The coast of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, near the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve, is a picture of calm. Clouds rest on the horizon, and gentle waves turn the sand into a reflection of the blue sky. But this serenity faces a threat—one driven by the demands of a warming climate and an economy rooted in fossil […]
Tag: environment
The Unplugged Reality of Electric Vehicles and Clean Transportation
In 2016, the California Senate passed SB-32, requiring that state greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown issued EO-B-55-18, establishing the statewide goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2045. Today, nearly six years later, the state is not on track to meet either target. […]
Driving Towards a Cleaner California
The future of electric vehicles along with climate change is not as far away as we may have thought. In 2020, Gavin Newsom announced, via Executive Order N-79-20, that California car dealerships will no longer be selling gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The California Air and Resource Board (CARB) has been working to implement cleaner practices […]
Panda-Monium: The Love Story of Pandas and Washington
In 1972, two ambassadors left China for the U.S. They did not speak a word of English or Mandarin. In fact, they could hardly walk on two feet. These were not people, but pandas, China’s national animal. Since arriving in America, they have become an enduring symbol of the goodwill and cooperation between China and […]
Environmental Activism: Eco or Ego?
2023 was set to become the hottest year on record. Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest point in history. Heat waves and wildfires are scorching our planet… Need I go on? It is impossible to turn a blind eye to the climate crisis we face today. And many of us aren’t—we feel we are […]
Red-Tagging and Reclamation: Manila Bay Activists Freed!
On September 2, 2023, Jhed Tamano, a programme coordinator of the Community and Church Program for Manila Bay of the Ecumenical Bishops Forum, and Jonila Castro, a member of the Alliance for the Defense of Livelihood, Housing and Environment in Manila Bay, went missing while volunteering in a fishing community near Manila Bay. Local eyewitnesses reported […]
Prescribed Burns As The Solution To California’s Increasingly Incendiary Forests
The weather has been a running joke for residents of San Francisco. Karl, the name they have given their fog, blankets their sky year-round. There is no snow season (it has snowed six times in the last 150 years.) And, due to California’s historic drought, residents of The City are losing their rainy season. But […]
A New Front in the Republicans’ Culture War: The Environment and ESG
In the past year, there’s been a push to include environmental considerations in investing and corporate operations. Now, it’s a “culture war” on Wall Street’s doorstep for investors and a partisan debate in states like Florida. You may recognize this as part of the unfolding story on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) — a new […]
An Open Letter to the Fashion Industry: Forget Your Instagram Posts, Change Your Supply Chain
Fast fashion disproportionately affects women on both the consumer and producer end. According to Vogue Business, “more than half [of women] reported buying most of their clothes from fast-fashion brands” and young women between the ages of 18 and 24 make 80% of fast fashion clothing. This parasitic relationship only became possible in the past […]
The Little Red Dot’s Solution to the Environmental Crisis
In 1798, economist Thomas Malthus proposed his theory of the Earth’s carrying capacity. Taking into consideration various environmental factors, he posited that humans will eventually exhaust Earth’s finite supply of natural resources, placing a hard cap on human population growth. In the modern context, the dire state of climate change is the primary culprit for […]
Falling Far Behind: Insufficient Climate Education in the U.S.
Upwards of 80% of people living in the United States are advocates for climate education, with “more than three out of every four Americans [wanting] schools to teach children about global warming.” However, according to the 2021 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) report, Cambodia ranks as the leading country in climate education, with the Dominican Republic […]
Where Does “Where the Crawdads Sing” Come From?
——— History of Things ——— Any decent murder mystery should begin with a dead body in the woods. That’s how this one starts. In 1994, park scouts shot a man dead in the empty woodlands of North Luangwa National Park, a Zambian nature preserve about the size of Delaware. Squadrons wielded their rifles at the man and […]
CA Isn’t Ready to Close Its Last Nuclear Power Plant— But It Can’t Stay Open
On the first of February, 79 top energy experts signed an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, urging him to halt the decommission of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, California’s very last operational source of nuclear power. The group behind this letter includes dozens of prominent energy executives, professors from Berkeley, MIT, Stanford and more, […]
Guatemalan Maya Take the Country to Court
On February 9, Indigenous elder Rodrigo Tot testified before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) on behalf of Agua Caliente, a Q’eqchi’ Maya community. For the first time in history, in Maya Q´eqchi´ Indigenous Community of Agua Caliente v. Guatemala, Guatemala is facing judgment in international court for violating Indigenous collective land rights. The […]
What Lead’s Rise and Fall Can Teach Us About Microplastic Pollution
We have reached a point in our planet’s history where what we do will have effects that may outlast us entirely. In the relatively short amount of time humans have been catastrophically polluting, we have had several moments where we realized our harmful effects were too great and needed to be resolved. Those moments are […]
The Earth is Begging for a Carbon Border Tax
In 2015, the US signed on to the Paris Agreement, vowing to work towards a goal of reducing global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels, by 2100. Scientists argue that even this increase is too high, ideally it should be below 1 degree. But, as of right now, we are on […]
What Debt-for-Nature Could Mean For Developing Countries
In 1842, Charles Darwin referred to the Belize Barrier Reef as “the most remarkable reef in the West Indies.” With its gleaming turquoise waters, verdant clusters of mangroves and rainbow of brightly-colored coral rising from the seafloor, it is plain to see why. In addition to its aesthetic appeal, the site is home to multiple […]
Climate Change Fatalism: The Nail in the Coffin for a Dying Planet
“After 30 years of intensive climate science research, we have sufficient knowledge about our climate system and how it interacts with atmospheric emissions. But our knowledge about how people respond to climate science has been lagging behind.” – Per Espen Stoknes The planet is dying. Or more accurately, humanity’s chance at long-term survival on the […]
Sarah Edwards and Beyond: Building Cities That Are Safer For Women
3rd March 2021 was not a peculiar day for most living in South London. It was yet another day of lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic mandated by the Boris Johnson government. A woman was walking home at night from a friend’s house in Clapham Common. She went missing on the same night. Six days later, […]
The Lasting Harms of Toxic Exposure in Native American Communities
“They never told us uranium was dangerous. We washed our faces in it. We drank in it. We ate in it. It was sweet,” explained Cecilia Joe, an 85-year-old Navajo woman, in a recent interview. Joe’s experience illustrates the under-researched but extremely pervasive problem of environmental injustice on Native American reservations. Due to decades of […]
Weathering the Storm: How California Needs to Adapt to Sea Level Rise
The classic postcard image of beautiful wide, sandy beaches in California is under threat by climate change. Climate change is irrevocably changing the California coastline and will soon have a resounding impact on local economies, housing, and quality of life. Clashes between municipal governments and state governments have led to a stalemate over what beach […]
GreenWashing: On How Neo-Liberal Capitalism Persists Amid The Climate Crisis
Are we truly in an era of green marketing and greenwashing today as our climate crisis continues to deteriorate? Does Fiji water truly justify their claim that ‘every drop is green’? Coined in the 1980s and beginning with the anti-nuclear campaign, “greenwashing” describes a business strategy of making claims about the environment to promote companies’ […]
“Carpooling Can Save the Planet,” and Other Lies Exxon and Shell Want You to Believe
During the Cold War, students learned to duck and cover under their desks in the event of a nuclear bomb. The flimsy wood wouldn’t have made an appreciable difference in whether or not they survived, of course, but it must have felt better to have some tiny piece of control over an otherwise terrifying and […]
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: How the United States Discards E-Waste
It’s all about the new. Increasingly, the people of the United States want the latest technology; every time tech giants like Apple and Samsung release new devices, hundreds of thousands flock to buy them, often discarding their old devices by simply throwing them in the trash. Everyday, Americans throw out over 350,000 cell phones and […]
Dam Shame: Examining China’s Hydro-Hegemony
It was done in a panic. As Japan’s rapid and devastating invasion of China continued inward, Chinese President Chiang Kai-Shek turned to the Yellow River, a symbol of Chinese civilization, to accomplish what his soldiers could not. In early June, 1938, Chinese troops were ordered to destroy the dykes along the river with the hope […]
Unpopular Populism: The Dismal Prospects for Far-Right Politics in Canada
He has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by “environmentalist alarmists.” His immigration policy includes building border fences, restricting family reunification, and making temporary foreign workers less competitive. And he spends much of his time railing against “the Liberal cult of diversity” on his Twitter account, a platform he uses to comment on — […]
Murder and Famine: Sand’s Story in 21st Century India
In 2004, Sumaira Abdulali, one of India’s foremost environmental activists, drove to an illegal sand mining site. Upon her arrival, four men, including the son of a local Indian National Congress politician, smashed her side window, dragged her out of the car and beat her in an effort to silence her efforts to stop the […]
New Paradigms of Prosperity: Challenging Traditional Metrics of Success
It’s a running joke across many college campuses that economics is the “dismal science”. For those who are not economists, it can be hard to connect abstract terms like “absorptive capacity” and “nonparametric statistical methods” to the real lives of people across the globe. Part of the reason that these concepts seem so obfuscated is […]
Fire Season: California, Climate Change, and Convict Labor
2018 summer fire season is on record as being one of California’s most demanding and devastating. In the 9 month fire season from January to September, over 4,800 wildfires burned 617,00 acres across the state. The effort to combat such extensive emergency is incredibly costly; California spent $431 million in just the two months following […]
Florida’s Sand: Gone with the Wind
If You Can’t Keep Your Own Sand, Store-Bought is Fine Florida, the Sunshine State. The land of white, sandy world-renowned beaches. The beauty of Florida’s beaches has been commemorated since the first Spanish colonial settlement in 1565 to the 21st century, with popular beaches like Daytona and Miami a feature in movies, TV shows, and […]
Lebanon: Too Beautiful for its Own Good
National pride has historically been founded on biases and ignorance of a country’s flawed history. But of course, it is also founded on some merit. It takes one visit to understand why so many in Lebanon beam at the mention of their nation. Cedar trees from thousands of years ago stand tall across from ancient […]
The United States… And Territories: America’s Paradise Lost
On October 13, one news headline stood out among the rest: “Trump says he spoke to U.S. Virgin Islands’ ‘president’ — which is him.” “Must’ve been a one-sided conversation,” one Twitter user noted. The Daily Show put out a video of Trump shaking hands with his “genetic replica.” This hilarity momentarily puts a spotlight on […]
Blood for Trees: The Plight of Uncontacted Tribes in Brazil
Last month, around the Jandiatuba river in the Amazonas region of Western Brazil, a small cohort of illegal gold miners happened upon a group of indigenous people, members of one of many uncontacted tribes throughout Brazil. Reports state that these miners murdered between ten to twenty people, including women and children. This massacre would have […]
California’s Drought: Reviewing the Past, Critiquing the Present, and Preparing for the Future
Written November 21, 2016. As Governor Jerry Brown trekked on a dry, brown meadow nearly 7,000 feet above sea level, something was wrong. The date, April 1st, 2015, seemed appropriate: it was almost like a joke gone wrong; where there had once been a copious amount of snow covering the ground, there was not one […]
Pollution, Plastic, and Profit: California’s Conflicting Propositions
In California, a high-profile war for the future of plastic bags is underway; however, underneath the surface lies a much more sinister battle between private interests, with both sides having significant financial stakes in the situation. Just over two years ago, California became the first state in the nation to pass legislation (SB 270) banning […]
Don’t Cap Cap and Trade
California’s signature environmental program is in jeopardy, creating a ripple effect that places the state’s entire climate plan at risk Since the passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32), California has implemented a number of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the most ambitious being cap and trade. Heavily influenced by a similar […]
Politicians, Capitalism, and the Dying Earth: Why the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement Became a Roadblock
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson When the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was finalized on December 12th, 2015, politicians, the media, and various non-profit groups from around the world heralded the agreement as a momentous occasion for international cooperation. U.S. Secretary of State […]
“Leapfrogging”: Can developing countries truly skip over fossil fuel reliance in favor of renewable energies?
There is a popular argument that progress and growth are not possible without reliance on fossil fuel-powered energy. Examples abide to support this claim: almost every industrialized country is (relatively and subjectively) thriving today because of their rampant abuse of coal, oil, and gas. The 1.3 billion people without electricity access are largely concentrated in […]
Cyberwar with China
The U.S. has been hacked on over 700 occasions in just five years on fronts ranging from corporate to private to governmental. Over the past two years, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was hacked on two separate occasions; the hack this year was deemed the largest in U.S. history, with 5.6 million fingerprints and […]
Courting Controversy
The California State Legislature took its interim study recess on September 11 and will reconvene on January 4. The first year of this session was full of drama, much of which will play out in the next couple of weeks, as the deadline for Governor Jerry Brown to sign or veto bills on his desk […]
California’s Drought: A Trickling Time Bomb
In early March senior NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory water scientist Jay Famiglietti reported that the state of California has approximately a single year’s supply of water in its reservoirs, with backup groundwater supply having rapidly decrease. His LA Times editorial urges an immediate call to action following its startling announcement. “California has about one year of […]
“Under the Dome”
China’s internet censors strike again, and this time, the country’s already deteriorating environment becomes the victim of their restrictive policies. A newly released documentary, “Under the Dome,” instantly went viral on the internet as the most thorough investigation of China’s pollution problems. In its first week the documentary attracted more than twenty millions viewers and […]
ANWar: The Historic Fight for Alaska’s Wilderness Heats Up
As Obama looks to the end of his presidency, he’s turned to the Arctic North to put some heat on his environmental detractors. In January 2015, President Obama designated 12.3 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, the largest formal designation of its kind. President Obama’s conservation legacy has long been […]
The Northern Sea Route: Could It Be The New Suez Canal?
Under the influence of climate change, Arctic ice is melting away. This scares climatologists, but also intriguingly creates possible economic benefits. The melted ice has opened trade routes and energy resources, attracting the interest of many of the world’s most powerful nations. However, while the melting ice has created these two potential economic benefits, only […]
Breaking the Ice: The Politics of the Arctic Council
Arctic policy has been frozen in United States political conversation for years. However, in May of 2015, the US will take over chairmanship of the Arctic Council, an understated organization for the Arctic. This comes in a time of expanding opportunities in the Arctic as well as rising tensions where caution is the lingua franca […]
Hypocrisy In the EPA: Environmental Discrimination in Louisiana
It has been decades since dioxin, a chemical contaminant, overtook the Mossville, Louisiana population. The deleterious toxin reigns supreme over its residents, conquering their lives one by one. Today, the African American community of Mossville is surrounded by fourteen industrial facilities within a half mile radius. These buildings have been spewing hazardous substances into […]
An Unnecessary Evil: The Politics of Wild Horse Roundups
The mustang is an iconic symbol of the American West. The horses roam the protected mountains of ten U.S. states with a spirit that makes them legendary. You can even “adopt a living legend” yourself, courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Land Management. What’s concerning, however, is the BLM’s roundups of wild horses, a miles-long […]
The Fuss About Fracking
If you enjoy drinking clean water and breathing clean air, you should know about fracking. Fracking, formally known as hydraulic fracturing, is the process of pumping water, sand, and chemicals deep underground to break open reservoir rock and allow the oil and natural gas within to escape. Toxic waste, air pollution, public health issues, increased […]
Pipe Dreams
On April 18, 2014, the Obama administration indefinitely extended the review period of Keystone XL, leaving the controversial pipeline in regulatory purgatory for the foreseeable future. The pipeline, proposed to extend from Alberta, Canada through the central US, has met fierce opposition from environmental groups. Environmental activists decry the increases in carbon emissions and form […]