>Industrial waste pollutes water >Filter feeders process waste and store toxins in their bodies >People harvest shells for art >Artist suffers from exposure to toxic materials, suffers for years with debilitating mental and physical symptoms.
She will NEVER recover.
People act like environmental pollution is always something happening “somewhere else” but we’re all breathing and eating and drinking it and it should really put some shit into perspective that just having a hobby around seashells turned this woman’s household dust into a death trap.
“Hobby” ?????
oh wow i didn’t even catch that (wasn’t reading the reblogs as carefully as i should have been).
Gillian Genser’s art is incredibly intricate, time consuming (she spent 15 years on these sculptures, often working on them up to 12 hours a day) and evocative. She gave years of her life and sacrificed her health to make these sculptures, working on them even after she became ill. It’s not a hobby around seashells, and characterizing it that way is a disservice to the incredible work this artist has put into her craft.
She writes, I’ve experienced the suffering of so many creatures trapped in their polluted habitats. I now hope their voices can be heard—that my art might create a sense of awe, a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world.
I often think of Beethoven, who suffered from lead poisoning; he lost his hearing and producing his work became an angry struggle. In the end, he had to create his music from the memory of sound. I was creating my art from the memory of joy. When I look at Adam, I feel grief—both for myself and our planet. But I also feel satisfaction because he is magnificent. That’s how I find my hope. I call him my beautiful death.
This is a really good clarification and I’m glad you wrote it!
I’d also like to add that the dust produced by grinding down shells is not “household dust”. There are many artistic practices/fields that involve working with hazardous dust (for example, ceramicists need to take precautions against silicosis, an incurable, potentially fatal condition caused by inhaling ceramic dust which contains tiny tiny glass shards). Artists like Genser are aware of this; this woman is someone who went to work aware of these risks, took the workplace precautions she believed were necessary according to the accepted standards of her field, and is dying because those standard precautions (which countless artists in numerous fields rely on! Seashells are just one material artists use that comes from the earth!) are no longer adequate due to environmental degradation. Framing this as a “hobby around seashells” that produced toxic “household dust” not only is a condescending, minimizing, and frankly misogynistic way of talking about an extremely accomplished creative professional, it undersells the nature of this problem on a larger scale; this is a workplace hazard for many, many people, and it is directly tied to workers rights and safety.
Solar panels could increase productivity on pastures that are not irrigated and even water-stressed, a new study finds. The new study published in PLOS One by researchers at Oregon State College finds that grasses and plants flourish in the shade underneath solar panels because of a significant change in moisture. The results bolster the argument for agrovoltaics, the concept of using the same area of land for solar arrays and farming. The idea is to grow food and produce clean energy at the same time.
“Shifting seasonality can also negatively affect the health of forests (Ch. 6: Forests, KM 1) and wildlife, thereby impacting the rural industries dependent upon them. Warmer winters will likely contribute to earlier insect emergence and expansion in the geographic range and population size of important tree pests such as the hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, and southern pine beetle. Increases in less desired herbivore populations are also likely, with white-tailed deer and nutria (exotic South American rodents) already being a major concern in different parts of the region. According to State Farm Insurance, motorists in West Virginia and Pennsylvania are already the first and third group of claimants most likely to file an insurance claim that is deer-related. Erosion from nutria feeding in lower Eastern Shore watersheds of Maryland has resulted in widespread conversion of marsh to shallow open water, changing important ecosystems that can buffer against the adverse impacts from climate change. Species such as moose, which drive a multimillion-dollar tourism industry, are already experiencing increased parasite infections and deaths from ticks. Warmer spring temperatures are associated with earlier arrivals of migratory songbirds, while birds dependent upon spruce–fir forests in the northern and mountainous parts of the region are already declining and especially vulnerable to future change. Northern and high-elevation tree species such as spruce and fir are among the most vulnerable to climate change in the Northeast.”
Jair Bolsonaro, the president-elect of Brazil, might be the biggest single-person threat the Amazon rainforest has seen in a generation. He has likened indigenous reserves in the Amazon to “chickenpox” on the land, and promised that “there won’t be a square centimeter demarcated as an indigenous reserve” under his leadership.
Pesticide-based agriculture is killing the one part of the natural world people thought was “unkillable” and it’s the part that keeps everything else alive.
This is an article from last year but it still sums it up the best. By this year, we found it was actually even worse. There’s almost no part of the planet that hasn’t lost over half of its insects in less than sixty years, even the most “untouched” depths of the rainforests.
CARIBOU RUN ACROSS PLAINS IN THE ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, ALASKA. PHOTOS BY KILIII YÜYAN
To a new arrival, the Arctic in summer is pure confusion, a set of realities that seem to always shift and conflict. You can’t tell the time or your place in it because of the endless days; you completely forget to be tired, or hungry, or hurried. Distance and size, too, become mysteries: Without trees for scale, hills that seem close take hours to reach. Plants that you usually think of as trees max out at only a few inches high, while tiny lichens grow in mats so thick they bounce like pillows. Whole herds of caribou, hundreds or thousands of enormous animals, can disappear in a few minutes, swallowed up by a far more enormous landscape. In the flat plains, the horizon blurs in and out, as though reality is getting poor reception.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge holds Alaska’s single-most-remote spot, the very farthest you can get from human roads, trails, or homes. A bush plane bringing travelers will fly over hours of uninterrupted wilderness (a fact that guides implore you to think long and hard about before climbing that boulder or fording that stream or messing around with that pocketknife) and land on “airstrips” that are simply areas of flattish tundra or gravel bars cleared of large rocks and sometimes marked with caribou antlers. And yet it is far from isolated. You’ll come around a bend in the river and see, in a strange new landscape, familiar old friends on summer vacation: geese and mallards and swans, falcons and thrushes and sparrows and sandpipers, each a reminder that the refuge is directly linked by avian migration to every U.S. state and every continent but Australia.
Though the Arctic may be far from factories and traffic jams and other major sources of carbon pollution, human-driven climate change is warming it faster—as much as two times faster—than anywhere else on Earth. The signs are everywhere: melting permafrost that makes ponds and wetlands drain and hillsides collapse; disappearing sea ice that leaves polar bears starving and new shipping lanes open; animals and plants whose ranges are moving northward. Some of the changes, such as the increase in dark, heat-trapping open water and the release of methane once locked in permafrost, also act as accelerators of change that will lead to even more change and even more warming. When it comes to the planetary-scale transformations of climate change, isolation doesn’t exist. Not even here.
The future of the refuge is still the mystery it has always been. The faraway politics, our ideals about wilderness, and, not incidentally, the prices of oil and possibly carbon are all in flux. Environmental groups and Alaska Natives like the Gwich’in have vowed to fight drilling in any way they can, but they are on the defensive as never before, with the focus moving to court battles and delays and to dissuading oil companies and banks from getting involved.Supporters of drilling contend that the ecosystem damage would be minor. They usually don’t talk about the wilderness value behind the refuge’s original establishment. The Trump administration has asked for the required environmental review to be fast-tracked, demanding in months what normally takes years. Isolation has never felt so illusory.
A lot of people are really scared and angry because of the results of the newest climate change reports — as they should be. But I’m already seeing a lot of posts and news reports like “HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING” and bizarrely enough, the answers are never like “weed out climate change deniers from your government, impose strict new rules for the corporations that are creating most of the emissions, pour government resources into alternate forms of fuel, etc.” It’s always like “carpool to work!”
Look. Of course you should be working to reduce waste in your own life. But let’s not fucking pretend that consumers are the ones who made this mess. You know what another recent study found? Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. If the rest of us stopped ALL WASTE and fucking ascended to a higher plane of existence that no longer requires consumption of any kind, the world would still be absolutely fucked if those 100 companies keep on as they do.
I hate this personal responsibility model when it comes to conservation. By ignoring the actual source of the problem and focusing on individuals instead, guess who gets targeted? The absolute most vulnerable individuals on the planet. When people advocate personal responsibility, somehow they’re never talking about billionaires and their private jets. They’re creating straw bans that will make life more dangerous for people with disabilities. They’re shaming women for using disposable menstrual products. They’re criticizing the poor and destitute for using “wasteful” products because they’re all they can afford. They’re making vaguely eugenic statements about getting people in “third world countries” to stop ~breeding~ so much. It’s monstrous.
Stop shaming consumers for the sins of corporations and their powerful investors. Stop placing the blame at the feet of the people who already have the hardest time getting through life. Do something, and by “do something” I mean buy a reusable coffee cup on the way to fucking vote. Go to a protest. Call a representative. Demand accountability from the people who got us into this mess.
As Tolkien might have observed portentously in one of his sprawling, Middle-earth sagas, the time of the giants – in this case, the eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) – may be soon coming to an end. These magnificent conifers, so critical to the carbon and hydrologic cycles of Appalachia’s mixed mesophytic forests, are dying in large numbers, killed off by by a double whammy of global warming and an invasive pest from Asia – the hemlock woolly adelgid – barely visible to the naked eye. As these trees become sick and die, the unique ecosystems they support are irreversibly altered. While the Southern Appalachians have
been most heavily impacted to date, the death march of the adelgids continues northward. As I stood in the shadow of the great hemlocks in Cathedral State Park over the weekend, I hoped that this small stand of virgin forest would survive as a testament to their ancient power to transform the world around them – a real magic as special as anything in Tolkien’s imagined universe.
Zebras by a termite mound in Okonjima, Namibia. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Excerpt:
Nobody loves termites, even though other social insects such as ants and bees are admired for their organisation, thrift and industry. Parents dress their children in bee costumes. Ants star in movies and video games. But termites are never more than crude cartoons on the side of exterminators’ vans. Termite studies are likewise a backwater, funded mostly by government agencies and companies with names such as Terminix. Between 2000 and 2013, 6,373 papers about termites were published; 49% were about how to kill them.
Every story about termites mentions that they consume somewhere between $1.5bn (£1.1bn) and $20bn in US property every year. Termites’ offence is often described as the eating of “private” property, which makes them sound like anticapitalist anarchists. While termites are truly subversive, it’s fair to point out that they will eat anything pulpy. They find money itself to be very tasty. In 2011 they broke into an Indian bank and ate 10m rupees (then £137,000) in banknotes. In 2013 they ate 400,000 yuan (then £45,000) that a woman in Guangdong had wrapped in plastic and hidden in a wooden drawer.
Another statistic seems relevant: termites outweigh us 10 to one. For every 60kg human you, according to the termite expert David Bignell, there are 600kg of them. We may live in our own self-titled epoch – the Anthropocene – but termites run the dirt. They are our underappreciated underlords, key players in a vast planetary conspiracy of disassembly and decay. If termites, ants and bees were to go on strike, the tropics’ pyramid of interdependence would collapse into infertility, the world’s most important rivers would silt up and the oceans would become toxic. Game over.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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