Tag: climate action

These Purple Creatures Are Eating All Our Kelp. It’s Time to Eat Them

Posted on by robbie

There are underwater forests spanning millions of acres — but they’re rapidly dying due to climate change and an unlikely predator.
Kelp forests, which are often referred to as the rainforests of the sea, play an important role in fighting climate change. Kelp, which is a type of macroalgae, is estimated to sequester 634 metric tons of CO2 each year — slightly lower than the amount of emissions released from the country’s largest carbon emitter, Texas.
Instead, the kelp forests are being replaced with the “ecological equivalent of a parking lot,” said Tom Ford, the executive director of The Bay Foundation, a nonprofit environmental group in the Santa Monica Bay area.
These “parking lots,” called urchin barrens, occur when thousands of purple urchins enter a kelp forest and mow it down. Urchins, about the size of a golf ball, with purple spikes shooting out from every direction, devour kelp at an astonishing rate. 
Around the world, variables like predator die-off, overfishing, strong storms and warming oceans have caused purple urchin populations to grow and relocate to warmer waters, putting new pressure on kelp forests. 
Once the kelp in an area is gone, instead of dying off, the urchins go into a dormant state where they’ll survive for years, waiting for new food to arrive. 

urchins, urchin, urchinomics, kelp dieoff
An urchin barren, which was formerly a kelp forest home to hundreds of marine animals.

While this is happening off the coasts off of Japan, Tasmania, Norway and Australia, California’s coasts are experiencing traumatic changes. 
In the last decade, more than 90% of bull kelp forests have died off in the north coast of California. Tristin McHugh, the Northern California Regional Manager for Reef Check California, a nonprofit working to save reefs and oceans, is researching what led to this. 
It’s hard to pinpoint one cause that has led to this current state, she said. But since the California Department of Fish and Wildlife started collecting data in 2008, California’s coast has experienced major losses.
In 2013, researchers watched urchin-eating sea stars die off for unknown reasons. “Losing sea stars in the north coast was kind of that last line of defense in terms of ecological structure,” McHugh told NationSwell. That’s because the purple urchin’s only other predator in the north was the sea otter, which was hunted to near extinction in the mid-1800s fur trade. 
Between El Niño storms and the warm blob hitting the coast, “by the end of 2016, the north coast was kind of torched,” she said. 
Purple urchins began to move inshore, feasting on the kelp forests that span 200 miles across Northern California’s coastline. Once the kelp forests, which are home to millions of underwater creatures, are gone, all that’s left is a desert-like urchin barren.
A few hundred miles south, areas on California’s coast have similar barrens. 
In 1998, Ford, having completed thousands of diving trips, jumped into the water and swam through a kelp forest for the first time. “I was blown away by how gorgeous they were,” he told NationSwell. “That is the simple and honest truth.”
Ford began studying the forests and quickly learned the forests were declining and falling apart. That research led to looking towards solutions with how to restore the forests.
Since the urchins can remain in a dormant state for years, the only way to bring back kelp is if the urchins are removed or destroyed.
“To move it from an urchin barren back to a kelp forest, you can either wait a long time or you can go out there and get to work,” Ford said. 
The startup company, Urchinomics, is also looking to get to work. Its solution: ranch them.
The company model is simple, collect these purple urchins, feed them until they’re at a marketable size and ship them off to consumers. The profits will then be invested back into restoring the kelp forests and collecting more urchins, deemed a restorative seafood model. 
“We try to turn this environmental challenge into an economical, ecological and social opportunity,” Denise MacDonald, the director of global brand marketing at Urchinomics, told NationSwell.
Crack open a healthy urchin, and in its center will be spilling out with orange gonads, called uni. It’s found in a variety of Japanese, French, Chilean, Spanish and Italian dishes. In those regions it’s an expensive delicacy — “sort of like the foie gras of the sea,” MacDonald said. In the rest of the world, it’s a potential new market. 
urchins, opened urchin, kelp
The inside of a farmed urchin.

Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda, the CEO and founder of Urchinomics, worked with a Norwegian company that had successfully developed a feed for sea urchins. During that same period, Takeda watched the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami leave the coast of Japan, his home country, barren.
Those two things opened an opportunity to farm urchins and meet the market demand for the delicacy. 
“There’s a lot of opportunities for us to do good by bringing these kelp forests back and being part of the solution,” MacDonald said. 
Urchinomics is working with nonprofits to collect urchins. Urchinomics is in the final stages of launching its ranching facility in Newfoundland, Canada, which will transport urchins to the New York City market. It also has markets in Japan, Norway and other parts of Canada. In California, it’s working with divers to collect urchins for ranching.
Sam Briggs, a scientific diver, has collected urchins for over a decade. “I’ve witnessed firsthand what’s going on with the urchin problem,” he told NationSwell. So when Urchinomics hired his lab to collect purple urchins to farm, it was refreshing to be part of the solution, he said. 
“I like the idea of using these animals for a purpose,” he said. 
The Bay Foundation hires commercial sea urchin fishermen to go out and smash the animals. 
Smashing is the quickest approach. Previously, divers at the foundation would capture urchins and relocate them to other, non-populated areas, but due to expanding numbers, it’s no longer viable to move urchins to other areas. Ford’s team also looked at collecting urchins and composting them, but that proved to be greenhouse gas-intensive work. 
So for now, carefully trained divers enter the water and smash. Scientists research which areas to focus removal and monitor over the years. Since 2013, divers have spent 7,000 hours removing 3.6 million urchins across 46 acres. “There’s a tremendous amount of science before and after this all goes down,” Ford said. “They don’t just jump off the back of the boat and start swinging away like Paul Bunyan.”
So far their work has been successful. The kelp species in Southern California is a perennial, which means it is constantly reproducing and growing. Once nearly all the urchins have been removed, kelp rebounds in just a few months. 
urchins
Collected urchins from an urchin barren.

But in the north, where bull kelp is an annual species, that means there’s only one shot each year to reproduce. With all the changes to Northern California’s coast, conservationists are unsure if the kelp will grow back. 
“We’re just not equipped to deal with such rapid changes to our environment like this,” McHugh said. So Reef Check is launching a study to see if the kelp will regrow when urchins are removed and how many need to be removed for regrowth. 
Across the northern coast, groups like the Watermen’s Alliance are conducting large-scale removals of urchins, and NOYO Center is expanding public outreach.
Everyone from divers to scientists, fishermen to startup founders remain positive.
“There’s a wider audience that’s paying more attention to this kelp forest loss and not seeing it as the biologist’s problem but all of our problem,” McHugh said. “If the ocean agrees, I’m optimistic that the kelp will come.”
More: These Gorgeous Fish Are Invading Florida’s Coasts. One Solution? Eat Them

Joaquin Phoenix Isn’t Joking: It’s Time to Take Climate Change Seriously

Posted on by robbie

Rainn Wilson wants you to cut back on meat consumption.
Susan Sarandon is using reusable bags, straws and cups, and she’s hoping you will, too. 
Michael Greyeyes is urging you to compost and donate your old clothing. 
And they’re not the only celebrities encouraging you to combat our climate crisis. 
A new campaign, “The World Is in Our Hands,” captures celebrities in black and white photographs holding a pristine globe in their hands. Each photo is paired with action items anyone can add to their daily life. Whether it’s traveling sustainably, using less energy or demanding action from leaders, the featured celebrities are advocating for everyone to take matters into their own hands. 
“We chose people from all walks of life, from all different ages and different ethnicities,” Justin Wu, the photographer behind the campaign, told NationSwell. “I think if they can all come together for one unified message … that is amazing.”
Launched on September 18, the campaign is a partnership between Wu, the UN Environment Programme, social impact company The Krim Group and Accor, a hospitality company. 

Celebrity
Celebrities came together for the “The World Is in Our Hands” campaign, which urges individuals to adopt eco-friendly practices to combat climate change.

The campaign builds upon the UN’s ActNow initiative, a global call to raise awareness and spur action around climate change.
“With climate change, the world really is in our hands,” Todd Krim, president and CEO of The Krim Group, told NationSwell. “It’s up to those of us that are old enough to actually do something active to save the planet.”
In a pop-up studio at the Toronto International Film Festival, Wu and Krim recruited actors and actresses who are already invested in tackling climate change.
From there, interest in the campaign snowballed, Wu said. Word spread and other celebrities were eager to get involved. 
The end result is a series of photographs featuring Antonio Banderas, Joaquin Phoenix, Rosario Dawson, Neve Campbell and Alfre Woodard, to name a few.
Krim and Wu both have a history of working with celebrities and know the influence they can have on the general population.
“There’s a connection they’ve already made with the audience because they’ve already made audiences cry, they’ve made audiences laugh, and intrinsically, the audience already feels that much closer to the celebrity and so that kind of bond really resonated,” Wu said. 
But Krim stressed that this is just the beginning. 
Krim and Wu plan to continue the photo series through the fall and into 2020. This week, at UNEP’s Champions of the Earth gala, they’ll be taking photographs of individuals from grassroots and corporates sectors. 
“We don’t just view this as a ‘campaign’. We’re trying to create a movement here,” Krim said. “We want to inspire action.”
More: ‘Climate Apocalypse Chic’ and 7 Other Ways Art Tackles Climate Change 

Can Religion Save the Environment?

Posted on by robbie

Evangelical Christians and climate change? The two aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath, unless referring to the former as staunch and outspoken deniers of the latter.
Like the origins of life itself, the notion of man-made climate change is one that frequently puts religious conservatives at odds with the scientific community. And despite the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists agree the threat of ecological disaster at the hands of humans is real, just over a quarter of white evangelicals believe the same. Even less believe in climate reform.
This puts the small cohort of eco-conscious Christians in a bind: How do they convince their fellow worshippers that the earth is warming due to human activity, that it will disproportionately affect the poor, and that evangelicals have a role to play in stopping it?
“There’s a lot in the Christian faith that is chock-full of evidence of God’s love for the world that he created, and particularly in the non-human world,” says Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer and spokesperson for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. “Faith and a concern for the environment tend to get pitted against each other and get associated with one side of the aisle or the other. We don’t have to bridge these two seemingly disparate concerns because they are the same concerns.”
Meyaard-Schaap and others in the so-named creation-care movement are facing an uphill battle, if numerous studies are right. Two years ago, for example, evolutionary biologist Josh Rosenau dug into a massive 2007 Pew Research Center survey on America’s religious beliefs. He created a chart that examined the relationship between a denomination’s acceptance of evolution and the degree to which it supports stricter environmental regulations.
Rosenau found that the more a religion dismisses evolution in favor of creationism, the more its members push back against government action on climate change.
But while evangelicals’ religious beliefs inform their views on climate change, it’s their politics that might be more responsible for their attitudes — especially where environmental regulations affect the fossil fuel industry. (To wit: Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin’s christening of Oct. 13 as “Oilfield Prayer Day.”)

What Influences Your View on Climate Policy
A Pew study found that once you take political leanings out of the conversation, religion is one of the smallest factors in a person’s view on climate policy.

That entangling of religion, science and politics has become a hallmark of the current administration, perhaps most visibly in the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a former Sunday school teacher and deacon, to sit atop the Environmental Protection Agency. Just as he once said there aren’t “sufficient scientific facts to support the theory of evolution,” Pruitt has made no bones about his dismissal of man-made climate change. In a February interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he alleged that unfettered development of the nation’s energy reserves is rooted in Scripture.
That view is in line with most evangelicals, who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. For many of the faithful, earth was created for human “dominion” — a word found in Genesis and used often in the argument against human-led climate change.
But that kind of literal reading of the Bible is problematic — and misguided — says Rev. Mitch Hescox, a leading voice in the creation-care movement.
“There are some very conservative people who believe that humanity’s right to use the earth is biblical, and correcting that understanding is my number one job,” says Hescox, who also serves as president of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). He adds that the church has long ignored creation-care.
Creation-care isn’t a new movement — EEN was founded in 1993 — but it has gotten more attention in recent years as prominent religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, have agitated on behalf of environmentalism and balked at the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. And from its beginnings, creation-care has pushed a human-centric message whereas liberal-leaning groups might focus on more abstract concepts like melting glaciers and eroding coastlines.
“We’ve never been climate deniers; we’ve acknowledged it was real, but it didn’t ever impact [our] day-to-day life,” say Dave and Lonna Schaap, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s parents, who were convinced to pay attention to climate change by their son’s campaign. “We have other values. We care for the poor, for orphans, for those in prison. And we’ve always been taught to care for those things.”
Hescox says the focus on people is where those in the left-leaning environmental movement get lost in relaying the message.
“What liberals don’t get is that faithful conservatives have a different value system,” Hescox says. “Trying to get conservative folks to care about polar bears is the wrong issue. And where maybe people like polar bears, people will not change their life over a polar bear. People will, though, change their life when you start helping them understand how fossil-fuel pollution affects children around the world.”
Still, that doesn’t mean EEN and other groups have found it easy to convert the faithful. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan think-tank New America, it’s a battle of David-and-Goliath proportions, where eco-conscious evangelicals just don’t have the resources or organization and lobbying power to go head-to-head with opposing groups — groups like the Christian Right, for example, whose network of outspoken evangelical leaders have pushed back against the environmental activism of their fellow followers.
The reason? It’s political.
“First, evangelicals’ political partners saw Creation Care as a menace for economic conservatives and opponents of environmental regulation, and did not hesitate to let evangelicals know it,” concluded the New America report. “Second, the evangelical old guard saw the Creation Care activists as threatening their role as the arbiter of evangelicalism’s political engagement.”
Another Pew study likewise found that once you take political leanings out of the conversation, there are only a few areas where deeply religious individuals actually digress from conventional scientific thinking.
And that’s news that Meyaard-Schaap, Hescox and others in the creation-care movement can use, especially where younger evangelicals are concerned.
In the past six years, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, the group Meyaard-Schaap helps lead, has grown from 18 people signing a call to action to currently reaching over 10,000 youth, he says.
“A lot of conservative lawmakers are the ones holding up on the progress of climate change from a policy position, and most conservative lawmakers rely on evangelicals to keep their seat,” says Meyaard-Schaap. “So now we’re using our voice to say, ‘You’ve depended on the support of our community to keep your seat and be a member of Congress, and you have to continue relying on our support. So now you have to pay attention.’”

These Scientists Were Fed Up with Climate Change Deniers. Here’s What They Did About It.

Posted on by robbie

Reddit’s popular /r/science forum has banned posts and comments from people who deny that human-caused climate change is real. First announced on Grist, the controversial move has drawn charges of censorship. “Since when is science so concrete that differing opinions are not allowed?” one commenter complained. But as moderator Nathan Allan explained,  the forum is only for discussing “recent, peer-reviewed scientific publications.” With the need for more productive, reality- and solutions-based conversations about climate science, this might just be the beginning of a trend.
Source: Think Progress