Long Beach, Calif., where I spent my first 17 years, has had many notable contributions to the world. Snoop Dogg. Cameron Diaz. Sublime. Some not-so-classic Paris Hilton music videos. I’m proud to have grown up there for more substantial reasons, too, like the fact that it makes the top five in America’s most diverse cities, and has one of the best public school districts in the country.
But when it comes to living green, Long Beach’s pedigree leaves something to be desired. Oil is big business. The city was designed with cars in mind and little attention to transit alternatives. And, being in the desert, Long Beach has to take half of its water from the Colorado River or Northern California’s Bay Delta Region (neither of which are exactly well-supplied with the stuff themselves). To further illustrate: As I walked down the beach near my father’s house when I visited in February, I saw far more bits of colorful plastic than I saw seashells, more dead animals than live ones, and the view looked out onto oil drilling sites and a fleet of tankers lined up to enter the harbor. When I came back, the bottoms of my feet were covered in splotches of tar. New Mayor Robert Garcia, elected last June, wants to clean up Long Beach’s environmental rep. At his first State of the City address in January 2015, Garcia issued an urgent call for global warming adaptation. “That means changing the way we produce and use energy, supporting transportation that is not reliant on fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, creating green space, and looking at every way we can to reduce our carbon footprint,” he said in his address. He’s already commissioned the Aquarium of the Pacific to craft a Climate Change Action Plan — i.e. suggestions on what the city should do in order to get ready for everything from sea-level rise to heatwaves. The plan is due at the end of this summer. The orca iconography in Puget Sound tourist gift shops borders on sappy, but for those lucky enough to have seen an orca in the flesh, the love of these whales is not so hard to understand. Yet the whale tourism industry may also come with a darker side: Are we literally loving the Southern Resident killer whales to death?
The Orca Relief Citizens’ Alliance — a non-profit dedicated to reducing the mortality rates of Puget Sound’s endangered local killer whales — thinks we are, through the demand to see orcas via boat-based whale watching tours. So the organization is pushing for the establishment of a whale protection zone on the west side of San Juan Island, where the orcas frequently hunt and rest. As Mark Anderson, the group’s founder and chairman, explains, disturbance noise from boats interferes with the sonar the whales use to communicate and to hunt. “It’s like a loud piece of music, right over the frequencies they use,” Anderson says. Putting further restrictions on boats within this zone “would be like giving them a dining room they can use without harassment.” I'm currently one of the first fellow's in Grist's brand-new fellowship program.
Check out my Grist stories here. For National Geographic Daily News
The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, aims to shift how we think about our own waste. They want to "close the nutrient cycle" by using our urine to grow what we next consume. Today, most human waste in the U.S. flows down the pipes to a facility such as DC Water's Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest facility of its kind in the world. Blue Plains receives an average of 370 million gallons of wastewater, 94 percent of which is from residential sources in the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia. This includes what washes down the kitchen drain, fills up washing machines, and flushes down toilets. Once at Blue Plains, it all goes through a multistage process in which it is passed from pool to pool of various hues of reddish brown, where the liquid is stirred, bubbled, fed to algae, and filtered until it is clean enough to get dumped back into the Potomac River. Much of what this process is doing is removing nitrogen and phosphorous, elements that can be pollutants when too much of them get into our rivers and oceans. But they are also essential nutrients for plant growth—and thus, two of the basic components of fertilizer. For National Geographic Daily News
Note: I reported and wrote this story in about four hours. As the ice storm that pummeled much of the United States on Thursday continues to lock the country in a deep freeze, some areas may be more ready than others to deal with the consequences. That's because a new index is under development that can be used to categorize expected damage from ice storms, dangerous phenomena that occur when rain freezes on contact with the ground or other surfaces. (Read more about weather and natural disasters.) Scientists didn't actually kill the world's oldest animal, a clam, just to find out how old it was.
For National Geographic Daily News Consternation over the death of the world's oldest-recorded animal, a 507-year-old clam nicknamed Ming, has earned marine researchers unhappy headlines worldwide. But a closer look at the story—"Clam-gate," as the BBC called it—finds the tempest over Ming a bit overblown. (Also see "Clams: Not Just for Chowder.") News of the clam's death, first noted in 2007, took on a life of its own this week after researchers led by James Scourse, from the United Kingdom's Bangor University, reanalyzed its age and announced the 507-year estimate. Contrary to news reports, the researchers say they did not kill the elderly clam for the ironic-seeming purpose of finding out its age. I contributed to the reporting for Robert Draper's National Geographic Magazine's November cover story on Tim Samaras and the El Reno tornado. Read it here.
Some said I was too young. But I think the fact that I was just twelve years old when I went to Tanzania and climbed Kilimanjaro with my dad meant that I still had that fleeting openness to life that comes from having a mind that is not yet fully formed. The scenes and experiences I took in over the course of that trip shaped me in a way that still persists today. I wrote a bit about what climbing Kilimanjaro meant to me in my story, “Discovering a Certain Grandness of Life,” for Dreamers and Doers. This is a collection of stories, published by the Ladies Trekking Club, by women from across the world whose lives have in some way been shaped by the fact they climbed to the top of Africa; it is an anthology that is edifying, enlightening, and inspiring. But it’s not actually necessary to travel halfway around the world in order to learn most of the personal lessons that we wrote about. Many of the benefits of travel and adventure can come from simply opening and reading a book. This is the gift this project aims to give to many children who have grown up living in the shadows of Kilimanjaro: every copy of Dreamers and Doers sold provides for a textbook that will be donated to a Tanzanian school. Take part in these ladies’ adventures and give the gift of education by ordering a copy of Dreamers and Doers here. for National Geographic Daily News
It was a storm of epic proportions: The tornado that hit El Reno, Oklahoma, was as wide as Manhattan, spun off subvortices as fast as NASCAR drivers circle a track, and had some of the strongest winds ever measured. It took the lives of three highly experienced storm chasers. Yet it's going down in the record books as a mundane EF3. The reason: The May 31 storm just didn't do enough damage to achieve a higher Enhanced Fujita (EF) rating. Now weather scientists are asking if the rating system needs an overhaul in the age of mobile Doppler radar and other sophisticated tracking techniques, and some are pressing for a new rating formula that would include measurements of maximum wind speeds. Pam Matson discusses her agricultural research in the Yaqui Valley and how it relates to the Green Revolution. She also reflects upon the politics of sustainable agriculture and how we might go about feeding the 9 billion people we expect in the coming decades. As a final thought, she offers some advice to those who are coming of age in the Anthropocene, and why we shouldn’t waste our time trying to assign blame. Pamela Matson is an interdisciplinary Earth scientist who works to reconcile the needs of people and the planet. Her research addresses a range of environment and sustainability issues, including sustainability of agricultural systems; vulnerability of particular people and places to climate change; the consequences of tropical deforestation on atmosphere, climate and water systems; and the environmental consequences of global change in the nitrogen and carbon cycles. With multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, managers, and decision makers, she has worked to develop agricultural approaches that reduce environmental impacts while maintaining livelihoods and human wellbeing. [LISTEN IN] |
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