Hello, all. I'm starting to have a little hope for this planet. It goes in waves (is that an earth joke?) - I feel scared and hopeless one moment and hopeful and motivated the next when it comes to climate change. I think this feeling of hope has to do with a certain new president who believes in science.
PHOTOGRAPHER/ARTIST:
Aftyn Shah, @riseandwander
Aftyn Shah is an outdoorsy printmaker and painter working in Philadelphia. After being in a life-changing car accident and living with the daily effects of a brain injury, one of her doctors ordered her to get outside and keep her hands busy. As you can see from her work, she draws inspiration from her connectedness to nature.
Tobias Hagg, @airpixels
Tobias Hagg, also known as Airpixels, is a photographer and videographer in Stockholm, Sweden.
BAD NEWS:
How the waters off Catalina became a DDT dumping ground by Rosanna Xia by LA Times
"Between 1947 and 1961, as much as 767 tons of DDT could have gone into the ocean.
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DDT is so stable it can take generations to break down. It doesn’t really dissolve in water but stores easily in fat. Compounding these problems is what scientists today call “biomagnification”: the toxin accumulating in the tissues of animals in greater and greater concentrations as it moves up the food chain.
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“There’s a broader problem of thinking of the ocean as this unlimited garbage dump that’s going to take up our CO₂, take up our mercury, deal with the plastic that we don’t throw away properly, be a dumping ground for pesticides, deal with whatever is in runoff — and that our health is going to be separable from that,” he said. “But what we’re learning more and more is that our health and the ocean’s health are pretty inseparable.”"
'We packed long underwear and never wore it': Arctic scientists shocked at warming by Emily Holden by The Guardian
"Grebmeier explained that the lack of sea ice was leading to higher levels of algal production – including the kind that can be deadly. Clams eat the toxic algae, and walruses, diving ducks and humans eat the clams. That’s also worrying because indigenous populations along the Alaska coast depend on clams for food."
GOOD NEWS:
Climate heroes: the countries pioneering a green future by Jonathan Watts by The Guardian
Spain will go carbon neutral by 2050. In May, the cabinet approved a bill that would ban new coal, oil, and extraction projects and end fossil fuel subsidies - adding to the fact that Spain will be shutting down 69% of its coal-fired plants this year.
South Korea promises that by 2025 they will bring about 230,000 more energy-saving buildings, 1.13 million electric and hydrogen-powered cars, and an increase in renewable energy capacity. Money will also be made available to upgrade public rental housing and schools to make them zero-energy, and to expand green areas in cities.
Uruguay, last year, "was ranked fourth in the world in the proportion of electricity it supplies from wind and solar. The International Energy Agency said the country’s 36% share was behind only Denmark (50%), Lithuania (41%) and Luxembourg (37%). If hydropower is added, Uruguay leaps ahead of them all with 97%."
Kenya's electricity is provided by renewables (93%) and the government plans to expand further so everyone in the country has access either to the grid or community solar power by 2022. Kenya is also home to east Africa’s biggest solar generation plant - more than 200,000 PV panels soak up the energy from the sunshine each day.
Tiny Atlantic island takes giant leap toward protecting world's oceans by Karen McVeigh by The Guardian
"The government of Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic archipelago in the south Atlantic and part of the UK’s overseas territories, has announced that almost 700,000 square kilometers of its waters will become a marine protected area (MPA), the fourth largest such sanctuary in the world. In doing so, the community will safeguard the area’s wealth of wildlife, including sevengill sharks, the globally threatened yellow-nosed albatross and Atlantic petrel, rockhopper penguins and other birds that live there, and help the UK government achieve its target of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030."
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A photo of mine of this beautiful world:
xx
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