“Are you going to run out of water?” is the first question people ask when they find out I’m from Arizona. The answer is that some people already have, others soon may and it’s going to get much worse without dramatic changes. Robert Glennon, University of Arizona The Conversation Unsustainable water practices, drought and climate […]
Billions of people around the world rely on the ocean for food, income and cultural identity. But climate change, overfishing and habitat destruction are unraveling ocean ecosystems. By Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, Oregon State University The Conversation As a marine ecologist, I study ways to improve ocean conservation and management by protecting key areas of the ocean. […]
Farmers are coping with a fertilizer crisis brought on by soaring fossil fuel prices and industry consolidation. The price of synthetic fertilizer has more than doubled since 2021, causing great stress in farm country. This crunch is particularly tough on those who grow corn, which accounts for half of U.S. nitrogen fertilizer use. Kathleen Merrigan, […]
Welcome to another week, another episode of the EcoRight Speaks, this time featuring Dale Strickler, an agronomist for Green Cover Seed, a Kansas rancher, and author of the book The Drought Resilient Farm. The Drought Resilient Farm is a compilation of techniques for increasing the ability of soil to capture more rainfall, hold more moisture, and increase the […]
Usually, you have to wait a few sentences for deniers to say something stupid, but a recent post at the industry-funded Heartland Insitute‘s daily disinfo hub is wrong in the very second word! This is impressive,even for Heartland’s ClimateRealism page, where past (mostly false) posts have proven that they apparently don’t understand Google, or what “proportion” means, or how natural variability and time […]
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has just published their monitoring report on 2021’s spring Chinook salmon run on Butte Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River in Northern California. By Dan Bacher The number of adult spring-run Chinooks that perished before spawning is worse than the preliminary estimate by the CDFW in October 2021, when the CDFW […]
Kelsey Scott is a fourth-generation rancher raising 250 head of cattle on the banks of the Missouri River, which passes through the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation where she and her family live. She’s the 125th generation to steward the Great Plains land, but the violent wheel of colonization has drastically shifted how and why […]
It’s springtime in California, and bees are emerging to feast on flowering fields – acres upon acres of cultivated almonds, oranges and other fruits and nuts that bloom all at once for just a few weeks. Farmers raise these lucrative crops in monoculture fields, each planted with neat, straight rows of a single type of […]
Early on a cool June morning, heavy dew lies on the grass of rolling farm country somewhere in Tennessee, or Missouri, or Pennsylvania. Small patches of fog hang in low lying pockets of these fields. In the distance, hardworking farmers are starting their day. Farm equipment clangs, tractors roar to life and voices lining out […]
Environmental campaigners on Tuesday cautiously embraced the Biden administration’s historic new blueprint to guard endangered species from pesticides as a much-needed step forward while also calling for more concrete moves to protect wildlife, people, and the planet. By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Welcoming the Environmental Protection Agency’s “first-ever comprehensive workplan” on the topic, Center for Biological Diversity environmental […]
Press Release from the Karuk Tribe, Yurok Tribe • Hoopa Valley Tribe • Swiftwater Films: Bring the Salmon Home Tells Story 20 years in the making By Dan Bacher Klamath River Basin (Calif. and Ore.) – Bring the Salmon Home is a new short documentary by Swiftwater Films. The film chronicles Klamath River tribal communities’ 320-mile relay run from the redwood-shrouded […]
Limiting global warming to 1.5C or 2C would mean “rapid and deep” emissions reductions in “all sectors” of the global economy, says the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead, emissions have continued to rise – albeit at a slowing rate – and it will be “impossible” to stay below 1.5C with “no or […]
As the record drought in California and the West continues and the Sacramento River watershed already begins to see die-offs of endangered Chinook salmon, Governor Gavin Newsom on March 29 announced that state, federal and local water leaders had reached “broad agreement” on a package of controversial voluntary agreements purported to provide additional water flows and new habitat […]
The fall of 2021 was a good season for adult Chinook salmon swimming up Auburn Ravine to spawn in the foothills east of downtown Lincoln, California, according to an update from Friends of Auburn Ravine. By Dan Bacher ”Over 200 large fall-run chinook salmon, some over 43 inches long, made the trip. The thousands of eggs […]
Even before the Russian army crossed into Ukraine, food prices had been on the rise for the past year. But the world has seen large jumps in the cost of food over the the last two months. By Alfons Weersink, University of Guelph and Michael von Massow, University of Guelph The Conversation Globally, food is […]