Environment/Climate Crisis archives - Page 2 of 9

Autumn in The Gila, 1 of 3: Trees

October 31, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Inverted photograph from a pond at the Nature Conservancy plot down the road

It’s a really buzzy time because of the US elections, so rather than putting out some writing that’ll just get lost in the noise, I’m offering a 3-part series of photos. I had originally planned just one post, but have been taking so many pictures, I broke it into sections: Trees, Wildflowers and Insects.

I’m currently staying at a friend’s rural property in the upper Gila River valley in southwestern New Mexico. If anyplace can be said to be the home-base in my nomadic existence, this is it. It’s in a remote, sparsely populated location. The pavement ends a mile further down, and the road dead-ends entirely a couple miles later at a campground in the Gila National Forest. From there you can be hiking in the Gila Wilderness in just a few minutes. Also down the road is an old farm owned by the Nature Conservancy where they’re doing passive restoration, where I take walks regularly. It’s also chill enough around here that you can just take off across the pastures to get to the river and nobody pays any mind.

So I’m blessed with a lot of space to explore, full of plants and other creatures, and I’ve been carrying my camera with me so I can share what I find. I hope you enjoy this 3-part visual offering of the more-than-human world.

Meet the new Roundup, worse than the old Roundup

October 28, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Two bottles of Roundup Weed Killer, facing each other as if meeting, with a skull and crossbones superimposed

Photos by Flo Beck, public domain

If we brought Rachel Carson back from the grave, I’m sure she’d be shocked and dismayed at the increased use of pesticides since her book, “Silent Spring,” was published in 1962. For those who don’t know, “Silent Spring” was all about the dangers of pesticide use to people and planet, and had a profound impact on raising awareness among the public about pesticides and their dangers. The book is credited with the banning of DDT and the launching of the modern environmental movement, which led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency under the Nixon administration.

Despite those victories, and a few others, the overall situation is much worse now, with worldwide agricultural pesticide use more than doubling since 1990. Since the 1996 introduction of “Roundup Ready” crops (which are genetically modified to tolerate Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Bayer/Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide), Glyphosate usage has gone up 15-fold. I would guess that another factor in the increase of herbicide use over the last couple decades has been the heightening of the war against so-called “invasive” plants, since spraying is such a common method of attempted (and usually failed) eradication, especially (and perversely) in restoration projects. (See: Methods used by land managers to control “invasive” plants at the Conservation Sense & Nonsense website.)

Glyphosate has taken a hit in both the public consciousness and the legal arena, though. When the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that Glyphosate was a “probable” carcinogen in humans, the lawsuits started, and Monsanto (at the time recently purchased by Bayer) ended up paying out billions in damages for disease and death by users of their products. Most of the victims were grounds keepers, landscapers and home owners. Thousands of cases are still working their way through the legal system.

In response, Bayer/Monsanto pledged to remove Glyphosate from their consumer products beginning in 2023. Because they were concerned about health? Nope. The report quotes a Bayer statement: “We have taken this action exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns.” Nonetheless, phasing out Glyphosate sounds like a great idea. Two questions: A) Have they? And B) if so, how?

Patriarchy is an Environmental Issue

October 22, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

March in Portland, Oregon, 2017. Photo by Karney Hatch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Patriarchy” isn’t a very common word in mainstream US American discourse. When it does come up, it usually refers to the inequities of power between women and men in terms of rights, opportunities and outcomes within our socio-economic system. Such inequities are very real, and issues like access to safe abortion are vitally important.

However, Patriarchy goes deeper than the particular struggles of our time and place. Patriarchy is not only the oppression of women as a class by men as a class—and the resulting abuse of individual women by individual men—but also the suppression of that which is considered feminine by that which is considered masculine. Patriarchy is a framework of values. Everything is gendered—qualities, ideas, objects, living things and even colors—and anything feminine is relegated to secondary status. Competition is elevated over cooperation; authoritarianism over agreement; muscle over emotion.

So, Nature itself—because we perceive it as herself—is debased.

Bringing Land Use into the Climate Conversation

September 16, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Most of the time, the conversation around climate chaos is narrowly focused on carbon emissions, to the exclusion of land use as a major factor whose effects are at least equal if not greater. Both the mainstream corporate media and independent/activist media commit this same lapse. This is due in part to the fact that proposed policy around carbon emissions can be neatly folded into the appetites of industry, whether Capitalist or Socialist, without interrupting business-as-usual. Capitalist profits are not threatened by carbon trading. Socialist “development” can continue unabated with new energy infrastructure. Ecocide, however, marches on with both, and that’s what’s left out of the popular narrative as it’s currently told.

In episode 3 of the “Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From” podcast, Nikki Hill and I talked to Nikos Giannakis is a biologist with the University of Leeds, currently working in Greece. His graduate work was in environmental pollution control and agricultural chemistry, and his PhD was on soil microbiology. His national service requirement in Greece led to environmental consulting including impact assessment. Currently he is living with his wife (an architect specializing in natural building techniques) and six cats in an abandoned village in a national park in northwestern Greece. His activism focuses on defending nature from “green energy” projects and on bringing land use into the climate conversation.

Ep. 3 teaser: Bringing Land Use into the Climate Conversation

September 7, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

In this interview with biologist Nikos Giannakis, Nikki Hill and I delve into these topics and more.

Paid subscribers to my Substack and my Patreon will have early access to the full, unedited interchange (2 hours and 12 minutes in length) on Sept. 9th.

The edited public version, at 1 hour and 25 minutes, will be dropped on Sept. 16.

Here’s a six-minute teaser!

Listen:

or watch on YouTube:

Ep. 2: Eugenics & Conservation: Too Close for Comfort

August 19, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

YouTube

In this episode, Kollibri is joined by co-host Nikki Hill for a conversation with Calyx Liddick, founder of the Northern Appalachia School. Calyx has taken a deep dive into the common origins of the eugenics and conservation movements in the US in the early 20th Century, and what she has found is alarming. The boosters of race science, white supremacy, forced sterilization of “lesser” people and other now discredited concepts were the same who founded conservationism, and their odious residue remains. Conservationism must now be re-thought so that what is good can be kept and what is bad dismissed.

In our far-ranging discussion, we talked about all this history plus “invasive species” (a central pillar of eugenics as expressed through anti-immigration sentiment and law); the futility of “fortress conservation”; how the wilderness ideal erases Indigenous people and their relationship to ecology; the importance of reciprocity, integration and coexistence in our interactions with nature; our disagreement with the characterization of “invasive plants” as agents of settler-colonialism; climate change, and more.

Calyx Liddick is a bioregional herbalist, ethnobotanist, holistic nutritionist, wildcrafter, writer, wildlife tracker and a mother of two. She is strongly interested in exploring the relationships between plants and people. Find out more about her and the school she runs at:
northernappalachiaschool.com

Subscribers to Kollibri’s Substack or Patreon enjoy early access to all episodes in their full length. (Public episodes are edited for length and clarity.)

Podcast ep. 2 teaser: “Eugenics & Conservation: Too Close for Comfort”

August 10, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Episode 2 of my podcast is upcoming!

Aug. 12: full unedited version for paid subscribers of my Substack or my Patreon (3 hours and 14 minutes long)

Aug. 19: edited version for the public (2 hours and 34 minutes long)

Here’s the teaser on YouTube:

Or listen here:

In episode 2 of the “Speaking for the Trees No Matter Where They’re From” podcast, I am joined by co-host Nikki Hill for a conversation with Calyx Liddick, founder of the Northern Appalachia School. Calyx has taken a deep dive into the common origins of the eugenics and conservation movements in the US in the early 20th Century, and what she has found is alarming. The boosters of race science, white supremacy, forced sterilization of “lesser” people and other now discredited concepts were the same men who founded conservationism, and their odious residue remains. Conservationism must now be re-thought so that what is good can be kept and what is bad dismissed.

Also, check out Kelly Moody’s 2023 interview with Calyx on the Ground Shots podcast, which inspired this interview.

Why I Hate Market Farming [part 2 of a 3-part series]

August 4, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Part 2 of a 3 part series [Read part 1 here]

“Zeus” cherry tomatoes

Agriculture as currently practiced in the United States is, by and large, quite harmful to both the environment and to human health. Yes, there are a handful of people who are trying to be respectful of the greater-than-human world and beneficial to their fellow Homo sapiens, but they are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, much of what is labeled “organic” is part of the problem, with the industry’s mechanized practices, utilization of plastic, depleting of soils, killing of wildlife, profligate use of water, and labor abuses, among other issues. As I’ve mentioned before, the single greatest threat to biodiversity worldwide is habitat destruction, and its single biggest driver is agriculture. Further, toxins routinely applied in agriculture have deleterious effects on local and far-flung ecologies and on workers and consumers alike. Agricultural labor is some of the most dangerous in the United States (ranking far ahead of policing; maybe we need one of those black and white American flags with a green stripe in it to show solidarity for those suffering far more than the members of the “thin blue line” for their service to the populace).

All this is without even getting into how agriculture changed human cultures for the worse. We broke our ties of reciprocity with our home ecologies, and became dominators, leading us directly to the multiple environmental crises we are facing today. As well, agricultural society spawned patriarchy, slavery, private property, debt and elevated war to new levels of violence.

In sum, it’s a big mess.

So, in terms of environmental and social collapse, if we are to have a livable planet and healthy societies, one of our central efforts must be to radically change agriculture. For some starting points, see my “Six Things We Must Do So That Farming Is No Longer Massive Ecocide,” in which I spell out that agriculture must be de-monetized, de-corporatized, de-mechanized, re-localized, re-seasonalized, and re-naturalized.

People may be surprised to hear me say this, but, in service of these goals, farmers markets and the market farming that support them are not, in my opinion, all that helpful. Yes, they are local and seasonal by definition. However, many if not most are mechanized, few are naturalized, and all of them are dependent on monetization, which leads to corporatization for the larger operations. Farmers markets are all about income generation, which means bowing to market pressures that are driven by customer expectations, or at least the market farmer’s perception thereof. Which can end up resulting in a heavy focus on crops that are resource-intensive to grow or serve only a minor role in providing calories. Think heirloom tomatoes and fancy salad greens.

Postcard from the Grand Mesa

August 2, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

View west from the Grand Mesa

In mid-August, I met up with Nikki Hill at a trailhead on the Grand Mesa. She was there to scope out sites for the field course she’s teaching next week, on Human-Landscape Relationships, Ecology, & Ethnobotany. Summer wildflowers were blooming and berries were coming on. Within earshot of our camp, a fork of Kannah Creek was babbling over the rocks on its journey down into the valley below. Birds and chipmunks twittered and squeaked. No traffic noises except the occasional passing car on the nearby gravel road. No light pollution but a few twinkling lights on ranches in the valley. Fresh air, scattered clouds, and lovely overnight temps. A truly idyllic spot.

But the star of the show was the view. In the far distance were the peaks of the La Sals range, over 100 miles away as the crow flies, in Utah. Below was the Grand Valley, which is part desert, part irrigated agriculture. On the other side of the Valley, and extending to the horizon, were the tumbled ridges and deeply cleft canyons of the Uncompahgre Plateau. The vista is startling in its expansiveness, like little else I’ve seen before. The sense of space is so vast, it almost feels like being at the ocean.

The rough terrain of the Uncompahgre Plateau was especially evident in the morning light:

View of Uncompahgre Plateau from the Grand Mesa

What’s “invasive” in this photo? Let’s take a close look

July 11, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Hay field as observed from within a wetland reserve, with so-called “invasive” plants in foreground

The other day I went into the nearby town of Sebastapol to do grocery shopping. In no hurry to return to the sweltering heat of the farm, I went to a wetland reserve on the edge of town to seek some shade by water. I found a good spot to enjoy and on the way I stopped to take this photo to share with my readers.

Between the path and border of the reserve is mostly Himalayan Blackberries and Poison Hemlock, both much maligned as “invasive” plants, as well as a collection of other “weedy” plants below them, at least some also categorized that way. Beyond the border is a huge irrigated field of what I assume is a hay crop because it’s grass (or grasses). Beyond that is a line of trees, mostly native Oaks. I don’t know what’s on the other side of the trees, but the landscape of Sonoma County is dominated by agriculture, vineyards more often than not. Indeed, I was surprised to see a crop that wasn’t wine grapes. Oaks also grew along the path, and their branches are hanging down in the top of the photo.

The very first Blackberries were ripening, and no flowers remained. The clusters of berries, resembling loose bunches of grapes, dangled invitingly towards the path, but most were still green, only a few were red, and precious few dark purple. I’m happy to report that I got to enjoy a single, perfect juicy one, sweetened by the sun. I’m looking forward to more!

The Hemlock was past flowering but its fruits were not yet dried into seeds. The foliage was drained of its vibrant green but was not yet desiccated. Given that they are not perennial, I was seeing these plants near the end of their lives, at their peak of maturity, fulfilling their raison d’être: to reproduce.

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Episode 2 of my podcast is upcoming!

Here’s the teaser on YouTube:

Or listen here: