Search results

Flooding and landslides have left thousands of refugees cut off from food supplies in Ituango, the conflict-strewn municipality in north-western Colombia.

Many of the world’s plastic containers and bottles are contaminated with toxic PFAS, and new data suggests that it’s probably leaching into food, drinks, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products and other items at potentially high levels. Less than a month ago they were going to feed us the stuff… tr

The incredibly biodiverse Cerrado is Brazil’s second-largest biome after the Amazon. However, half of the savanna’s native vegetation has already been lost to industrial agribusiness, which produces beef, soy, cotton, corn, eucalyptus and palm oil for export.Those wishing to save the Cerrado today are challenged by the lack of protected lands. One response by traditional communities and conservationists is to help the rest of Brazil and the rest of the planet value the Cerrado’s cornucopia of endemic fruits, nuts and vegetables that thrive across South America’s greatest savanna.

A sequence of inadequate chemical safety analyses, hidden studies and lax oversight created a scenario in which Americans continue to be exposed to the dangerous compound in food packaging.

The carbon footprint of U.S. food waste is greater than that of the airline industry. Globally, wasted food accounts for about 8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental consequences of producing food that no one eats are massive.

Native American Yurok women in California are fighting for environmental protection following salmon scarcities

If, as a planet, we stopped wasting food altogether, we’d eliminate 8% of our total emissions – so one easy way to eat for the planet would be to tackle that, Steel points out. That could be through preserving and making stock from meat and fish bones – but it could also be as simple as eating as much of a fruit or vegetable as possible. “The skin, the seeds, the leaves – these are where the phytonutrients are.”

As for producing cheap food that Americans can afford, yeah, that’s a trade off. That’s an industrial revolution era trade off. Workers were paid, it was assumed that women’s labor was free. So you didn’t have to pay workers enough to worry about child care or cooking or any other domestic chores. And then if you made food cheap, you could pay them even less.

Researchers have worked out a way to transform food scraps, used cooking oil, animal manure and wastewater sludge into jet fuel with a carbon footprint 165% lower than standard jet fuel, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Biodiversity in the ecosystem is critical for the planet to survive. You want to see different plants and flowers in the fields, not rows and rows of corn or soya. We’re also losing diversity of seeds and plants because of climate change. We need to go back to our indigenous roots where diversity of mother nature has always been critical.

Food discarded in homes is 74kg per person each year, with problem affecting rich and poor countries

Arsenic is a carcinogen and that it can impair neurodevelopment in children even at low levels. Arsenic is also associated with lung disease, heart attacks and kidney failure. Similarly, lead is known to alter brain development in children, reducing attention span and intelligence and increasing the likelihood of antisocial behavior. Cadmium is linked to kidney and gastrointestinal diseases, DNA impairment, cancer, osteoporosis and immune system deficiencies.

Kiss the Ground reveals that, by regenerating the world’s soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies. Using compelling graphics and visuals, along with striking NASA and NOAA footage, the film artfully illustrates how, by drawing down atmospheric carbon, soil is the missing piece of the climate puzzle. This movie is positioned to catalyze a movement to accomplish the impossible – to solve humanity’s greatest challenge, to balance the climate and secure our species future.

Voices of Transition An enthusiastic documentary on farmer- and community-led responses to food insecurity in a scenario of climate change, peak oil, and economic crisis. Concrete examples from Cuba, France, and the United Kingdom tell of a future society where our monoculture deserts will be restored to living soil, where fields will be introduced into our cities, and where independence from oil will help us live a richer, more fulfilling life.

Swallowtail: An Apprenticeship Story follows six young aspiring farmers as they navigate the rollercoaster season of 2019-2020 in North Central Florida. The film centers on the thoughts and experiences of these apprentices who leave home to live at Swallowtail Farm and how the COVID-19 pandemic turned an already challenging learning experience into an unprecedented one. Throughout their journey, they reflect on issues of food security, sustainability practices, and community.

Avocados have become a “global commodity crop”, he says, the perfect example of what happens when “an exotic food becomes normalised with no thinking through of the consequences”. Problems including deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and water shortages mean that “the communities growing them do not have enough water for washing and hygiene”, adds Lang.

Population growth has been left out of the climate debate because it is considered controversial, yet it is one of the most important factors. The global population has passed the 7 billion mark and India will soon overtake China as the most populous nation in the world, but one state in southern India has found the solution: Kerala educates its women. The unique history of Kerala and ‘the Kerala Model’ is outlined, using it as an example of achieving population control in developing countries without coercion. Links are highlighted within the documentary between issues such as women’s education, women’s rights and status in society, women’s health, population growth, global poverty and global food shortage, economic growth and environmental stability.

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level off eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

Synthetic chemicals called phthalates, found in hundreds of consumer products such as food storage containers, shampoo, makeup, perfume and children's toys, may contribute to some 91,000 to 107,000 premature deaths a year among people ages 55 to 64 in the United States, a new study found.

Some of this gear can weigh thousands of pounds and have buoys that prevent entangled whales from diving deep enough to find food. Whales who don’t drown or starve right away will often drag gear for several years. Doing this can create deep lacerations in the whales’ soft flesh and sap energy from essential processes such as reproduction and, the researchers suspect, growth.

This is a horror story about a war against nature… the poisons used in agriculture seep into our food, water and air. And all to kill a plant that indigenous communities have relied on for centuries. -tr. The plant is native to the Southwest, and its leaves were once baked and eaten by people among the Cocopah and Pima tribes; the Navajo ground the seeds into meal. But as the pigweed spread eastward, the plants began competing with cotton in the South, emerging as a serious threat to the crops by the mid-1990s.

The resilience of our planet is largely dependent on its biodiversity. Today environmental degradation is threatening the extinction of plants and fungi across the planet, many of which we have yet to discover and could prove to solve many of humanity’s problems.

“Ending the use of chlorpyrifos on food will help to ensure children, farmworkers, and all people are protected from the potentially dangerous consequences of this pesticide,” he said in a statement. “After the delays and denials of the prior administration, EPA will follow the science and put health and safety first.” That science indicates the chemical can cause irreversible harm. Children exposed to organophosphate pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, have an increased risk for abnormal neurodevelopment, including persistent loss of intelligence and behavior problems, studies have shown. Even low-dose exposure, particularly in the womb, has been found to harm brain development, leading to higher risk of disorders such as autism.

The Global Ocean Explorers Survey Foundation (GOES) warns that the bits of plastic filling the seas are merging with toxic chemicals from sunscreens, fire retardants (PBDE), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), tin and mercury, bonding together and being mistaken for food by plankton and other inhabitants of the sea. These poisonous cocktails have already wiped out an enormous amount of the plankton population on Earth, and GOES says we have only ten years to correct this death spiral. Plankton eat a significant amount of carbon dioxide and produce an astounding 75 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. That’s more than the Amazon rainforest. If all the planet’s plankton are killed off, it spells doom for all life on Earth.

"The bill is light on specifics but sets out a general framework for directing at least $1 trillion per year over the next decade to rapidly weaning the United States off fossil fuels and replacing corroded water systems, increasing benefits for home care workers, remediating toxic industrial sites, and propping up new, localized food producers, among other things. The bill lays out an expansive vision of how to slash the nation’s planet-heating emissions in half and balance the racial and regional gaps in wealth and health, issues that have animated the party’s base and inflected once-sleepy debates over roads and rail funding with the energy of a new-wave civil rights movement."

While the IPCC opus doesn’t drill down into emissions from food production per se, it does contain rich information about its impacts. Carbon dioxide, now prevalent in the atmosphere at it highest rate in 2 million years, gets most of the ink, but two other heat-trapping gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also contribute mightily to the greenhouse effect. These gases now waft about at their highest levels in 800,000 years, the report states—and are spewed in large quantities by industrial-scale farms, mostly related to the mass production of meat. Overall, a 2021 report from the United Nations Environment Program and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition found, fossil fuel production accounts for 35 percent of global methane emissions, vs. 32 percent for agriculture.

Chinook, coho, and steelhead populations in the Salish Sea have declined by up to 90 percent over the past 40 years. Canada declared several populations of steelhead endangered in 2020. Unpicking exactly how and why fish are crashing has proved hard. Whatever happens to the fish out at sea has been seen as something of a black box, so much recent research has focused on marine survival. Those efforts point to multiple culprits for declining salmon numbers, including climate change, overfishing, reductions in the salmons’ food, and rebounding populations of seals and Steller sea lions that gorge on the fish. Wilson’s research, however, highlights the need to keep our eyes on terra firma. Logging has long been known to have big impacts on the well-being of fish. Watershed logging was improved after the 1990s “War in the Woods” in British Columbia—salmon streams are better protected under regulations now—but remains a concern. Reducing shade over rivers can boost water temperature, which can be good or bad for spawning fish. Removing roots loosens soils and causes turbidity. Fewer logs may fall into streams, reducing the number of pools and turns that salmon like. A recent study by David Reid, completed when he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, found the full impacts of logging can take a surprisingly long time to kick in. “It might take decades,” he says. Wilson’s paper aims to weigh up riverine against marine survival. “It’s nice to see these components linked together,” says Reid.

Floating wind projects take advantage of steady winds that blow offshore. Those faster, steadier winds can produce more energy. Wind power increases with the cube of wind speed. Bigger turbines with longer blades capture more wind and are more aerodynamically efficient. How they overcome obstacles such as interference with fisheries, environmental damage, and high cost will influence how many, and which ones, get built.

“It is my sense that most Floridians would live with the risk of water to preserve their lifestyle,” said Cynthia Barnett, a Gainesville-based environmental journalist who has published books about rain and the fate of the oceans. “This idea of working with water rather than always fighting against it is really the lesson of Florida history. If Florida history has taught us one thing, it’s that hardscaping this water that defines us will bring hardships to future generations.”

Nicholas Vazquez is bringing his 800-mile journey to Gainesville Tuesday to Florida’s protest climate change in Florida.The 23-year-old climate pilgrim is a member of Extinction Rebellion America began his walk in Miami on April 22. From there he’s traveled on foot to cities across Florida like West Palm Beach, Tampa, and Orlando as an act of political rebellion. His goal is to catch the attention of Governor Ron DeSantis and have him issue an executive order declaring a climate emergency for the state of Florida.

Finn’s nagging fear that Gold Hill is living on borrowed time is replicated across western states ravaged by some of the most intense wildfires in modern American history. But angst about the immediate threat is accompanied by increasingly urgent questions for communities on the frontline of the climate crisis about the long-term financial cost of survival – who should foot the bill? Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100m over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.