#environmental-ethics

#environmental-ethics

"The responders weren't just FEMA, it was people taking up direct collections for food, for clothing; it was a community response."

Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and has contributed as much as 30% of the current warming of the planet.

To fuel our bodies, we must eat other living things, killing them in the process. However, most plants and algae are autotrophs. They bootstrap their biomass without the barbarism of eating others: using photosynthesis, turning sunlight, water, and carbon into energy.

'Oh my gosh, you're a tree hugger. You're probably one of those tree huggers,' Brown recalled hearing from others. 'It was meant as a bad word.' Now, she said, the word brings 'pride.'

Kangaroo Island is home to wildlife found nowhere else, including a soot-coloured dunnart, and has a human population so low that there are 14 kangaroos for every one person.

Somebody sent to this world to try to give people hope in dark times, because without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing, and in the dark times that we are living in now, if people don't have hope, we're doomed. How can we bring little children into this dark world we've created and let them be surrounded by people who've given up?

At a young age, I learned quickly how oil wealth and power could burn the land while people struggled. I saw heat rise off the streets, the Nile strained, and the air thickened with injustice. In my teenage years, through Aotearoa, being on the edge of the Pacific, I felt the ocean breathing heavy, swallowing the shores of islands that have done the least to cause this harm.

Researchers have known since at least 2008 that wildfires can create chromium-6, but a new study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology in November, is the first to report details such as how long it might persist in groundwater.

When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."

Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years.