Environment

Life in the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) is not exactly paradise. Children are indoctrinated, women are severely oppressed, and infidels are beheaded. Ancient cultural artifacts and historical treasures are destroyed. Liberating people conquered by ISIS, therefore, is good not only for humanitarian reasons but for archaeological ones, as well. Now, it appears there is yet another reason to defeat ISIS: It might be good for the planet. A new study published by Princeton University and the World Bank shows that oil production in ISIS-controlled areas has fallen by over 70%, from 56,000…

A San Francisco activist group claims major candy and snack manufacturers have deceived consumers by promising to clean up their palm oil supply chains, but these promises have been delayed, revised or watered down. Palm Oil is a common vegetable oil, Nutella famously said their product won't be popular without it, and it has replaced partially hydrogenated oils in many uses due to higher yields than plants like rapeseed and sunflower plus stability at high temperature. But the popularity has come at a price.  Some countries in Southeast Asia engage in widespread deforestation and…

The activist army in the war on common pesticides like glyphosate (and adjacently GMOs, they don't know enough science to know they are different) is having a Gettysburg moment.(1) They are out of options so they are making a desperate charge but they are in an open field a long way off and opposing them on the other side is every legitimate science and regulatory body in the world. Things should look bleak. Yet somehow they still get assistance from journals like JAMA, which now seem to do editorial review of "Letters" rather than peer review, and journalists at partisan…

If you read a headline declaring that scientists had discovered that up to 75 percent of human food samples were found to be contaminated with some scary-sounding substance, like arsenic, what would you think? (1) You'd be worried, and rightfully so. But if you then found many paragraphs into the story the scientists admitting that the scary substance is in such minuscule trace amounts that it can't possibly pose a risk to human health, how would your feelings change? In an era of "fake news", you'd feel like that's just what you got. And you'd be right. How do you trust science when so many…

Two recent studies on the health of bumblebees and links to neonicotinoids were published simultaneously last month in sister publications of the prestigious science journal empire Nature. Both examined closely similar scientific questions, with somewhat different experimental methodologies. They had one big difference: The study that found that neonics caused no serious issues was ignored by the media while the one suggesting a bee-apocalypse was widely played up as “definitive.’ Let’s unpack what these studies actually showed, and reflect on why the studies have been reported on so…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General recently did an audit of the National Organic Program, which is part of its Agricultural Marketing Services group. Marketing? Yes, that is the only real thing that the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 set out to accomplish. The AMS group was given $120,000 at the request of organic food lobbyists and permission to create a set of standards they could use in marketing, to create an official seal of what "organic" would mean. The time-limited advisory board they created was re-authorized by USDA in 2014 and at that time, a group…

The President has declared he is against the Estate tax, and he is not alone. For decades it has seemed punitive to levy a special tax on wealth people already paid taxes on just because the person who paid the taxes died.  In North Dakota, President Trump said he would "protect small businesses and family farmers here in North Dakota and across the country by ending the death tax" and that would ease the "Tremendous burden for the family farmer, tremendous burden. We are not going to allow the death tax or the inheritance tax or the whatever-you-want-to-call-it to crush the American…

There is ongoing concern about species extinction but it isn't just the fact that 99.999% of species have never been cataloged, so it's impossible to know how many are extinct, it's that Mother Nature may cause it long before we could. A new study suggests nature's ecological web is so tenuous that it's amazing anything survived this long; even the smell of a predator can have disastrous effects in populations of small size in flies. They spend less time eating, more time being vigilant, have less sex, and produce fewer offspring.  This long-standing biological conundrum related to…

In Big History there are many transitions as complexity seems to grow in the natural ecosystems and social historical development. There are still many questions concerning why the transitions happened at all.  For example, in going from hunter gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle, the amount of work required seemed to radically increase, after much of the land had been settled in small agricultural communities why did large cities evolve with little connection to agriculture except to consume, and why did the scientific revolution and industrial revolution predominantly first occur…

I received an announcement that the "State Water Resources Control Board, Division of Drinking Water (DDW) has completed a review of the perchlorate maximum contaminant level (MCL).  DDW will present the findings of the review and recommend investigation of a lowered detection limit for purposes of reporting, or DLR, at the July 5, 2017 Board Meeting in Sacramento.  If the Water Board agrees with the staff recommendation, and directs an investigation into lowering the DLR, the public will have another opportunity to comment on any proposed changes to the regulations during the…