Farming – Organic Farming – Page 28

For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest

The New York Times

For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest

Gabriel Popkin – February 17, 2023

A hand-planting crew plants poplar trees in Vidalia, Ga., Feb. 13, 2023. (Audra Melton/The New York Times)

On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees.

These weren’t just any trees, though: Some of the seedlings being nestled into the soggy soil had been genetically engineered to grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air.

The poplars may be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard. Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters Monday hope to transform forestry.

Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change.

“We’ve had people tell us it’s impossible,” Maddie Hall, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said of her dream to deploy genetic engineering on behalf of the climate. But she and her colleagues have also found believers — enough to invest $36 million in the 4-year-old company.

The company has also attracted critics. The Global Justice Ecology Project, an environmental group, has called the company’s trees “growing threats” to forests and expressed alarm that the federal government allowed them to evade regulation, opening the door to commercial plantings much sooner than is typical for engineered plants.

Living Carbon has yet to publish peer-reviewed papers; its only publicly reported results come from a greenhouse trial that lasted just a few months. These data have some experts intrigued but stopping well short of a full endorsement.

“They have some encouraging results,” said Donald Ort, a University of Illinois geneticist whose plant experiments helped inspire Living Carbon’s technology. But he added that the notion that greenhouse results will translate to success in the real world is “not a slam dunk.”

🌳🌳

Living Carbon’s poplars start their lives in a lab in Hayward, California. There, biologists tinker with how the trees conduct photosynthesis, the series of chemical reactions plants use to weave sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into sugars and starches. In doing so, they follow a precedent set by evolution: Several times over Earth’s long history, improvements in photosynthesis have enabled plants to ingest enough carbon dioxide to cool the planet substantially.

While photosynthesis has profound impacts on the Earth, as a chemical process it is far from perfect. Numerous inefficiencies prevent plants from capturing and storing more than a small fraction of the solar energy that falls onto their leaves. Those inefficiencies, among other factors, limit how fast trees and other plants grow, and how much carbon dioxide they soak up.

Scientists have spent decades trying to take over where evolution left off. In 2019, Ort and his colleagues announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently. Normally, photosynthesis produces a toxic byproduct that a plant must dispose of, wasting energy. The Illinois researchers added genes from pumpkins and green algae to induce tobacco seedlings to instead recycle the toxins into more sugars, producing plants that grew nearly 40% larger.

That same year, Hall, who had been working for Silicon Valley ventures like OpenAI (which was responsible for the language model ChatGPT), met her future co-founder Patrick Mellor at a climate tech conference. Mellor was researching whether trees could be engineered to produce decay-resistant wood.

With money raised from venture capital firms and Hall’s tech-world contacts, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, she and Mellor started Living Carbon in a bid to juice up trees to fight climate change. “There were so few companies that were looking at large-scale carbon removal in a way that married frontier science and large-scale commercial deployment,” Hall said.

They recruited Yumin Tao, a synthetic biologist who had previously worked at the chemical company DuPont. He and others retooled Ort’s genetic hack for poplar trees. Living Carbon then produced engineered poplar clones and grew them in pots. Last year, the company reported in a paper that has yet to be peer reviewed that its tweaked poplars grew more than 50% faster than non-modified ones over five months in the greenhouse.

The company’s researchers created the greenhouse-tested trees using a bacterium that splices foreign DNA into another organism’s genome. But for the trees they planted in Georgia, they turned to an older and cruder technique known as the gene gun method, which essentially blasts foreign genes into the trees’ chromosomes.

In a field accustomed to glacial progress and heavy regulation, Living Carbon has moved fast and freely. The gene gun-modified poplars avoided a set of federal regulations of genetically modified organisms that can stall biotech projects for years. (Those regulations have since been revised.) By contrast, a team of scientists who genetically engineered a blight-resistant chestnut tree using the same bacterium method employed earlier by Living Carbon have been awaiting a decision since 2020. An engineered apple grown on a small scale in Washington state took several years to be approved.

“You could say the old rule was sort of leaky,” said Bill Doley, a consultant who helped manage the Agriculture Department’s genetically modified organism regulation process until 2022.

On Monday, on the land of Vince Stanley, a seventh-generation farmer who manages more than 25,000 forested acres in Georgia’s pine belt, mattock-swinging workers carrying backpacks of seedlings planted nearly 5,000 modified poplars. The tweaked poplars had names like Kookaburra and Baboon, which indicated which “parent” tree they were cloned from, and were interspersed with a roughly equal number of unmodified trees. By the end of the unseasonably warm day, the workers were drenched in sweat and the planting plots were dotted with pencil-thin seedlings and colored marker flags poking from the mud.

In contrast to fast-growing pines, hardwoods that grow in bottomlands like these produce wood so slowly that a landowner might get only one harvest in a lifetime, Stanley said. He hopes Living Carbon’s “elite seedlings” will allow him to grow bottomland trees and make money faster. “We’re taking a timber rotation of 50 to 60 years and we’re cutting that in half,” he said. “It’s totally a win-win.”

Forest geneticists were less sanguine about Living Carbon’s trees. Researchers typically assess trees in confined field trials before moving to large-scale plantings, said Andrew Newhouse, who directs the engineered chestnut project at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Their claims seem bold based on very limited real-world data,” he said.

Steve Strauss, a geneticist at Oregon State University, agreed with the need to see field data. “My experience over the years is that the greenhouse means almost nothing” about the outdoor prospects of trees whose physiology has been modified, he said. “Venture capitalists may not know that.”

Strauss, who previously served on Living Carbon’s advisory board, has grown some of the company’s seedlings since last year as part of a field trial funded by the company. He said the trees were growing well, but it was still too early to tell whether they were outpacing unmodified trees.

Even if they do, Living Carbon will face other challenges unrelated to biology. While outright destruction of genetically engineered trees has dwindled thanks in part to tougher enforcement of laws against acts of ecoterrorism, the trees still prompt unease in the forestry and environmental worlds. Major organizations that certify sustainable forests ban engineered trees from forests that get their approval; some also prohibit member companies from planting engineered trees anywhere. To date, the only country where large numbers of genetically engineered trees are known to have been planted is China.

The U.S. Forest Service, which plants large numbers of trees every year, has said little about whether it would use engineered trees. To be considered for planting in national forests, which make up nearly one-fifth of U.S. forestland, Living Carbon’s trees would need to align with existing management plans that typically prioritize forest health and diversity over reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon, said Dana Nelson, a geneticist with the service. “I find it hard to imagine that it would be a good fit on a national forest,” Nelson said.

Living Carbon is focusing for now on private land, where it will face fewer hurdles. Later this spring it will plant poplars on abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. By next year Hall and Mellor hope to be putting millions of trees in the ground.

🌳🌳🌳

To produce an income stream not reliant on venture capital, the company has started marketing credits based on carbon its trees will soak up. But carbon credits have come under fire lately and the future of that industry is in doubt.

And to head off environmental concerns, Living Carbon’s modified poplar trees are all female, so they won’t produce pollen. While they could be pollinated by wild trees and produce seeds, Mellor says they’re unlikely to spread into the wild because they don’t breed with the most common poplar species in the Southeast.

They’re also being planted alongside native trees like sweet gum, tulip trees and bald cypress, to avoid genetically identical stands of trees known as monocultures; non-engineered poplars are being planted as experimental controls. Hall and Mellor describe their plantings as both pilot projects and research trials. Company scientists will monitor tree growth and survival.

Such measures are unlikely to assuage opponents of genetically modified organisms. Last spring, the Global Justice Ecology Project argued that Living Carbon’s trees could harm the climate by “interfering with efforts to protect and regenerate forests.”

“I’m very shocked that they’re moving so fast” to plant large numbers of modified trees in the wild, said Anne Petermann, the organization’s executive director. The potential risks to the greater ecosystem needed to be better understood, she said.

Ort of the University of Illinois dismissed such environmental concerns. But he said investors were taking a big chance on a tree that might not meet its creators’ expectations.

“It’s not unexciting,” he said. “I just think it’s uber high risk.”

The Water Crisis No One In America Is Fixing

Time

The Water Crisis No One In America Is Fixing

Bryn Nelson – February 16, 2023

drone photograph showing the continuing cleanup of portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed Friday night in East Palestine, Ohio

This photo taken with a drone shows the continuing cleanup of portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed Friday night in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 9, 2023. Credit – Gene J. Puskar—AP

On Feb. 3, 2022, a train loaded with toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, igniting a fire and forcing the controlled release and burn of vinyl chloride, a known cancer-causing compound, to avert a disastrous explosion. The environmental catastrophe killed thousands of fish in nearby streams and has triggered growing concerns over the impact on residents’ health and on the village’s surface, ground, and well water.

East Palestine joins a long list of other places in the United States facing major threats to clean water. In October 2022, a campaign called “Imagine a Day Without Water” asked Americans to stand with those who lack adequate drinking water, sanitation, or both. In one of the richest countries on Earth, the tally of those who live even without basic indoor plumbing might surprise you: more than 2 million.

The acronym WASH, which stands for “water, sanitation, and hygiene,” is often associated with nonprofits like the World Toilet Organization, working in developing parts of the globe. But the lack of access to clean drinking water, sanitary bathrooms, and treated wastewater is an ongoing emergency for many parts of the U.S. as well. In rural and urban communities throughout the country, water tainted by pollutants, woefully inadequate sewage treatment, and a lack of restrooms (or plumbing at all) have laid bare the legacy of neglect.

This photo provided by the Ohio National Guard, ONG 52nd Civil Support Team members prepare to enter an incident area to assess remaining hazards with a lightweight inflatable decontamination system (LIDS) in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 7, 2023.<span class="copyright">Ohio National Guard/AP</span> — This photo provided by the Ohio National Guard, ONG 52nd Civil Support Team members prepare to enter an incident area to assess remaining hazards with a lightweight inflatable decontamination system (LIDS) in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 7, 2023.Ohio National Guard/AP

In her book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, author Catherine Coleman Flowers describes how rural residents in Lowndes County, Ala., often have no means of wastewater treatment. They lack what most of us take for granted, “because septic systems cost more than most people earn in a year and tend to fail anyway in the impervious clay soil,” Flowers writes. “Families cope the best they can, mainly by jerry-rigging PVC pipe to drain sewage from houses and into cesspools outside.” With her assistance, researchers found that more than one-third of 55 stool samples collected from county residents tested positive for hookworms—intestinal parasites often associated with poor sanitation in developing countries.

To the west, historic flooding incapacitated an aging water treatment plant in Mississippi’s capital of Jackson in September 2022, leaving residents of the predominantly Black city without safe drinking water for weeks. When students returned from their holiday break in January 2023, more than half of the city’s public schools lacked water and had to hold virtual classes after cold weather again damaged the system. The majority-Black Michigan cities of Flint and Benton Harbor faced severe lead contamination in their own drinking water, a consequence of aging lead pipes leaching the toxic contaminant into the water supply. And in West Baltimore, E. coli bacteria contaminated the water, a crisis again blamed on aging water treatment infrastructure.

A 2021 analysis, “The widespread and unjust drinking water and clean water crisis in the United States,” found that nearly half a million U.S. households lacked complete plumbing, while many more were living in communities with unclean water. Surveys suggest that the former problem is a disproportionately rural issue while the latter is disproportionately urban. “As it currently stands, counties with elevated levels of incomplete plumbing and poor water quality in America—which are variously likely to be more indigenous, less educated, older, and poorer—are continuing to slip through the cracks,” the authors of the study concluded.

Without urgent action, those cracks will only continue to widen. The 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, released by the American Society of Civil Engineering, gave a dismal D+ grade to the country’s more than 16,000 wastewater treatment plants, a significant fraction of which have reached or exceeded their design capacities. The U.S. drinking water infrastructure earned only a marginally better rating, with a C-grade.

As local and state investment in vital infrastructure has faltered, so too has federal action. Amid decades of chronic underfunding, the U.S. government’s share of capital costs on water infrastructure fell from more than 60% in 1977 to less than 10% 40 years later. A 2020 report by the American Society of Civil Engineering spelled out the growing investment gap in stark terms. But the costs of failing to update the country’s aging and deteriorating drinking water and wastewater infrastructure could be far greater, with trillions lost in preventable diseases, higher medical costs, lost productivity, and environmental pollution.

That inattention couldn’t come at a worse time. A 2021 study by Just Security, based at the NYU School of Law, explained how extreme weather events—exacerbated by global warming—are leading to even more failures of inadequate and poorly maintained infrastructure. Undoing the harm will require sustained attention, especially in what environmental justice pioneer Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University describes as the “invisible” communities of color that have disproportionately shouldered the burden of environmental racism.

Effecting change will require a major investment in urban and rural systems. Nearly $800 million in federal funds have been earmarked for water projects in Jackson. And in 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture launched the Closing America’s Wastewater Access Gap Community Initiative, to be piloted in Lowndes County and ten other underserved communities where residents lack basic wastewater management. The federal Inflation Reduction Act provided another $550 million for water systems in disadvantaged communities—not nearly enough but a start in reversing the decades of damage.

Well-considered projects could make a big impact by not only improving public and environmental health, but also redistributing wealth back to those same communities. More wastewater treatment plants are becoming resource recovery facilities, preventing pollution from the treated liquid waste and extracting valuable resources. Biogas and electricity, pure water, charcoal-like biochar, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, and soil amendments can all be recovered, creating new sources of local wealth.

At the grass-roots level, organizations like PHLUSH (Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human) are pushing for equitable access to toilets and sanitation systems. PHLUSH has positioned public restrooms as critical elements of the U.S. infrastructure, rightfully arguing that they are “as essential to community well-being as sidewalks, traffic signals and street lighting.” For people experiencing homelessness, a lack of access to sanitary toilets can be dehumanizing, dangerous, and disease-causing. The public health crisis for that segment of the population is growing throughout America, with a recent report calling for more stigma-free access to WASH facilities in rural areas.

In rural communities from Puerto Rico to Hawaii, advocates are introducing advanced biofilters and composting or incineration toilets as more affordable, sustainable, and sanitary alternatives to leaking, broken, or altogether lacking septic systems. Installing these systems in large enough numbers to make a difference will require revisions to outdated or punitive local codes and a rethinking of what might be recouped through long-term investments in our communities.

The Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, founded by Flowers, is working to “eliminate the health, economic and environmental disparities suffocating rural and marginalized communities.” Doing so will be easier with renewed local, state, and federal backing, bolstered by public awareness and the recognition that reinvesting in neglected communities helps us and our environment. Most of all, it will require a reaffirmation that access to water and sanitation are fundamental human rights—no matter where you live.

Snowpack continues to grow in California, Colorado River Basin

The Hill

Snowpack continues to grow in California, Colorado River Basin

Sharon Udasin – February 16, 2023

Deep snowpack has continued to accumulate and expand in California, the Great Basin and the Colorado River Basin, federal meteorologists reported on Thursday.

Following a series of severe storms that drenched the region earlier this winter, moderate systems with less moisture have yielded smaller but persistent gains, according to an update from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).

Total “snow water equivalent” — the amount of water stored in snowpack — at a subset of monitoring stations in California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Arizona has reached the highest or second highest levels to date, NIDIS reported.

Such accumulation is now 150 percent above the mid-February average at many of these stations, according to the agency.

Snow water equivalent levels at many of the long-term snow courses in California’s central and southern Sierra Nevada have achieved record highs not seen in 60 to 90 years, the meteorologists added.

While NIDIS reported good news for snowpack in much of the West, the agency warned that much of Oregon, Washington and Idaho experienced very little growth over the past 30 days.

Most of these areas are not yet considered to be experiencing “snow drought,” but a relatively dry January has left open the possibility that such conditions could develop in the coming months, according to NIDIS.

Another location of concern cited by NIDIS is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico — including the headwaters region for the Rio Grande and Arkansas rivers.

Across this region, snow water equivalent sits at about 45 to 60 percent of quantities typical for the date, the agency reported.

Plant-based foods may reduce prostate cancer progression, study says

The Washington Post

Plant-based foods may reduce prostate cancer progression, study says

Marlene Cimons, Special to The Washington Post – February 15, 2023

A diet heavy in plant-based foods – fresh fruits and vegetables – can reduce both the progression of prostate cancer and the likelihood that it will return, new research shows.

Eating fruits and vegetables has many health benefits, such as reducing the risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and contributes to a longer life span, said Vivian Liu, clinical research coordinator for the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of California at San Francisco and lead study author.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.

“Now, we have evidence that they can influence this very common – and sometimes deadly – cancer in men,” she said.

Prostate cancer is the second-most common cancer in men, after skin cancer, with an estimated 288,300 new cases and 34,700 deaths projected for this year. Risk factors include age, with most cases occurring in men older than 65; race, with African Americans at an increased risk; and certain gene mutations.

“This is something men can do for themselves with a healthy grocery shopping list,” Liu said. “And it doesn’t require drugs or other medical interventions.”

Higher amount of plant-based foods, lower cancer growth risk

The link between diet and cancer risk has been explored in many studies. Eating certain foods such as low-fat products and shunning others such as red meat have been linked to a lower risk of certain cancers, chief among them breast and colon. For prostate cancer, eating foods rich in the antioxidant lycopene, such as tomatoes, appears to lessen the risk.

Liu and her team focused on men who already had prostate cancer and were at risk of the cancer growing or returning after treatment. The researchers found that men with prostate cancer who reported diets containing the highest amounts of plants had a 52 percent lower risk of disease progression and a 53 percent lower risk of recurrence compared with those whose diets had the lowest amounts of plants.

The disease advanced in 204 of the more than 2,000 participants during the study period, Liu said. “This is a small number, which is significant,” she said.

She said the analysis involved scoring for good and bad foods, and though the participants reported the amounts they ate, it was not possible to state the amounts as individual or recommended servings of fruits and vegetables.

The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that adults should consume 1 1/2 to 2 cups of fruit equivalents and 2 to 3 cups of vegetable equivalents daily.

The results of this as-yet-unpublished observational study will be presented at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Genitourinary Cancers Symposium this week in San Francisco. The research was a sub-study of the Cancer of the Prostate Strategic Urologic Research Endeavor, or CaPSURE, which is a large multisite study of 15,000 men started in 1999 and looking at many aspects of prostate cancer.

The plant-based sub-study research began in 2004 and involved 2,038 men with early-stage prostate cancer – cancer that had not spread or whose spread was limited.

They completed questionnaires about how often they ate about 140 foods and beverages, including such items as broccoli, red meat and potatoes, trying to gauge both the good foods and the bad, Liu said.

“We did not tell the men what to eat, since this was an observational study,” she said. “They ate what they wanted to eat and told us what it was.”

Many things influence cancer – people who eat healthy foods often engage in other healthy habits – and the investigators took other factors into account, including walking pace – a faster pace seems to help prostate cancer patients – smoking, diabetes, family history of prostate cancer, household income, education level, height, body mass index, alcohol use, and multivitamin and supplement use.

Implications for future studies

These findings are consistent with previous research “and extend the health benefits” and “few risks of a plant-based diet,” said Donald Hensrud, associate professor of preventive medicine and nutrition at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, who was not involved in this recent research. One large study, for example, found that consuming plant-based foods was linked to a lower risk of developing aggressive forms of prostate cancer, especially among men younger than 65.

Other scientists called the work important but said future research needs to include more specific analyses of genetics and metabolism to better understand the impact of foods on prostate cancer.

“More such studies in larger populations of cancer patients, with even more detailed studies of dietary elements and measures of blood and tissue levels of nutrients, will be very helpful in designing a more specific cancer-risk reducing, and even cancer-therapeutic diet,” said Jeffrey Jones, professor of urology at Baylor College of Medicine and a urologic oncology specialist. He was not involved in the study.

“Future studies also need to look at the molecular and genetics of the people, and the mutations driving the cancer,” said Nicholas Mitsiades, professor of medicine and chief translational officer at the University of California at Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, who also was not part of the research. “We need to know how [the patients’] metabolism is programmed because different people may process food differently.”

Mitsiades also pointed out that socioeconomic status may discourage some populations from eating a healthful diet, as fresh fruits and vegetables often are costly or inaccessible. “It’s more expensive to eat a plant-based diet than to go to McDonald’s and have a burger,” he said. “So, it’s not always easy.”

Still, he always advises his cancer patients to avoid animal saturated fats – especially red meat – and to increase plant intake. “This diet is healthy for many other cancers,” Mitsiades said. “Unfortunately, we have not been able to put all these diets into a pill, which is probably what most Americans would like.”

Liu and her colleagues next plan to analyze plant-based diets in relation to prostate cancer-specific mortality, or death, and quality of life at specific intervals – two, five and 10 years – following diagnosis.

Meanwhile, Liu suggested that men – with or without prostate cancer – fill their plates with plants and stick to fresh foods, avoiding plant-based meat substitutes, which tend to be high in fat, she said.

“I love those burgers myself, but unfortunately not all diets are equal in terms of risk factors,” she said.

Stick to the basics, she advised, “fresh fruit and vegetables – and whole grains. The more you can fit in, the better.”

It is a common refrain that fruits and vegetables are good for you, Liu said. “And now, here’s another reason to say it.”

How dangerous was the Ohio chemical train derailment? An environmental engineer assesses the long-term risks

The Conversation

How dangerous was the Ohio chemical train derailment? An environmental engineer assesses the long-term risks

Andrew J. Whelton, Professor of Civil, Environmental & Ecological Engineering, Director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, Purdue University – February 15, 2023

Several cars that contained hazardous chemicals burned after the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment. <a href= — Several cars that contained hazardous chemicals burned after the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Headaches and lingering chemical smells from a fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, have left residents worried about their air and water – and misinformation on social media hasn’t helped.

State officials offered more details of the cleanup process and a timeline of the environmental disaster during a news conference on Feb. 14, 2023. Nearly a dozen cars carrying chemicals, including vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, derailed on the evening of Feb. 3, and fire from the site sent up acrid black smoke. Officials said they had tested over 400 nearby homes for contamination and were tracking a plume of spilled chemicals that had killed 3,500 fish in streams and reached the Ohio River.

However, the slow release of information after the derailment has left many questions unanswered about the risks and longer-term impact. We put five questions about the chemical releases to Andrew Whelton, an environmental engineer who investigates chemical risks during disasters.

Let’s start with what was in the train cars. What are the most concerning chemicals for human health and the environment long term, and what’s known so far about the impact?

The main concerns now are the contamination of homes, soil and water, primarily from volatile organic compounds and semivolatile organic compounds, known as VOCs and SVOCs.

The train had nearly a dozen cars with vinyl chloride and other materials, such as ethylhexyl acrylate and butyl acrylate. These chemicals have varying levels of toxicity and different fates in soil and groundwater. Officials have detected some of those chemicals in the nearby waterway and particulate matter in the air from the fire. But so far, the fate of many of the chemicals is not known. A variety of other materials were also released, but discussion about those chemicals has been limited.

State officials disclosed that a plume of contamination released into the nearby creek had made its way into the Ohio River. Other cities get their drinking water from the river, and were warned about the risk. The farther this plume moves downstream, the less concentrated the chemical will be in water, posing less of a risk.

Long term, the greatest risk is closest to the derailment location. And again, there’s limited information about what chemicals are present – or were created through chemical reactions during the fire.

It isn’t clear yet how much went into storm drains, was flushed down the streams or may have settled to the bottom of waterways.

There was also a lot of combusted particulate matter. The black smoke is a clear indication. It’s unclear how much was diluted in the air or fell to the ground.

How long can these chemicals linger in soil and water, and what’s their potential long-term risk to humans and wildlife?

The heavier the chemical, often the slower it degrades and the more likely it is to stick to soil. These compounds can remain for years if left unaddressed.

After the Kalamazoo River oil pipeline break in Michigan in 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency excavated a tributary where the oil settled. We’ve also seen from oil spills on the coasts of Alaska and Alabama that oil chemicals can find their way into soil if it isn’t remediated.

The long-term impact in Ohio will depend in part on how fast – and thoroughly – cleanup occurs.

If the heavily contaminated soils and liquids are excavated and removed, the long-term impacts can be reduced. But the longer removal takes, the farther the contamination can spread. It’s in everyone’s best interest to clean this up as soon as possible and before the region gets rain.

Air-stripping devices, like this one used after the derailment, can help separate chemicals from water. <a href= — Air-stripping devices, like this one used after the derailment, can help separate chemicals from water. U.S. EPA

Booms in a nearby stream have been deployed to capture chemicals. Air-stripping devices have been deployed to remove chemicals from the waterways. Air stripping causes the light chemicals to leave the water and enter air. This is a common treatment technique and was used after an 2015 oil spill in the Yellowstone River near Glendive, Montana.

At the derailment site in Ohio, workers are already removing contaminated soil as deep as 7 feet (about 2 meters) near where the rail cars burned.

Some of the train cars were intentionally drained and the chemicals set on fire to eliminate them. That fire had thick black smoke. What does that tell you about the chemicals and longer-term risks?

Incineration is one way we dispose of hazardous chemicals, but incomplete chemical destruction creates a host of byproducts. Chemicals can be destroyed when heated to extremely high temperatures so they burn thoroughly.

The black smoke plume you saw on TV was incomplete combustion. A number of other chemicals were created. Officials don’t necessarily know what these were or where they went until they test for them.

We know ash can pose health risks, which is why we test inside homes after wildfires where structures burn. This is one reason the state’s health director told residents with private wells near and downwind of the derailment to use bottled water until they can have their wells tested.

The EPA has been screening homes near the derailment for indoor air-quality concerns. How do these chemicals get into homes and what happens to them in enclosed spaces?

Homes are not airtight, and sometimes dust and other materials get in. It might be through an open door or a window sill. Sometimes people track it in.

So far, the U.S. EPA has reported no evidence of high levels of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride in the 400 or so homes tested. But full transparency has been lacking. Just because an agency is doing testing doesn’t mean it is testing for what it needs to test for.

Media reports talk about four or five chemicals, but the manifest from Norfolk Southern also listed a bunch of other materials in tanks that burned. All those materials create potentially hundreds to thousands of VOCs and SVOCs.

Are government officials testing for everything they should?

People in the community have reported headaches, which can be caused by VOCs and other chemicals. They’re understandably concerned.

Ohio and federal officials need to better communicate what they’re doing, why, and what they plan to do. It’s unclear what questions they are trying to answer. For a disaster this serious, little testing information has been shared.

In the absence of this transparency, misinformation is filling that void. From a homeowner’s perspective, it’s hard to understand the true risk if the data is not shared.

California Reservoirs Refilled by Winter Deluges, Satellite Images Show

Yale Environmental 360

California Reservoirs Refilled by Winter Deluges, Satellite Images Show

February 13, 2023

Lake Oroville before and after December's heavy rainstorms. NASA — Lake Oroville before and after December’s heavy rainstorms. NASA

In the wake of a series of destructive storms in late December and early January, California’s long-ailing mountain reservoirs have risen, satellite images from NASA show.

Lake Oroville, which sits in the northern reaches of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, was at just 28 percent of capacity in late November and is now at 69 percent capacity, following the winter deluge. Long depleted by drought, the reservoir is now close to its historical winter level. Lake Shasta, in far northern California, was at just 31 percent of capacity in late November and is now at 58 percent capacity, bringing it in line with the historical average.

Recent storms “certainly helped reservoir storage in California following the driest three years in the state’s recorded history,” Jeanine Jones, an official with the California Department of Water Resources, told the Los Angeles Times. “Over the next two months, it is important that we still see periodic rain and snowstorms to keep an above-average pace for our precipitation totals.”

Shasta Lake before and after December's heavy rainstorms. NASA — Shasta Lake before and after December’s heavy rainstorms. NASA

Experts warn, however, that recent storms will likely do little to ameliorate long-term shortfalls. While this winter’s snow and rain will help recharge stores of groundwater in the near term, “if the climate pattern is the same as before — dry and hot in summer followed by low precipitation — and the water demands are still high, then we expect the groundwater drawdown will continue,” Pang-Wei Liu, a NASA scientist involved in groundwater monitoring, said in a statement.

A recent study found that the drop in groundwater in California’s Central Valley has accelerated over the last two decades. “The years 2000–2021 represent the driest 22-year period since at least 800,” authors wrote. They highlighted the need for better management of groundwater “to ensure its availability during the increasingly intense droughts of the future.”

Imperial Valley has made enough sacrifices already in the water rights war

Palm Springs Desert Sun

Imperial Valley has made enough sacrifices already in the water rights war

Craig William Morgan – February 12, 2023

There is an old saying in the water world that it is better to be upstream with a shovel than downstream with a law book, which is the position California finds itself in as it stands apart from its neighbors on the Colorado River in negotiations over the use of the river’s water.

On Jan. 31, representatives for the six other basin states submitted a proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation describing the measures by which the supply deficit on the Colorado River should be closed in the near term. Not surprisingly, the other basin states have asked that California reduce its water use beyond that which the state had previously proposed last fall. California was right to decline its neighbors’ new proposal notwithstanding its position on the river.

As many readers know, California water users have priority rights to Colorado River water that allow them to receive water first in times of drought. These rights are derived under the appropriative rights doctrine known as “first in time, first in right” that has been a mainstay of western water law for more than a century and a half. Those without such rights are legally bound to reduce their use.

Not surprisingly, those without such rights have developed a new theory of law that effectively says the priority system of water allocation is no longer applicable because of climate change.

The new buzzword describing this change is “aridification.” The terms “shortage” and “drought” that have historically been used they claim are no longer relevant to describing water conditions. The reason for this change in nomenclature is because existing law is very clear that water is apportioned based on priority during times of shortage and drought.

They argue that aridification is somehow different. It is not.

If state and federal courts were to interpret a distinction in such terms, water law would not only be upended along the Colorado River system, but indeed across the entire United States.

The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico have joined the chorus of Nevada and Arizona in arguing that aridification demands the priority system be ignored. They also argue that the requirement under the 1922 Colorado River Compact among the basin states guaranteeing a fixed quantity of water be delivered to the Lower Basin states should be ignored on the same grounds. Their fears are that such a requirement will limit their existing and proposed future diversions of Colorado River water. To date, these states’ diversions have been well below their junior allotment. The imbalance on the Colorado River they argue is a Lower Basin concern, not an Upper Basin concern.

But such a position is inconsistent and self-serving. If in fact, aridification demanded that the priority system be ignored along the river, wouldn’t it make sense that all water users within the Colorado River basin take a reduction, not just those in the Lower Basin as Upper Basin users have proposed? It is noteworthy that Upper Basin states thus far have not meaningfully participated in reducing demands on the Colorado River. Yet they should.

Why haven’t Arizona and Nevada looked harder at the Upper Basin states to reduce their water use to balance demands instead of focusing on California? Perhaps they are hoping that California’s Imperial Valley will once again come to the rescue of the river’s water users as was done in 2003 when the Imperial Irrigation District signed the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) and reduced its water use by more than 15 %. As the river’s biggest water user (and least politically potent), surely, they must have more water to spare.

The residents of Imperial Valley are right to be concerned about the future of their community. In 2003, the Imperial Irrigation District, despite holding senior water rights to the river for the benefit of its farming community, succumbed to the political pressures within California and from other basin states to reduce their demands on the Colorado River.

The argument made at the time by the river’s other water users was that the district was wasting water. However, the fact of the matter was that the district’s water use was no different than that of other irrigation districts across the west. The QSA water transfers have created significant hardships on the local communities and an ecological nightmare for the Salton Sea.

As the basin states and federal government move forward in crafting solutions to the water shortage problem on the Colorado River, they must consider the sacrifices that have already been made by those living in Imperial Valley: Sacrifices that have been made by those holding senior water rights. They must also consider the damage that would be done to the legal structure governing water use across the west if the priority system is to be ignored.

Craig William Morgan is a water resources engineer who served as consultant to farmers opposing the QSA. He is the author of the recently published book about the QSA and the fight for Imperial Valley’s water called “The Morality of Deceit.”

To avert ‘poppy apocalypse,’ California city closes canyon to visitors

The Washington Post

To avert ‘poppy apocalypse,’ California city closes canyon to visitors

Hannah Sampson – February 9, 2023

Visitors pose for a picture among wildflowers in bloom in March 2019 in Lake Elsinore, Calif. (Gregory Bull/AP)

Wildflower lovers won’t be able to get their fix this year in one Southern California city after officials announced that they were closing trails, roads and parking at a canyon that attracted thousands of visitors during an earlier poppy bloom.

The superbloom of 2019 blanketed Lake Elsinore’s Walker Canyon with a layer of vibrant orange poppies. They proved irresistible to phone-wielding, Instagram-posting visitors, who clogged roadways and trails, trampled the growth and occasionally needed rescuing due to heat and exertion and at least one rattlesnake bite.

“The flowers were beautiful,” Lake Elsinore Mayor Natasha Johnson said during a news conference this week with patches of California poppies in the background. “The scene was a nightmare.”

Facing another seasonal bloom – though likely not a supersized one – city, county and law enforcement officials decided not to risk a repeat. Johnson announced that the trails on Walker Canyon, as well as parking around it and an access road, are all closed. Shuttles will not run to the canyon, as they did for part of the 2019 season. Trails were closed in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic, and drought kept blooms away for the last couple of years.

“While typically the city of Lake Elsinore welcomes visitors to enjoy our vibrant community and boost our economy, the overwhelming number and unfortunate behavior of our visitors to Walker Canyon in 2019 came at a cost that was way too steep for our residents and our wildlife,” Johnson said.

Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco warned that the penalty for visiting anyway could be steep, though he said courts would determine any fine.

“We don’t want anybody coming here thinking that they’ll pay the fine and be good with it,” he said. “It’s a misdemeanor infraction subject to arrest.”

Walker Canyon, which closed in 2019 due to the crowds, has become the latest popular destination to close because of overtourism. A daffodil-dotted ranch east of Sacramento that had been open to the public for decades announced it was closing indefinitely in 2019 after being overwhelmed by a “crush of visitors.” Comparing the influx of tourists to a “zombie apocalypse,” Ontario farmers shut down access to their sunflower fields after a little more than a week, the New York Times reported in 2018.

The story has been similar around the globe, with a canyon in Iceland, an island in the Philippines and a bay in Thailand closing, at least temporarily, due to an influx of tourists.

In Lake Elsinore, reaction on the Facebook page that carried the news conference ranged from laudatory to disappointed to politically charged.

“So instead of responsibility, City officials decide to take away our rights,” one person wrote. “Taking their orders from the progressives.”

Another was more succinct: “Poppy police,” they wrote.

Some residents said they had been excited to explore the canyon, though others – still scarred from 2019 – were glad to escape a few weekends of gridlock. Many chastised officials for missing out on the chance to make some money from the phenomenon.

“You’re going to lose million in tax and tourist revenue,” one commenter wrote. “Should have leaned in and had a poppy festival with shuttles etc. Missed opportunity.”

But Bianco, the county sheriff, said there was no way to safely accommodate the crowds that have shown up in the past.

“Your warning is right now; we will have a zero-tolerance policy for people that are here trespassing and parking on sides of the roadways,” he said. “If you are going to come here and you are going to park your car, you are subject to citation and possibly the towing of your vehicle.”

For poppy fans who need updates on the bloom, the city has live video footage of Walker Canyon linked from its website.

“We understand that this is not the news that everybody may want to have heard, but our community’s safety as well as preservation is our main focus,” Johnson said. “Thank you for your support and especially your poppy patience. This weekend I encourage you to focus on the Super Bowl and not the superbloom that we’re not having.”

Climate change contributing to spread of antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’: UN report

The Hill

Climate change contributing to spread of antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’: UN report

Zack Budryk – February 7, 2023

Climate change is heightening the risk posed by antibiotic-resistant viruses, according to research published Tuesday by the United Nations Environment Program.

The report found so-called superbugs have been exacerbated by climate change due to increased bacterial growth caused by warmer temperatures and pollutants that have increased the spread of antibiotic-resistance genes.

The analysis notes that overuse of antimicrobials and pollutants can spread resistance, while contact with resistant microorganisms can create resistance in bacteria already present in air, water and soil. Pollution associated with wastewater, particularly from hospitals, is a major factor, as well as runoff from pharmaceutical production and agriculture, according to the report.

The risk is particularly great for historically polluted waterways, which are more likely to provide shelter for microorganisms that foster antibiotic resistance. A combination of increased pollution and decreased resources for pollutant management has made the problem worse in combination with resistance in health care and agriculture settings.

Meanwhile, 2021 research published in the journal Sci Total Environ suggests urban flooding is also increasing the threat from antibiotic resistance due to disruptions of soil, with the risk possibly lingering for up to five months after major floods or hurricanes.

“While the relationship between environmental pollution and AMR [antimicrobial resistance] and the reservoir of resistance genes in the environment has been established, the significance and its contribution to AMR globally is still unclear,” researchers wrote. “Even so, there is enough knowledge to implement measures to reduce the factors that influence AMR from an environmental perspective; this will also address the triple planetary crisis by addressing sources, sinks and waste.”

The report calls for stronger regulatory frameworks to address the spread of AMR, as well as increased incorporation of environmental factors into National Action Plans for antimicrobial resistance and international standards for signs of antimicrobial resistance.

Policymakers should also develop stronger water sanitation standards, U.N. Environment Program researchers wrote.

Huge chunk of plants, animals in U.S. at risk of extinction -report

Reuters

Huge chunk of plants, animals in U.S. at risk of extinction -report

Brad Brooks – February 6, 2023

A Venus flytrap is seen at the meat-eating plant exhibition "Dejate Atrapar" (Let Yourself Get Caught), in Bogota — A Venus flytrap is seen at the meat-eating plant exhibition “Dejate Atrapar” (Let Yourself Get Caught), in Bogota

Endangered Key Deer are pictured in a puddle following Hurricane Irma in Big Pine Key, Florida

Endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus is seen in the Oak Flat recreation area outside Superior, Arizona

A full moon rises over a cactus in Phoenix

The endangered dusky gopher frog, a darkly colored, moderately sized frog with warts covering its back and dusky spots on its belly, is shown in this handout photo

(Reuters) -A leading conservation research group found that 40% of animals and 34% of plants in the United States are at risk of extinction, while 41% of ecosystems are facing collapse.

Everything from crayfish and cacti to freshwater mussels and iconic American species such as the Venus flytrap are in danger of disappearing, a report released on Monday found.

NatureServe, which analyzes data from its network of over 1,000 scientists across the United States and Canada, said the report was its most comprehensive yet, synthesizing five decades’ worth of its own information on the health of animals, plants and ecosystems.

Importantly, the report pinpoints the areas in the United States where land is unprotected and where animals and plants are facing the most threats.

Sean O’Brien, president of NatureServe, said the conclusions of the report were “terrifying” and he hoped it would help lawmakers understand the urgency of passing protections, such as the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act that stalled out in Congress last year.

“If we want to maintain the panoply of biodiversity that we currently enjoy, we need to target the places where the biodiversity is most threatened,” O’Brien said. “This report allows us to do that.”

U.S. Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat who has proposed legislation to create a wildlife corridor system to rebuild threatened populations of fish, wildlife and plants, said NatureServe’s work would be critical to helping agencies identify what areas to prioritize and where to establish migration routes.

“The data reported by NatureServe is grim, a harrowing sign of the very real problems our wildlife and ecosystems are facing,” Beyer told Reuters. “I am thankful for their efforts, which will give a boost to efforts to protect biodiversity.”

HUMAN ENCROACHMENT

Among the species at risk of disappearing are icons like the carnivorous Venus flytrap, which is only found in the wild in a few counties of North and South Carolina.

Nearly half of all cacti species are at risk of extinction, while 200 species of trees, including a maple-leaf oak found in Arkansas, are also at risk of disappearing. Among ecosystems, America’s expansive temperate and boreal grasslands are among the most imperiled, with over half of 78 grassland types at risk of a range-wide collapse.

The threats against plants, animals and ecosystems are varied, the report found, but include “habitat degradation and land conversion, invasive species, damming and polluting of rivers, and climate change.”

California, Texas and the southeastern United States are where the highest percentages of plants, animals and ecosystems are at risk, the report found.

Those areas are both the richest in terms of biodiversity in the country, but also where population growth has boomed in recent decades, and where human encroachment on nature has been harshest, said Wesley Knapp, the chief botanist at NatureServe.

Knapp highlighted the threats facing plants, which typically get less conservation funding than animals. There are nearly 1,250 plants in NatureServe’s “critically imperiled” category, the final stage before extinction, meaning that conservationists have to decide where to spend scant funds even among the most vulnerable species to prevent extinctions.

“Which means a lot of plants are not going to get conservation attention. We’re almost in triage mode trying to keep our natural systems in place,” Knapp said.

‘NATURE SAVINGS ACCOUNT’

Vivian Negron-Ortiz, the president of the Botanical Society of America and a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who was not involved in the NatureServe report, said there is still a lot scientists do not know and have not yet discovered about biodiversity in the United States, and that NatureServe’s data helped illuminate that darkness.

More than anything, she sees the new data as a call to action.

“This report shows the need for the public to help prevent the disappearance of many of our plant species,” she said. “The public can help by finding and engaging with local organizations that are actively working to protect wild places and conserve rare species.”

John Kanter, the senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation, said the data in the report, which he was not involved with, was essential to guiding state and regional officials in creating impactful State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs), which they must do every 10 years to receive federal funding to protect vulnerable species.

Currently $50 million in federal funding is divided up among all states to carry out their SWAPs. The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, whose congressional sponsors say will be reintroduced soon, would have increased that to $1.4 billion, which would have a huge impact on the state’s abilities to protect animals and ecosystems, Kanter said, and the NatureServe report can act as roadmap for officials to best spend their money.

“Our biodiversity and its conservation is like a ‘nature savings account’ and if we don’t have this kind of accounting of what’s out there and how’s it doing, and what are the threats, there’s no way to prioritize action,” Kanter said. “This new report is critical for that.”

GRAPHIC-The collapse of insects

Penguins offer varied clues to Antarctic climate change

ANALYSIS-U.N. nature deal can help wildlife as long as countries deliver

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Additional reporting by Julio-Cesar Chavez in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)