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An Indigenous Community Finds its Agricultural Roots

Civil Eats

An Indigenous Community Finds its Agricultural Roots in Tucson’s San Xavier Farm

After securing much-needed water rights, the co-op farm on the Tohono O’odham reservation is honoring thousands of years of the tribe’s farming history.

By Rudri Bhatt Patel, Indigenous Foodways April 25, 2019

In a quiet part of Tucson, Arizona, only a few miles southwest of the city center, the San Xavier Cooperative Farm honors the agricultural legacy of the Tohono O’odham, a Native American tribe that has farmed the land for over 4,000 years. Located on the ancestral village of Walk, the 860-acre operation, one of the few farms on an Indian reservation at last count, is a lush green oasis in the otherwise dry desert.

Julie Ramon-Pierson, president of the San Xavier Co-op board, grew up hearing stories about her grandparents and great-grandparents cooking traditional O’odham foods such as tepary beans, squash, and corn, and she remembers seeing her mother harvest and clean the native beans. She hopes the co-op will help resurrect narratives like the ones she was raised with.

“The primary goal of the co-op is to create economic development in the community, re-educate people about traditional foods so they can prepare them at home to adopt a healthier lifestyle, and preserve O’odham values, like respect of land, plants, animals, and elders,” she says.

The Tohono O’odham Nation spans 4,460 square miles in Southern Arizona and includes 28,000 enrolled tribal members. The land is divided into 11 districts, and the San Xavier District is home to about 2,300 members. Founded in the early 1970’s, the co-op leases farmland from the landowners, called allottees, and about 90 percent of its 25 to 28 employees are O’odham tribe members, according to Gabriel Vega, the co-op’s farm manager for 13 years.

The welcome sign outside the entrance reflects this agricultural history; it’s a shield painted with a traditional planting stick and feathers representing a blessing. In the center is a sprouting seed, considered “new life,” and the four parts represent seasons containing the cycle of the sun, rain, moon, and wildlife. (Photo by Rudri Patel)

While the co-op grows alfalfa as its primary money-maker, other parts of the property are home to orange, plum, and apple orchards; an assortment of vegetable crops; and native foods such as tepary, pima lima, black, and white beans, wild mesquite trees, and pima wheat.

In addition to growing and selling crops, the co-op hosts blessing and spiritual ceremonies and provides educational opportunities for the tribal community. In early March, for example, it hosted a cooking and culture workshop for women tribe members.

Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, is focusing her dissertation research on water and land rights, as well as the impact of the San Xavier Co-op. She sees the co-op’s impact as three-fold: “It keeps traditional ecological knowledge alive, assists with food sovereignty, and allows the community to know its history,” she says.

There is a real effort, says Ramon-Sauberan, to keep doors open and educate people. If a member of the O’odham community wants to learn how to cultivate a certain food, she says, the co-op creates a teaching space to achieve this goal. More importantly, this attitude helps foster a “communal spirit among the members” that extends beyond the organization.

Bringing the Water Back

Though the O’odham has built an agricultural history in the Sonoran Desert over the course of thousands of years—one that recently helped earn Tucson the honor of becoming the first U.S. city designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy—the tribe’s farming legacy has been threatened in recent decades by a conflict over the desert city’s limited water supply.

Traditionally, the O’odham people structured their fields to channel water into planting areas, using the Santa Cruz River as the main source. When Tucson began to develop, however, its water demands drained the aquifers from the area, and by 1950, Vega says, “much of the agriculture ceased.”

Farm manager Gabriel Vega has worked for San Xavier Co-op for 13 years. (Photo by Rudri Patel)

When the farm formed in 1971, it fought to reclaim tribal water rights and reintroduce farming practices that had been halted during the dry years. In 1975, the San Xavier District sued the City of Tucson over water rights. Ten years later, the Southern Arizona Water Rights Settlement Act granted an allotment of 56,000 acre-feet of water yearly from the Central Arizona Project—enough to sustain roughly 900 acres of land.

“Water to this community is a sacred element,” Vega says. “To have a running flow of water is fulfilling the prayers of the O’odham people.”

During the period when water supplies were nonexistent, the connection between the land and its people diminished, according to Vega. “Wells went dry, farming decreased, and it led to the decline of mesquite trees,” which in turn led to the loss of agriculture and tradition, and a rise in diet-related diseases like diabetes.

When water returned, it opened the door to reintroduce native foods, a healthier way of living, and a pathway to reconnect to the land. And that’s where San Xavier comes in.

Even with the busy undercurrent of activity, the farm is a tranquil space where a palpable sense of peace permeates the air. This isn’t accidental, according to Vega. “Many of the O’odham elders wanted this area to return to an agricultural community,” he says.

Reconnecting with Tradition by Saving Seeds and Cultivating Wild Plants

Although the water has returned to the area and re-enabled agriculture, healthy eating habits are slower to catch up. Vega says for many people the reality of day-to-day life on the reservation includes fast food.

To reverse this trend, San Xavier Co-op is preserving the “genetic resources” stored in seeds. Though the O’odham have 19 different varieties of corn, San Xavier has access to only two. Recently, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded the farm a grant to build a 2,400-square-foot cold storage facility to preserve its seeds.

“The plan is to go door-to-door in the community and see if families have corn seeds that were lost in the last few decades,” Vega says.

A large nursery houses several different varieties of seeds. (Photo by Rudri Patel)

Organizations like Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) help preserve indigenous seeds and serve as a repository to protect cultural heritage. Although there isn’t an official partnership in place, Laura Neff, an associate at NS/S, says that San Xavier Co-op recently received two community seed grants from the organization. Additionally, San Xavier sells its products in the Native Seed/SEARCH retail store. With efforts like these, the O’odham people may be able to return to the foods their ancestors enjoyed.

Another focus at San Xavier is cultivating wild foods. In the past, the O’odham relied on the pods of mesquite trees to supply them with protein. Once the pods dry, the O’odham harvest, mill, and eventually turn them into flour. “Traditionally it was eaten with water, and these high nutrients provided energy,” Vega says.

Diversity of Sustainable Crops

San Xavier Co-op remains viable—and able to aggressively pursue growing native foods—“because it invests in alfalfa crops, its best-seller on the farm,” Ramon-Pierson says. But the focus on income doesn’t mean sacrificing what is good for the land, Vega emphasizes. The co-op is Certified Naturally Grown, he says, which means it grows everything without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or GMOs.

“This farming community has been here for several thousand years, and there is an intentional purpose to how the O’odham use the land,” says nursery coordinator Cie’na Schalaefli. Keeping it chemical-free helps the tribe maintain its traditional values.

Orchards line the property near the side of the farm. (Photo by Rudri Patel)

The co-op has also formed a partnership with the Compost Cats program through the University of Arizona, a student-run organization that collects food waste and scraps from local businesses, processes the material at the San Xavier Co-op, and sells it as compost to the community.

The co-op constantly looks for ways to diversify its offerings in order to stay afloat, Vega says. San Xavier has a blossoming partnership with both the food bank community and Tucson schools, says Ramon-Pierson, where it sells broccoli and melons. It also runs a catering business that blends seasonal indigenous O’odham foods with non-traditional items like tortillas and tamales.

Several other projects are in the works or already underway, Vega says. “Bridgestone, the tire company, recently contacted the co-op about the Gualye, a woody shrub which thrives in the desert Southwest,” he says. The interest is to produce rubber for tires. There’s also the possibility that pork production could begin on the property, he adds.

Giving Back to the Community

Even though the farm looks for numerous ways to be profitable, the O’odham Nation is the first priority. Workshops like the Wild Harvest teach community members how to harvest, process, and prepare traditional foods such as cholla buds from a cacti, also known as ciolim, mesquite, and prickly pear.

A colorful mural serves as a reminder of San Xavier’s ancestral roots. (Photo by Rudri Patel)

“Once they learn how to harvest, they can do this on their land at home, bring it back to the farm, and we pay them by the pound,” Vega says. This fosters economic resiliency and a way to reintroduce traditional foods to children and families.

The workshops also cover the basics of how to cook foods like tepary beans—which can easily boiled in water with chiles—and sends participants home armed with how to search for online recipes used in making traditional O’odham meals. A resurgence of traditional foods, according to Ramon-Sauberan at the University of Arizona, is working to reduce the rates of diabetes and other health issues among the O’odham people.

San Xavier Co-op’s multi-pronged approach to caring for its community, is merely a “continuation of what’s in their ancestral genes,” Vega says. “Not many spaces that allow you to pay your bills, take care of your elders, and adopt a healthy way of living.”

Canada is Warming at Twice the Rate of the Globe

the real news network

Canada is Warming at Twice the Rate of the Globe, Says New Report

April 20, 2019

Greenpeace Canada analyst hopes study serves as a wake-up call for Trudeau government, but says “You can’t wake up a man who’s only pretending to be asleep” on climate change

Story Transcript

SPEAKER: It’s the 21st century. We know climate change is real. We know that one of the challenges we have is that pollution has been free, but we need to put a price on it.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network from Montreal, Canada. Earlier this week, officials from Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian federal government, presented the results of a study on warming in Canada. Their study concluded that Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and that northern Canada is warming even more quickly, nearly three times the global rate. The officials also reported that three of the past five years have been the warmest on record in this country. Their study is the first of its kind. Entitled Canada’s Changing Climate Report, the study has been in the works for years and is the first of a series aimed at informing policy decisions and increasing public awareness and understanding of Canada’s changing climate. Now here to discuss this new study with us is Keith Stewart. Keith is a Senior Energy Strategist with Greenpeace Canada and part-time instructor at the University of Toronto. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from York University and has worked as a climate policy researcher and advocate for 19 years. He joins us today from Toronto. Thanks for coming back on The Real News, Keith.

KEITH STEWART: Thanks for having me.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So Keith, even with all of the warming that has occurred in this country since the beginning of the fossil fuels era, we Canadians continue to live in what is one of the world’s relatively colder climates. Why should Canadians be concerned about this report? How is the warming of the atmosphere and of the oceans affecting their lives in practical terms and what practical effects should Canadians anticipate as Canada continues to warm?

KEITH STEWART: It’s kind of a standard joke that oh, in Canada it would be nice if it was a little warmer. The problem is the rate of change. We haven’t historically– well, in the geological record climate has changed a lot over time– but we’re trying to pack change that usually take 50,000 to 100,000 years into 50 years. Because we’re burning fossil fuels and sort of increasing the greenhouse effect trapping heat, which it then causes a whole bunch of other changes. You might think oh, a little bit warmer that would be nice, but you’re also changing rainfall patterns. You’re going to have drought in some places. You are going to have more wildfires, the kinds we’ve seen in B.C. and Alberta the last couple of years where people literally couldn’t breathe. Walking outside in Vancouver was like breathing eight packs, smoking eight pack of cigarettes. In urban areas, one of the warnings in the report is we’re going to see even more flooding. In particular, the kind of flash flooding which in one incident here in Toronto back in 2013, we saw $960 million worth of damage in a couple of hours. We saw street cars under water. People had to be rescued from the GO train by boat. These kinds of severe impacts– the heat waves, the droughts, the wildfires, the flooding– these cause enormous damage to our economy, they cause enormous damage to our health, and we’re only seeing the thin edge of the wedge here.

When you look at this report, a big part of the message in the report is: what the future looks like depends a lot on what actions we take today. In their low emissions scenario, if Canada warmed about one point seven degrees, it would warm by another two degrees, that’s bad because it would have a whole bunch of negative impacts. The negative impacts by far outweigh the positives. In the high emissions scenario, the one we’re actually on the path to right now, they’re talking about warming by six degrees in Canada, on average even more than the far north, by the end of the century. That would make agriculture basically impossible in large chunks of the prairies. They say oh, you can just move further north. Well a lot of places in this country you move further north, they don’t have soil to be able to support agriculture. Here in Ontario, we have this thing called the Canadian Shield. It’s all granite. You can’t grow crops there. And similarly, forests which are suited for one climate system, can’t move themselves north 50, 100, 200 kilometers in the space of 20 years.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This study was released on April 1st, Keith, which also happened to be the date on which a federal carbon tax of $20 a ton took effect in provinces that lack provincial pricing plans, including the provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The carbon tax, as I’m sure you know, is the centerpiece of the Trudeau government’s strategy for fighting climate change. In your view, is this carbon tax adequate both from the perspective of the amount of the tax and the breadth of its application? And if not, what kind of a carbon tax do you think we need in this country given the urgency of the situation?

KEITH STEWART: I think one of the problems we have in this country right now is action on climate change has been narrowed to carbon tax, no carbon tax. And really we need a whole, vast suite of efforts not just carbon taxes but also massive investments in things like public transit, so people can get to where they need to go without having to drive a car. We need to invest in better sewage/stormwater systems so that we’re not having these floodings. We need to invest in rapidly transitioning to renewable energy. A carbon tax is a key part of that. Raising the price of fossil fuels makes them less attractive relative to cleaner forms of energy. It also brings in some cash that can be done to build things like great public transit systems or, put up windmills and solar panels. So in the U.S. we are talking about this as a Green New Deal, kind of built on the New Deal that Roosevelt, that the Americans brought in to fight the Great Depression. That’s the kind of change we need. This carbon tax is a component of that and I think it’s kind of like the lowest possible measure, $20 dollars a ton kicking in this year. That’s 4.4 cents per liter of gasoline. When you look at the price of oil, the price of gasoline goes up and down. That’s not a huge change. That on its own is by no means enough. They’re also talking about increasing it $10 a year. Greenpeace would support that. We also think the money should be invested back in renewables, but that’s got to be just one piece of a much bigger package.

The big problem we have right now is no one is treating the climate crisis really like a crisis. We treat it more as kind of a messaging problem; we do a few things it will go away. Or, on one side of the political spectrum with the conservatives at the provincial level and federally who are fighting against even the small carbon tax that’s being proposed, they’re proposing we do nothing. That somehow if we ignore the problem, it will go away. One of my friends was asking me, “do you think this new report that just came is a wakeup call?” And was like well, there’s an old proverb that says “you can’t wake up a man who’s only pretending to be asleep” and that’s the problem with a lot of the politicians in this country and around the world. They’re pretending to be asleep on this issue, hoping they can get out of office and it will be someone else’s problem down the road.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Now at the same time as the Trudeau government has raised alarms about the extent of warming in this country, federal and provincial governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of about $3 billion a year. Also, as we’ve reported extensively on The Real News, the Trudeau government is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to buy its TransMountain tar sands pipeline. Keith, doesn’t this new study– I mean, what Justin Trudeau did on Monday was he held it up and said to the public and in particularly was addressing the conservatives and those who are opposed to the carbon tax, this shows that we have to impose a carbon tax. But doesn’t it also highlight the recklessness of the Trudeau government’s continued defense of the fossil fuels industry, its massive investments in the fossil fuels industry, this perpetuation of our dependence on fossil fuels?

KEITH STEWART: Absolutely. Subsidies in fossil fuels is basically like a negative carbon tax. You’re making them cheaper in order to get people to use more. Similarly, the federal government yesterday was denying that, in response, were denying that the purchasing the pipeline was a subsidy to fossil fuels. Well it is and I think the Trudeau government is trying to have it both ways. They say we’re going to do a carbon tax and we’re going to promote expansion of the oil industry. If you’re serious about climate change, that means getting off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible by mid-century, at the latest. Building a new tar sands pipeline that has to operate for 50 years to make the money back, makes no sense at this point if you’re seriously committed to achieving the Paris climate goals, to protecting the future of our economy, of our communities, of our ecosystems. So it’s not one step forward, one step back which is kind of what we’re seeing from the federal liberals. It’s got to be leaping forward and I think the big problem in Canada and also similarly in the U.S. and many other places is that entrenched power of the fossil fuel interests in Canada and particularly the oil lobby. In the US it’s also the coal lobby who are basically saying, don’t go too fast. Give us time to get our money out. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has launched an election campaign in Alberta saying, we want to double the rate of growth of oil production in Alberta and here’s all things you have to do to help us do that which is kill regulations, get rid of carbon pricing, build new pipelines. That’s basically asking people to vote for climate destruction.

And I think this is going to be a big issue in the federal election here in the fall as we have the conservatives who are saying do nothing about climate change and give more subsidies to the oil industry. You have the liberals who are saying let’s do stuff on climate change but not touch oil production. So they are doing a coal phase out, they’re doing a bunch of other measures. But basically, oil is sacrosanct and what we really need is a push for this kind of a Green New Deal which actually, we can make our lives better. We can create great green jobs right across the country. We can deal with all sorts of problems in this country by the kind of investments that are necessary, putting people to work, solving the climate crisis.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: We’ve been speaking to Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada about an important and alarming new study showing that the rate of warming in Canada is far above the global average. Thank you very much for joining us today, Keith.

KEITH STEWART: Thanks so much for having me on.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network.

These are the U.S. states most and least dependent on the federal government

Yahoo – Finance

These are the U.S. states most and least dependent on the federal government

Adriana Belmonte, Associate Editor April 16, 2019.

These are the U.S. states most and least dependent on the federal government.

States that voted Democrat in 2016 generally rely less on federal funding than Republican states, according to a study by WalletHub.

The analysis looked at the return on taxes paid to the federal government, the share of federal jobs, and federal funding as a share of state revenue.

Thirteen out of the top 15 states found to be most dependent on the federal government voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Ten out of the 15 least dependent states voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

New Mexico is the most dependent state on the federal government, according to WalletHub. (Graphic: David Foster/Yahoo Finance)

‘No ranking like this is ever going to be perfect’

“Obviously, no ranking like this is ever going to be perfect,” Stan Veuger, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told Yahoo Finance. “Some things you can definitely say, like where the states that have the highest per capita income or pay the most in taxes.”

But “it’s not really true across the board,” Veuger said. “Virginia is a blue state and obviously has a lot of federal contractors and a lot of federal money … It obviously relies heavily on what the federal government does.”

According to WalletHub’s analysis, Virginia receives the second-highest amount of federal contracts while ranking federal funding as a share of state revenue. And given that WalletHub weighted federal funding four times more than share of federal jobs, Virginia is one of the least-dependent states on the federal government.

‘Poor states receive more federal funding through Medicaid’

WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez explained that “federal funding as a percentage of state revenue was calculated as states’ intergovernmental revenue from the federal government divided by the states’ general revenue.”

Intergovernmental revenue includes funding for Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), child welfare services, and other low-income assistance programs. For TANF, Kentucky (3rd overall), Alaska (7th overall), and Delaware use the most federal dollars.

“Because the federal income tax is progressive,” Veuger said, “I think you can also generally say that poor states receive more federal funding through Medicaid, which is a huge part of states’ budgets.”

The electoral map after the 2016 election. Stripes indicate that the state flipped from 2012. (Source: The New York Times)

In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, Massachusetts ranked first, followed by New York, Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. On the other end of the spectrum, Mississippi is the lowest, followed by Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, and Alabama.

Veuger noted that “all the poor states are red. Mississippi and Louisiana get a lot of Medicaid money.”

What If the Sahara Desert Was Covered With Solar Panels?

What.If

What If the Sahara Desert Was Covered With Solar Panels?

April 22, 2019

Could this be the solution to climate change?
#earthday

What If the Sahara Desert Was Covered With Solar Panels?

Posted by What.If on Monday, October 22, 2018

The planet has until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change

CNN is premiering a video.

How To Fix the Planet

April 22, 2019

According to United Nations experts, the planet has until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change. CNN climate change correspondent Bill Weir joins Full Circle to discuss his travels all around the world looking at the causes of, and solutions to, climate change.

How to fix the planet

According to United Nations experts, the planet has until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change. CNN climate change correspondent Bill Weir joins Full Circle to discuss his travels all around the world looking at the causes of, and solutions to, climate change.

Posted by CNN on Monday, April 22, 2019

Feedback loops will make climate change even worse

Yahoo News

David Knowles April 22, 2019

When the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its dire report in October warning of humanity’s fast-approaching reckoning with global warming, one factor adding to the urgency was a new estimate about how much additional carbon dioxide was being added to the atmosphere as a result of the warming of Arctic permafrost.

With rising Arctic temperatures setting free a vast amount of carbon previously locked beneath permafrost, the additional greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere would speed up warming, the report concluded — and that, in turn, would further melt the permafrost.

It is “feedback loops” like that one that make climate change unpredictable and represent a threat of global warming spiraling out of control.

“It’s already begun,” Thomas Crowther, professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science of ETH Zurich, told Yahoo News. “The feedback is in process.”

Crowther estimates that carbon dioxide and methane emissions from thawing soils are “accelerating climate change about 12 to 15 percent at the moment,” and said past IPCC reports that left out the feedback “were way more optimistic than they should have been.”

Almost every scientist studying the effects of climate change is worried about the extent to which feedback loops will hasten global warming. One of the most serious concerns is the “albedo effect,” the amount of the sun’s radiation the planet reflects back into space, mostly from the polar ice sheets. The warming that has already occurred has begun melting the ice caps, leaving the relatively dark ocean and land exposed to absorb solar radiation — further warming the planet and leading to more ice melt.

“The impact that it has on making the earth darker by removing all the snow and ice is estimated by some to be 25 to 40 percent of the warming that we’ve experienced,” Jennifer Francis, research professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, told Yahoo News. “In other words, global warming is that much worse. There’s a lot of ways these things are totaled all together.”

Feedback loops are not a root cause of the climate change problem, but they make the problem that much worse. When climatologists began seriously studying global warming in the 1970’s, there was some doubt about how the feedback loops would operate. Scientists theorized there might also be negative feedback loops, which would slow global warming — for instance, by increasing cloud cover. But so far it has all gone in the opposite — wrong — direction.

Austfonna, a melting ice cap located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. (Photo: Jan Tove Johansson/Getty Images)

“I’m not optimistic. It’s not just because of those feedbacks, it’s because we’ve already put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that carbon dioxide lasts a very long time,” Francis said. “A molecule of carbon dioxide, on average, lasts about 100 years in the atmosphere. So, we haven’t yet felt the impacts of the carbon dioxide that we’ve already put in the atmosphere. Even not thinking about feedbacks, we’re already got a lot more climate change built into the system just because it takes awhile for the climate system to adjust itself to this new level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. All the feedback that [happens is] just making that response even bigger than it would be otherwise.”

Francis has been researching how rising Arctic temperatures have been weakening the jet stream, causing shifts in weather and ocean current patterns that, in yet another feedback loop, warm the earth and further destabilize the jet stream.

“What we’re seeing is that the Arctic is warming much faster than the planet is farther south, making that north-south temperature difference much smaller and so there’s less of that fuel driving the jet stream wind,” Francis said. “That should cause the jet stream to take more of these big north-south swings. And the reason that’s important is because those waves in the jet stream are actually what create high- and low-pressure systems that we see on a weather map on TV and when you get those really big waves in the jet stream, they tend to move much more slowly, so those highs and lows we see on a weather map also tend to move much more slowly and so the weather conditions we see on the surface associated with those weather systems are much more persistent.”

Persistent weather patterns, such as periods of rain or drought lasting months, can have potentially devastating consequences, Francis said.

Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and a leading expert on sea level rise, has studied the rate at which the oceans have risen and retreated over millennia. He fears that a variety of feedback loops will contribute to a dramatic increase in sea level in the coming decades.

“My work on ancient climate shows we have these rapid pulses of rise that are rather dramatic, up to 10 meters of sea level rise certainly within a century, and that’s a really rapid disintegration of ice,” Wanless said. “We’re just seeing the beginning of ice melt and the beginning of the warming of the waters reaching up to the Arctic, in what is most certainly going to be the beginning of one of these rapid pulses.”

Floating drifting ice floe forming around the Antarctic continent. (Photo: Philippe Bourseiller/Getty Images)

To Wanless, the evidence is clear that we’ve already reached a tipping point when it comes to the cascading impacts of climate change on sea level rise.

“Once you start adding up these different feedbacks, because that’s the only thing we have to go on in the modern era, well, there are all these things that are speeding up ice melt, some of which we’re just becoming aware of, like the collapse of the high ice sheets. We’re just trying to figure out how fast and how dramatic that will be,” Wanless says. “A lot of them work together. The warm water getting in under the outlet fjords of Greenland and Antarctica that ends up detaching the ice from the substrate and once that happens, you can have this sort of automatic fracturing of the detached ice like a stack of books starting to splay out off a table.”

It’s sobering to realize the extent to which the planet’s ecosystem is interconnected. For years, relatively little was known about the vital role the Arctic played in keeping the world stable. As the permafrost has begun to thaw, however, the global ramifications have become unavoidable.

“The permafrost acts like a giant freezer. The reason we have freezers in our kitchen is you put organic carbon in the form of food in your freezer and it doesn’t decompose,” said Charles Koven, research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The same thing happens in these Arctic ecosystems. Plants grow and then die and form organic layers, kind of like compost on the surface of the soil and then over time, that carbon gets mixed down deeper into the soil where it gets locked into these deeper layers where it gets frozen and can stay for thousands of years.”

Koven is the author of a 2015 study that found that every 1 degree Celsius of warming releases from the permafrost the equivalent of 1.5 to two years of human-generated global carbon dioxide emissions.

“When you have warming, it causes the layer of soil that thaws every summer to thaw a bit deeper. It’s like taking stuff that’s been in your freezer and putting it into your fridge. It doesn’t last as long and it decomposes, and then you end up releasing greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane.”

Yet Koven stressed that emissions from thawing permafrost were not, in and of themselves, necessarily catastrophic.

“The carbon that’s released from the permafrost isn’t such a strong feedback loop,” Koven said. “It’s more just that because you get this additional amount of carbon in the atmosphere with every additional bit of warming, that makes it that much more difficult to meet the kinds of climate targets that we’d like to.”

Icebergs stranded in shallow bay near Booth Island, Antarctica. (Photo: Eastcott Momatiuk/Getty Images)

Roisin Commane, assistant professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, has also been studying the thawing permafrost and was the lead author on the first study to show that Alaskan tundra was now a net emitter of carbon dioxide.

“Christmas Day last year the North Pole wasn’t frozen. The sea ice isn’t freezing, the soils aren’t freezing,” Commane told Yahoo News. “This past year, 2017-2018, a lot of Alaska’s North Slope and into Siberia never froze through. They had a very early snow, which provided an insulating layer and those soils never froze and the amount of CO2 and methane coming out was quite high.”

Unlike Wanless, who has witnessed firsthand the deterioration of the ice sheet in Greenland over decades, Commane has only recently begun traveling to the Arctic. Still, she has struggled with what she’s found there and fears that feedback loops will only exacerbate the metamorphosis of that landscape.

“All of our preconceived notions of what should be happening, they’re gone,” she said. “I didn’t grow up in the Arctic, so everything I’ve been learning about it is from what I’ve been reading. But then I go there and it’s a completely different place.”

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Read more from Yahoo News:

‘It’s over’: Miami Beach tries to save itself from climate change’s rising seas

Food Photos Could Change the Way You Think About Farmers

Civil Eats

Aliza Sokolow’s Food Photos Could Change the Way You Think About Farmers

The L.A.-based photographer has trained her lens on the growers in your local farmers’ market, showcasing the art and beauty of their hard work.

By Bridget Shirvell, Farming, Local Eats April 19, 2019

Photo by Holly Liss; all other photos courtesy of Aliza Sokolow.

Scroll through the photos on your phone and chances are good that you’ll find at least one shot of food. And you’re not alone. Today, everything from how baristas decorate their lattes to the way restaurants plate their food is approached at least partly with an eye toward how it will look in a photo.

For Los Angeles-based photographer Aliza Sokolow, 33, food ’grams are about more than social status; they’re also a way to honor the people she admires most: farmers. A former food stylist who worked on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and Recipe Rehab, Sokolow founded Poppyseed Agency, a social media and branding firm that works with food brands, restaurants, and chefs. Her photos show off produce: bright, carefully arranged citrus; sliced-open avocados; pints of blueberries from the farmers’ market—all showcased in a stunning line of prints and in her Instagram feed, where she also shares details about the people behind the food.

Aliza Sokolow photo by Holly Liss Photo by Holly Liss

“I really like to tell the stories of the farmers because they’re such heroes of mine,” Sokolow says. “They put in the manual labor and are able to tell when a tomato is ripe for the picking, something a machine is not capable of.” Her hope in capturing the work of her local farmers is to “give people a bit more knowledge and gratitude for what they’re eating and awareness as to how much went into what’s on the plate.”

The popularity of food photographs in social media feeds started off as a bit of joke, but as the influence of Instagram has grown, it has become one of the best ways to recommend and learn about restaurants. “Instagram feeds are the first place Millennials look when scoping out the food,” says Michelle Zaporojets, who runs social media marketing for several Boston-based restaurants. “Foodie influencers have so much power in driving traffic just from a single photo or Instagram Story.”

A self-trained photographer, Sokolow studied architecture and industrial engineering at UC Berkeley and graduated in 2009, at the height of the recession. Uncertain of what she wanted to do at a time when creative jobs were scarce, she took a job in television set design.

“The first day on set there were all these food stylists putting things together and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like teeny tiny architecture. This is what I’m going to do when I grow up.’”

Sokolow started apprenticing and assisting on sets, and she eventually landed a job working as an assistant to food stylists on Food Revolution. It was while in that role that she took a tour of the Santa Monica farmers’ market with Chef Josiah Citrin of Melisse, and met Karen Beverlin, a “produce hunter” who introduced her to every farmer at the market.

rose apples photo by Aliza Sokolow Sokolow says all the coolest things she knows about have come from farmers, like hidden rose (or Pink Pearl) apples (which have pink flesh), orange watermelons, oca wood sorrel, which comes in 32 different varieties and colors.

Her a-ha moment came one day when she brought produce from Laura Ramirez of J.J.’s Lone Daughter Ranch. Ramirez is known for growing a variety of citrus, 12 different kinds of avocados, and other specialty fruit. Sokolow bought two of each type of avocado, went home, cut them all open and took a picture that she posted online. It quickly caught the attention of editors at Food & Wine, who asked if they could use it.

“I was like ‘Oh, maybe that is art,’” says Sokolow.

After getting burned out from working in television, she leveraged the relationships she made at the farmers’ market to launch her digital agency, and began running the social media accounts for restaurant groups and chefs, including Mindy Segal and Suzanne Goin.

In 2016, Sokolow began selling prints of the photographs featured in her Instagram feed and some of them have made their way to restaurants around the United States, including L.A.’s République and Moody Rooster. She has also donated prints for fundraisers, including one for Brigaid.

She uses the eye she developed through her architecture training to style the food in her photos. She’ll line up a row of colorful carrots, or place circular slices of candy-striped beets on top one another until they create a dizzying, colorful display, or cut open citrus to expose their inner geometry. Then she’ll share the photos with her 33,000 followers along with tidbits about the people who grew them in a way that is genuine, educational, and fun.

Beets photo by Aliza Sokolow “By using color, she’s able to make something as simple as a single avocado looking visually beautiful and extremely appealing,” says Beverly Friedmann, a NYC-based content manager for consumer websites.

Aaron Choi of San Marcos-based Girl and Dug Farms says that while he’s can’t say for sure if Sokolow’s photographs of their produce has resulted in more sales, it has definitely attracted more Instagram followers for the farm.

“Her work has reached pockets of people who ordinarily wouldn’t browse a farm’s IG posts on their own,” Choi adds.

Sometimes she shoots directly at a farmers’ market, but most of the time Sokolow brings food home to photograph. It can take as long as a week to gather and shoot, as she travels from market to market across the city, seeking out particular items.

“The colors are what really excite me,” Sokolow says. “When you’re growing up, you think carrots are orange and watermelon is pink, but when I find a pink mushroom or I see that there are five different-colored carrots, that is so mind-blowing and exciting.”

After a food shoot, Sokolow cooks up the ingredients or shares them with friends. Her Instagram also features a number of snaps of cakes and other baked goods often topped with dehydrated fruits. She does a lot of dehydrating and drying, for instance, to make citrus chips that she displays on charcuterie boards.

“I’m really a snacker, so it works out very nicely,” Sokolow says.

Sokolow hopes to connect with even more people through her work. “I like to show the beauty that is what’s grown from the earth,” she says. “The farmers do the work. I just cut things open.”

What the ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Has to Do With the Food We Eat

Anna Lappé talks to environmental scientist and ecologist Francisco Sánchez-Bayo about his new research on global insect decline and the under-reported connection to agriculture.

By Anna Lappe, Farming, Pesticides April 17, 2019

In early 2019, the journal Biological Conservation published findings from a study about global insect decline that did what few such scientific journal articles ever do: It hit the front pages of major media outlets around the world. The reason? The paper found that one-third of all insect species are in serious decline around the globe and, if trends don’t improve, we could face near mass extinction of all insects within the next century.

Civil Eats recently spoke with one of the lead authors, Francisco Sánchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney, about the implications of these findings, the underreported connection to agriculture, and what we can do about it.

While the story of environmental collapse, particularly climate change, has focused on species other than humans, it has been focused mainly on the fate of “charismatic megafauna” such as the iconic polar bear. Can you explain more about why your findings about insects, animals that often fly under the radar, are so significant?

We don’t always appreciate insects. They’re small, many are perceived as a nuisance. But their role in an ecosystem is essential; a large proportion of vertebrates depend on insects for food. To put it bluntly, most vertebrates on the planet would not be here if it weren’t for insects. There’s also the function they play in aquatic systems: Insects help purify and aerate water. Together with micro-organisms and worms, they’re vital to soil health. It’s important to realize that insects essential. If we remove them, we disrupt all life on the planet.

What surprised or alarmed you most about these findings?

When we first started, we expected to see declines. We knew that from the start. I have been following the fate of bees for years and I knew that we were seeing significant declines. We had also come across a few studies on butterflies from as far back as 20 years ago that portended decline. But what surprised us was the numbers: One-third of insects are endangered. And it’s not just butterflies and bees; it’s all groups. It’s particularly [alarming] for aquatic insects and specific groups like the dung beetles.

You compiled data from more than 70 studies around the world, and you noted that most of the data in your studies came from the global North. How confident are you that this sampling is representative of global insect decline?

We looked at 73 studies, and we are now including three more that were brought to our attention since we published our first article. The fact that most of these studies are from the Northern Hemisphere is undeniable: We were looking for long-term trends, in particular, and only Europe and North America have records that go back 100 years or more.

Unfortunately, countries with the largest biodiversity—China, Brazil, Australia, for example—don’t have good studies we could rely on. There were none in China and Australia, and only one from Brazil. But the 20 percent of studies that came from regions beyond North America and Europe, Central America, Southeast Asia, etc., all showed the same problems. And the drivers of this decline are common to all these countries no matter what region we’re talking about.

Can you say more about those drivers?

It’s a combination of habitat loss, pollution, biological factors, and climate change. But if you go deeper, you realize that the biggest drivers—habitat loss and pollution—are jointly found in agriculture expansion. So, without a doubt, agriculture is the main driver of the decline of insects, more than all the other factors combined.

What has been the response from your peers?

We’ve received hundreds of emails, saying essentially, “Yes, you are right.” Some publications have criticized us for being alarmist. We only use the word “catastrophic” once, and we use it very carefully. We chose that word deliberately: If 30 percent of insects, the largest group of animals on Earth, are in danger, that iscatastrophic. Damage from a tropical cyclone can be characterized as catastrophic, but that is localized. This is global. This is a true catastrophe.

The paper points very clearly to the damaging impacts of agricultural chemicals around the world; considering that, what has the reaction been from the chemical industry?

We haven’t had much pushback. I received one email from someone from a chemical company. He was very polite, but said that I was unfairly blaming pesticides. [He pointed out that] there are other causes: light pollution, for instance. I demonstrated he was partially right, but mostly wrong. The fact that we point to agriculture as the main culprit and to pesticides as one of the main factors is based on the evidence, examples from the literature. Understand that our study is not an experimental study that can be subject to criticism or misinterpretation. It is based on actual numbers derived from 73 studies all over the world over 30 years. If that’s not evidence enough, then tell me what is?

Let’s talk about the pesticides that you flagged as most concerning: neonicotinoids [also known by the shorthand “neonics”] and fipronil. Why are these particularly worrisome?

These insecticides have been introduced in last 25-30 years and there are features that make them different from older chemicals. First, they’re extremely toxic, particularly fipronil: it’s the most toxic ever produced to all insects and to many other organisms. Neonics are also highly toxic. They’re also soluble in water. So when they’re applied, they don’t just stay in the place you spray or in the soil. When you get that first rainwater, they go everywhere.

Because they’re soluble, they thought they could be used as systemic pesticides that you would apply at the time of planting and because there would be no drift, there would be less impact on the environment. But the risk of drift is minimal compared with the risk to insects in water: Residues from these insecticides flow into the rivers and streams and go out the sea. We know that the waters in North America are completely contaminated with neonics and the same is true in Japan, Canada, and in many other places. All the insects in these waterways are rapidly disappearing.

These insecticides have a delayed and long-term effect, which is not well understood by the authorities that regulate them. When you apply them, they eliminate certain species, which never recover—particularly species with a long life-cycle, like dragonflies. These are the insects we’re seeing disappear the quickest. These insecticides are also causing havoc among pollinators.

With many companies using these insecticides as coating on seeds—corn or oilseed rape [canola], sunflower crops, or soya beans in North America—this problem is only getting worse. And it goes against all principles of IPM [integrated pest management]. You’re using these on all seeds. When there is no evidence that there is even a pest problem, why should a whole field be contaminated? This makes no sense from a pest control and management perspective and it makes no economic sense, either.

Then there’s the basic question: What’s the point of using them? They say they boost productivity but recent studies out of the EU show that there is no gain in yield by using neonics. We are using massively enormous amounts of this insecticide for no gain whatsoever.

The EU has evaluated this and determined that coating seeds with these insecticides should be banned. These insecticides should be used only when needed, when there is a problem. The current approach—to use on all the crops, all the time, year after year—makes no sense from any perspective.

What about herbicides? You note that they’re not as toxic to insects, but they’re also really damaging.

Yes, we could have written much more about that. We were particularly struck by the studies showing the impact on wetlands. About half of all herbicides are water soluble, so they end up in wetlands and eliminate many weeds, which are an important food and breeding ground for insects.

What about the speed of decline?

Most of the declines have occurred in the last 30 years. We know that the sales of pesticides worldwide have increased exponentially in that period, mostly in underdeveloped countries in tropical areas where they spray with no controls whatsoever. Increasingly, many departments of agriculture are cutting back on the number of personnel dedicated to advising farmers on growing practices, known as extension officers. As a result, farmers don’t have pest management advice from anyone with expertise. So where do they get the advice? From chemical companies. They’re told if you have a problem, just apply this or that product. This is one reason pesticide sales have increased.

I recently met two entomologists from Oaxaca who expressed their dismay that the most recent annual meeting for professionals in their field they attended had been sponsored by Bayer, one of the largest makers of chemical pesticides in the world.

I’m not surprised. That happens everywhere.

Your study’s findings are sobering and alarming. It left me wondering, what do you think can be done to avert this impending insect apocalypse?

[Farmers] can adopt different pest-management practices. The key is to apply practical and effective solutions to eliminate pesticide use and also restore habitat across farmland. That can be done through farmer education and through policy. Governments can give incentives for using IPM to change the paradigm: Pesticides should be the tool of last resort. At the moment, many countries encourage the use of pesticides. That has to stop. Why don’t they do the same thing with IPM? Say to the farmers, “we’ll give you a tax rebate if you use less pesticides.”

I also think banning products in some cases makes sense. Certain compounds, like DDT, should be banned for agricultural use, even if it’s still allowed in certain tropical countries to control malaria. If we took the time to educate farmers and put sensible practices into place to produce food without dependence on chemicals, the whole thing would change overnight.

I would encourage everyone to read the conclusions in the paper: we cannot have monocultures covering hundreds of square miles. We have to plant trees and other habitats for insects. Biodiversity is the only thing that will help crops be resilient and sustainable in the long term and keep balance in the soil. When we [grow diverse crops], we can reverse this trend, but that means taking on a system completely dominated by chemical corporations.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000.

NOAA Science On a Sphere

April 8, 2019

We have a new earthquake data set thanks to the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000. You’ll notice that more earthquakes appear as monitoring improved with time. Watch until the end to see a composite frame of all the earthquakes at once!

And watch a flat version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhmF-IwP6uM&feature=youtu.be

We have a new earthquake dataset thanks to the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000. You'll notice that more earthquakes appear as monitoring improved with time. Watch until the end to see a composite frame of all the earthquakes at once! Read more here: https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/earthquakes-of-the-20th-century/And watch a flat version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhmF-IwP6uM&feature=youtu.be

Posted by NOAA Science On a Sphere on Monday, April 8, 2019

Trump won’t save the air and water — but cities can

Yahoo News

Alexander Nazaryan April 16, 2019

Firemen over the Cuyahoga River — Firemen spray water on a tug boat as a fire, ignited in an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River, consumes the docks at the Great Lakes Towing Co., Cleveland, June 25, 1952. (Photo: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A wise man once said that you can’t step into the same river twice. Some rivers, you shouldn’t step into even a single time. That used to be true for the Cuyahoga, which snakes through downtown Cleveland before emptying into Lake Erie. For most of the 20th century, it was legal to dump waste into waterways. So the industries along the Cuyahoga dumped, and dumped — and dumped some more. The river’s surface crusted over with debris, and where the water was visible, it was black with oil.

Then, on June 22, 1969, a train crossing a bridge across the Cuyahoga near the Republic Steel mill caused sparking, which fell toward the oil-thick surface. It’s not hard to imagine what happened next. Time magazine published images of the river aflame (the pictures were actually from an earlier Cuyahoga fire). “Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows,” the article read.

Randy Newman even wrote a song about the Cuyahoga fire. “Burn on, big river, burn on,” Newman’s song went, “Burn on, big river, burn on.” You’ll never guess the title of his ballad to the Cuyahoga: “Burn On.”

Plumes of industrial waste emptying into Lake Erie — This from 1967 shows plumes of industrial waste emptying into Lake Erie. (Photo: EPA Ohio)

But 50 years later, the Cuyahoga is a point of pride for Cleveland, having been the focus of a $3.5 billion restoration effort that has helped anchor a broader revitalization of Cleveland. And it has just been named “River of the Year” by American River, a Washington-based organization focused on protecting the nation’s waterways. The near-miraculous recovery of the Cuyahoga is a testament to the efforts of local officials, begun by then Mayor Carl Stokes — and to the success of one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in the nation’s history, the Clean Water Act, which the Trump administration is now attempting to undercut.

“It’s a dramatic comeback for the Cuyahoga,” says Chris Williams, vice president for conservation at American River. For Clevelanders, the comeback is also an affirmation of the Midwestern spirit.

“We were never the ‘Mistake by the Lake,’” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told Yahoo News, referencing the nickname with which Cleveland was tagged after 1969.

“We like to call ourselves ‘Gritty City,’” adds Matt Gray, Cleveland’s chief of sustainability. Like Brown, he plainly dislikes the image of Cleveland as a post-industrial landscape for ruin-porn aficionados. Cleveland, for him, is a “green city on a blue lake,” a slogan that has become popular in this once-sooty town. Under the guise of Sustainable Cleveland 2019, Gray and other city officials have pushed a plethora of green initiatives, from cleaning up brownfields to encouraging farm-to-table dining.

The Cleveland skyline is reflected on the Cuyahoga River, 2018. (Photo: Getty images)

This must all seem highly improbable to anyone who was there in 1969. Because by then Cuyahoga had burned plenty of times before, Clevelanders hardly noticed, with the city’s paper of record, the Plain Dealer, giving the story the dog-bites-man treatment. “Just another fire on a river that had ignited many times before,” as former Environmental Protection Agency engineer Michael Mikulka put it in a recent recollection of the incident. In fact, the river had been considered “an open sewer through the center of the city” as early as 1881.

It was Mayor Stokes, the first African-American to lead Cleveland, who realized that by publicizing the fire, he could bring attention to the Cuyahoga’s plight. The day after the fire, he went to the scene of the crime. Leaning against a wooden pillar on the river’s banks, with the bridge leading to Republic Steel behind him, Stokes treated the event like the newsworthy catastrophe it should have been — and would have been if such fires were not dismayingly commonplace. Stokes painted the city as a helpless victim of industry: “We have no jurisdiction over what’s dumped in there,” he complained.

The Time story appeared a few months after that. Far more importantly, in 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act — in part thanks to testimony Stokes and his brother, U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes provided — that made illegal the kind of dumping that had turned the Cuyahoga into a tinderbox of horrors. In the years that followed, Washington, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio’s capital, were not always models of cooperation, but they did well enough to make sure that the Cuyahoga would never catch fire again. In 1998, it was declared an American Heritage River, one of 14 around the nation given such designation by the EPA. Today, its waters are inhabited by 60 species of fish. Bald eagles nest on its banks.

And Cleveland is a growing city, with luxury condominium buildings rising on the formerly blighted shores of the Cuyahoga. “You’re not gonna have stuff like the Flats on a river that’s full of oil,” explains Bob Wysenski, a retired Ohio EPA official, in an EPA video about the Cuyahoga. The reference is to the Flats East Bank, a massive redevelopment near where the Cuyahoga flows into Lake Eerie. The Flats represents the kind of upscale initiative that would have been unthinkable two decades ago.

The Cleveland Clinic, one of the top-rated hospitals in America. (Photo: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Brown, who moved back to Cleveland from the suburbs five years ago, argues that conservatives for too long have been given license to peddle without much challenge what he says is the false narrative that “you either have good environment policy or good jobs policy.” Brown argues that “good environmental policy can be good jobs policy,” pointing to the massive solar-panel manufacturing plant now being built in Toledo, which is expected to add 500 jobs.

There are now 737,031 people across 12 Midwestern states working in renewable energy jobs, according to Clean Jobs Midwest, a nonprofit organization that studies the renewable energy sector of that region. Ohio, according to Clean Jobs Midwest, now employs 112,486 people in clean energy, which puts the state in eighth place nationwide for jobs in the renewables sector. By contrast, only 51,000 people around the country are employed in coal mining, an industry President Trump has promised to restore.

In the meantime, the Trump administration has moved to cancel or delay many of the environmental regulations that it believes hamper growth in the extractive industries and heavy manufacturing. Those are many of the same regulations that have kept river fires from becoming a normal occurrence of American life, on the order of say, early morning presidential tweetstorms.

Brown calls Trump a “tool of the oil and gas industry.” As harsh as that charge may be, Trump does have Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, heading the EPA, and Department of Interior chief David Bernhardt, also a former lobbyist, carries a card with all of his potential conflicts of interests.

Wheeler’s predecessor at the EPA, Scott Pruitt, led a sustained assault on the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act before being forced to resign in ignominy last year. Pruitt cancelled the Waters of the United States rule, an Obama-era directive that had expanded the provisions of the Clean Water Act. According to Williams, the American Rivers vice president, that rollback could endanger 18 percent of the nation’s rivers and half of its wetlands. Pruitt also repealed Obama’s clean power plan, which would have hastened the transition away from fossil fuels. Bernhardt’s predecessor, Ryan Zinke — who like Pruitt ended his career as a public official in disgrace — wantonly leased public lands to oil and gas companies, endangering pristine areas across the West.

Wheeler, the current EPA chief, has spoken about returning the EPA to “its core mission,” but his favorite version of the EPA appears to be the one before there was any EPA to speak off. He has overseen — without any seeming concern — the attrition of hundreds of scientists from the agency and supports Trump’s proposed budget for his agency, which would see a 31 decrease in funding.

But as Williams of American River says, “the Trump administration can’t simply strip away protections by fiat.” It falls to cities and states to fight the administration in court. Attorneys general like Maura Healey of Massachusetts and New York’s Barbara Underwood, who has since left office, fought Pruitt in court, keeping him from critical victories in Trump’s war against the regulatory state. That battle will continue as long as Trump is in office: for the Cuyahoga, the Hudson and every other river in the nation.

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