Reese Halter

Ecocide: Killing British Columbia’s Last Great Big Trees

Published on

How much is enough? More. Since 1981, I have witnessed the greatest and most diversified temperate old-growth rainforests in the world, those of British Columbia (BC), being raped and pillaged under the auspice of crown (provincial) forestry management propping up a couple hundred timber-harvesting towns and the opportunistic (and fleeting) multinational corporations that milk the system and taunt the people with jobs.

Giant British Columbia Trees
Reese Halter planting trees in the Northern Rockies, circa 1986.
Image credit: Jane Williams

Today, about a couple dozen old-growth wood-addicted communities with automated state-of-the-art mills remain. It’s a house of cards that over the previous decade has siphoned $3.65 billion from the provincial coffers to stay afloat. Lousy subsidies.

In reality, every day there are less wild rainforests and far less animals. Habitat destruction is horrible in an accelerating man-driven Age of Extinction. Additionally, those cutover forestlands are incapable of decontaminating putrid fossil fuel-tainted rainwater, which runs off into the sea or through your tap.

Keep Reading

Fossil Fuels Ruined Iconic Aussie Snow Forests

Published on

Fossil fuel stoked global heating has laid waste to the Aussie’s second favorite tree, the wonderful snow gums of the Alps.

Sprawling forest graveyards are strewn across Oz. From the lonely giants of the temperate southwest to the skeletons mangroves of the tropical northeast and along the bare high plains of New South Wales to the boiled ones of northeast Tasmania – it’s bloody grim.

snow forests
Cooma Monaro, New South Wales, is a vast high plateau where many ancient ones died of a strangling thirst egged on by recurring brutal heatwaves.
Image credit: Greening Australia

I’ve walked in these eerie, lonesome tree cemeteries and lamented their loss to the nation. How many more millions of acres must we lose of these complex, climate-making, biodiverse hotspots replete with water-rich bastions before governments stop the annual $5.3 trillion in subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest polluters, the fossil fuel industry?

Keep Reading

Ecocide: Norway Murders 1278 Climate-Stabilizing Whales

Published on

Thirty-nine years ago, the world agreed to end commercial whaling. Only two rogue nations, Japan and Norway, still refuse to abide by the rule of law.

In 2020, Norway’s bloodthirsty whaling armada slaughtered 503 minke whales, 74 more whales than they destroyed in 2019. This year, Norway has issued death warrants for 1,278 minkes. These crazed planet-killers have single-handedly annihilated more than 14,000 wonderful whales over the previous 39 years. What the frack!

End whaling in Norway NOW!
Image credit: Bill Waldeen

Are the Norwegians starving? Is there really a consumer demand to eat our mammalian kith and kin, the whales? No. Instead, these glorious masterpieces are brutally killed and minced into dog food. Wot.

Keep Reading

Climate Generation Going Vegan To Save Life On Earth

Published on

The climate generation (Gen Zs, or under 26s) comprises almost a third of the world’s population. These intrepid kind humans are fighting the climate crisis by ‘taking the rose by the thorn’ and eating plant-based diets to save Mother Earth. Happy dance!

Going Vegan

The purchasing power of the Gen Zs is formidable. It exceeds $3 trillion. Recently, the UK’s BOL Foods became an entirely plant-based company with planet-friendly food for the burgeoning Gen Zs vegans. Additionally, that company is now saving 200 metric tons of CO2 and 1.8 million gallons of water annually.

Keep Reading

Age of Extinction: Cowardly Hunters Massacre 200 Wisconsin Wolves

Published on

Many people loathe trophy hunters. Hunters have sullied the word ‘conservation’ and wreaked horrible pain and suffering upon the animal kingdom. Moreover, these worthless planet-killers are hastening the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction.

YouTube player

The Trump administration inflicted tremendous damage on Mother Earth, national monuments, old-growth-forests and our brethren and sistren, the animals. See The Gen Z Emergency for gory details.

Since 1933, wolves have been persecuted in the United States. Forty-seven years ago the Endangered Species Act saved the gray wolves in the lower 48 states from extinction.

killing wolves
Wolves have two layers of fur, an undercoat and a top coat, which allow them to survive in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. In warmer weather they flatten their fur to keep cool.
Image credit: Public News Service
Keep Reading

Mayday, 5000 Bee Species Missing In Action

Published on

Bees are mysterious, smart and indispensable beings. They have stood the test of time for a 100 million years on this planet. Bees are in dire trouble today, and we know the main culprit all too well – many, many dozens of billions of pounds of man-made nerve poisons.

bees are in trouble
A 100 million year old Burmese bee entombed in amber.
Image credit: George Poinar

There are about 400,000 kinds of flowering plants that depend upon pollinators in order to successfully reproduce. Bees, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, beetles, bats, lizards, primates and birds pollinate the plants. About 20,000 bee species undertake the lion’s share of cross-pollinating the plant kingdom.

Keep Reading

Japan Drowns ‘Hope’, A Brutal Whale Murder

Published on

A horrible whale massacre took place last month near the infamous town of Taiji, south central Japan, renowned for its cruelty. It sickened (and rightfully so) millions of empathetic people as they helplessly witnessed cold-blooded executioners in-action.

Japan Drowns Whale

Try as it may, the minke whale could not escape from these wretched penned fishing nets.
Image credit: Ren Yabuki/LIA

On Christmas Eve 2020, a minke whale unsuspectingly swam into a pen of stationary nets near Taiji.  Ren Yabuki, an animal activist with the Life Investigation Agency, fortuitously saw it. Using a drone, he documented the whale’s plight and enlisted the global support of animal lovers to free our brethren and sistren of the sea.

Keep Reading

Ocean Heat, An Elephant In The Living Room

Published on

The oceans store more than 90 percent of all combustion heat. In 2020, record fossil fuel and wood pellet heat in the ocean was the energetic equivalent of detonating 315,536,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The energy within the oceans drives the climate, which is becoming less predictable and more violent.

Planetary ice is important for reflecting incoming solar radiation back to outer space. As the world’s temperature rises, planetary ice is in peril. In fact, Earth’s ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s. The world has lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice since 1994. That is enough meltwater to fill 10.2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or, cover the entire state of California in ~200 feet of water.

Keep Reading

Climate Victims: Whales And Sharks

Published on

*

The year 2020 set another horrible heat record in the oceans, which make up 99 percent of the planet’s biosphere, or, where life can exist. Many billions of our brethren and sistren, the animals, are already dead. It’s simply too hot.

The ocean heat is in lockstep with burning fossil fuels and wood pellets. In 2020, the world’s oceans absorbed the equivalent heat to dropping 10 Hiroshima atom bombs every second of the year (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 {sextillion} joules).

Climate Victims
Since the 1990s the heat in the oceans has taken off as the amount of fossil fuel combustion has more than quadrupled.
Image credit: Kevin Trenberth

Allow me to remind you that the oceans drive Earth’s climate. Hence we are amid a worsening man-made climate crisis. It is never just about humans though. We share this glorious blue planet with a couple of million other life forms. All life is interrelated and we need everything that is left, alive.

Keep Reading

Poisoned Great Barrier Reef, Gruesome Green Turtles

Published on

*

I was taught to respect my elders. The world’s largest coral reef system, or, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), is about 8,000 old. It is sacred, yet it has been horribly abused. Consequently, the GBR is terminally ill.

Great Barrier Reef
Burning fossil fuels and wood pellets and the resultant increased marine heatwaves are sweeping the planet and laying waste to reefs. Coral graveyards are expanding at a terrorsome rate. 
Image credit: Brett Monroe Garner
Keep Reading

Fossil Fuels Torture Dolphins to Death

Published on

*

From Florida to Western Australia, our brethren and sistren, the bottlenose dolphins, are dying horribly. The culprits are the moneyed, banker-backed, government subsidized villains: Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal.

Each second, the heat from combusting fossil fuels is the equivalent of dropping five Hiroshima-style bombs into the oceans. Since 1994, that’s 3.6 billion atomic bombs worth of fossil fuel heat absorbed by the oceans. The oceans drive Earth’s habitable climate.

For every 1oC (1.8oF) increase, Earth’s atmosphere holds seven percent more moisture. Hence there are more extreme climate rain events today compared with a quarter century ago.

Fossil Fuels and Dolphins
Climate hurricane Harvey (2017) unloaded 27 trillion gallons of rainfall onto Houston, or, enough water to fill almost 41 million Olympic swimming pools. 
Image credit: Vox
Keep Reading

Aussies Dig Alberta’s Coal

Published on

*

Alberta’s expensive, dirty, planetary-fricasseeing, water-ruining tar sands is a non-starter even with many billions of taxpayers subsidies that failed to prop up multi-national corporations with a nationalized pipeline. And now, 330 billion gallons of hideous carcinogenic poisons from giant tailing ponds (visible from space) are seeping into the waterways that empty into the Western Arctic Ocean.

Coal mining in Canada
Alberta’s tar sands are the world’s most destructive and poisonous Big Oil operation.
Image credit: Garth Lenz

If gooey water-contaminating oil deposits won’t work then how about dynamiting mountaintops, digging up coal and sullying another 100 billion gallons of alpine and glacier meltwater that eventually drains into Hudson Bay, the Eastern Arctic Ocean?

Keep Reading

Fossil Fuel Retribution: Climate Hurricanes

Published on

*

The heat from fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion stored within the oceans (equivalent to dropping five Hiroshima atomic bombs every five seconds nonstop) is supercharging these god-awful climate hurricanes and climate fires.

Climate Hurricanes
Climate Hurricane Iota decimated life in its wake. It was a record 30th named tropical storm within the Atlantic during 2020. 
Image credit: Luis Guillermo Ferrebus/AP

Today, tropical storms are rapidly intensifying into hurricanes and typhoons. In addition, global heating is slowing down these tempests, which means they have become more torrential, violent and deadly.

Keep Reading

‘Beeautiful’ Buzzing Sistren

Published on

*

Gen Zs (<26 year olds) are rescuing and breaking new ground within the queendom of our sistren, the bees.

Honeybees have a remarkably complex language. It includes dancing, headbutting and scaling vibrations. Each intriguing maneuver conveys specific and precise meaning. For example, when honeybees encounter giant Asian hornets their vibrational dialect quickly pulses up the scale. That is, the higher the pitch, the greater the peril.

YouTube player

Honeybees can communicate danger better than any other of the 900,000 or so kinds of insects. That’s why scientists are paying close attention to the bees because they spotlight toxicity within the environment. It’s high time for the lawmakers globally to ban all these deadly nerve poisons that are killing bees and birds, e.g., neonicotinoids, sulfoxaflors, flupyradifurone and chlorpyrifos.

Keep Reading

Your #GlobalHeating Battle Line

Published on

*

From climate fires and insect epidemics to megadroughts and climate hurricanes, man-made global heating is terrifying! All hands on deck.

This Monday evening, satellite data from Hurricane Eta revealed sustained winds of 190 mph (306 kph) at its core. This climate hurricane in the North Atlantic was the strongest storm so far recorded, and the only Category 5 hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic during November.

Global Heating
Eta was the twelfth hurricane and the record 28th Atlantic storm in 2020. Image Credit: Tropical Tidbits

On Tuesday, Eta delivered an unsurvivable 21-foot (6.4 m) storm surge to northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 500,000 children (Gen Zs) were in danger of becoming climate refugees.

Global Heating
The Saopin Bridge along highway CA-13 in Atlántida, Honduras, buckled and then collapsed from an extreme deluge of 40 inches (1016mm) of rainfall on Wednesday (Nov. 4, 2020). Image Credit: Twitter/Policia Honduras

Meanwhile, Eta has left the ravaged landfall and is drawing energy from the warm Caribbean Sea while moving slowly northeast towards the Florida Keys.

Keep Reading

Nature’s Harbinger of Heat

Published on

Why has Earth’s climate changed so radically in such a short span of time? The elephant in the living room is combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets chopped up from old-growth forests. That accumulated heat is being stored deep within the oceans. Over the previous 25 years, that heat is the equivalent of dropping 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bombs. The oceans drive Earth’s climate, which has become unstable with both higher highs and lower lows.

Even to the untrained eye, the effects of climate instability are highly conspicuous across western North America’s cold tolerant and hardy coniferous forests.

Keep Reading

Age of Extinction: Massacring Sharks Won’t Rid COVID-19

Published on

*

The pharmaceutical gold rush to invent an antidote for the highly infectious airborne coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has set its sights on devouring the most perfect fish to swim the seas: the shark.

Some of the 176 coronavirus vaccine trials are using an oily animal hydrocarbon found in deepsea shark livers called squalene. Squalene is believed to improve the human response of the antigen (toxin) within the dose.

Sharks and Covid-19 vaccine
Great white sharks are the largest predatory fish on Earth.
Image credit: Michael Muller
Keep Reading

Trump Greenlights Destruction of America’s Amazon-like Rainforest

Published on

*

Nestled along 500 miles of Alaska’s verdant Inside Passage there are spellbinding skyscraper Sitka spruce, giant western hemlocks, colossal  western redcedars and weathered 1,800-year-old yellow cedars. The hallowed old-growth temperate rainforest is ruled by the monarchs of nature, three-quarter ton grizzly bears. Altogether, some 17 million dripping, breathing, climate-making Mother Earth forested acres are guarding a whopping eight percent of all the carbon held in the United States. The Tongass National Forest is America’s Amazon rainforest. It contains about one-third of the sanctified old-growth temperate forests left on our man-besieged planet. That priceless rainforest is every American (and planetary) Gen Zs birthright, and Donald J. Trump, the chief promoter of extinction, has just signed off on the death warrants for more than half of it, some 9 million acres.

Yellow cedar tree rings are living museums. They provide an unparalleled looking glass into the climate when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great established his capital at Constantinople in 330CE (much later becoming Istanbul, Turkey).
Image Credit: Reddit
Keep Reading

Vengeance: Climate Fires

Published on

* As I’m writing, the air is putrid and acrid. A fog of death has cloaked Washington, Oregon and California. Climate fires have incinerated about five million acres – a once-in-a-generation-event – and they are far from over.

The enormity and ferocity of these man-made, global heating fires is gobsmacking. The climate has reached a planetary tipping point. The only unknown is how we survive it – especially with Republicans intoxicated on Trumpism, recklessly reassured by Rupert Murdoch’s science-denying talking heads.

Four hundred and fifty million honeybees were burned to death during the December 2019 Australian climate-driven bushfires. Image credit: ABC News

*My upcoming book Gen Z Emergency has chronicled the hideous 2019-2020, worst-ever, Australian climate fires. More than one billion of our brethren and sistren, the animals, were cremated. This does not include frogs and insects, which would have elevated that number into several billions.

Keep Reading
1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 12