Reese Halter

Ban Neonicotinoids Immediately

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SAN FRANCISCO — The latest Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) review of three widely used neonicotinoid insecticides shows that the majority of endangered plants and animals are in harm’s way from these deadly nerve poisons.

In the midst of the accelerating man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction, the animal and plant kingdoms cannot contend with the ever-increasing onslaughts of horrible poisons.

In addition to plants and animals, the soils are in danger too. Soils are vital not just because they give us our food, they store a whopping 1500 billion metric tons of carbon. Poisons that destroy life within soils lessen the chances of the Gen Zs (under 26s) reaching 2040.

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Superb Palm Oil Exposé, Planet Palm

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SAN FRANCISCO – Mother Earth defender and author, Jocelyn Zuckerman, has penned an excellent detailed account in Planet Palm of the insidious and ubiquitous palm oil trade. Victress.

Zuckerman journeyed to four continents and witnessed firsthand this planetary destructive, crafty industry. It’s a riveting read.

If ever there was one farmed crop that begged the United Nations (UN) to enact a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, palm oil is it.

Refuse Palm Oil
Support companies that do not use palm oil as an ingredient in their hand-soaps

A West African tropical palm, Elaeis guineensis, produces bunches of fruits the size of plums, which yields copious pulp and kernel oils that are loaded with saturated fats. 

Today, those oils are the backbone of processed everything, from personal care products to deep fried foods and pastries to instant noodles. Humans also burn a shit ton of it, one-third of all biofuels annually are palm oil. They emit four times more planet-cooking gases per unit than diesel fuel.

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Manmade Noise Uproots Sea Grasses, Hastens Climate Catastrophe

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WASHINGTON (DC) – About 72 species of sea grasses are nature’s protective chainmail that filter land runoff, boost water quality, recharge aquifers and provide habitat for thousands of species. Yet they, too, are being assaulted and plundered by man.

Climate and Sea Grass
The world’s sea grasses are highlighted in green. Credit: United Nations Environment Programme

Sea grasses in mesmerising meadows occupy the coasts of every continent except Antarctica. Although their total ocean area is about 0.1%, sea grasses hold an astonishing 11% of the ocean’s carbon (sometimes referred to as ‘blue carbon’).

Climate and Sea Grass
Each year, sea grass meadows drawdown 83 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent emissions of 18 million automobiles). Credit: Christoffer Bostrom

Some of my colleagues affectionately call the sea grasses ‘the lungs of the sea’. And for a good reason, one square metre of a sea grass meadow releases 10 litres of oxygen each day of the year. Bonanza!

Each year, Mediterranean sea grass meadows are helping to protect the deep North Atlantic ocean and all life therein by sieving 900 million pieces of pernicious petroleum-based plastics.

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Almighty GDP Supersedes Climate Code Red, Not For Long

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SAN FRANCISCO – This week the United Nations (UN) climate body, the IPCC, issued its sternest warning a ‘climate code red.’ Yet every IPCC decarbonising scenario has GDPs (Gross Domestic Product) rising not falling. The jarring reality is that it’s not possible for civilisation to grow enough food with increasing, intensifying and longer lasting ferocious heatwaves.

Combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets has supercharged the oceans by adding the equivalent heat of detonating 10 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second of the year. The oceans drive the climate, which is becoming terrifyingly unstable.

Climate Change and GDP

Climate fires are raging all over the globe. Siberia is one giant firestorm with untold losses of our brethren and sistren, the animals. Over 40 million acres are charred across Russia’s Northern Asia. For the first time in recorded history the North Pole is blanketed with thick choking climate smoke.

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Intrepid Ecologist, Suzanne Simard, Discovering Big Old Trees

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SAN FRANCISCO – Professor Suzanne Simard is a remarkable woman – a passionate, courageous forest ecologist who has upended Canada’s, male dominated, planet-killing forestry sector.

Simard’s new book, Finding the Mother Tree, is an epic read loaded with curiosity, grit, discovery, grief and triumph.

Fearless, intelligent, caring women are healing our planet. Simard is indeed amongst them.

Professor Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard with an ancient western redcedar Mother Tree.
Credit: Diana Markosian

Old-growth rainforests are superlative carbon storehouses and incomparable intercontinental climate-makers, secondly only to the oceans. We cannot inhabit this planet without old-growth inhaling carbon and exhaling oxygen.

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432 New Coal Mines, The Bitter End

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SAN FRANCISCO – This week, climate fires, climate floods, climate heatwaves and climate mega-droughts are laying waste to people and Mother Earth.

Climate and Coal Mines
Credit: Peter Carter, Climate Emergency Institute

A mega-drought across America’s West is deepening. In California, a million acres are fallow. Billions of dollars forgone. No mid winter Sierra Nevada snowpack, no spring groundwater recharge, so millions of taps across the Golden State have begun to trickle.

In June amid record U.S. heat, the world’s coal producers announced 432 new coal mines, mostly in China, Australia and Russia. Avarice bankers, oligarchs and the world’s leaders are unconcerned about adding more combustion heat into the biosphere that has become a gigantic land and sea graveyard.

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Droves of Dead Blue Carbon Shepherds – Manatees SOS

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SAN FRANCISCO — Woefully out of touch Floridian lawmakers have thrown nature’s indispensable carbon-keepers, manatees, under the bus. So far in 2021, almost a thousand peaceful sea cows have died. Unprecedented.

Dead Manatees
Where are the animals supposed to live on this Florida island? Credit: Wikimedia

Unbridled development, fossil fuel and wood pellet heat, poisons, vessel strikes, red tides, sewage and agricultural runoff, fertilizer factories disgorging, plastics, and the former Trump administration lessening protection by downgrading from endangered to threatened status, have fast-tracked Florida’s manatees to extinction.

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Netflix Backs Planet-Killing Show – Unacceptable

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SAN FRANCISCO — An upcoming Netflix series, Big Timber, glorifies the annihilation of Vancouver Island’s rare and indispensable old-growth rainforests. Revolting.

British Columbia (BC), Canada, has about one percent of its old-growth forests intact. Vancouver Island, BC, the world’s forty-third largest island, has been cutover within an inch of its life.

Netflix Climate Show
A sacred old-growth western redcedar in unceded Pacheedaht Territory of southern Vancouver Island.
Credit: TJ Watt

The few unharmed stands of old-growth on Vancouver Island create coveted clouds, which reflect incoming radiation and help keep the planet within a habitable range of temperatures. Those hallowed rainforests are crucial habitat for endangered marbled murrelets, little brown bats, northern bats, black swifts and scarce sockeye salmon.

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Chinese Fisheries Emptying Oceans

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Chinese Fisheries

SAN FRANCISCO – China’s fishing armada operates more hours than the next 10 biggest nations combined. Mother Earth and all the marine creatures stand no chance whatsoever against this formidable voracious onslaught.

China has fished out the South China and East China Seas, the Sea of Japan and the Philippine Sea. So now, they’ve set sail with an expanded flotilla to conquer the oceans and all life therein.

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Aussie Old Boys, Wrong Side Of History

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The neocon Australian government, led by climate science-denying Prime Minister Scott Morrison, has bet the nation’s future on combusting coal, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and wood pellets. To hell with 17 Aussie ecosystems collapsing.

takayna
Seventeen ecosystems collapsing across Australia
Credit: Conversation

Has every member of Morrison’s caucus reserved a one-way seat on Space X? Do they have shares in terraforming the moon, Venus and Mars?

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Ode to Idaho’s 1500 Wondrous Wolves

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Keepers of rivers, waterways and
cathedrals of splendor –
O, how we of earth honor Ye and
Gitche Manitou!

Shepherd of sacred balance:
elk, beavers, trout, sturgeons,
grizzlies, wolverines, rattlesnakes,
eagles, ravens, hummingbirds,
worms, butterflies, bees.

Earthmen pay homage to thee.

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Old-Growth Rainforests, Key To Human Survival

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Old-growth rainforests are mesmerizing. No other planet in this or any other galaxy, which we know of, supports these hallowed cathedrals of splendor.

Long-lived, self-perpetuating, unique genetics, structurally diverse with dead standing and fallen trees, gaps in the canopy and habitat for a rich array of life forms – old-growth has it all. It is the best that Mother Earth can muster at inhaling and storing carbon, exhaling oxygen, circulating freshwater, making climate and providing lodging for our brethren and sistren, the animals. Hallelujah.

Old-Growth Rainforests
Moisture created in old-growth rainforests circulates and irrigates the globe.
Image credit: Richard Whitcombe

Where there are rainforests it is wet: locally, regionally, continentally and intercontinentally. These stupendous biologically complex treed communities create vast atmospheric rivers of moisture, sustaining life on land. And they are giant air conditioners seeding clouds that reflect an extra five percent of incoming solar radiation into space.

From spirit bears to Tasmanian devils, rainforest life is absolutely dazzling. Predator/prey interactions are in a constant arms race. For instance, tropical rainforest fishing bats use sonar to locate fish and utilize a gaff-like toe to catch them, while plants have developed mind-boggling chemical defenses against fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects and animal grazers and browsers.

The scent within an old-growth rainforest is like walking into a heady aromatic medicine chest. Every breath is a medicinal tour de force that helps the human body ward off cancers.

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Community Food Forests To The Rescue

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Community Food Forests

About 40 million Americans, including many children, experience food insecurity. An estimated 26.5 million people in the United States live in food deserts with little fresh produce on public spaces. Urban food forests to the rescue!

Community Food Forests
Atlanta’s Brown Mills Food Forest has a fruit and nut orchard, raised beds, herb gardens along with terrific walking paths across seven acres. Many hundreds of school children have visited and learned how to grow, tend and harvest the bounty.
Image credit: Sharon Lee

These marvelous oases on community lands often have three layers of food. Fruit and nuts trees make up the overstory, shrubs like raspberries and huckleberries occupy the mid layer, and an abundance of ground food like trailing strawberries or carrots, beets, potatoes and broccoli beautify the floor.

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Water, Wind And Worms, A Wonderful World

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Natural systems and animals have been inspiring people for ages. Water, wind and worms are teaching us many new lessons to help caretake our ailing planet.

For example, Portland-based InPipe Energy has devised an ingenious micro-hydro system using a pressure recovery value (PRV) to regulate the flow of municipal water. It harnesses the energy within flowing water by spinning a microturbine, which makes electricity.

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Sensors within PRVs help municipal agencies to better manage water infrastructures by quickly pinpointing any leakage. In addition, InPipe Energy can erase the carbon footprint of pumping water throughout the system, an energy-rich process that currently relies mostly on the fossil fuel-powered grid.

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Imagine It! An Ideal Handbook To Heal Us And Our Planet

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Laurie David and Heather Reisman have penned a terrific how-to take care guide for individuals, families and ultimately our Mother Earth.

They remind us that, “Our planet, like our bodies, is a system. Everything is interconnected.” Many of us have become disconnected. This book teaches us how to reconnect and nourish our bodies and minds.

how to heal the planet

To kick-start this process, they ask thought-provoking questions: “Is the amount of news about heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires really beginning to worry you? Do you sometimes feel as though our climate crisis is so big that your individual actions can make much of a difference?”

This concise handbook brings awareness to plastics, food, clothing, chemicals, paper, water and transportation. Each chapter begins with important facts that are followed by an inspiring story. And each one closes with a doable action plan to reduce your individual and family footprints.

Every small step is significant. David and Reisman’s winning formula helps us understand why we must break old habits that are detrimental to both Mother Earth and us.

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The Joy of Curiosity And Kindness

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The human brain is a stupendous three-pound electrically-charged organ that has hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells. Those cells are so miniscule that thousands of them could comfortably fit into the period at the end of this sentence.

The brain is exceptional at both solving problems and making tools. It also constantly seeks to explore. In fact, we are all natural explorers, born to look around.

An old-growth rainforest is a heavenly community of nature’s finest fauna and flora in concert. 
Image credit: Reese Halter
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Man-Made Global Heating Is F*%#ing Hideous

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Why is only one day, each year, set aside to pay homage to our Mother Earth? Is it, so that for 364 other days we can turn a blind eye, or worse, rape her with impunity?

Escalating deforestation, soaring mercury. Radio National Australia, The Science Show, Earth Day 2021

Our kith and kin, the animals, are terrified because ghastly man-made heatwaves, climate fires, climate droughts, climate floods and the GDP-driven Age of Extinction are accelerating at breakneck speed. Ladies and gentlemen, we need all the animals, old-growth rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands, salt marshes, mangroves, peatlands, kelp forests and marine grass meadows in-tact to survive and cohabitate on this hallowed blue planet.

The elephant in the room is human consumption and the insatiable fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion energy required to make more. Do you really need more?

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Fisheries Demolishing Our Only Home

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The mysterious oceans occupy 99 percent of the blue planet’s living space (biosphere). The oceans are the cradle of life, climatemakers, oxygenmakers and home to unknown numbers of species.

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Today, the oceans are dreadfully ill with vast areas of boneyards. “The oceans are really a mirror of human health, if they are sick and dying then that’s the future of humanity as well,” admonished oceanographer David Baker, University of Hong Kong’s Swire Institute of Marine Science.

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