Dilip Simeon's blog

The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California . More than 73 p...

In case you hadn’t been paying attention, it’s hot on this planet. I mean, really hot. And I’m not just thinking about Europe’s worst heat wave in at least 200 years . There, fires in Spain, Portugal, and France rage , barely checked. Nor do I have in mind the devastating repeated spring heat waves in South Asia or the disastrous drought in the Horn of Africa . It’s burning right here! Scarcely noticed in the rest of the country (or in national news coverage), the American Southwest and parts of the West are in a megadrought of historic proportions. And parts of New Mexico, as naturalist and TomDispatch regular William deBuys describes so vividly today, have been burning in jaw-dropping fashion. (As a poor state, its fires don’t get the attention that those in wealthier southern California might.) And yet, right now in what Noam Chomsky recently suggested could be “the last stage in human history,” the question is: When it comes to climate change, who’s really paying att...

Only breaking at midday to refuel on peanuts and palm wine, the village works methodically as a unit to grow fonio – a precious grain crucial to their diets that only takes days to germinate and can be harvested in as little as six weeks. Though laborious, growing fonio, one of Africa’s oldest cultivated grains, is simple and reliable, say Kamara’s Bedik people. It grows naturally, they insist, where mainstream crops such as wheat and rice are harder to cultivate. It is also well adapted to the climate, nutritious, tastes good and can be stored far longer than other grains. “If you put in front of me some fonio and also something made of maize, I’ll push aside the other because the fonio is much healthier. There are no chemicals used; it just grows naturally and then we harvest it. We don’t add anything,” says Kamara... https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jul/07/fonio-indigenous-crops-africa-food-security NORMAN MILLER: The forgotten foods that could excite our...

When I began work as an environmental journalist in 1985, I knew I would struggle against people with a financial interest in destructive practices. But I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth. The UK government and the US supreme court look as if they are willing the destruction of our life support systems. It feels like the end game. In the US last week, the third perverse and highly partisan supreme court decision in a few days made American efforts to prevent climate breakdown almost impossible. Ruling in favour of the state of West Virginia , the court decided that the Environmental Protection Agency is not entitled to restrict carbon dioxide emissions from power stations. The day before, in the UK, the government’s climate change committee reported a “shocking” failure by Boris Johnson’s administration to meet its climate targets. So stupid and perverse are its policies on issues such as energy sav...

The English journalist John Diamond, shortly before his death from throat cancer in 2001, wrote that ‘there is really no such thing as alternative medicine, just medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t’. Ecological knowledge might be thought of as similarly indivisible. There are no alternative birds, non-traditional plants, complementary ecologies. More often than not, bodies of knowledge develop not in opposition to one another but along parallel tracks. Richard Smyth: Nature does not care I worry, sometimes, that knowledge is falling out of fashion – that in the field in which I work, nature writing, the multitudinous nonfictions of the more-than-human world, facts have been devalued; knowing stuff is no longer enough. Marc Hamer, a British writer on nature and gardening, said in his book Seed to Dust (2021) that he likes his head ‘to be clean and empty’ – as if, the naturalist Tim Dee remarked in his review for The Guardian, ‘it were a spiritual goal to be de-cluttered of fa...

Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand, sometimes he balanced them on a  koromyslo  – an arched wooden pole placed over the shoulders to distribute weight evenly. He poked small holes in the tomato patches where the dried-up plants carried no fruit that sewage could contaminate – and poured the goo into them, covering the holes with soil. He splashed some around the roots of the apple and cherry trees and raked some leaves over so that, when we walked around, we wouldn’t get any on the soles of our feet. And he also dumped a bunch into one of the compost pits, adding it to the heap of other organic refuse. The compost pits were where Mother Nature forged its black gold. And there was a system to...

The Associated Press reports  that the Conger/Glenzer ice shelf in East Antarctica has collapsed. The event was caught on satellite video, and it is the first such collapse known to have occurred on the east coast of Antarctica, which had been thought to be more stable and less affected by human-caused global heating than the west. The ice shelf was holding back two glaciers,  Conger  and  Glenzer , named for American naval personnel who helped survey the area in the late 1940s. The glaciers collapsed along with the ice shelf. As I observed in January, “Global heating is being driven by 100 corporations supplying and encouraging the burning of petroleum, coal and natural gas, which emit billions of dangerous heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere annually. We are setting the sky afire every time we drive our cars or heat our homes.”… https://www.juancole.com/2022/03/climate-antarctica-collapses.html Murtaza Hussain: Industrialized Militaries & Climate Emergenc...

Nature is a tricky term. It can refer to the quality of things, to what moves things into existence or to the world as a whole. Read and heard, from political debate to food labelling, it is in constant use: back to nature, 100% natural, natural order, unnatural acts, natural ways of living, wisdom of nature, natural remedies. Despite taking propolis when I get a cough and enjoying organic food, I’m critically suspicious of the term – the concept of Nature is often used to backup moral stand points, as a device for legitimization, claiming and appealing to an external truth as a reference point. An ecology without Nature: In the first chapter of  Facing Gaia , ‘On the instability of the (notion of) nature’, Bruno Latour responds to the contemporary urgency of climate change. The Earth’s population is facing a mutated relationship with the world, laden with growing concern and dramatic outcomes. ‘Ecology drives people crazy’, claims Latour. This intense reaction can ...

Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction. Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No.  It happens routinely  and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon. The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab  we’ve   been   studying  for the past decade. Much of this land is cleared for cattle ranches and soybean farms,  threatening biodiversity and the Earth’s climate . Prior research has quantified how much public land has been grabbed, but only for one type of public land called “ undesignated public forests .” Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforesta...

The regent honeyeater is an endangered native Australian songbird, with only a few hundred left in the wild. A few years ago scientists noticed something odd – they were mimicking other birds, and unable to sing their own song. Environment reporter Graham Readfearn and Dr Joy Tripovich explain how this species lost its song, and whether teaching it how to sing again could help save it from extinction Photograph: Lachlan L Hall/AP https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2022/jan/13/revisited-could-bringing-back-its-love-song-save-one-of-australias-rarest-songbirds

The production and release of plastics, pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and other pollutants is now happening so fast and on such a large scale that it has exceeded the planetary boundary for chemical pollution, the safe limit for humanity, a new study claims. We asked Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate at Stockholm University and one of the authors of the study, to explain what this means. What are planetary boundaries?: In 2009, an international team of researchers identified nine planetary boundaries that maintain the remarkably stable state Earth has remained within for 10,000 years – since the dawn of civilisation. These boundaries include greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, the ozone layer, an intact biosphere and freshwater. The researchers quantified the boundaries that influence Earth’s stability and concluded in 2015 that human activity has breached four of them. Greenhouse gas emissions are pushing the global climate into a new, hotter sta...

A cool breeze sweeps through the Dhamma Sakyamuni Monastery. Sitting cross-legged on the polished stone floor, monks meditate silently under the gaze of a Buddha painted gold. Above them, stalactites hang from the rough limestone ceiling. This is one of the last remaining  limestone cave  temples in  Malaysia . It sits nestled into the foot of Mount Kanthan, one of 12 limestone hills that rise up from the Kinta Valley in the Malaysian state of Perak. There are currently some 15 Buddhist monks living and practicing their faith in these caves. But the peace here is fragile. Outside the monastery, explosions can be heard echoing through the valley like gunfire. This is the sound of the mountain — and neighboring peaks — being blasted with dynamite to extract limestone that will be used to make cement.. https://www.dw.com/en/malaysia-buddhist-monks-fight-to-protect-mountain-home/a-60341441 George Monbiot: Dead Line - Future corporate profits are officially more importa...

The epic wilderness of Greenland – in pictures. From Inuit hunters to the vast expanses of snow and ice, Danish photographer Carsten Egevang’s images spring from a three-decade fascination with the planet’s least-populated country  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2022/jan/12/freeze-frames-the-wilderness-of-greenland-in-pictures

The climate crisis is set to profoundly alter the world around us. Humans will not be the only species to suffer from the calamity. Huge waves of die-offs will be triggered across the animal kingdom as coral reefs turn ghostly white and tropical rainforests collapse. For a period, some researchers suspected that insects may be less affected, or at least more adaptable, than mammals, birds and other groups of creatures. With their large, elastic populations and their defiance of previous mass extinction events, surely insects will do better than most in the teeth of the climate emergency? Sadly not. At 3.2C of warming, which many scientists still fear the world will get close to by the end of this century (although a flurry of promises at Cop26 have brought the expected temperature increase down to 2.4C), half of all insect species will lose more than half of their current habitable range. .. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jan/11/climate-change-insect-world-global-heating-s...

I was fortunate to play a small part in a new study, just published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which shows that the Earth broke yet another heat record last year. Twenty-three scientists from around the world teamed up to analyze thousands of temperature measurements taken throughout the world’s oceans. The measurements, taken at least 2,000 meters (about 6,500ft) deep and spread across the globe, paint a clear picture: the Earth is warming, humans are the culprit, and the warming will continue indefinitely until we collectively take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We used measurements from the oceans because they are absorbing the vast majority of the heat associated with global warming. In fact, more than 90% of global warming heat ends up in the oceans. I like to say that “global warming is really ocean warming”. If you want to know how fast climate change is happening, the answer is in the oceans… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan...