Posts

Showing posts from October, 2020

Manitoba’s organic sector seeing slow but steady increase: report

Image
OrganicBIZ An organic market garden in Manitoba. A PinP photo. Manitoba was the only Prairie province to see an increase in organic crop acres in 2019. Story here.

Pallister's petrifying parks privatization plan.(Video)

The Manitoba Wilderness Committee

A vicious circle. Global heating leads to melting ice leads to more heating.....

Image
                                                       Nature Communications A polar bear navigates a dwindling ice pack. Photo by Andreas Weith The melting of ice in polar and mountain regions around the world could lead to an additional 0.43 °C increase in global warming in the long term, according to a study published online in Nature Communications. The loss of ice cover is known to influence air temperatures, for example through albedo changes (the amount of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface). Although the mechanisms that are responsible for increased warming are well understood, it isn't clear how large the contributions of different ice sheets and feedback mechanisms to global temperature changes are. Nico Wunderling and colleagues use a simplified Earth system model in combination with different CO2 concentration levels to provide such an estimate. They find an additional median warming of 0.43°C in response to the loss of all ice sheets at CO2 concentrations sim

Residues of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides (known as "Plant Protection Products," or PPPs), being found in pollen and nectar, are "a significant stressor" for bees and other pollinators.

Image
Environmental Research    

The Government of Manitoba robs its rural citizens of their local autonomy to serve its political friends and big business. (Opinion)

Image
        by Larry Powell  The Premier of Manitoba, Brian Pallister. A Gov't. photo. The lengths to which the Pallister government is going to enable the unfettered exploitation of Manitoba's resources and massive expansion of its hog industry, should now be clear for all to see. For the past few years, it’s been rolling out, at significant taxpayer expense, the truly draconian measures it’s now taking, to make this happen.  While the writing has been on the wall, only now are the worst fears being realized. They expose this government’ naked contempt for the democratic rights of rural Manitobans who have the audacity to point out that these goals are misguided - that the emperor has no clothes. Late last year, the Municipality of Rosser, near Winnipeg, rejected a bid for a gravel mine (euphemistically called a limestone aggregate quarry). The politically well-connected owner of the construction company proposing the mine (who made a substantial contribution to the Conservative P

Can manmade rope bridges offer relief for the world's rarest primate - the Hainan gibbon? A new study shows encouraging results.

Image
by Larry Powell Hainan gibbons started to use the canopy bridge 176 days after installation. Females and small juveniles were the faithful users. The Hainan gibbon  (Nomascus hainanus) is described as "The world's most critically endangered primate." In fact, its numbers are said to be much lower than any other primate on Earth, with only about 30 individuals remaining for the entire species. It's found in just a single block of forest on Hainan Island, China, and nowhere else.  The adult male is jet black with a hairy crest. The female is golden yellow with a black crown patch. The immature gibbon is black, regardless of gender. Like so many similar creatures, it travels through the forest canopy, tree-to-tree. But major disturbances, like roads or landslides, can produce major gaps or gorges which seriously restrict its movements. This, in turn, can make it harder for it to feed or breed, but easier to be killed by predators. Professional tree climber in action con

Siberian heatwave of 2020 'almost impossible' without climate change

Image
world weather attribution Siberian wildfire north of the Arctic Circle. Photo by Pierre Markuse. In the first six months of 2020, Siberia experienced a period of unusually high temperatures, causing wide-scale impacts including wildfires, loss of permafrost, and an invasion of pests. Story here. 

Location! Location! Location! "Rewilding" less than a third of the world's damaged ecosystems in the right places, could go a long way toward curbing both species extinctions and atmospheric carbon!

Image
Nature The Great Egret in a wetland in southwestern Manitoba, Canada.  Canadian populations are said to be declining. For decades, the egrets have had to contend with major habitat loss and degradation, as well as threats like contaminated runoff from farm fields. A  PinP  photo. Restoring 30% of the world’s ecosystems in priority areas could stave off more than 70% of projected extinctions and absorb nearly half of the carbon buildup in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. As the world focuses on dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, a landmark report in Nature pinpoints the ecosystems that, if restored, give us the biggest "bang for our buck" in terms of both climate and biodiversity benefits. Despite being shown to be beneficial, shelterbelts are being systematically  destroyed  by  modern farmers.  A PinP video. Returning specific ecosystems in all continents worldwide that have been replaced by farming to their natural state would rescue the maj

Compassion needed for farm animals. (Letter)

Image
The following letter appeared in the Saturday, Oct. 10th edition of the Winnipeg Free Press, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. (Photo added by PinP.) Sows like this spend much of their lives in tiny steel cages. Re: Changes needed to protect farms, animals (Opinion, Oct. 5)  As a former executive director at the Winnipeg Humane Society, I feel compelled to respond to Bill Campbell’s op-ed on the need to protect farms and animals. After starting at the Humane Society in 1994, I quickly came to learn that some of the most egregious suffering imposed on animals by humans occurs in the industrial barns of today’s animal agriculture. I am not speaking of the few remaining family farms, but rather the large industrial-style buildings that house thousands of animals in small confined spaces with no access to the outdoors. These operations treat the animals more like cars on an assembly line, as they do not allow the animals to fulfill natural instincts and limit their movement severely. In short, t

Nitrous oxide emissions pose an increasing climate threat

Image
The sprawling Koch fertilizer plant in Brandon, Manitoba, CA. Each month, hundreds of trucks and rail cars deliver both nitrogen and methane-based fertilizers made here, to farmers in western Canada & the US. Both nitrogen & methane are more potent as greenhouse gases than CO2, the commonest one. The plant has, for many years, been the single-biggest industrial source of GH gases in MB. A PinP photo. Rising nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions are jeopardizing the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, according to a major new study. The growing use of nitrogen fertilizers in farming worldwide is increasing atmospheric concentrations. N2O is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide and remains in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. Story here.

The Arctic is burning in a whole new way

Image
ScienceDaily "Where There's Smoke There's Fire" by Western Arctic National Parklands Widespread wildfires in the far north aren't just bigger; they're different. Details here.

Global heating. How will it impact the world’s nature reserves?

Image
ScienceDaily The Athabasca glacier in Jasper National Park, Canada. Already a shadow of its former self, many fear it will be gone altogether within a generation. A 2020 photo by Ethan Sahagun. Nature reserves will be affected by future climate change in very different ways - especially in the tropics. A new study drawing attention to this fact, raises even more fears for wildlife species. It's based on forecasts for more than 130,000 nature reserves worldwide. Story here.

The Bio of Larry Powell - publisher of this blog.

Image
Larry Powell Powell is a veteran, award-winning journalist based in Shoal Lake, Manitoba, Canada. He specialize in stories about agriculture and the environment. For decades, he worked for broadcast outlets in all four provinces in western Canada. This included a 5 years stint as Senior Editor for CBC Radio News in Saskatchewan. He is authorized to receive embargoed news releases on important, global stories, through the Science Media Centre of Canada, the Royal Society, Nature Research and the World Weather Attribution Network. He's a member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, the Canadian Association of  Journalists and a past member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2020, Powell joined an international team of writers providing articles for the Swiss-based online journal, Focusing on Wildlife - celebrating  the biodiversity of Planet Earth. In June, 2014, he was a panelist at a world conference in          Winnipeg entitled Holding

Plants at Risk of Extinction, New Report Finds

Image
Common Dreams One of several species at risk in Canada, the small white lady's slipper, (Cypripedium candidum).  Photo by Mason Brock. A grim new assessment of the world's flora and fungi has found that two-fifths of its species are at risk of extinction as humans encroach on the natural world.  Details here.