The 2021 World Happiness Report just arrived.
As Kira M. Newman reports, “The secret ingredient? Our trust in each other seems to have been crucial in weathering this crisis, both as individuals and as societies.”
She notes that the report “might seem like a misnomer given all the anxiety, grief, and general unhappiness that we experienced last year. But their survey told a surprising story, one of ‘almost astonishing resilience.’”
People were interviewed in nearly 100 countries.
Find out how they responded to specific questions, and what the researcher’s other conclusions were here.
Photo Credit: R. Nyberg, USAID
OUTSTANDING! PRESIDENT BIDEN PLEDGES TO PRESERVE 30% OF U.S. LANDS AND WATERS BY 2030
The news travelled around the world at lightning speed.
As Hannah Chinn reported in The Guardian in the U.K., “It was an executive order that made waves in environmental circles: after only a week in office, President Joe Biden pledged to preserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.”
What does this goal mean? Currently only 12% of U.S. lands are permanently protected.
To reach it, the U.S. will have to protect and conserve and additional 400 million acres of land and waterways over the next 9 years.
The goal has bipartisan support in Congress and, as Hannah notes, “It aligns with science-based global preservation targets to reach an eventual target of 50% by 2050.”
To find out which areas are already ear-marked for this transition, click here.
Hint: one of them, part of 80,000 acres, is pictured above.
Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
13,100 SCIENTISTS AGREE: WE ARE IN A CLIMATE EMERGENCY
Mark Fischetti, a senior editor at Scientific American, announced that “Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term ‘climate emergency’ in its coverage of climate change.”
A Scientific American article published in January explains: “Why ‘emergency’? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, humanity must take action immediately. Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires and ice melt of 2020 routine and could 'render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable'...
“Every effort must be made to reduce emissions and increase removal of atmospheric carbon in order to restore the melting Arctic and end the deadly cycle of damage that the current climate is delivering.”
Read the article We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So here.
Photo credit: David McNew Getty Images
CHECK OUT OUR 4-16 NEWSLETTER!
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Our newsletter can arrive for you in your inbox every two weeks on a Friday morning. It features two or three recent important events regarding our climate, environment, animals, agriculture, or community that may have escaped your attention. One health article or insight is a regular feature as well.
Engaging. Brief. Bi-monthly. Free!
Just enter your email in the box on the bottom of any page on this website and click “Subscribe” and the next issue is coming your way.
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AMERICAN FARMLAND IS BEING SOLD TO FOREIGN AND INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS - NOT TO ASPIRING FARMERS
In the attached article appearing in The Counter, Joe Fassler quotes University of California, Santa Cruz sociologist Madeleine Fairbairn, in her new book Field of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush:
“Institutional investors—pension funds, university endowments, private foundations, and other organizations that manage huge pools of capital—are increasingly incorporating farmland into their investment portfolios. The same is true of those extremely wealthy people who in financial circles are euphemistically termed ‘high-net-worth individuals.’ This investor interest has spawned a host of new asset management companies eager to accommodate and encourage investors’ newfound passion for soil … managers [who] promise to shepherd investor capital safely, and often extremely profitably, into plots of farmland the world over.”
Foreign corporations are also buying up American farmland.
This is a big deal. Aspiring farmers who want to start their own farms already find farmland artificially overpriced as insolvent industrial agriculture farmers are bailed out annually by U.S. Government crop insurance subsidies.
Speculative foreign and institutional investor interest further inflates land value. Land in these investment portfolios can be farmed — but American farmers leasing the land are reduced to the status of tenant farmers. They don’t own anything.
States and the federal government need to take action to limit and stop speculator land sales. To survive our climate emergency, U.S. agriculture must transition from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture and the future will require a proliferation of regenerative small (family) farms. Many of these farmers will want to own their own land. That ability must be protected by taking action now.
Read the article here.
Photo credit: Chaim Zvi Farm Landscape/flickr CC
HERE ARE THE ‘CLEAN FIFTEEN’! AND THE ‘DIRTY DOZEN’...
Environmental Working Group's annual Pesticides in Produce guide is here. Discover this year’s ‘Clean Fifteen’ and find out which fruits and vegetables are now the ‘Dirty Dozen’...
Always buy organic produce. To protect your health, especially whenever you purchase one of the ‘Dirty Dozen,’ make absolutely sure you are buying organic.
The images above reveal the top 6 in each category. View the rest here:
Discover this year’s ‘Clean Fifteen’ here.
Find out about the ‘Dirty Dozen’ here.
THE GULF STREAM IS WEAKENING - WHAT THIS MEANS
In the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf Stream carries 30 times more water than all the world’s rivers combined.
A set of new studies finds that an arm of the Gulf Stream, the warm currents flowing up past Norway before veering toward Iceland may be slowing due to a vast ‘cold blob’ of melting Greenland ice.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff and Jeremy White report in the New York Times that the consequences of this, “could include faster sea level rise along parts of the Eastern United States and parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, a semi-arid swath of land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox...
“‘We’re all wishing it’s not true,’ Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. ‘Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.’”
Check out the Gulf Stream in motion in the beautifully designed interactive Atlantic Ocean map pictured above and get a heads up on what else may be in store for us here.
Image: Large scale ocean circulation arrow from The Relationship Between U.S. East Coast Sea Level and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: A Review by Christopher M. Little et al.
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HOW KINDNESS FOSTERS A HEALTHIER HAPPIER LIFE
In a newly published review, researchers analyzing the results of 126 studies involving nearly 200,000 people found that people who are kind to others tend to have healthier happier lives themselves.
In Greater Good Magazine, Jill Suttie reports several other interesting findings:
“People who performed random, informal acts of kindness, like bringing a meal to a grieving friend, tended to be happier than people who performed more formal acts of kindness, like volunteering in a soup kitchen.
“People who were kind tended to be higher in ‘eudaimonic happiness’ (a sense of meaning and purpose in life) more than ‘hedonic happiness’ (a sense of pleasure and comfort).
“People who were kind tended to have higher self-esteem and a sense of self-efficacy. To a lesser degree, they also experienced less depression and anxiety and improved physical health—with the links to health being strongest in older adults.”
Discover the report’s other conclusions here.
Photo credit: Shutterstock_604287893
U.S. CONGRESSMAN EARL BLUMENAUER IS WRITING THE FOREWORD FOR MY UPCOMING BOOK
His opening paragraph begins: “Stephen Erickson provides an extraordinarily timely and critically important book…”
I’m honored — and thrilled — to have Congressman Blumenauer’s advocacy.
Lots to reveal and announce in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
GLYPHOSATE HARMS 93% OF ENDANGERED SPECIES
In a recent report, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that “over 93% of endangered species and 96% of their habitats are likely to be harmed by glyphosate poison."
Sam Bloch continues in The Counter, “In its report, EPA found that glyphosate, which affects non-farm environments predominantly through field runoff and spray drift, is ‘moderately to highly toxic to fish, highly to very highly toxic to aquatic invertebrates, moderately toxic to mammals, and slightly toxic to birds on an acute exposure basis.’ Chronic exposure causes ‘a variety of growth and reproductive effects’ to land and aquatic animals as well as plants.
“Overall, it’s ‘likely to adversely impact’ 75 endangered species of mammals, 88 endangered bird species, 36 endangered amphibian species, 33 endangered reptile species, 179 endangered fish species, 185 endangered aquatic invertebrates, 140 endangered terrestrial invertebrates, and 940 endangered plant species.”
Read The Great Healing to learn just how widespread Roundup is throughout our GMO-crop dominated agriculture system, and how prevalent its poison, glyphosate, is in the food and beverages Americans consume.
Last June, Bayer, the corporate multinational manufacturer of Roundup, allocated $10.5 billion to settle over 95,000 lawsuit claims from Americans who proved they contracted cancer — primarily Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — from exposure to glyphosate.
Yet this poison remains a staple of industrial agriculture in America. Its use is actually increasing.
Fortunately for citizens of numerous other countries, glyphosate is banned there. And the number is growing. Navdanya International reported in January that Mexico, Peru and Tanzania have now banned glyphosate.
In February the German cabinet approved legislation to ban glyphosate in Germany from 2024 onwards.
How many hundreds of thousands more Americans will die from a hideous aggressive cancer caused by exposure to glyphosate before our government takes action on this?
Read Sam Bloch’s article here.
Read the EPA’s report here.
Read why GMOs have just been rejected on 3 continents here.
Read about last months’ resolution by the German cabinet to ban glyphosate here.
Photo credit: Shutterstock 752747815
WHAT THE FARMERS’ REVOLUTION IN INDIA SHOULD TEACH US
"Half of India’s population (about 700 million people) are directly engaged in agriculture, producing staples such as rice, wheat, lentils, peas, and vegetables. Eighty-six percent are smallholder farmers,” reports Indra Shekhar Singh.
“The farmers of Gandhi’s India are answering a call to arms to defend their motherland, their food system, and their dignity against a new wave of corporatization unleashed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.”
Three new law passed by the Indian Parliament in September are designed to forcibly expand industrial agriculture in India. Corporations such as Cargill India, Tyson Food, Adani, and Reliance have welcomed the "reforms."
Over 280,000 Indian farmer’s have committed suicide over the past two decades after having fallen deeply in debt and losing their farms because they made the tragic decision to convert their traditionally farmed fields over to industrial agriculture. Purchases of costly GMO seeds and requisite industrial inputs mired them inexorably in debt once they couldn’t profitably sell their crops.
Millions of farmers have been protesting for the past 90 days and their numbers are growing.
87 U.S.-based farm and food advocacy groups including Sierra Club, Farm Aid and Pesticide Action Network sent a letter “in support of the farmers in hopes of ‘connecting the dots between the forces of neoliberalism that stifle farmers, from India to the U.S..'”
American industrial ag commodity crop farmers would be similarly insolvent if our government didn’t pay out $26 billion yearly in crop insurance and other subsidies to keep them afloat.
It’s time for American industrial ag farmers to shift to a regenerative model. It’s time to insist that our government support this transition.
Read this article here.
Photo by Anindito Mukherjee/Getty Images
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A TIBETAN PROVERB I TRY TO LIVE BY
LEATHER AND CASHMERE MADE FROM FLOWERS? THEY’RE AVAILABLE NOW!
The global demand for humanely produced materials is exploding!
PETA reports that “HUGO BOSS, Reebok, H&M, and other brands have embraced… cashmere made from milkweed, wool from recycled plastic bottles or hemp, and leather from flowers, pineapple, or cork… Experts predict that the vegan leather market will top $90 billion by 2025.”
Check out what’s new and where you can buy it in this article on the front page of the PETA Global magazine.
Photo credit: Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0
LARGEST POLL TO DATE: 64% 0F 1.2 MILLION PEOPLE SURVEYED REALIZE CLIMATE CHANGE IS A GLOBAL EMERGENCY
An international survey of 1.2 million people conducted by the United Nations Development Programme from October to December 2020 revealed that, by age group, 69% of those under age 18 recognize global warming as an emergency. 58% of those age 60 or over did so as well.
By country, 81% of respondents in both the U.K. and Italy recognize our climate emergency. Over half of the respondents in every one of the 50 countries surveyed felt the same way.
How did Americans respond? Awareness of our climate crisis is growing. 65% of Americans now acknowledge climate change as an emergency.
Let’s do everything we can to communicate this to friends and colleagues and to urge the Biden administration to take even bolder action.
Read more survey results here.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons CC
CHECK OUT OUR 2-19 NEWSLETTER!
To read this newsletter click here.
Our newsletter can arrive for you in your inbox every two weeks on a Friday morning. It features two or three recent important events regarding our climate, environment, animals, agriculture, or community that may have escaped your attention. One health article or insight is a regular feature as well. Engaging. Brief. Bi-monthly. Free.
Just enter your email in the box on the bottom of any page on this website and click “Subscribe” and the next issue is coming your way.
Please recommend to your friends.
Click on the image above or view the newsletter here.
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HOW MUCH LONGER YOU CAN LIVE WITH A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE
Alice Park writes in Time Magazine about a study done in 2018 where, "An international group of researchers led by scientists at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that adopting five healthy habits could extend life expectancy by 14 years for women and by 12 years for men.
The five healthy habits were:
"eating a diet high in plants and low in fats
exercising at a moderate to vigorous level for several hours a week
maintaining a healthy body weight
not smoking
consuming no more than one alcoholic drink a day for women and two for men”
Recently, the researchers were curious to know how many of those extended years were healthy ones, which they defined as living free of three diseases: heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Their follow-up study, published on January 8th, found that men who follow these healthy habits can add 8 additional years of life expectancy after age 50 and women can expect to add 10 years.
For more details click here.
Photo credit: Pixabay.com CC