Tag: environment

Grandmother arrested after blocking pipeline construction in Ford Pinto

afloweroutofstone:

A 64-year-old woman was arrested earlier this week after she reportedly blockaded herself into a 1971 Ford Pinto and prevented Mountain Valley Pipeline construction in West Virginia.

Becky Crabtree, charged with obstruction earlier this week, was later released on her own recognizance, according to a local NBC affiliate.

Crabtree, who is a grandmother and retired schoolteacher, reportedly blockaded herself in the Pinto at the worksite of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which spans approximately 303 miles from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia.

“It just hit me,” Crabtree told Vice News on Friday. “I can’t just teach my students about climate change and have them fill out a sentence about fossil fuel energy and its negative impact. I know what the impacts are. I have to live this.”

Crabtree said she’s trying to “slow up the process” for the construction of the pipeline, because “once the pipeline is in the ground, the judge can say, ‘It is too late now.’ Sometimes the courts need time to catch up.”

Crabtree said she had written letters, organized debates, and attended town halls and protests to fight the construction of the pipeline prior to the demonstration.

“I’ve pretty much exhausted all my other options,” Crabtree said. “It wasn’t on bucket list to get arrested, but now can tell my grandkids that your grandmother was arrested trying to save this land.” Crabtree is currently awaiting her sentencing.

According to Vice News, Crabtree is the latest person to join the fight against the pipeline, with protests from local residents and environmental groups igniting across the region.

Once constructed, the pipeline would span more than 1,000 bodies of water and roughly 245 miles of forest, which protesters say could pose a threat to the area’s municipal water supplies and habitat, according to the publication.

Last week, a federal court rescinded permits for the project to cross the Jefferson National Forest, saying that the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management had not properly reviewed the pipeline’s environmental impact, according to The Washington Post.

The construction is scheduled to pass through 3.6 miles of the forest, according to the Post.

The agencies were ordered to reconsider the permits.

Appalachian-style resistance

Grandmother arrested after blocking pipeline construction in Ford Pinto

U.S. Military Is World’s Biggest Polluter

lauren-gets-lit:

A reminder with this article: an overwhelming amount of these superfunded military bases are located near homes of indigenous people and people of color. This shit is not only harmful to the environment, it is strategically placed near populations our country’s leaders value as less than the rest.

U.S. Military Is World’s Biggest Polluter

saguusa:

prokopetz:

Really, the galling thing about the golf industry is that it doesn’t need to be nearly as environmentally destructive as it is. In most parts of the world you can construct a totally acceptable golf course using native grasses, trees and shrubs, leaving the only the greens – which are a tiny portion of the course’s overall land area – as the high-maintenance bits. The only reason we insist on importing non-native grasses to climates for which they’re wildly unsuited and blowing a million gallons of water per course per week keeping them alive is because somebody decided that all golf courses everywhere need to look exactly the same.

It’s also as a display of status and power. Golf courses are a weird garden where you hit a ball with a stick into 18 holes and admire the architects grand plan on how they made this place beautiful. So some golf course architects show off their skill as masters over nature and completely ignore local grasses, sticking to what they’re comfortable with.

entitledrichpeople:

entitledrichpeople:

the-bitter-idealist:

entitledrichpeople:

Capitalism produces scarcity artificially where there is none.

There are enough houses.

There is enough food (in fact there’s currently massive amounts of “overproduced” grain being left to rot)

There is enough water.

Even without changing the horribly designed production systems, there is no real shortage.  People don’t starve, have no fresh water, have no houses to live in, etc. because there are not enough of these things.  People don’t have access because capitalism denies them it.

There’s enough to share for everyone.  It’s not a zero sum game for poor and oppressed peoples. 

I known the argument that only GMOs can save us is untrue for the reasons above, but is overpopulation draining resources and killing the earth a lie promulgated by capitalists as a diversion as well? Would we be fine with this many people under a different economic/social system?

Yes, overpopulation is a capitalist/racist myth too.  It originated in racist eugenics theory and ignores issues of distribution, infrastructure/technology, and disparate impact in favor of fearmongering about poor/brown people having too many babies.

This one pops up a lot, so I’m going to post some links on it here:

Here’s a website dedicated to debunking overpopulation.  It’s 101 and simple, but might be a good intro point for some.

Here’s a BBC article on the lack of good basis to even say how many people is the maximum the Earth could support.

A child in the US on average will use 13 times the energy of one in Brazil and 35 times one in India.

The wealthiest 10% of the world contributes 50% of emissions, but the poorest 50% only contributes 10% of emissions.

And even those estimates are off, because much of the energy use in the developing world is spent on resources sent to already developed/wealthy countries.

Within developed countries income has a stronger impact on household energy use than having another child does (with the wealthy consistently using more).

Just 100 companies contribute 70% of emissions globally-replacing those 100 companies with fully sustainable energy would fix 70% of emissions.

It’s impossible for developing countries to generally adopt Western style energy consumption development models on a large scale.  And China, one of the larger developing countries whose government is a bit less under the thumb of Western imperialist powers, doesn’t intend to keep trying that either (instead investing in more renewable energy).  

So, yes, it’s absolutely not the number of people that’s the main problem, but how resources are used and environmental management practices are done.  If you were going to get rid of people to fix environmental problems, you would start with rich white Westerners, the opposite of who gets targeted by “overpopulation” panics.

I’m reblogging this post from last year, because I see so many opinions about the environment that repeat this nonsense.

It’s racist imperialist capitalist bullshit, and it leads to the exact opposite of real solutions.  

Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change

rjzimmerman:

Ominous……

Excerpt:

Our research, recently published in Nature Climate Change, describes a series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred recently across Australia.

These changes, caused by the combined stress of gradual climate change and extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems’ natural resilience.

Despite land clearing, mining and other activities that transform the natural landscape, Australia retains large tracts of near-pristine natural systems.

Many of these regions are iconic, sustaining tourism and outdoor activities and providing valuable ecological services – particularly fisheries and water resources. Yet even here, the combined stress of gradual climate change and extreme weather events is causing environmental changes. These changes are often abrupt and potentially irreversible.

They include wildlife and plant population collapses, the local extinction of native species, the loss of ancient, highly diverse ecosystems and the creation of previously unseen ecological communities invaded by new plants and animals.

Australia’s average temperature (both air and sea) has increased by about 1°C since the start of the 19th century. We are now experiencing longer, more frequent and more intense heatwaves, more extreme fire weather and longer fire seasons, changes to rainfall seasonality, and droughts that may be historically unusual.

We identified ecosystems across Australia that have recently experienced catastrophic changes, including:

    • kelp forests shifting to seaweed turfs following a single marine heatwave in 2011;
    • the destruction of Gondwanan refugia by wildfire ignited by lightning storms in 2016;
    • dieback of floodplain forests along the Murray River following the millennial drought in 2001–2009;
    • large-scale conversion of alpine forest to shrubland due to repeated fires from 2003–2014;
    • community-level boom and bust in the arid zone following extreme rainfall in 2011–2012, and mangrove dieback across a 1,000km stretch of the Gulf of Carpentaria after a weak monsoon in 2015-2016.

    Of these six case studies, only the Murray River forest had previously experienced substantial human disturbance. The others have had negligible exposure to stressors, highlighting that undisturbed systems are not necessarily more resilient to climate change.

    • Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change

    epooleart:

    “Fish are some of our least visible urban animals, but their underwater world is not so very far away from ours. The things we put on our land, and specifically our lawns, are what we put in our groundwater, streams, and aquatic wildlife. From pesticides to erosion, excessive lawn maintenance can have a serious impact on the delicate chemical balance of a river ecosystem.” This painting will be appearing at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Illustration gallery for this summer’s Urban Wildlife show, sponsored by @creatureconserve. It’s inspired by the Trout Friendly Lawns initiative, which aims to raise awareness about how lawn care impacts native trout populations. A lawn full of drought-resistant native plants is the first step toward stewardship of the watersheds in which we live. #conservation #ecology #illustration #painting #watercolor #art #wildlifeart #animals #animalart #animalcreatives #fish #trout #flowers #wildflowers #creatureconserve #risd

    Source: epooleart

    Gove urged to follow Europe with ban on single-use plastic | Environment | The Guardian

    anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans:

    Gove urged to follow Europe with ban on single-use plastic

    “Last week the United Nations warned that Britain’s reputation was at risk over plans for a new post-Brexit environmental watchdog which would not have the power to take the government to court. Despite Gove’s promise of a “green Brexit”, the Treasury is said to have resisted giving the new watchdog the same powers as the European commission because of the potential impact on post-Brexit growth.”

    So what benefit will leaving the EU have for us in the U.K. Still waiting to find out. Lower standards seems to be a theme.

    Gove urged to follow Europe with ban on single-use plastic | Environment | The Guardian

    Federal Ruling on Controversial Pipeline May Halt Construction

    rjzimmerman:

    Excerpt:

    Opponents of the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia through Virginia’s Highland Country and into North Carolina, won a reprieve Tuesday when a federal appeals court invalidated a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) review of the pipeline, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

    The ruling was issued by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in Richmond, VA and agreed with environmental groups and their lawyers that the incidental take statement made by the FWS, which limits the number of endangered species that can be killed during construction and operation of a project, was not clear enough in the case of the pipeline.

    The case was argued by the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Virginia Wilderness Committee. The pipeline opponents argued that the ruling meant the pipeline had to halt construction.“ This fracked gas project has been proven to be perilous to our health, our communities, and wildlife, and now, thanks to tonight’s ruling, must be stopped,” Sierra Club attorney Nathan Matthews said in a press release.

    But Dominion Energy, the company leading pipeline construction, disagreed with that interpretation of the ruling. “[W]e will continue to move forward with construction as scheduled,” Dominion Energy director of communications Jen Kostyniuk said in an email obtained by U.S. News and World Report.

    Federal Ruling on Controversial Pipeline May Halt Construction

    Why restoring the Colorado River Delta matters

    rjzimmerman:

    The Wilson’s warbler is just one of the migratory birds that rest and recharge along the Colorado River Delta. (Photo: Sonoran Institute)

    Excerpt:

    The delta is located at a pinch point along the Pacific Flyway, a seasonal thoroughfare for neotropical migratory birds including many songbirds, shorebirds, raptors and waterfowl species. Nestled within an extremely arid region, habitat in the Delta provides a critical stopover and refueling point for migratory birds — the same exact birds you might see in your backyard or out on a hike somewhere in the western U.S.! Some of my favorite birds, like the western tanager, yellow warbler, Swainson’s hawk, cinnamon teal and the American avocet, all benefit from habitat in the Colorado River Delta.

    Fortunately, Sonoran Institute and its partners in a bi-national coalition of environmental organizations called Raise the River have been working for the past 20 years to bring water back to the Delta and restore diverse habitats; evidently, the birds like what we’ve been doing.

    In direct response to the pulse flow, the abundance of migratory waterbirds in the Delta was four times higher in 2014 than the previous year and was the highest ever recorded since the start of the surveys in 2002 by our partner, Pronatura Noroeste. Beyond the immediate response to water as evidenced by waterbird species, overall bird abundance and diversity are on average nearly 50 percent higher in our restoration sites than in other areas along the Colorado River in Mexico.

    At the Las Arenitas wastewater treatment wetland — a project Sonoran Institute has been working on since 2008 — the number of bird species went from eight to more than 160 in just over five years, with a maximum bird count of 18,000 birds! Our restoration sites provide not only diverse habitat types and structure — open water, marsh, riparian, mesquite bosque and mudflats — but they also provide a food source for many birds.

    Why restoring the Colorado River Delta matters