Iles de Salut, French Guyana
If You Eat Beef, Track Its Origins
A JBS facility in Tucuma, Brazil. JONNE RORIZ / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Reducing meat in our diet was easier living in India, and we committed specifically to cutting beef consumption. This effort has been assisted by awareness of this issue. Thanks to Yale e360 for bringing the work of this team to our attention:
Marcel Gomes (center) with colleagues at Repórter Brasil’s offices in São Paulo. GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE
Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger
Journalist Marcel Gomes has traced beef in supermarkets and fast food restaurants in the U.S. and Europe to Brazilian ranches on illegally cleared land. In an e360 interview, he talks about the challenges of documenting the supply chains and getting companies to clean them up.
Investigative journalism can be a very deep dive. By the end of his probe into the supply chain of JBS, the world’s largest meat processing and packing company, Marcel Gomes reckons he and his team at the São Paulo-based nonprofit Repórter Brasil knew more about the origins of the beef it supplies from the Amazon to the world’s hamburger chains and supermarkets than the company itself. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Marbled Godwits
San Diego River estuary, San Diego, California
Honeybee Facts & Figures
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
We have done our part to share, perhaps erroneously, that honeybees are in trouble. We hope we have been wrong:
For years, people have understood them to be at imminent risk of extinction, despite evidence to the contrary. Why?
Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: European Robin
Mt Falakro, Greece
Community Income From Rewilding
Rewilding Spain’s sustainable forest management support service helps municipalities generate income through activities such as resin extraction. NEIL ALDRIDGE
In the decade since we have been watching the work of Rewilding Europe we have seen income generation growing in importance:
Allowing trees to grow old in healthy ecosystems can help to lock up and store huge amounts of carbon.
JUAN CARLOS MUÑOZ ROBREDO /Rewilding forest generates revenue for communities in the Iberian Highlands
Rewilding Spain has signed its first agreement to protect an old-growth forest in the Iberian Highlands. A change in forest management will support natural regeneration, delivering benefits to both nature and people. With other owners of old-growth forests interested in signing similar agreements, there is significant scaling-up potential.
The old-growth forest protected by the new agreement is popular with mushroom pickers.
SEBASTIAN URSUTAThe importance of old-growth forests
Letting forests naturally regenerate is one of the most practical, immediate, and cost-effective ways of addressing our ecological and climate emergencies. As vital ecosystems that support millions of animals and plants, mature natural forests – or old-growth forests – lock up and store huge amounts of carbon. They are more resilient to climate change and disease than young tree plantations, with their diverse mix of native species allowing them to better adapt to a far wider range of conditions. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Ridgway’s Rail
Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge, California
Trillion Cicada Thrill
Illustration by Bjorn Lie
Cicadas were in our pages a few times a decade ago but now is the real time for celebrating them. This story by Rivka Galchen is as good as any:
The Peculiar Delights of the Enormous Cicada Emergence
As loud as leaf blowers, as miraculous as math, the insects are set to overtake the landscape.
Their parents passed away thirteen, or maybe seventeen, years ago. They grow up alone, hidden in tunnels of their own making, nursing from the rootlets of trees. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Louisiana Waterthrush
Finca Forestal Rubel Chaim, Guatemala
The Light Eaters
Thanks to Hanna Rosin, an Atlantic writer whose podcast conversation with this author brought the book above to my attention:
If Plants Could Talk
Some scientists are starting to reopen a provocative debate: Are plants intelligent?
When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Golden-olive woodpecker
Guatemala
Not The End Of The World
This book came to my attention through an episode of Ezra Klein‘s podcast:
Cows Are Just an Environmental Disaster
The environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that climate technology is increasingly catching up to the world’s enormous need for clean energy and with a few changes, a more sustainable future is in sight.
Bird of the Day: Blue Grosbeak
Adule Female
Christmas Mountains Oasis, Brewster County, TX
English Apple Heritage
Today completes a trifecta of shared articles about trees, and Sam Knight gets extra thanks for the link with a part of food heritage our family is especially fond of (which led to finding the video above):
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker
The English Apple Is Disappearing
As the country loses its local cultivars, an orchard owner and a group of biologists are working to record and map every variety of apple tree they can find in the West of England.
In June, 1899, Sabine Baring-Gould, an English rector, collector of folk songs, and author of a truly prodigious quantity of prose, was putting the finishing touches on “A Book of the West,” a two-volume study of Devon and Cornwall. Baring-Gould, who had fifteen children and kept a tame bat, wrote more than a thousand literary works, including some thirty novels, a biography of Napoleon, and an influential study of werewolves. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Blue Grosbeak
Adult Male
Christmas Mountains Oasis, Brewster County, TX
How Many Trees Are Needed In The Amazon?
Forest restoration workers planted native Amazonian seedlings on degraded pastureland in Mãe do Rio, Brazil.
We do not know how many trees are needed but hope that the answer to the question below is yes:
Can Forests Be More Profitable Than Beef?
Cattle ranches have ruled the Amazon for decades. Now, new companies are selling something else: the ability of trees to lock away planet-warming carbon.
The residents of Maracaçumé, an impoverished town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, are mystified by the company that recently bought the biggest ranch in the region. How can it possibly make money by planting trees, which executives say they’ll never cut down, on pastureland where cattle have been grazing for decades? Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Bat Falcon
Guatemala
How Much Communication Between Trees?
Baobab trees in Madagascar.
Photograph: Dave Carr/Getty Images
Ancient oak trees in Glastonbury, Somerset. Photograph: Eddie Linssen/Alamy
I acknowledge my enthusiasm for the idea that there is something going on between trees. I always want to hear more about it. Those who know me well joke that I am anti-woo-woo; but this one topic betrays a soft spot for the as-yet not fully explained. So I am thankful to Daniel Immerwahr for reminding me of the boundaries of what we know (so far):
A bristlecone pine tree, one of the oldest living organisms on Earth. Photograph: Piriya Photography/Getty Images
Mother trees and socialist forests: is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy?
In the past 10 years the idea that trees communicate with and look after each other has gained widespread currency. But have these claims outstripped the evidence?
There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Gray-hooded Parakeet
Bolivia
Honeybees & Salvation
Sarah Kliff
We had an experience with honeybees in our home in Costa Rica that echoes the one related below. We did get someone to help us extract the colony from under our roof and re-situate it as you can see in this photo. We were fortunate to find that man who did the extraction, but my takeaway was not that honeybees do not need saving. Read on:
Honeybees Invaded My House, and No One Would Help
Responding to fears of a “honeybee collapse,” 30 states have passed laws to protect the pollinators. But when they invaded my house, I learned that the honeybees didn’t need saving.
I noticed the first bee one afternoon as my dog gleefully chased it around the house. When the pest settled on a window by the stairwell, I swatted it with a cookbook and cleaned up the mess. Continue reading
Organikos 