Biology
Breach
July 25, 2011, from The Tennessean
A new report says groundwater contamination from coal ash has been found at Gallatin and eight of the nine other Tennessee Valley Authority fossil power plant sites where testing is being done.
Levels of toxic substances found at the Gallatin plant site in Sumner County and at the Cumberland site, 50 miles northwest of Nashville, are high enough that they could create a health hazard, the report says. Beryllium, cadmium and nickel levels are above drinking water standards at Gallatin, as are arsenic, selenium and vanadium at Cumberland.
One major surprise also showed up in the review by TVA's Office of Inspector General: For more than a decade, the TVA had been finding substances in groundwater at its Allen coal-fired plant in Memphis that indicated toxic metals could be leaking from a coal ash pond there.
July 25, 2011, from Bloomberg News
Radiation fallout from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant poses a growing threat to Japan's food chain as unsafe levels of cesium found in beef on supermarket shelves were also detected in more vegetables and the ocean.
More than 2,600 cattle have been contaminated, Kyodo News reported July 23, after the Miyagi local government said 1,183 cattle at 58 farms were fed hay containing radioactive cesium before being shipped to meat markets.
Agriculture Minister Michihiko Kano has said officials didn't foresee that farmers might ship contaminated hay to cattle ranchers. That highlights the government's inability to think ahead and to act, said Mariko Sano, secretary general for Shufuren, a housewives organization in Tokyo.
July 25, 2009, from Times Online (UK)
Doubts about Britain's recycling industry were growing last night as it emerged that a company suspected of shipping hazardous waste to Brazil was supplied with recyclable plastics by a business with previous convictions for pollution.... Worldwide Biorecyclables benefited from a loophole in the Environment Protection Act 1990 which allows waste management companies to avoid Environment Agency scrutiny by registering their businesses as "low-risk" operations.
The company was granted a "simple exemption" from seeking an environmental work permit when treating waste for the purpose of recovery and storing waste in a secure place.... Up to 7,000 sites, including supermarkets and department stores, handle low-risk waste, according to the Environment Agency. The watchdog admits it lacks the resources to ensure they are all adhering to the exemptions rules. It acts on tip-offs from the public and other sources.
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Climate
Chaos
July 25, 2012, from Guardian
The radical decline in sea ice around the Arctic is at least 70 percent due to human-induced climate change, according to a new study, and may even be up to 95 percent down to humans - rather higher than scientists had previously thought....
He found that a climate system called the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation (AMO) was a dominant source of variability in ice extent. The AMO is a cycle of warming and cooling in the North Atlantic that repeats every 65 to 80 years - it has been in a warming phase since the mid-1970s....
"We could only attribute as much as 30 percent [of the Arctic ice loss] to the AMO," he said. "Which implies that the rest is due to something else, and this is most likely going to be man-made global change."
July 25, 2011, from Solve Climate News
During the industrial boom of the mid-twentieth century thousands of man-made chemicals were created to make chemical processes and products stronger and more durable.
The substances became useful in pest control and crop production, but it wasn't long before they also proved deadly, causing cancers, birth defects and other health problems.
Known as persistent organic pollutants (or POPs), this group of the world's most toxic compounds takes decades to degrade as they circulate through Earth's oceans and the atmosphere, gradually accumulating in the fatty tissues of humans and wildlife.... Climatologists at Environment Canada, the Canadian environmental agency, found that as climate change heats up oceans and melts sea ice and snow, the buried pollutants, known as legacy POPs, are being re-released back into the atmosphere.
July 25, 2011, from Washington Post
A giant underwater "dead zone" in the Chesapeake Bay is growing at an alarming rate because of unusually high nutrient pollution levels this year, according to Virginia and Maryland officials. They said the expanding area of oxygen-starved water is on track to become the bay's largest ever.
This year's Chesapeake Bay dead zone covers a third of the bay, stretching from the Baltimore Harbor to the bay's mid-channel region in the Potomac River, about 83 miles, when it was last measured in late June. It has since expanded beyond the Potomac into Virginia, officials said.
Especially heavy flows of tainted water from the Susquehanna River brought as much nutrient pollution into the bay by May as normally comes in an entire average year...
July 25, 2009, from New York Times
Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayura's very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.... Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayura people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
"I'm stressed and anxious -- this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard," he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. "As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don't know what will happen to my children and grandchildren."
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Resource
Depletion
July 25, 2011, from London Guardian
Conservation group WWF let timber companies use its panda brand logo while they were razing some of the world's most biologically rich rainforests or trading in potentially illegally sourced timber, according to the investigative group Global Witness.
The WWF's flagship Global forest and trade network (Gftn), which is part-subsidised by the US government and EU, promotes sustainable timber, bringing together more than 70 international logging companies and large numbers of timber sellers. The WWF says the 20-year-old scheme is now responsible for nearly 19 percent of forest products bought or sold internationally, with members' combined annual sales approaching $70bn (£43bn).
However, Global Witness's report, Pandering to the Loggers, claims Gftn's membership and participation rules are inadequate, allowing companies to systematically abuse the scheme.
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Recovery
July 25, 2009, from TED talk, 2009
We almost didn't view this TED video -- 'Doc Michael was talking about online "tribes" back in 1996 (http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/tech6.htm), but we clicked anyway. As a consequence, we were illuminated: he is talking about operationalizing the tribe for a purpose. We were inspired. Because that is what, ideally, we ApocaDocs can do.
Internally, we are setting our goals for 2012. Either society will have woken up and begun radically shifting gears, or it's Road Warrior time, ahead. 2009 through 2010 need to be the holyshit period -- the time when we as a society grapple with what we've been doing to ourselves. 2011 needs to be the "why the hell aren't we fixing it faster era. And finally, 2012 needs to be the breakthrough year. We don't know what that breakthrough will be, but we need to do all we can to build to breakthrough.
The ApocaDocs, in three days, will have reached 3,000 stories identified, considered, recorded, and be-quipped, from the last 18 months. We have the data to help scare the hell out of people, in the next 18 months, if we have your help.
We are beginning to Twitter our stories (twitter.com/apocadocs), and have had fits and starts with Facebook. The problem is, we both have more-than-fulltime jobs. We want to get the ideas out into the world as fast as we can, to catalyze the change that is required to have a livable world for our grandchildren.
Over the next six months, we'll apply more tools for community, for outreach, for participation. But for now, if you're as panicked as we are, please follow us on Twitter and ReTweet or Facebook as much as you can, to your own networks. Add your own stories, and lead your tribe, so others can ReTweet and expand the tribe who understands what's going on.
As you probably know, most everything is happening faster than expected. We need to react just as fast.
July 25, 2009, from TED talk, 2009
Our favorite part of this TED talk (which is worth watching in its entirety), is the exponential photovoltaic efficiency increase (starting around 5:43), "eight doublings away from providing 100 percent of our energy needs." Currently PV is doubling in efficiency:price every two years; now that nanotechnology is being applied, doubling could increase dramatically, he implies. Would it not be fabulous if this is true? We could then have the energy to de-carbonize and de-methanize our atmosphere and possibly de-acidify the ocean with floating solar-powered smartboats. Eight to sixteen years? If, as Kurzweil posits, the other developments in computing, nanotechnology, information interpretation, and general progress grows exponentially..., then in eight years, a radically different world awaits. And how will we make it?
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