Water

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy , a project of the Independent Media Institute. By Barbara Williams The word “Minnesota” derives from one of two Dakota words, either Mni Sóta meaning clear blue water or Mnissota meaning cloudy water. Just one letter can change the entire meaning. Just one oil spill could ruin the entire ecosystem. I traveled to northern Minnesota with Jane Fonda and Tessa Wick in March to stand with the Ojibwe who are fighting a massive assault on their ancestral territory. Line 3 is a pipeline that was built in the 1960s and currently has 900 structural problems according to Enbridge, the Canadian company that owns it. Under the guise of replacing it, Enbridge is in fact abandoning the old one and aggressively laying the infrastructure to expand it into a larger pipeline with greater capacity. The proposed monstrosity would snake through 200 pristine lakes and rivers in northern Minnesota including watersheds for the wild rice that is unique to this part of the world and has been intrinsic to the Anishinaabeg/Ojibwe way of life for centuries. A spill could permanently destroy rice beds as well as the fish and wildlife habitat. Enbridge has had over 800 spills in the last 15 years, most notably the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history when 1.2 million gallons leaked into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. A spill is inevitable. ...

Just in time for Earth Week, WLRN’s April Neault interviewed Julia Barnes, producer of the new film Bright Green Lies, documenting the fundamental problems with ‘green’ energy. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjMWpboTxbw[/embed] Award winning Canadian filmmaker Julia Barnes sat down with WLRN member, April Neault, on April 16th to discuss her newest documentary entitled Bright Green Lies, based on the recently released book of the same name. Julia talks about how and why she started making documentaries, her passion for environmentalism and the overlaps between environmentalism and feminism. Check out Julia’s vimeo page for links to watch her award winning documentary Sea of Life, released 5 years ago. ...

For Immediate Release: Press Contact: Jennifer K. Falcon, jennifer@ienearth.org, 218-760-9958 \\\_________________________________________________________________________ Washington D.C. (April 9th, 2021)- The Army Corp announced today that they will not be shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline despite it lacking the proper operating and environmental permits. This move continues to ignore the treaties and voices of the Standing Rock Tribal Nation who have been vocal about their opposition to the pipeline for over five years. The decision comes on the heels of the Standing Rock Youth Council taking over the streets of to D.C. last week with a 318-foot-long snake to deliver 400,000 petition signatures in support of shutting DAPL down to the Army Corps. ...

This article outlines the effects of environmental destruction, specifically seagrass meadows, and explains how effective they are as a carbon sink. By Richard K.F. Unsworth, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology, Swansea University; Alix Green, PhD Candidate in Conservation Biology, UCL; Michael A. Chadwick, Senior Lecturer in Aquatic Biology, King’s College London; Peter JS Jones, Reader in Environmental Governance, UCL The native oyster beds are gone. The vast saltmarshes that soaked up carbon and buffered the coast from stormy seas have been reclaimed for farms and towns. The species-rich maerl and horse mussel beds have vanished and now, in new research, we’ve uncovered the decline of another jewel in the UK’s marine environment: seagrass meadows. ...

Written by Christian Ramp and originally published in The Conversation. This article highlights evidence linking reduction in reproduction of the humpback whale and climate change. Climate change is having a serious impact on the world’s oceans in various ways, ranging from its devastating effects on tropical coral reefs to melting polar sea ice. But until now, it wasn’t known how these changes could be affecting whale populations. Globally, humpback whales are increasing in numbers following the end of commercial whaling, but the populations in the northern hemisphere are not recovering to the same extent as those in the southern hemisphere. Our new research confirms that a North Atlantic population has shown a significant decline in the number of calves over the last 15 years. ...

News Alert: Land and water defenders are opposing the creation of a dam across the Zambezi River. They are requesting support to highlight concerns. We encourage you to comment on the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) before it closes on January 25th. The Zambezi River Authority needs to capture grievances for their Responses Report for the ESIA. You can access the ESIA here and leave your comments on this email address. ...

Originally published on Climate and Capitalism Over 90% of the excess heat due to global warming is absorbed by the oceans. Heat content change in the upper 2000 meters of the global ocean. (Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, January 2021) Even with the Covid-19-related small dip in global carbon emissions due to limited travel and other activities, the ocean temperatures continued a trend of breaking records in 2020. A new study by 20 scientists from 13 institutes around the world, reported the highest ocean temperatures since 1955 from surface level to a depth of 2,000 meters.The study was published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on January 13. It concluded with a plea to the policymakers and others to consider the lasting damage warmer oceans that can be caused as they attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change. ...

Derrick Jensen interviews activists each week. This week Derrick interviews Cayte Bosler. Cayte is an investigative environmental journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University. She researches solutions for protecting biodiversity and has worked with land-based communities and wildlife defenders throughout Latin America. Her interest is in chronicling community-led resistance to exploitation and ecological abuse to inspire resistance elsewhere. Today we talk about whales. [Whales] are some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. They spend 99% of their lives under water, far beyond any of our observational tools. Even with the sliver of what we do know, it’s so fascinating. ...

Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction. Experience Is Not An Abstraction by Trinity La Fey On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep. Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells. Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation. ...

This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters. By Cypress Hansen/ Mongabay Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows. For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore. While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect. Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science. ...