19 October 20
My Job: To Provide for RSN and Everyone it Serves
It’s a thankless job at times. Some people write in and express frustration over the funding drives. How frustrating do you think it is for us.
This, all of this is about getting 1% of the people who receive this appeal to respond with a $30. contribution. If that happened today the fundraiser would be over today.
I do this because it has to be done, not because I like it. I don’t.
With significant urgency.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
18 October 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
RSN: William Boardman | Nuclear Meltdown in Fukushima, Political Meltdown in US, No End in Sight for Either
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes: "Once again the people in charge of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant are talking about flushing 1.2 million tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean."
nce again the people in charge of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant are talking about flushing 1.2 million tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. That’s more than 265 million gallons of water so toxic that it currently has to be stored on-site to keep it safe. This is not a new problem. Radioactively toxic water has accumulated constantly since three of Fukushima Daiichi’s four nuclear reactors melted down in the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The present situation, as reported by Reuters on October 16, suggests some uncertainty about the actual release of radioactive wastewater:Nearly a decade after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan’s government has decided to release over one million tonnes of contaminated water into the sea, media reports said on Friday, with a formal announcement expected to be made later this month.
This is a “decision” that authorities at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the plant, and the Japanese government, which is responsible for it, have wanted to make for a long time as a safety shortcut and money-saving stopgap solution to a problem that’s not going away for decades to come. TEPCO and the government have been floating the Pacific dump for more than a year without ever carrying it out. No one knows what impact such a massive amount of radiation will have on the Pacific Ocean. Neighboring countries object to being guinea pigs in an experiment that has no fail-safe. The Japanese fishing industry in the Fukushima region, already battered by the after-effects of the meltdowns, adamantly opposes further release of radioactive water into the ocean.
TEPCO and the government have been trying to shed responsibility for the Fukushima disaster for years. A report in 2002 predicted the possibility of an earthquake and tsunami. The power company took no precautions. Government regulators failed to compel the company to take precautions. On September 30, ruling in a suit filed seven years earlier, the Sendai High Court found that TEPCO and the government are responsible for the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This is the first time a High Court has ruled on a Fukushima case, and the first time a High Court has sought to hold TEPCO and the government accountable for their actions and inactions. TEPCO and the government have appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
As matters now stand, radioactive water seeps continuously into the Pacific at a presumably low but unmeasured rate. This is uncontrolled groundwater that enters the melted cores clean but becomes irradiated by the cores that remain highly radioactive and all but unapproachable even by robots. The cores, inherently more dangerous than the original accident, are kept in check by cooling water pumped into the containment vessels. This water also becomes highly irradiated and is stored in huge tanks on site, which is running out of storage space.
Dumping radioactive water into the ocean won’t solve the problem. It will only free up storage space that will slowly fill until it needs to be dumped again – depending on whether the presently proposed dumping results in a new disaster. TEPCO has promised to treat the wastewater, removing all radioactive elements except Tritium. Nuclear wastewater with low levels of Tritium is routinely dumped by nuclear operations around the world. This dumpage is from normal nuclear operations, not plants in meltdown crisis. TEPCO’s treatment of Fukushima wastewater is expected to take another two years. Whether the treatment is effective remains uncertain.
Uncertainty is the key word when it comes to Fukushima. Reuters, having reported the dumping decision had been made (above), later in the same story quotes the Japanese industry minister as saying that no decision had been made, but that a decision needed to be made quickly to “prevent any delays in the decommissioning process.” That is nonsense, if not sheer dishonesty. The “decommissioning process” has no effective timetable, the melted cores are years if not decades from being brought under control, and the buildup of radioactive wastewater is only a visible sideshow to the largely invisible ongoing nuclear calamity at the bottom of the destroyed reactors.
By way of analogy, imperfect as all analogies are, the current state of American politics is all too much like Fukushima: a long-term crisis for which no foreseeable solution is available. And the American crisis seems, if anything, of longer standing and much greater intractability. Fukushima is at least subject to the laws of physics. American politics are increasingly unsusceptible to any laws at all.
The analogy goes something like this:
- In 2000, an electoral earthquake struck the United States. The election failed to produce a clear winner.
- This was followed by a tsunami of litigators and Republican intimidators swamping Florida and drowning the vote count under a flood of litigation.
- The partisan tide overwhelmed the Supreme Court, and American democracy melted down, votes went uncounted, and the people were denied their choice, whatever it might have been.
- The initial burst of deadly fallout was an illegitimate president and thuggish administration that soon lied us into war, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and escaped impeachment and prosecution by virtue of the broken system they had created.
- For years, the two parties responsible for the multi-meltdown of American institutions worked hard at denying the core crisis while blaming the other party for its effects. No one was called to account. Republicans went on behaving as if the melted-down one-party state was not only natural but preferable to any system centered on the common good.
- The continuing fallout crippled the next President, already weakened by his exposure to the withered state. Minor treatments of some of the symptoms failed to slow the national exposure to ever higher levels of vitriol, greed and criminality, until many Americans came to see those as the problem, not the rot of the melted core institutions that went untended and unrepaired.
- So here we are in 2020, our politically radioactive wastewater storage near capacity. Dumping vast amounts of Trump-waste into the ocean, as it were, is no solution, although it might buy time for the beginning of a solution to emerge.
Electing Joe Biden might improve the situation, but the underlying reality would remain the same on January 20, 2021: the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency have all melted down. They won’t be fixed by a mere change of leadership, least of all by leadership that emerged from one of the guilty parties. Although America’s political meltdown was led by Republicans, the crisis of a democratic state is a bipartisan achievement of profound dimensions.
Neither Fukushima nuclear power plants nor American government institutions have any easy fix. Both require, first and foremost, honest and clear assessment. That won’t be easy for those most responsible, and there’s little sign that it’s about to happen on either front. And once reality is clearly illuminated in either case, it gets harder, because someone has to figure out how to fix it. With Fukushima, at least, the framework is clear, applying nuclear physics to make a dangerous situation safe. At its cores, it’s not all that subjective. And it will still take decades.
Fixing or reinventing America’s system of self-government is much trickier, with no applicable laws. It took us decades to get here. We need to be prepared to invest decades to achieve a desirable future.
William Boardman has been writing for Reader Supported News since 2012. A collection of his essays, EXCEPTIONAL: American Exceptionalism Takes Its Toll, was published in September 2019 and is available from Yorkland Publishing of Toronto or Amazon. He is a former Vermont assistant judge.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Protesters dressed as handmaids attend the Women's March at Freedom Plaza on October 17, 2020, in Washington, DC. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
In 2017, Women Marched Against Trump. Now They're Marching to Get Rid of Him.
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "The emphasis on the election - a major focus for the organizers of the event, held as early voting has already begun in many states - is a long time coming for the Women's March."
lmost four years ago, millions of people gathered in Washington, DC, and around the world for the first-ever Women’s March, a historic demonstration against the rhetoric and positions of President Donald Trump that was, at that time, probably the largest single-day protest in American history.
And on Saturday, Americans gathered again in the nation’s capital and in cities around the country to protest the possibility of a Trump second term and call for progressive change. You could still spot pink “pussy” hats in the crowd in Washington, a sometimes-criticized homage to Trump’s boast on the Access Hollywood tape that he could grab women “by the pussy.”
But marchers also carried signs with messages like “Scare ‘em on Halloween, bury ‘em on Election Day,” “We will remember on the 3rd of November,” and “See you at the polls.”
The group, founded by some of the organizers of the original march, has been through change and controversy since January 2017, including allegations that some of its founders made anti-Semitic statements (the group has denied the allegations). But especially leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, it began to focus its energies more squarely on electoral politics. And Saturday found the group settling into an identity that could carry it through 2020 and beyond: a vehicle for women’s power at the ballot box.
That power hasn’t always been a force for progressive change. As many have pointed out — including some at the first Women’s March in 2017 — 53 percent of white women who voted in the 2016 election cast their ballots for Donald Trump. And while the Women’s March grew out of opposition to Trump’s election, it now has a more difficult job than protesting any one president — it has to bring women together as a multiracial voting bloc for progressive candidates.
To that end, the group’s activities on Saturday included a mass textathon, with attendees gathering in a socially distanced grid on the National Mall to text voters in swing states. The day also included a golf cart parade in The Villages retirement community in Florida, and more than 400 marches in all 50 states. These events clearly showed the Women’s March can still bring people together in the streets. Now the question is whether it can bring women together to vote.
“Women are going to be the driving force in American politics,” the group’s executive director, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, told Vox. “We cannot be divided and we cannot be distracted.”
The Women’s March has faced controversy over the years
The first Women’s March took place on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of President Trump. The events in Washington and across the country drew between 3 million and 5 million people, or about 1 percent of the entire population of the US, according to one estimate. The crowds in Washington appeared much larger than those at Trump’s inauguration, reportedly sending the new president into a rage.
But that march, initially planned by white women before a group that included organizers Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez took the helm, also faced criticism. In particular, many wondered whether the many white women in attendance were prepared to do the hard work necessary to stay involved in activism — and to convince friends and family members not to vote for more politicians like Trump.
A viral photo from the event captured many of the criticisms: in it, political strategist Angela Peoples holds a sign reading, “Don’t forget: White women voted for Trump.”
In the months and years that followed, the Women’s March worked to counter the idea that it was focused on white women and their concerns. At a convention hosted by the group in October 2017, for example, one of the most popular events was a panel titled “Confronting White Womanhood,” which discussed the roles white women can play in racism.
But the group also faced new controversy, including allegations that Mallory and Perez made anti-Semitic comments at a 2016 planning meeting for the original march. Representatives for the group have said those comments didn’t happen, but Mallory and two other members of its leadership stepped down in 2019, and the group added a large slate of new board members, including Rabbi Tamara Cohen, who works with a group focused on teens and Jewish identity, and Lucy Flores, a former Democratic state assembly member from Nevada who has said that Joe Biden planted an inappropriate kiss on her head at a campaign event in 2014.
The fourth annual marches in January 2020 were the group’s smallest yet, leading some to wonder whether it still had a role to play in the political landscape.
But Carmona, who became executive director in August, says the group still has a lot of work to do, whether that’s supporting women essential workers during the pandemic, or spearheading a program to counter online misinformation around the election. “We’ve been trying to respond to the political moment,” she said. “Where women are and where the issues are, that’s where we need to be.”
But organizers say it’s going strong — and focused on 2020
After the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, the group found another role to play. The Women’s March began organizing vigils for the justice around the country, but thousands of people on social media were calling for marches, Carmona said. So the group helped to organize the Washington event and hundreds of sister events around the country.
“We kind of see ourselves as the air traffic controllers directing support, expertise, tools, resources, across the ecosystem of organizations and groups that share a commitment to building the power of women,” Carmona said.
The events on Saturday are in part a protest against Republicans’ drive to replace Ginsburg before the election — with Amy Coney Barrett, who many fear will oppose abortion access, LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections, and voting rights. Many in attendance held signs opposing Barrett’s nomination, including one depicting Ginsburg and other female justices with the words, “Dear Amy, you can’t sit with us.”
But Saturday is also squarely about the election. “The through-line for us for the last year has really been how we get from the energy of the march from 2017, and the momentum from the wins of the 2018 midterms, to 2020,” Carmona said.
After a midday rally, protesters marched to the National Mall, where some would spend several hours texting voters in swing states. “We looked at the iconic photos of the first Women’s March in January 2017 — everyone marching had their sign in one hand and their phone in the other,” Carmona wrote in a memo in advance of the event. “We are capitalizing on that with a mass, Jerry Lewis style text-a-thon into the swing states that matter most.”
The group has also created a volunteer hub where protesters can sign up for more events, including vote-tripling drives where volunteers get the word out to three women in their networks.
And though Carmona is clear that “our goal is to build a multiracial mass movement,” a significant portion of that work is bringing white women into the fold. “While Women’s March has always been an organization run by women of color, we have always also had a significantly white base of about 70 percent white women,” Carmona said.
A lot of those white women are also new to activism. Part of the work of the Women’s March, now and in the future, is “to provide a really strong political education and orient people to this moment in time,” she said. “Across the board, because of Trump and because of his congressional enablers, women are sicker, women are poorer, women are terrified, and we’re without a safety net or a helping hand.”
Such messages might be resonating with women voters this year. Historically, women have not voted as a bloc, with Republican women choosing to vote with their party and white women often siding with white men rather than women of color. But that could be changing, with huge gender gaps in polling going into the 2018 election, and Biden up an eye-popping 23 percent among women in a recent nationwide poll (he and Trump were tied among men).
It’s too soon to tell whether the white women who cast their votes for Trump in 2016 will make a different choice this year. But the Women’s March is betting that they will, and that it can be part of driving that change, this year and beyond.
“We have never been more united, both across the movement and inside of our organization, towards a common goal,” Carmona said.
Former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Buttigieg Says Barrett Supreme Court Nomination Puts His Marriage in Danger
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "Pete Buttigieg, a former challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and a member of Joe Biden's transition team, believes his own marriage is under threat from Donald Trump's supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett."
ete Buttigieg, a former challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and a member of Joe Biden’s transition team, believes his own marriage is under threat from Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Buttigieg, who married his husband Chasten in 2018, indicated that the court’s 2015 decision that made same-sex marriage legal was among a number of rulings a strong conservative majority could look to overturn.
Republicans are seeking to seat Barrett before the 3 November general election. The Senate judiciary committee will vote this week on forwarding the nomination to a full floor vote.
“Right now as we speak the pre-existing condition [healthcare] coverage of millions of Americans might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice,” Buttigieg said.
“My marriage might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice. So many issues are on the line.”
The right to same-sex marriage were enshrined in Obergefell v Hodges, the culmination of a years-long fight incorporating challenges from several states and decided by the landmark 5-4 ruling.
Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said Republicans pushing through Barrett’s nomination days before the election, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, sent the wrong message to voters.
“It’s not in the spirit of our constitution, or our legal system, or political system for them to do this,” he said. “Most Americans believe that the American people ought to have a say. We’re not talking about an election that’s coming up, we’re in the middle of an election, millions of Americans are voting and want their voice to be heard.”
He added: “There’s an enormous amount of frustration that this Senate can’t even bring itself, with Mitch McConnell, to vote through a Covid relief package. People are suffering, people are hurting, there’s no clear end in sight.
“There’s been a bill we brought to them months ago coming out of the house, they won’t touch it, they won’t do anything but suddenly they have time to rush through a nomination that the American people don’t want.
“Whatever specific word you use for it, wrong is the word I would use.”
Buttigieg defended himself against a claim from Wallace that he had talked about expanding the court to 15 justices, so-called court packing.
“My views haven’t changed,” he said. “Bipartisan reform with the purpose of reducing the politicisation of the supreme court is a really promising idea. Let’s also be clear that a president can’t just snap their fingers and do it.”
People listen while President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Bemidji Regional Airport in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 18, 2020. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
Almost Two Dozen COVID-19 Infections Tied to Trump's Minnesota Rallies
Daniel Politi, Slate
Politi writes: "Public health officials in Minnesota have traced a total of 23 COVID-19 cases to the two rallies that President Donald Trump held in Minnesota in September."
The numbers have stood out to public health officials because they seem to suggest that the impact of the rallies isn’t as high as many feared. After all, more than 20 cases have been tied to a wedding that took place a day after Trump’s Bemidji rally. “The wedding had a lot fewer people than the rally,” Beltrami County Public Health Director Cynthia Borgen said. “But there was an indoor reception. There was dancing and conversation. People were close to each other for a long time.”
Officials, however, aren’t quite convinced they have a full picture of the impact and speculate there could be more cases they don’t know about. When someone is infected with COVID-19 they are asked whether they recently attended large gatherings and less than one in three people answer the question.
A separate analysis of new coronavirus cases from counties in which Trump held campaign rallies between late June and late September found that there was a surge in COVID-19 cases in seven of the 14 cities and townships where Trump held rallies. Even those who carry out the analysis acknowledge this “may be an imperfect measurement.” Some people travel from nearby areas to Trump’s rallies and then head home. And, of course, correlation does not equal causation. There could be lots of other reasons why there was an increase in cases. Beyond the immediate COVID-19 risk there is concern that Trump supporters will suffer other “collateral damage” from attending the event. “When the president promotes maskless mass gatherings during a pandemic, I worry that some of my patients might emulate this behavior, putting their lives—and the lives of those around them—at risk,” writes Zach Nayer.
A banner against renters eviction reading no job, no rent is displayed on a controlled rent building in Washington, DC on August 9, 2020. (photo: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images)
As the Housing Crisis Explodes, the Trump Admin Is Quietly Undoing Its "Eviction Moratorium"
Rebecca Burns, In These Times
Burns writes: "Following a pressure campaign from landlords and real estate groups, the Trump administration is giving landlords more leeway to evict tenants."
he Trump administration has quietly walked back federal protections for renters, giving property owners more leeway to pursue eviction cases.
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released an unprecedented order halting most residential evictions in order to stop the spread of Covid-19. But in new guidance released Friday, the agency clarified that “eviction” just means physical removal. Landlords are still free to take tenants to court to try to get them to pay up, and even secure eviction judgements that can be carried out as soon as the CDC’s order expires January 1.
“The Order is not intended to terminate or suspend the operations of any state or local court. Nor is it intended to prevent landlords from starting eviction proceedings, provided that the actual eviction of a covered person for non-payment of rent does NOT take place during the period of the Order,” reads a “Frequently Asked Questions” posted on the CDC’s website.
The agency’s eviction ban initially appeared to prohibit landlords from filing eviction cases in court, which is often used as an intimidation tactic against tenants and can leave a black mark on their records.
The apparent weakening of the order followed a pressure campaign by landlords and real-estate trade groups nationwide, which have filed more than 25 separate lawsuits since the federal moratorium took effect September 4.
One suit, filed September 8 by a Virginia landlord in U.S. district court, argues that the CDC’s actions “are unprecedented in our history and are an affront to core constitutional limits on federal power.” The case was later joined by the National Apartment Association and is supported by the Charles Koch-backed New Civil Liberties Alliance, as reported in the Washington Post. A response in the suit, filed October 2 by attorneys for the federal government, contended that nothing in the order prevents landlords from initiating eviction suits in court — a position now affirmed in the CDC’s official guidance.
The guidance released Friday also specifies that landlords have no obligation to inform tenants of the CDC’s order, which advocates worry will create an even more unequal playing field. To be protected under the order, tenants must make a declaration to their landlord that they’ve made their best effort to pay rent and obtain government assistance, among other requirements. But it’s unclear how most tenants would know to exercise the protection.
“Landlords often belong to associations that keep them up-to-date with any changes to the law they need to know about, but it’s not like there’s a tenant e‑mail list,” said Pam Bridge, director of Litigation and Advocacy at Community Legal Services, a Phoenix-based nonprofit law firm.
Bridge also noted that landlords will now be expressly permitted to challenge “the truthfulness” of a tenant’s declaration in court, which could subject them to a standard of evidence that’s difficult to meet. Documentation that tenants have tried to obtain rental assistance, for example, may be hard to come given that many local governments have awarded this assistance via lotteries where the number of applicants quickly overwhelm phone lines or online systems.
“It concerns me that this could end up being a subjective decision by judges, with every judge handling this differently,” said Bridge.
Even prior to the new guidance, three national housing rights groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, Right to the City Alliance and People’s Action — said during a press conference last week that highly uneven enforcement of the moratorium had created “mass confusion” and allowed thousands of evictions to proceed in apparent violation of the CDC’s order.
Emily Brockman, a mother of a 5‑month-old in Lexington, Kentucky, recounted how she ended up in court for unpaid rent in September after losing her job as a result of the pandemic. Brockman said that she had attempted to use the CDC’s declaration to stave off eviction.
“[The judge] just looked at my landlord and said, ‘What would you like to do?’ Of course they said they would like to move forward with the eviction,” she recalled during the press conference.
“Everything happened so fast. I was shocked. I had assumed I was going to be safe under the CDC guidelines because I matched perfectly,” Brockman continued.
Brockman connected with an attorney through the Lexington Housing Justice Collective and, on the day the sheriff was supposed to show up at her house to evict her, received word that she had been granted another hearing in appeals court. The eviction order was temporarily overturned, and Brockman is now waiting for another court date in January, after the moratorium expires.
But advocates worry that the further weakening of federal protections could leave vulnerable renters exposed even sooner. The U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent Household Pulse survey found that of 58 million households, roughly one-quarter had no or only slight confidence in their ability to pay November rent. The possibility of federal rent and mortgage assistance is tied up in negotiations over another Covid-19 relief package, and the $60 billion currently on the table is far below the $100 billion that housing groups estimated was necessary to help just the lowest-income households avoid eviction.
Meanwhile, local protections for eviction are rapidly expiring. In Miami-Dade county, where unemployment claims are rising again and a state eviction moratorium expired at the end of September, eviction filings have nearly returned to their pre-pandemic rate, according to Alana Greer, director of the legal nonprofit Community Justice Project.
“Right now, the CDC order is the last line of defense,” she said.
Thailand: Protesters Back on the Streets Despite Police Ban
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Hundreds of anti-government protesters have demonstrated against Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and the powerful monarchy in Bangkok on Sunday, defying once again a ban on protests."
READ MORE
Rewild to Mitigate the Climate Crisis, Urge Leading Scientists
Fiona Harvey, Grist
Harvey writes: "Restoring natural landscapes damaged by human exploitation can be one of the most effective and cheapest ways to combat the climate crisis while also boosting dwindling wildlife populations, a scientific study finds."
If a third of the planet’s most degraded areas were restored, and protection was thrown around areas still in good condition, that would store carbon equating to half of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution.
The changes would prevent about 70 percent of predicted species extinctions, according to the research, which is published in the journal Nature.
Scientists from Brazil, Australia, and Europe identified scores of places around the world where such interventions would be most effective, from tropical forests to coastal wetlands and upland peat. Many of them were in developing countries, but there were hotspots on every continent.
“We were surprised by the magnitude of what we found — the huge difference that restoration can make,” said Bernardo Strassburg of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and the lead author of the study. “Most of the priority areas are concentrated in developing countries, which can be a challenge, but also means they are often more cost-effective to restore.”
Only about 1 percent of the finance devoted to the global climate crisis goes to nature restoration, but the study found that such “nature-based solutions” were among the cheapest ways of absorbing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the additional benefits being the protection of wildlife.
Restoring nature did not have to be at the expense of agriculture and food production, Strassburg said. “If restoration is not properly planned it could lead to a risk to agriculture and the food sector, but if done properly it can increase agricultural productivity. We can produce enough food for the world and restore 55 percent of our current farmland, with sustainable intensification of farming.”
The study also says that planting trees, the “nature-based solution” that has received most support to date, is not always an appropriate way of preserving biodiversity and storing carbon. Peatlands, wetlands and savannas also provide habitats for a wealth of unique species, and can store vast amounts of carbon when well looked after. Strassburg said: “If you plant trees in areas where forests did not previously exist, it will mitigate climate change, but at the expense of biodiversity.”
Nathalie Pettorelli, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London, who was not involved in the research, said: “This paper provides further scientific evidence that ecological restoration is a sensible and financially viable solution to address the global climate and biodiversity crises. How ecosystems will be restored is however as important as where and how much will be restored. Ensuring that the best science is used to make decisions about how to restore each local ecosystem will be key.”
Three-quarters of all vegetated land on the planet now bears a human imprint. But some scientists have a target of restoring 15 percent of ecosystems around the world.
Alexander Lees, senior lecturer in biodiversity at Manchester Metropolitan University, who was also not involved with the study, said: “[This] analysis indicates that we can take massive strides towards mitigating the loss of species and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by restoring just 15 percent of converted lands. The global community needs to commit to this pact to give back to nature posthaste — it’s the deal of the century, and like most good deals available for a limited time only.”
The study focused on land, but the oceans also offer vast benefits linked to biodiversity and opportunities for absorbing carbon dioxide and mitigating climate change, said Richard Unsworth, senior lecturer in marine biology at Swansea University, and director of Project Seagrass, which restores vital marine habitats.
Unsworth said: “Marine habitat restoration is also vital for our planet and arguably more urgent given the rapid degradation and loss of marine ecosystems. We need restored ocean habitats such as seagrass and oysters to help promote biodiversity, but also to help secure future food supply through fisheries, and lock up carbon from our atmosphere.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.