I replied that, as an archaeologist, I hoped to investigate human history using the materials people left behind. He replied, You only know about the human story, but we know about the mythical beings and spiritual beings.

I got the sense that Western scientific chronologies do not pose an existential threat to the mythical and spiritual pasts of Orokolo Bay. Within the Oral Traditions themselves, there are already overlapping and interwoven chronologies, each of which serves a different purpose. Popo is understood simultaneously as a migration site occupied between 16 and seven generations ago, and as a timeless origin place. Carbon dates provide another parallel chronology, which can help place the site in a broader context and enable a comparison of the history of places along PNGs south coast. They can also be used by locals to serve their purposes, for example to argue for government protection of certain sites from mineral extraction or deforestation

The Orokolo Bay example also has crucial implications for how Western archaeologists understand oral Traditional Knowledge. Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in millennia-old Indigenous Oral Traditions from North America and Australia that record details of environmental changes and interactions with long-since-extinct animals. Aboriginal Oral Traditions from across coastal Australia describe a time in which sea levels rose dramatically, which Western science dates to a time from 13,000 to 7,000 years ago. Even more remarkably, stories told by Gunditjmara people, Aboriginal Australians, may describe a series of eruptions that took place 37,000 years ago.

Pottery sherds sit next to a banana plant at the Maivipi estate. Chris Urwin

Outsiders who study Oral Traditions often refer to them as memories. The word suggests that experiential information was passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone.

What if Oral Traditions are not only handed-down stories? What if they incorporate Indigenous peoples knowledge of the archaeological and geographical features they dwell among?

In Orokolo Bay, people read the ancestral past in their landscapes. They identify stratigraphic features and relate these to the stories told to them by their elders. They observe concentrations of pottery and weave their interpretations of old village sites into the Oral Traditions their families curate. These interactions hint that Indigenous archaeologies and other forms of landscape knowledge are crucial to how Oral Traditions are sustained and maintained across generations.

It is time that non-Indigenous people reconsider the remarkable (and complex) ways in which Indigenous peoples record and reconstruct the past. I think outsiders will continue to be amazed by communities Oral Traditional technologies and what they record.

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Where Archaeology and Oral Tradition Coexist - SAPIENS - SAPIENS

Eat JUST, the food tech behind the famous plant-based egg known simply as JUST, has just announced that as of August this year, it has sold the equivalent of more than 50 million eggs. The brands vegan eggs are made from mung beans, and comes with a far smaller environmental footprint than conventional animal protein sources.

The San Francisco, California-based food tech has recently announced that it has sold the equivalent of more than 50 million eggs, but all made with 100% plant-based ingredients since the company first came into being in late 2011. Its vegan egg alternative is made using mung beans and contains no cholesterol while leaving a far lighter footprint on the planet.

In addition to its award-winning liquid plant-based egg product and vegan mayonnaise, the brand added pre-cooked frozen folded vegan eggs to its line-up, which hit U.S. grocery chains Safeway and Whole Foods earlier this year. It has recently been made available in Hong Kong at Green Common stores citywide.

JUST entered the Asian market with its liquid egg back in 2018, and is currently available in a number of geographies including Hong Kong, Singapore and mainland China.

According to the company, its plant-based JUST Egg requires 98% less water, has a 93% smaller carbon footprint and uses 86% less land than conventional animal sources. Selling the plant-based equivalent of 50 million eggs has translated to saving an estimated 7.5 million kilograms of carbon dioxide, 1.9 billion gallons of water and 3,000 acres of land.

In its latest sustainability report, the brand has reaffirmed its commitment to making sustainable proteins and said that it strives to source mung beans, oils and all other ingredients that account for 1% or more of their product formulations only from sources that are in current agricultural production.

This will reduce the demand for unsustainable farming, which is currently driving deliberate land clearing and destruction of high conservation value habitats, leading to mass biodiversity loss and more greenhouse gas emissions.

We are sensing that there is no natural world where the human animal is separate from all animals. There is only this small, interconnected world where every breath of air and bite of food is made up of molecules that have been associated with another living thing.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists have repeatedly warned that the continued loss of nature and biodiversity poses an increased threat of more frequent and deadlier pandemics to come.

We are sensing that there is no natural world where the human animal is separate from all animals, said Josh Tetrick, CEO and co-founder of JUST. There is only this small, interconnected world where every breath of air and bite of food is made up of molecules that have been associated with another living thing.

Looking ahead, apart from plant-based eggs, the company wants to add cultivated meat to its offerings meat made from real animal cells. It has set its sights on creating cultured Wagyu beef using cells from Toriyama cows, which will then be sold by Awano Food Group, a premier supplier of meat and seafood.

Currently, raising livestock for meat accounts for around 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions and uses around 70% of agricultural land. Like plant-based alternatives, cultivated proteins represent one of the core core food technologies that will help bring about a more sustainable, ethical and safe food system.

Lead image courtesy of Eat JUST.

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Eat JUST Has Sold The Plant-Based Equivalent Of 50 Million Eggs - Green Queen Media

Upland donation is largest in organization's history.

WELLFLEET The Wellfleet Conservation Trust added an additional 18.5 acres to its inventory last week, thanks to the largest upland donation gift in its 36-year history.

Jacqualyn Fouse turned over a large parcel of native pine forest overlooking the Herring River estuary.

The land extends 1,300 feet along the eastern bank of the Herring River. The steep river bank, rugged topography and some Cape Cod National Seashore property preclude access to the river.

The land has significant conservation value for rare and endangered species, according to Dennis OConnell, the trust's president.

Weve seen Eastern box turtles and diamondback terrapins, he said.

Fishers, coyotes, foxes and a host of other animals also call the region home.

I havent tracked birds myself, but its got to be a great location for many different species, O'Connell said. The land runs 1,300 feet along the high eastern bank overlooking the Herring River at elevations extending higher than 60 feet, offering views of Cape Cod Bay.

The parcel is well above the expected water levels for the Herring River Restoration Project. That multimillion dollar project aims to restore tidal flow into the Herring River estuary that was choked off when the Chequessett Neck Road Dike was built 100 years ago.

Fouse earned a master's degree in environmental management in 2019. She studied carbon sequestration in the Herring River floodplain for her coursework as a volunteer intern for the Herring River Restoration Project.

The opportunity to support the project reinforced her views on the importance of restoring and protecting the river, as well as the land surrounding it.

Shes just that kind of person, OConnell said of Fouse. Shes committed to conservation. And this is in her neighborhood. It's all good.

Fouse also donated a building lot to the trust in 2015. That parcel is contiguous to the most recent land donation.

The trust will keep the area in its natural state, preserving the habitat and natural functions of the land. The organization also plans to create limited walking trails to scenic views across the Herring River valley. Access to the land and limited parking will be available along Chequessett Neck Road only, not through the club.

OConnell said the trust was extremely grateful to Fouse for stepping up and making a conservation success happen.

It is exciting to think that this beautiful land has never been developed, and never will be, he said.

This didnt happen overnight, OConnell added. The donation took about a year to finalize from start to finish.

Fouse acquired the land from the Chequessett Yacht & Country Club after it was deemed surplus to current and planned golf course renovations. Barbara Boone, the club's general manager, said the business needed capital for repairs and improvements to the club. She called the land donation a win for the club, the town and the public.

The Cape Cod Commission had to give approval to the club to carve out the18.5 acres fromits 105 acre parcel.

"It had to be the easiest project to get through the commission," Boone said.

Fouse said giving back to her adopted community gave her great joy. The transplanted Texan said she is big on taking local action and is happy to have the means to do so.

"Nothing can compare to the Cape," she said.

The donation will help protect uplands adjacent to wetlands. There will be no carbon loss from tree clearing or nitrogen overload from development.

Fousethanked the trust, the Chequessett Yacht & Country Club Board of Directors and Mark Robinson of The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts, Inc. for their collaboration and commitment to the project.

Follow Denise Coffey on Twitter: @DeniseCoffeyCCT.

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Wellfleet trust nets more than 18 acres of conservation land - Cape Cod Times

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management wants Rhode Islanders to keep an eye out for signs of a disease that kills rabbits, both wild and domestic.

The DEM is asking residents to report unusual cases of rabbit deaths, because it could mean rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus 2 (RHDV2) has spread into the Ocean State.

The highly contagious disease spread across Australia in two years, 2015 and 2016, and has now been detected in North America, according to the DEM. As of May 12, RHDV2 had been confirmed in Vancouver Island, Canada, and nine U.S. states, including New York.

"Once RHDV2 gets into our wild rabbit populations, it will be very difficult to manage or eliminate," the DEM says.

The disease affects both domestic and wild rabbits, including the Eastern cottontail and the threatened New England cottontail.

"Many times, the only signs of the disease are sudden death and blood-stained noses caused by internal bleeding," the DEM says in a press release. "Infected rabbits may also develop a fever, be hesitant to eat, or show respiratory or nervous signs."

The virus is not related to coronavirus and does not affect human health, although people can spread it to rabbits by carrying the virus on their clothing or shoes.

New England cottontails were native to New England, but land clearing for agriculture destroyed much of their habitat, and theyve been replaced largely by the Eastern cottontail, which was more suited to the landscape, according to Scott N. Marshall, deputy chief Rhode Island state veterinarian.

The two species look "very similar and it really takes an expert eye to tell the difference," Marshall says.

The disease poses a particular threat to New England cottontails because their numbers are so low. "When there is a population already threatened because of low numbers in the wild, losing a few animals might mean losing an entire population," Marshall says.

While kids might enjoy watching bunnies hop around their yards, and gardeners might see them as nuisances, rabbits have their role to play in nature, Marshall says.

"We dont ever want to see any species become extinct, especially when that is coming at the hands of human beings destroying their habitat," Marshall says. "Rabbits, like virtually all species on the planet, have both good and bad traits (caveat, humans define what is good and bad). They are destructive to our gardens, so we generally think of that as bad. That said, rabbits were around long before people decided that it is a good idea to have a couple lettuce plants in our yard.

"They serve as a food source for various wild carnivores, like bobcats, coyotes and foxes. They also serve as a food source for raptors like hawks and owls," he says.

People who have domestic rabbits must be especially careful how they handle their rabbits. For example, the DEM says, "Do not allow pet, feral or wild rabbits to have contact with your rabbits or gain entry to the facility or home."

Residents whove seen signs of unusual rabbit deaths or otherwise suspect that RHDV2 is affecting local rabbits should contact Marshall at (401) 222-2781 or scott.marshall@dem.ri.gov; Dylan Ferreira, senior wildlife biologist in the DEMs Division of Fish and Wildlife, at (401) 789-0281 or dylan.ferreira@dem.ri.gov; or Sarah Riley, implementation aide in the Division of Fish and Wildlife, (401) 789-0281 or sarah.riley@dem.ri.gov.

More information on the virus and recommendations for prevention are available on DEMs website at http://www.dem.ri.gov/programs/bnatres/fishwild/pdf/disease-rabbit-hemo.pdf

jperry@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7614

On Twitter: @jgregoryperry

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Another thing to worry about in R.I.: Rabbit disease - newportri.com

There are such a lot of tales swirling concerning the coronavirus, its exhausting to inform whats truth or fiction. Folks have been holed up for weeks obsessively looking at pc screens sifting by means of conflicting and complicated recommendation about find out how to keep protected and deal with the virus.

Time for a actuality verify. Right heres what essentially the most credible authorities the World Well being World Well being Group, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention and the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Ailments know and are nonetheless studying concerning the virus.

An individual in all probability bought it from an animal, however well being officers arent positive.

The primary human instances of COVID-19 have been recognized in Wuhan Metropolis, China in December 2019. At this stage, its not attainable to find out exactly how people in China have been initially contaminated, based on the World Well being World Well being Group.

Its thought that [it] jumped the species barrier and initially contaminated peoplethis may very well be a home animal, a wild animal, or a domesticated wild animal and, as of but, has not been recognized, the group stated.

Someplace between a number of hours and a number of days, based on the WHO.

Its not sure how lengthy the virus that causes COVID-19 survives on surfaces, however it appears to behave like different coronaviruses. Research recommend that coronaviruses might persist on surfaces for a number of hours or up to a number of days,the group stated.

To wash the floor, wash it with a easy disinfectant to kill the virus and shield your self and others, the WHO advises.

Its unlikely {that a} bundle despatched to your house together with grocery deliveries or different provides can be carrying the virus, based on the WHO.

The chance of an contaminated individual contaminating business items is low and the chance of catching the virus that causes COVID-19 from a bundle that has been moved, traveled, and uncovered to totally different situations and temperature can also be low, it states.

Authorities nonetheless dont know if masks assist a wholesome individual outdoors of a medical setting keep away from catching the virus. The CDC is investigating.

The thought of getting a way more broad, community-wide use of masks outdoors of the well being care setting is below very lively dialogue on the activity drive. The CDC group is taking a look at that very rigorously, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illness, stated earlier this week.

Different well being officers suggest carrying one provided that youre already sick.

Solely put on a masks in case you are sick with COVID-19 signs (particularly coughing) or taking care of somebody who might have COVID-19. Disposable face masks can solely be used as soon as, the WHO advises.

Sure, however there havent been many confirmed instances, and canines are usually not more likely to unfold it.

Whereas there was one occasion of a canine being contaminated in Hong Kong, so far, there is no such thing as a proof {that a} canine, cat or any pet can transmit COVID-19, based on the WHO.

The CDC studies that two canine have been contaminated, and recommends avoiding contact with your pet together with, petting, snuggling, being kissed or licked in case you are sick and washing your fingers after dealing with animals.

Sure, it seems to hit these demographics hardest.

A CDC examine confirmed that round 80 p.c of coronavirus deaths have been amongst adults 65 years and older. Folks with extreme power medical situations like coronary heart illness, lung illness and diabetes, for instance appear to be at larger threat of growing severe COVID-19 sickness, the CDC stated.

Nonetheless, many younger folks have been significantly sick. The CDC additionally reported that about 20% of hospitalized sufferers have been between the ages of 20 and 44.

It normally begins with a cough or a fever.

The commonest signs of COVID-19 are fever, tiredness, and dry cough, based on the WHO. Some sufferers might have aches and pains, nasal congestion, runny nostril, sore throat or diarrhea. These signs are normally delicate and start regularly. Some folks turn into contaminated however dont develop any signs and dont really feel unwell.

Docs are testing out a number of totally different medication together with antiviral and antimalarial medicines however nothing has been scientifically confirmed to work.

There isnt a proof that present medication can forestall or treatment the illness, based on the WHO.

It could actually journey three to 6 ft, most officers agree.

The illness can unfold from individual to individual by means of small droplets from the nostril or mouth that are unfold when an individual with COVID-19 coughs or exhales. These droplets land on objects and surfaces across the individual, based on the WHO. Folks can catch COVID-19 in the event that they breathe in droplets from an individual with COVID-19 who coughs out or exhales droplets. That is why you will need to keep greater than three ft away from an individual whos sick.

Well being officers are nonetheless trying to find solutions as a result of some contaminated persons are asymptomatic and others werent examined earlier than dying. Final week, the CDC launched a report noting that of the 170,000 coronavirus instances reported globally between Feb. 12 and March 16, roughly 7,000 about 4.1 p.c resulted in loss of life.

Of the 213,144 folks contaminated within the US, 4,513 folks have died, or about 2 p.c, the CDC stated Thursday.

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Coronavirus facts and myths: Clearing up COVID-19 confusion with truth - Gruntstuff

The iconic American newspaper The Washington Post adopted an inimitable slogan in 2017, which sums up a perennial threat: Democracy Dies in Darkness. Ironically, we are witnessing the sad and unconscionable death of nature in the Ides of COVID-19, and yet nobody seems to notice the approaching darkness.

India has refused to buck the old way of doing things, as though COVID-19 were just a bad dream. It has not found a new way of thinking about future transactions, which is as astonishing for its naivet as it is for persisting with egregious wrongs of the past. I allude not to the neglect of healthcare that is starkly obvious from the vehement surges of the viral infection but to a root cause that is germane to pandemics that loom in the future.

The issue is the draft Environment Impact Assessment 2020 (EIA) notification, published on March 12 the day after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Heath Organisation (WHO). To any individual or organisation with even a passing acquaintance with nature, this draft is preposterous if ever one was. That the Indian nodal ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change conceived and proposed it is plainly arrant.

For, the draft EIA flies in the face of the rationale of the ministry, which is as follows:

The primary concerns of the Ministry are implementation of policies and programmes relating to conservation of the countrys natural resources including its lakes and rivers, its biodiversity, forests and wildlife, ensuring the welfare of animals, and the prevention and abatement of pollution. While implementing these policies and programmes, the Ministry is guided by the principle of sustainable development and enhancement of human well-being.

Now, take a look at the rationale of the EIA from an abstract of EIA in a Risk Society, a 2007 paper by Joe Weston, who taught planning at Oxford Brookes University, which was published in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management:

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was developed and introduced in the 1960s during a time that was dominated by three key societal influences. These were the growth of modern environmental concern, the drive for more rational, scientific and objective environmental decision making and a desire for more public involvement in environmental decision making. The legitimacy of EIA, as a tool to aid decision making, lies in its ability to meet the requirements of all three demands, the chief among these being its ability to be a systematic scientific and rational approach to decision making. Yet today we live in a society that no longer accepts the rationalist model as either possible or desirable. The deference to the expert and our trust in science and technology has steadily declined during the period of EIAs development and widespread use. Today, EIA still depends for its legitimacy on its claim to provide a systematic and scientific approach to assessments, while society has moved on.

Plentiful infractions of the foundational principles of EIA are at the heart of Indias latest draft EIA, for which many environmentalists and commentators have rightly criticised it. Beyond the proposal for post facto approval of projects, exemption of activities such as extraction, sourcing or borrowing of ordinary earth for linear projects and dredging or de-silting of dams, reservoirs, rivers and canals, the dilution of environmental standards in the draft EIA militates against the Rio Declaration of 1992 that helped set up the EIA framework in India. It also flouts several multilateral environmental agreements to which India is party.

Critics have expressed concerns that the EIA will become a tool to wield political control such that economic projects and actors can be moulded to political ends.

These are legitimate and well-founded apprehensions that are hard to quibble with. One cannot miss the shrinkage of time for public hearings from 30 to 20 days, nor that the government of India is attempting to alter Centre-state relations by giving itself more control over how the state-level regulatory authorities and expert committees are constituted.

But environmental violations aside, consider the buccaneering desecrations of nature that the EIA presages. It is these that provide a neat segue into the lessons we have not learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The novel coronavirus is of zoonotic origin: it spawned in the wild and jumped from bats to humans through an intermediate animal. The famous ecologist Peter Daszak wrote in The New York Times that unprecedented road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development, as well as globalised travel and trade make us supremely susceptible to pathogens like coronavirusesPandemics are like terrorist attacks: we know roughly where they originate and whats responsible for them, but we dont know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.

Put differently, environmental depredation facilitates pathogen reproduction and promotes human health crises, including pandemics.

To escape from the Age of Pandemics, Daszak noted, well need to treat them as a public health issue and start working on prevention in addition to responses. Our first goal should be to broaden our armoury against potential mass epidemics.

Prevention of pandemics is better and less damaging to life and property than prophylaxis in the form of vaccine. When some of us added Disease X to the WHOs priority list two years ago, Daszak wrote, we wanted to make the point that its not sufficient to develop vaccines and drugs for known agents when the next big one is likely to be a different pathogen a virus close to SARS, say, but not close enough that the same vaccine can work against both.

It is clear that the answer lies in coalescing the environment with healthcare; environmental interference feeds into diseases which leads to periodic epidemics or pandemics. In other words, any disease is a manifestation of humankinds cavalier treatment of nature, and they are largely born from Homo Sapiens hubris. For all its vainglory, humans cannot beat back nature. Instead, we will pay collectively and dearly for our environmental misadventures.

In a lacerating piece published on The New York Times on March 31, Thomas L. Friedman excoriated Trumps stock-market obsession: Mother Nature, alas, doesnt open her workday at 9:30 am or close it at 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and then take weekends off, he wrote.

Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. Thats all she is Friedman recalled one of his teachers saying: You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot manipulate her. And you certainly cannot tell her, Mother Nature, stop ruining my beautiful stock market. He distinguished a pandemic from climate change the latter does not peak, flatten out and dissipate or be permanently prevented by vaccine. Nor is there herd immunity to climate change. There are only endless impacts on the herd, he wrote eloquently.

Such warnings are not new though. Red flags were always being raised, but nobody of consequence in most of the world responded. The world was busy watching capitalism in full play, the free market at its acme, and enjoying its Indian Summer. There were once-a-while setbacks, but the rich were getting richer so how did it matter if the poor were getting poorer? The bubble was holding.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report of May 2019 sounded the alarm. The canary was out of the coal mine now.

Nature and its vital contributions to people, which together embody biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are deteriorating worldwide Both nature and natures contributions to people are vital for human existence and good quality of life While more food, energy and materials than ever before are now being supplied to people in most places, this is increasingly at the expense of natures ability to provide such contributions in the future and frequently undermines natures many other contributions, which range from water quality regulation to sense of place Biodiversitythe diversity within species, between species and of ecosystemsis declining faster than at any time in human history, it wrote.

Not that the world especially in the 1900s did not notice the unacceptable marauding of the Earth. The loss of species accelerated in that century and ecosystems fragmented. In June 1969 came the bizarre sight of Cuyahoga river in Ohio, United States, burning. There were other tell-tale signs that the worlds protective natural shield had been breached.

The rate of global change in nature during the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history, the IPBES report said. The direct drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact have been changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of organisms; climate change; pollution; and invasion of alien species.

There is no doubt that conservation goals and sustainable growth cannot be met by our current trajectory. In other words, it is too late for exorcism. We require transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors and we need governance systems to adapt to multi-sectoral planning. Strategic policy mixes could perhaps help transform the public and private sectors and achieve sustainability at the national and global levels. But these are big ifs.

To return to Friedman, he is not painting a dystopia but stating reality when he said that the first rule of scientists for climate change mitigation happens to be the first rule for public health officials of COVID-19 mitigation: Manage the unavoidable so that you can avoid the unmanageable epidemiologists will tell you that climate change may well be the next great engine for the next pandemic.

He is far from alone. The scientific journal Nature reported that the effect of climate change and the warming of the Earth have already taken a heavy toll on Australias Great Barrier Reef coral reproduction has fallen by a staggering 89% following two severe mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017.

Not as well-known are phenomena impacting other spheres of human existence. Over millennia, human habitation has concentrated within a surprisingly narrow subset of earths available climates, characterised by mean annual temperatures around 13C, Nature reported. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) said that the earths temperature in the next 50 years would rise more than it rose cumulatively over the last 6,000 years.

Growing populations will experience MATs [Mean Average Temperature] currently found in very few places. Specifically, 3.5 billion people will be exposed to MAT 29.0C, a situation found in the present climate only in 0.8% of the global land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara, but in 2070 projected to cover 19% of the global land, the study said.

It would translate to expanding extreme hot zones, as in the Saharaexcept that the Sahara covers less than one percent of the earths land surface today, while Sahara-like zones in 2070 could cover 20% of the landmass. This would likely place one of every three people alive outside the 13-degree climate niche. A finding published in the journal Science Advances in August 2017, surmised that venturing outdoors in such temperatures for even a few hours will result in death even for the fittest of humans under shaded, well-ventilated conditions.

Lest we forget, the most intense hazard from extreme future heat waves will likely be in the Ganges and Indus river basins. Climate change is a particularly serious threat for South Asia, where a fifth of the global human population lives and which is at risk from unprecedented severe natural hazards that make it acutely vulnerable.

The author is a former civil servant. The views are personal.

(This is the first of a two-part series on the connection between pandemics and climate change.)

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Mother Nature and the Ides of a Pandemic - NewsClick