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By Erik Hoffner BLUE HILL, Maine — January brought a pair of rough storms to the northeastern U.S. They hit when the tides were high and pushed higher than normal by rising sea levels, setting numerous high-water records and prompting Maine Governor Janet Mills to request a federal disaster declaration. These events, just three days apart, built on damage suffered during another storm during the December 2023 holidays and another during the previous December. “Extensive” is the word that Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist for the Maine Geological Survey, chose to describe the most recent dama...
Mongabay
By Liz Kimbrough After the first flower bloomed on the Earth, flowering plants evolved a staggering diversity and now make up about 90% of all plant life. Charles Darwin called this rapid domination an “abominable mystery.” A study published today, April 24, in the journal Nature and led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, unveiled the most comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary history of flowering plants to date. The research, which analyzed 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species, clears up some of the mystery surrounding the rise of flowering plants. Much l...
Mongabay
By Taylar Dawn Stagner Last week, a United States federal judge rejected a request from Indigenous nations to stop SunZia, a $10 billion dollar wind transmission project that would cut through traditional tribal lands in southwestern Arizona. Amy Juan is a member of the Tohono O’odham nation at the Arizona-Mexico border and brought the news of the federal court’s ruling to New York last week, telling attendees of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, that she was disappointed but not surprised. “We are not in opposition to what is called ‘green energy,’” she said....
Mongabay
By Vitor Prado dos Anjos CONCEIÇÃO DA BARRA, Espírito Santo — Beatriz Cassiano was working in her vegetable garden when she suddenly heard her grandson yelling, “Grandma, get out of there, get out, come in the house! The plane!” In an interview with Mongabay, Cassiano recalls being caught off guard by an airplane dropping pesticides as it flew over the homes in her community. “We didn’t know, [nobody] let us know it would happen. They were dumping the poison out, but they were turning in the air over our people’s properties,” she says. At a certain point, Cassiano was hit by the pesticides. “I...
Mongabay
By Astrid Arellano Yuturi ants are peaceful until their territory is threatened. This species, also known as the ‘conga ant,’ is considered a warrior in Amazonian Kichwa Indigenous culture, as these bugs don’t allow anyone to enter their home without permission — just like the women of Serena, an Indigenous community located on the banks of the Jatunyacu river in the upper part of the Napo river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Yuturi Warmi first decided to come together to increase their families’ income through making and selling handicrafts, but when their territory was increasingly threatened by ...
Mongabay
By Abhaya Raj Joshi As winter bids adieu to the Northern Hemisphere and the mercury peaks and humidity plummets, most of Nepal’s plains and hills become tinderboxes awaiting a spark. As officials face a gargantuan task of controlling wildfires, some authorities from Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation are themselves involved in starting fires in the name of “habitat management,” especially inside national parks in the plains. They say they believe that fires are a cost-effective tool to prevent grasslands, which provide habitat for Nepal’s iconic tigers (Panthera tig...
Mongabay
By Sarah Brown The Amazon Rainforest continues to feel the effect of 2023’s severe drought that intensified the dry season, provoking blazes across vast regions of untouched vegetation. Fire outbreaks in these swaths of primary forest grew by 152% in 2023, according to a recent study, and record highs of wildfires continue to be registered this year across several Amazonian countries. According to the research published in February in Global Change Biology, satellite images show that fire outbreaks in mature forest areas rose from 13,477 in 2022 to 34,012 in 2023. The increase in fires in old-...
Mongabay
By Richaldo Hariandja JAKARTA — Civil society advocates representing more than 2,000 customary communities in Indonesia have initiated last-ditch legal challenges over parliament’s failure to pass an Indigenous rights bill during the 10-year administration of President Joko Widodo. “It is very important that there is the guarantee of legal certainty concerning the recognition and protection of Indigenous peoples who are in a threatened position, and have even become victims of criminalization and land confiscation,” said attorney Fatiatulo Lazira. Fatiatulo was retained by the Indigenous Peopl...
Mongabay
By Alden Wicker Almost 25 years after their hopeful debut, bioplastics contribute only about 1% of the global plastics market share, mainly for food packaging. But that may soon change. The Biden administration announced an initiative in 2023 to “spur a circular economy” with the goal of replacing 90% of petrochemical-sourced plastics with bio-based materials over the next 20 years. With looming European mandates also aimed at addressing the plastic pollution crisis, analysts expect the bioplastics market to grow to 5 million metric tons by 2025. At first glance this sounds like a good thing, ...
Mongabay
By Edward Carver The Emperor Seamount Chain is a massive and richly biodiverse set of underwater mountains stretching about 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) south from the Aleutian Islands in the northwest Pacific. From the 1960s until the 1980s, bottom trawlers plied the area aggressively, decimating deep-sea coral communities and fish stocks, and removing biomass to a degree not observed on any other seamounts in the world. Fishing has decreased greatly since then, but one Japanese trawler has remained active on the seamounts in recent years — and, to conservationists’ disappointment, that tra...
Mongabay
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