LEADING CLOTHING BRANDS END USE OF EXOTIC-ANIMAL SKINS

Photo credit: brown-crocodile-in-close-up-photography-pikrepo.com

Photo credit: brown-crocodile-in-close-up-photography-pikrepo.com

Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Izod, Arrow, and 5 other clothing brands have announced that they will end the use of exotic-animal skins going forward!

They join Brooks Brothers, Jil Sander, Chanel, Diane von Furstenberg, HUGO BOSS, Victoria Beckham, Vivienne Westwood, and other fashion lines who have banned exotic skins.

Read the article here.

1,397,113 Signatures! A huge Push across the European Union to end factory farms

Across Europe over the past three years the #EndTheCageAge campaign amassed 1,397,113 validated signatures, far exceeding the minimum 1,000,000 required to force EU legislative action. Significantly, signatures must also exceed minimum thresholds in at least 7 member states. This campaign surpassed the thresholds in all 18 EU member states.

Support for ending factory farming is a common concern that runs broad and deep throughout the European Union. Olga Kikou writes, “A ‘Eurobarometer’ survey of EU public opinion conducted for the Commission found that 94% of people believe protecting the welfare of farmed animals is important and 82% want farmed animals better protected.”

This forces the European Commission to put forward meaningful legislative proposals to phase out confinement systems in animal farming, in effect, putting an end to factory farms!!!

Read #EndTheCageAge Update here. Read It’s High Time to End the ‘Cage Age’ for Farmed Aminals here.

VOTE AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!

Bill McKibben is the founder of climate change campaign 350.org. If you’ve read The Great Healing you know that ‘350’ refers to the atmospheric carbon dioxide level in parts per million, a threshold that if exceeded, would end Earth’s climate stability. The higher the level above 350ppm the more severe the consequences of global warming will be. We blew past that threshold around 1950. Today we have reached 419ppm. 
 
Bill is an engaging writer. His most recent book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out.

Read Bill McKibben’s full article here.

China's Forests Are Flourishing

China’s Natural Forest Preservation project, which launched in 1998, has been so successful that nationwide, China’s forest land has increased from 124 million hectares to 220 million hectares over 13 years. Forests now cover 23% of China’s land mass, up from 13% when the project began — the best net gain of any country in the world according to the United Nation’s 2020 Global Forest Resources Assessment. In addition, 4800 forest farms in China have switched from logging to preserving their natural resources. Forest related industries and job growth are booming. China has had 1.8 billion forest-related tourist visits; loggers and lumber mill workers have found new jobs as forest rangers, guides, and a wide array of new businesses are now tapping forest resources in environmentally-friendly ways.

China is ahead of schedule in attaining its goal of reaching the global 30/30 rule: having 30% of its country’s land in its fully natural state by 2030. We can learn a lot from China.

Read the full article here.

The Mediterranean Diet: better for mind, body, and planetary health

“The research joins a body of knowledge that affirms the value of living healthy lifestyles featuring conscious eating patterns that ascribe to the Mediterranean diet guidelines—which  emphasize eating primarily plant-based foods, reducing meat intake, limiting alcohol consumption, and enjoying meals with family and friends. ‘It’s a really nice example of the potential to love food that loves you back,’ says Dr. David Katz, founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center and founder and President of True Health initiative.”

- Article author Katherine Walla

The new U.N. Climate report is dire

The United in Science Report, a multi-organization compilation of the latest climate science information released by the United Nations this week, states: “The 5-year period from 2016–2020 is expected to be the warmest on record with an average global mean surface temperature of 1.1 °C above pre-industrial era (1850–1900).”

The report reaches the sobering assessment that there is now a 20% chance Earth’s annual global mean near surface temperature will exceed 1.5 °C by 2024. (The goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement was to unite countries in accomplishing the necessary greenhouse gas emission reductions to prevent a 1.5 °C increase by year 2100).

It concludes: “The challenge is clear: if we want to keep the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global warming to well below 2 °C and pursuing a 1.5 °C goal alive, postponing transformational action is not an option. The Emissions Gap Report 2019 showed that to have a likely chance of meeting the Paris Agreement goals, the cuts in global emissions required per year from 2020 to 2030 are close to 3% for a 2 °C target and more than 7% per year on average for the 1.5 °C goal.”

António Guterres, Secretary-General of the U.N. states, “Never before has it been so clear that we need long term, inclusive, clean transitions to tackle the climate crisis and achieve sustainable development. We must turn the recovery from the pandemic into a real opportunity to build a better future.”

Wonderful news: Another country bans fur farms

Kitty Block, President and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States writes, “The Netherlands is the world’s fourth largest producer of mink fur, behind only Denmark, Poland and China. Today’s announcement will spare suffering for millions more animals who would have been raised and killed for their fur had these farms remained in business until the original 2024 deadline. The nation had already closed down fox and chinchilla fur production in the 1990s, so the closure of mink farms next year will end all fur farming on its soil.”

Jo-Anne McArthur and I write about this in The Great Healing:

Mink on fur farms - TGH Twitter grab.png


OP ED: The Reason Why California Wildfires Become Megafires – and the Solution

Soda Rock Winery in Healdsburg's Alexander Valley burns in the 2019 Kincade Fire Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP

Soda Rock Winery in Healdsburg's Alexander Valley burns in the 2019 Kincade Fire Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP

The Reason Why California Wildfires Become Megafires – and the Solution

By Stephen Erickson

 

California wildfires have burned over 1,400,000 acres in less than a week’s time. The L.N.U. Lightning Complex fire in Napa Valley and the S.C.U. Lightning Complex fire east of Silicon Valley are megafires. Each one has scorched over 370,000 acres and continues to burn largely uncontained. They are already the 2nd and 3rd largest fires in state history.

‘Megafire’ is one of several new descriptors that have entered our climate lexicon for weather events whose intensity and scale are so extreme they require new definition. Megafires blaze with such intensity they create their own weather patterns and are virtually unstoppable, each one releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.[1][2] They are ravaging warming, beetle-stricken forests, not just across the Western United States and Australia, but in what were ‘cooler’ regions, Canada, Alaska, and Arctic forests even further north. Siberian megafires have charred over 51 million acres so far this year.[3]

The causes of California megafires vary. Several years ago it was arson or human negligence, in 2019 the principal culprit was downed power lines. This time 12,000 lightning strikes from dry thunderstorms ignited 700 fires.

There is, however, only one reason why fires become megafires.

Global warming. We are in a climate emergency. Greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere have reached a point that, absent from profound human-caused emission reductions over the next four years, human extinction will likely occur later this century. The science on this is abundantly clear.

Temperatures will continue to increase and weather events will become even more severe just from the greenhouse gasses already trapped in our atmosphere. Megafires will return to California every fire season and rage beyond our ability to control them.

So what can we do? Pray and endure? Yes. And take action. Realize this:

Far and away the most climate-destructive industry is Big Agriculture. Big Ag, comprised of industrial agriculture and factory farming, produces as much as 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions.[4][5] Industrial agriculture is responsible for 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, 60% of methane gas, and 80% of nitrous oxide emissions.[6] Just manufacturing synthetic fertilizer by converting nitrogen to ammonia requires 1.2% of the world’s energy use.[7]

There is only one way that exists to drawdown atmospheric carbon: healthy soil’s ability to sequester carbon. This is our singular solution to global warming.

The farming method that maximizes plant’s ability to draw carbon out of the atmosphere is Regenerative Agriculture. Regenerative ag sequesters carbon. Lots of carbon. Esteemed Australian climate scientist and soil microbiologist Walter Jehne, molecular biologist and soil scientist David C. Johnson, Ph.D.,[8] and others have calculated that regenerative agriculture can draw down 20 billion tons of atmospheric carbon a year. 20 billion tons is double the world’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.[9] We need to do this at scale — and quickly.

You have an essential role in stopping and reversing global warming. Vote and advocate. Vote this November for candidates who have the best voting records supporting environmental and climate friendly legislation, who promise the strongest commitment in this regard.

The Green New Deal is one part of the solution. The other is replacing the 2018 Farm Bill. Lobbied for and drafted in large part by Big Ag, it’s a blanket endorsement of industrial agriculture and factory farming. It significantly increases global warming and enables the killing of the soil microbiome on 231 million American crop acres eliminating that soil’s ability to sequester carbon. It is a path to disaster.

A New Farm Bill repurposing subsidies currently propping up industrial agriculture over to incentivizing regenerative agriculture will turn the tide on global warming and become one of the most important pieces of legislation ever signed into law.

At its core this solution is, perhaps surprisingly, nonpartisan. Build soil carbon and soil health. All else — increased crop yields, nutrient-dense toxin-free produce and the health benefits for everyone of eating safe healthy food, one million new small farm jobs and the revitalization of rural economies across the country, the recovery of Monarch butterflies and thousands of other species on the brink of extinction, a cooling planet, and the end of megafires — all bounty follows.

Each one of us can be a firefighter. Take immediate action with your vote and your voice. Join the most important cause of all of humanity’s endeavors to date. By slowing and reversing global warming and cooling California’s climate, we will extinguish the ‘mega’ from our fires.

————————————————————-

[1] Laura Parker, How Megafires Are Remaking American Forests, National Geographic Aug. 9, 2015  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-wildfires-forest-fires-climate-change-science/

[2] Heyck-Williams, S., L. Anderson, B.A. Stein. Megafires: The Growing Risk to America’s Forests, Communities, and Wildlife. Washington, DC: National Wildlife Federation. 2017  https://www.nwf.org/-/media/Documents/PDFs/NWF-Reports/NWF-Report_Megafires_FINAL_LOW-RES_101717.ashx

[3] The Great Healing blog  https://www.thegreathealing.org/blog/siberian-wildfires-have-burned-49-million-acres-so-far-this-year

[4] GRAIN, Henk Hobbelink, The Great Climate Robbery. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications, 2016. Pgs. 1-7 

[5] GRAIN, Commentary IV: Food, Climate Change and Healthy Soils: The Forgotten Link, Trade and Environment Review, 2013, https://www.grain.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTUvMTEvMDUvMDhfNDZfMDZfNTIyX0dSQUlOX1VOQ1RBRF8yMDEzLnBkZiJdXQ

[6] Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016. pg. 8

[7] Paul Hawken, Drawdown, New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2017 pg. 201

[8] David C. Johnson, Ph.D., is a Molecular Biologist and Soil Scientist at New Mexico State University unraveling the secrets of soil microbes. 

[9] Walter Jehne, Regenerate Earth, Healthy Soils Australia, Global Cooling Earth, 2017, http://www.globalcoolingearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Regenerate-Earth-Paper-Walter-Jehne.pdf