Water

The Australian government has moved to create two new marine protected areas that cover an expanse of ocean twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The two parks will be established around Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean to the northwest of continental Australia. The new parks, which cover to 740,000 square kilometers (286,000 square miles) of ocean, raise the protected share of Australia’s oceans from 37% to 45%. The decision was immediately welcomed by conservation groups. This article originally appeared on Mongabay. Featured image: Whale shark feeding the ocean surface. Image by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay. ...

Biodiversity is plummeting, but restoring rivers could quickly reverse this disastrous trend. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. By Alessandra Korap Munduruku, Darryl Knudsen and Irikefe V. Dafe In October 2021, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in China to adopt a new post-2020 global biodiversity framework to reverse biodiversity loss and its impacts on ecosystems, species and people. The conference is being held during a moment of great urgency: According to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we now have less than 10 years to halve our greenhouse gas emissions to stave off catastrophic climate change. At the same time, climate change is exacerbating the accelerating biodiversity crisis. Half of the planet’s species may face extinction by the end of this century. ...

Originally published in Resource Insights Featured image: Colorado river floating into Lake Mead NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Kurt Cobb The American West is having a drought. So, what else is new? And, that’s just the point. The American West has been in an extended drought since 2000, so far the second worst in the last 1200 years. Here is the key quote from the National Geographic article cited above: In the face of continued climate change, some scientists and others have suggested that using the word “drought” for what’s happening now might no longer be appropriate, because it implies that the water shortages may end. Instead, we might be seeing a fundamental, long-term shift in water availability all over the West. ...

This is part 4 of a series that originally appeared on ClimateandCapitalism. You can read part 1, part 2 and part 3. Featured image: Processing cod in a 16th Century Newfoundland ‘Fishing Room’ THE FISHING REVOLUTION Centuries before the industrial revolution, the first factories transformed seafood production By Ian Angus Marxist historians have been debating the origin of capitalism since the 1940s. It is true, as Eric Hobsbawm once commented, that “nobody has seriously maintained that capitalism prevailed before the 16th century, or that feudalism prevailed after the late 18th,” [1] but despite years of vigorous discussion in many excellent books and articles, there is still no consensus on when, where and how the new system formed and became dominant. [2] ...

This is part 3 of a series that originally appeared on Climate and Capitalism. You can read part 1 and part 2. Featured image: The Spanish Armada off the English Coast, by Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen, ca. 1620 THE FIRST COD WAR How England’s government-licensed pirates stole the Newfoundland fishery from Europe’s largest feudal empire By Ian Angus In 1575, a moderately successful Bristol merchant named Anthony Parkhurst purchased a mid-sized ship and began organizing annual cod fishing expeditions to Newfoundland. Unlike most of his peers, he travelled with the fishworkers; while they were catching and drying cod, he explored “the harbors, creekes and havens and also the land, much more than ever any Englishman hath done.” In 1578, he estimated that about 350 European ships were active in the Newfoundland cod fishery — 150 French, 100 Spanish, 50 Portuguese, and 30 to 50 English — as well as 20 to 30 Basque whalers. [1] ...

The Philippine government has suspended work on a bridge that would connect the islands of Coron and Culion in the coral rich region of Palawan. Activists, Indigenous groups and marine experts say the project would threaten the rich coral biodiversity in the area as well as the historical shipwrecks that have made the area a prime dive site. The Indigenous Tagbanua community, who successfully fought against an earlier project to build a theme park, say they were not consulted about the bridge project. Preliminary construction began in November 2020 despite a lack of government-required consultations and permits, and was ordered suspended in April this year following the public outcry. This article originally appeared on Mongabay. Featured image: The Indigenous Tagbanua community of Culion has slammed the project for failing to obtain their permission that’s required under Philippine law. Image by anne jimenez via Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY 2.0). ...

This is an edited transcript of this Deep Green episode. Featured image: “Watershed” by Nell Parker. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about aquifers. As we know, this culture is drawing down aquifers around the world. Aquifers are underground rivers, lakes, seeps - it’s underground water and they can be anywhere from just six inches below the surface down to about 10,000 feet and they are being drawn down around the world. ...

The aquatic food web has been seriously compromised by chemical pollution and climate change. This article originally appeared on Climate and Capitalism A report released today by the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) and the National Toxics Network (NTN) says that rising levels of chemical and plastic pollution are major contributors to declines in the world’s fish populations and other aquatic organisms. Dr. Matt Landos, co-author of the report, says that many people erroneously believe that fish declines are caused only by overfishing. “In fact, the entire aquatic food web has been seriously compromised, with fewer and fewer fish at the top, losses of invertebrates in the sediments and water column, less healthy marine algae, coral, and other habitats, as well as a proliferation of bacteria and toxic algal blooms. Chemical pollution, along with climate change itself a pollution consequence, are the chief reasons for these losses.” ...

Original Press Release Relatives, Together we are powerful. Since the #DefundLine3 campaign launched in February, bank executives have received more than 700,000 emails, 7,000 calendar invites and 3,000 phone calls, demanding that they stop funding Line 3. There have been protests at bank branches in 16 states. Collectively, we’ve raised more than $70,000 for those on the frontlines. Now, we’re pulling all of that energy together for one powerful, coordinated day of action. ...

In this article Rebecca Wildbear talks about how civilization is wasting our planet’s scarce water sources for mining in its desperate effort to continue this devastating way of life. By Rebecca Wildbear Nearly a third of the world lacks safe drinking water, though I have rarely been without. In a red rock canyon in Utah, backpacking on a week-long wilderness training in my mid-twenties, it was challenging to find water. Eight of us often scouted for hours. Some days all we could find to drink was muddy water. We collected rain water and were grateful when we found a spring. ...