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    News — epidemics

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    Good and Not so good News August 2021

    Autumn is coming! Here are some great links & information about what is going on in the world of environmental activism : Good News!

    Each of us must experience one of two pains- the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Which pain will you choose?” --John Harding, WildEarthGuardians.org
    Wild Earth Guardians works to stop coal, oil, fracking, and natural gas . Also, they protect wolves, wildlife, rivers and forests.

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    Good news- the removal of a dam led to the return of fish, wildlife, and an inspiration that has led to many other dams being removed.

    “The removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River helped river conservationists reimagine what’s possible”, said Amy Souers Kober, communications director at American Rivers. “Dam removal also makes sense for economic reasons and public safety in a lot of cases.” That includes Bloede Dam on the Patapsco River in Maryland, where she says nine people have drowned. Efforts to remove the dam there began in September. There are also a number of big projects on the horizon, including on the Middle Fork Nooksack River, which Kober says is the number-one salmon-recovery project on the Puget Sound that conservationists hope will help struggling Southern Resident killer whales. All eyes are on the Klamath River as plans come together to remove four dams in 2021 in what would become the largest dam-removal and river-restoration project in the world. Dam-removal proponents don’t think we need to take out all of our dams, and of course we couldn’t. The United States has more than 90,000 dams, and many still serve crucial functions. But where dams have been removed, the past two decades have shown the environmental results are unparalleled. “There’s no faster or more effective way to bring a river back to life than taking out a dam,” says American Rivers’ Graber. “That’s why we focused on it for 20 years. It’s a win for environmental reasons, public safety and a relief from liability for dam owners. ”Ultimately, dam removals are much bigger than the dams themselves", says Kober. “Dam removals are really stories about people reclaiming their rivers. Those stories started with the Edwards Dam.”
    Source:  TheRevelator.org

    There is a bill now to remove 1000 more dams in the senate passed infrastructure bill.. It will also increase dam safety and add environmental protections to some hydro power dams. We also need to remove the 4 federal dams on the lower Snake river.
    Source:  AmericanRivers.org

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    The heat is unbearable! Support Natives, and activists, and other water protectors who protest against fracking, pipelines, LNG terminals, banks that fund fossil fuels, Big Oil, and politicians corrupted by Big Oil.
    Link:  Stop Line 3
    Link:  350.org
    Link:  Price of Oil
    Link:  Clean Energy Action
    Link:  Inside Climate News:  Line 3 Protests

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    Many Senate Republicans and some Democrats voted to for an amendment to continue to allow fracking for oil and natural gas- to prevent bans on fracking. Oil and gas and coal companies gave millions to the senators.
    Source:  DailyPoster.com
    "$10 billion for carbon capture, transport, and storage, along with $8 billion for hydrogen—with no stipulation that the energy used to produce it comes from clean sources. A new liquid natural gas plant in Alaska won billions in loan guarantees, while other waivers in the bill will weaken environmental reviews of new construction projects"
    Source:  CommonDreams.org

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    YES magazine has lots of articles on how people and the planet are happier when they have enough, instead of having a lot.  Instead of competing to have a lot, working with others and having less is healthier.
    Article:  Yes Magazine

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    NYT wrote recently that 2 studies showed at diet with flavonoids in strawberries, raw spinach, winter squash, and brusells sprouts  help prevent dementia. Also, apple juice,  onions, and grapes help to a lesser extent.
    Source:  NYT “Fruits an Vegetables and Brain Health” by Bakalar

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    I wrote the following to my congressman, Rep Joe Neguse, asking him to change his forest cutting bill:

    "Please oppose your forest thinning plan!  Your  legislation, the Joe Neguse Landscape Restoration Partnership Act, is misguided.  Recent articles in the Science News show that large trees every year take alot of co2 out of the atmosphere and store it in their layers of cambium and xylem.  It is stupid to cut down the big old trees that provide shade, and hold the soil in place, and resist fire, along with taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere.   It reads like giving the timber cos. and forest service a boondoggle."

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    Article:  Boulder Weekly:  Misguided Forest Policy

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    Keeping Forests
    JULY 28, 2021
    Mature trees add more tissue each year - more than planting lots of small, new trees.
    To achieve the all-important goal of cutting global emissions, saving the natural forests already in the ground must be a priority, “Protect existing forests first,” That priority also gives the planet’s magnificent biodiversity a better chance at survivingarticles on keep the trees we have.
    Source:  ScienceNews.org - Planting Trees
    https://www.sciencenews.org/article/planting-trees-protect-forests-climate-change

    Food crops and trees can work together. Also fence off areas from cattle so the land can recover.
    Article:  ScienceNews.org - Trees and Biodiversity

    Caring for Trees that We Plant:  We need to better plan and care for the tress being planted, so they survive. Not just plant a lot, and abandon them. You need buy-in from and benefits for local communities, so they will water and care for them.
    Article:  ScienceNews.org - Planting Trees and Climate Change
    Article - ScienceNews.org - Tasking Trees With Averting Climate Crisis

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    Great Book about how trees cooperate -
    Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard
    Link - The Guardian - Finding the Mother Tree
    "Here's Suzanne Simard's 2016 TED talk about forest communication and cooperation. For me, this 17-minute talk provided an engaging framework for the sometimes detailed and repetitive information in her book about carbon and nutrition pathways among fungal networks linking tree species."
    Link:  Ted Talks - Suzanne Simard
     "I've been told Suzanne (Simard) was the inspiration for the forest ecologist in ( Richard Power's) (novel) The Overstory. Her true life story, while divergent, is just as riveting. She's one of my heroes, and I think The Mother Tree is one of the most important books of this century."  wrote a great ecologist Steve Jones, who teaches birding and leads hikes and surveys for wildlife : birds, dragonflies, owls,....
    About the mother tree book:
    GoodReads.com
    ScienceNews.com
    Erin explains about the connection between the Overstory and this book:
    "Richard Powers explains that the character Patricia in The Overstory is a composite based largely on Simard as well as Diana Beresford-Kroeger. "
    Link - Conjunctions.com - Richard Powers

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    Trees Foundation is a great organization that works to restore forests and rivers, and to stop the CA dept of forestry from cutting down forests. They save salmon, and work with Native American tribes to restore and protect forests and rivers and salmon: TreesFoundation
    They have partner groups: Link and a newsletter: Link

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    I have started the new sci fi book, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley. It shows people coming together to stop Big Oil and the banks from continuing to cause climate change. Activists, students, and normal people use protest, direct action, lawsuits, experiments, and scientific research to stop it.
    Link:  The Guardian - The Ministry for the Future
    Link:  Rolling Stone - The Ministry for the Future

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    EXXON lobbyist explains that EXXON has bought Congress by spending $115 million on lobbying, plus more in campaign contributions. This way they block progressive bills that would limit their drilling, fracking, and selling of oil and natural gas. EXXON spent a lot on Joe Manchin (WV), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Jon Tester (MT), Maggie Hassan (NH), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Chris Coons (DE) .
    Link - GreenPeace - Quotes from the EXXON Tapes
    “In 2020, the oil, gas, and coal industry spent more than $115 million lobbying Congress in defense of fossil fuel subsidies; currently, the industry receives $15 billion of our tax dollars in direct federal subsidies every year. All told, that amounts to a return on investment of over 13,000% for these corporations annually. “

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    Monopolies increase their lobbying and prevent regulation, so we need anti-trust laws that prevent and break up monopolies, instead of just letting them happen under the excuse of lower prices for the consumer. "Casts doubt on pure regulatory solutions that do not reduce concentration, since more lobbying can mitigate regulatory action or even turn regulatory choices into mechanisms to protect entrenched incumbents,"..  "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand."
    The author looks at oil and gas, big pharma, and social media (FB, Amazon, MS, Google,....)- these eliminate their competitors then concentrate on lobbying and campaign contributions.
    Link: CommonDreams - Corporate Lobbying

     


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    “Forgotten oil and gas wells linger, leaking toxic chemicals” 7-30-21, They leak into drinking water, groundwater, water for ranches rivers and homes. They release methane a greenhouse gas and benzene, a carcinogen. They have exploded. The companies often go bankrupt or sell off the well to some other company that goes bankrupt to avoid having to pay to plug their inactive wells. And the plugs are unplugging themselves, polluting! Existing wells don't pay enough in bonds to cover having to clean up and plug a well. It is all a scam, with oil companies dumping the responsibility to clean up wells onto the states and the federal govt.
    Link:  APNews - Joe Biden Business, Health, Environment, Nature

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    Stanley Aronowitz, a writer and labor organizer, has died – He said we need an organized left, that we need mass struggle to turn around capitalism, that he organized against the vietnam war, for unions, to deal with questions of power, and for civil rights.

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    I like recent book on the Covid epidemic called the The Premonition by Michael Lewis- He interviews some enthusiastic public health activists who pioneered in figuring out how badly it was spreading in the US and in China; how using masks, social distancing, contact tracing, isolating super spreaders, and creating green , yellow, and red local zones based on the number of new cases to determine whether there was a need to close businesses and schools depending on how much infection was occurring in different settings. They figured out stuff on the backs of envelopes and wrote and gave speeches and sneakily wrote policy for the CDC, Governors, and the president who all didn't want to do anything controversial, such as shutting down schools or businesses. They take the approach, if the worst that could happen were to happen, what would I wish in the future that I had done now. They also believed in getting their hands dirty, directly treating patients, listening to patients, etc. they figured out how to trace the disease spread thru looking at mutations as it spread from one person to another. They invented with volunteer grad students and researchers at UCSF a quick free test that gave results in hours plus allowed them to track the spread- but no hospitals or prisons or health care insurance cos. or anyone would use it because the hospitals and prisons had long term contracts with testing labs that had tests that were worthless for determining how fast the virus was spreading– (the labs with the contracts took 10 or 14 days to get results).
    Link:  CBS News:  Michael Lewis - Premonition
    Link:  3mhsinsideangle.com
    Link:  GoodReads - The Premonition
    Link:  The Guardian - The Premonition
    Link:  NY Times - Review - The Premonition

    Share the Earth,

    Jim Morris

    Humanity Must 'Heal  Our Broken Relationship With Nature' to Prevent Future Pandemics

    Humanity Must 'Heal Our Broken Relationship With Nature' to Prevent Future Pandemics

    "We must curb the high risk trade and consumption of wildlife, halt deforestation and land conversion, as well as manage food production sustainably."

     

    https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/17/top-global-experts-say-humanity-must-heal-our-broken-relationship-nature-prevent

    "If we do not do things differently, we are finished," she said. "We can't go on very much longer like this."-Jane Goodall

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/17/coronavirus-warning-broken-relationship-nature

    Epidemics - Books & Movies

    The Betrayal of Public Trust and The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett http://lauriegarrett.com/ She explains how medical investigators figure out the causes of epidemics. She describes how we need a public health system and a disease surveillance system. She also notes along with Paul Farmer, Jim Kim, and Ophelia Dahl and the other founders of Partners in Health, the need to treat all people, especially to provide options for the poor. If we do not treat the sick people in Africa, Russian jails, and the South America, both those people will suffer and diseases will grow and spread from there. Where many people are sick and are given incomplete and varying doses of antibiotics, the bacteria develop resistance. Similarly, some of the AIDS drugs both are not available to the poor and do not cure AIDS, but just prevent the bad effects. Sometimes people do not use condoms, and AIDS spreads. In the US, some young people think AIDS is cured, so they engage in unprotected sex. In South Africa , large fractions 15% to 26%) of the population get AIDS. So we need changes in behavior and culture so that people use condoms and don't spread it. She also relates like a thrilling story the way that people investigate a disease outbreak. First they notice an unusual rise in similar symptoms. Then they have to figure what the sick people have in common. They have to determine what causes it- a parasite, a bacteria, a virus, a retro virus, some radiation leak from some pollution,... They have to figure out how the disease is transmitted – fleas on rats, worms in the ground or the water, poop of a bird, bite of an infected mosquito, urine aerosolized by sweeping the dirt floor, . .. Then what is the solution? And what was the cause? In one example, cutting down the trees to make a plantation displaced the rats from the forest, so they moved into town, where sweeping the dirt floors of the housed spread their urine into the air, where people inhaled it. Then cats were introduced to rid the huts of rats and the disease. Sometimes we do not figure out what caused an outbreak. Adventures of a Female Medical Detective by Mary Guinan She fights smallpox and AIDS, and helps to figure out that a disease originates from in the contaminated tubes of an army emergency room. Plagues and People by William H McNeill -a history of infectious diseases, Mentioning the bubonic plague in China, typhoid epidemic in Europe, and smallpox in Mexico. He explains how people discovered that some diseases were caused by the the human sewage, because they occurred in cities which had their water intake downstream from the sewage outflow. Another disease was traced back to everyone who used a certain polluted water pump in London. Milkmaids were resistance to pox from their exposure to cow pox. The French then inoculated their army with cowpox and were able to be much healthier. Earlier theories had guessed that diseases were caused by a fog or a cloud. Parasite Rex and A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer These show how prevalent parasites, virueses, and bacteria are. It is amazing how many parasites are inside birds and clams. They are part of the ecosystems. Some people's asthma goes away if they get parasitic worms. Some think that humans and other species evolved with parasites and almost need them. Six Modern Plagues by Jerome Walters Mad Cow Disease, HIV/AIDS, Salmonella DT104, Lyme Disease, Hantavirus, West Nile, and new strains of flu. He shows that they originate from manipulation of the environment, from emitting carbon and clear-cutting forests to feeding naturally herbivorous cows “recycled animal protein.” Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the WorldTracy Kidder. “The book traces the life of physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer with particular focus on his work fighting tuberculosis in Haiti,Peru and Russia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_Beyond_Mountains Some movies about epidemics: movie “Contagion” where Laurie Garrett was an advisor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(film)) “Outbreak” http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/outbreak-1995 “28 Days Later” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later

    And the Band Played On (1993) “the real story of epidemiologists trying to make sense of mysterious deaths among the gay communities” Book and movie- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Band_Played_On

    Some alien movies: . District 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9 Monsters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters_(2010_film)) a monster movie caused by pollution

    The Host (2006)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_(2006_film)