Just before Christmas in 2008 in the Tennessee town of Kingston, a pile of coal ash located near the Kingston Fossil Plant broke free and spread into the 300 acres surrounding the plant and eventually into the Emory River Channel. The six-story high pile of coal ash – residue from burning coal – had accumulated over five decades in an area that had started out as a swimming hole. 

“It looked like a black wave, almost like a black tsunami swallowed a town,” says Jared Sullivan, author of Valley So Low. “It punched forward with the force of water punching through a dam. All this ash just flooded the landscape.”

A billion gallons of ash, estimated to be 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, eventually spilled out of the pond, destroying dozens of homes in the area. 

“As far as I know, it is the largest environmental disaster, in terms of just the sheer volume of material that was released, in U.S. history,” Sullivan says.

Sullivan recounts the fallout of this disaster in his new book, which tells the story of the disaster, the cleanup workers, and the fight for justice against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by a determined lawyer, Jim Scott. 

“It’s an environmental book dressed up as a legal thriller,” Sullivan says. 

“I was a kid when it happened,” Sullivan recalls. “I remember watching on the news. There are people in front of the news cameras, and they say again and again this stuff poses no legitimate risk. Don’t worry about it. They really went out of their way to try to put the community and Tennesseans generally at ease.” Almost immediately, the TVA put out a statement stating the ash was not hazardous. 

Shortly afterwards, the cleanup of the site began, and Jacobs Engineering was hired by the TVA as the cleanup contractors. But once the cleanup crew started the work, they weren’t provided any protective gear, such as masks or hazmat suits. This seemed to align with what the TVA was saying publicly at the time, which was that the coal ash was non-toxic. 

“Imagine if, all of a sudden, all the workers are in hazmat suits stomping around this site. That kind of really undermines TVA’s initial claims that the coal ash doesn’t really pose any substantial threat,” Sullivan says. “The EPA had given TVA tight deadlines in which to complete this huge cleanup project, and if the workers would have been given dust masks, under federal rules around worker safety, they would have needed to take mandatory breaks so they wouldn’t overheat in the Tennessee summer.”

“I found transcripts from a meeting in 2009 where this worker’s wife basically asked a TVA senior vice president when we’re going to have hazmat suits and the TVA senior vice president responds, oh, within two weeks, we will get them to you. And that just never happened.”

Jared Sullivan author photo by Mackenzie Wray

Sullivan found in his research for the book that the ash, which contains arsenic, lead and radioactive materials, was recognized decades earlier by TVA to be toxic. 

“There are documents going back to 1964 where TVA’s top brass are telling each other that that they’ve run tests on the coal ash and it contains definite corrosive tendencies. And they also tell each other that this coal ash lands on employee’s cars at one of their plants in Kentucky, and it’s eating away at the paint.”

But Tom Bock, a top safety officer with Jacobs Engineering at the cleanup site in Kingston, claimed that the fly ash – part of the coal as that floats through the air – is “safe enough to eat.” 

“I don’t think he, in my personal opinion, carried out his job in the most effective way possible. But I really do think he was taking marching orders. He was a trusted figure, and he was in a position of authority.”

But people started to get sick, the first group being smokers. And then other people started having respiratory issues after the coal ash dried up and started to blow around the job site, affecting other workers. Sullivan dedicates large parts of Valley So Low to these workers and how their lives were upended by simply taking on the cleanup job. 

“They start coughing up blood in their truck, they start passing out in the truck. So it really snowballs,” Sullivan says. Eventually, at least 30 workers died who had worked on the cleanup site, and hundreds became sick. 

In Valley So Low, lawyer Jim Scott enters the picture on behalf of the workers to file suit against Jacobs Engineering. Sullivan traces all of the legal maneuverings and the challenges that Scott and his team faced against the corporate behemoth that is Jacobs. These led, eventually in 2023, to a settlement offer that the plaintiffs accepted. Sullivan notes that Jacobs denies any wrongdoing. 

 “It was far too little and way too late — that’s the general view of the workers. Don’t get me wrong — they were glad it was finally over. There was some relief of just like, okay, I can move on with my life.” 

“The legal system was not set up to reach an equitable or fair conclusion in these sorts of cases,” Sullivan adds. “The corporations have all the money and honestly, all the time in the world to drag these cases out. So eventually, they have to capitulate. The system does not force these cases to come to speedy resolutions. And that’s to the incredible disadvantage of everyday Americans.”

And Sullivan notes that the EPA should take responsibility as well. 

“They had people on site at Kingston, and yet did not ensure that the workers had proper respiratory protection,” he says.

“The EPA has been undercut, you know, bit by bit for so many years that it’s not an effective organ. It’s not effective at these sort of disaster cleanups.”

Hundreds of unlined coal ash dumping sites still exist around the country, leaching into the ground water and rivers. The Duke Energy Dan River coal ash spill also affected the water and rivers in the Dan River, followed by another breach in 2018 near the Cape Fear River, both in North Carolina. But in 2015, new rules stated that new coal ash piles had to have liners to prevent leaching, along with monitoring of groundwater. And then in 2024 the EPA finalized rules that force power companies to clean up their inactive piles of coal ash. 

“I think the American people will benefit from both those rules,” Sullivan says. “The problem is that the EPA still does not consider coal ash, fly ash, a hazardous material. So the fact is these EPA rules are self-enforcing. So that means that you have to trust the power company to monitor their own coal ash ponds. And you can read my book and decide for yourself whether you want to trust the power companies to be responsible for managing their coal ash ponds and being honest about it.”

Sullivan writes passionately about the TVA, nothing that it was one of the great liberal public works projects when it was created by FDR, one that rescued Tennessee’s economy and moved customers away from a privatized, corrupted power industry, but that perhaps the TVA has lost its way. But he sees a real opportunity for the TVA to seize the moment and move away from coal-fired plants in the region.

“We need to be urging it to ramp up nuclear power, in addition to other renewable energy sources,” he says. “We could sure use the seven giant nuclear power plants today to help reduce our emissions.”

The post A Flood of Ash: The Fight for Justice in Kingston, Tennessee appeared first on EcoWatch.

A colony of eight beavers in the Czech Republic have flooded and built dams on a former army training site that is now a protected area, saving taxpayers $1.2 million, reported AFP.

Officials had wanted to construct a dam to protect endangered crayfish in the Klabava River from acidic water and sediment spilling into the waterway from two nearby ponds.

“Beavers always know best. The places where they build dams are always chosen just right – better than when we design it on paper,” Jaroslav Obermajer, Central Bohemian office head at the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency, told Radio Prague International.

Administrators of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area project — first drafted in 2018 — had been dealing with bureaucratic issues while trying to obtain building permits from authorities when they discovered that the wetlands plan had been completed by local beavers.

“Beavers are able to build a dam in one night, two nights at the most. While people have to get building permits, get the building project approved, and find the money for it. But of course a digger working on his own could build it in about a week,” said zoologist Jiri Vlček.

After plans stalled for a new dam in the Czech Republic, eight beavers saved the day seemingly overnight. “At this point, nothing that beavers do surprises me.” www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti…

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) February 8, 2025 at 9:35 PM

Environmentalists who came to inspect the European beavers’ work said the pools they created will provide good conditions for wetlands species like frogs and the rare stone crayfish. They will also improve water quality.

Beavers are semi-aquatic “ecosystem engineers” who use mud, rocks and wood to block streams. This creates “beaver ponds” that the rodents use as food sources and to protect them from predators, reported National Geographic.

Their ingenious structures create habitat for other species as well, including fish, insects, amphibians, herons, whooping cranes, bison and moose. They can also serve as firebreaks and carbon sinks.

“They built a wetland with pools and canals. The area is roughly twice larger than planned,” Bohumil Fišer, who heads the Brdy Protected Landscape Area and works with the Czech Nature Conservation Agency, told AFP.

The beavers have so far constructed at least four dams south of Prague and are working to build more.

While there are some critics, such as farmers who complain of the beavers felling trees, there is no farmland near the site, which sits in an area that was designated as protected in 2016.

“We don’t expect any conflict with the beaver in the next 10 years,” Fišer said.

The post Beavers Engineer Long-Delayed Czech Wetlands Project appeared first on EcoWatch.

New research has found that the structure of humpback whale song is similar to human language — both use shorter sounds more frequently than those that are more complex, reported The Guardian.

The structure helps infants of both species learn to communicate from their elders more quickly.

“Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species,” a press release from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said. “However, research published today in Science has uncovered the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language in humpback whale song. Humpback whale song is a striking example of a complex, culturally transmitted behavior, but up to now, there was little evidence it has language-like structure.”

A thread explaining our new discovery about humpback whale song published today in Science… We found key statistical properties that characterise all human languages in another species for the first time. We have more in common with whales than we previously thought! doi.org/10.1126/scie…

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— Simon Kirby (@simonkirby.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 6:48 AM

All known human languages follow the same pattern — known as Zipf’s law — wherein the most frequently occuring word is twice as prevalent as the second most, recurs three times as often as the third, and on and on, the researchers wrote in The Conversation.

Scientists have searched for evidence of the same pattern in the commutation of other species, but had not found it until now.

When infants learn, they need to learn to understand where words begin and end, as speech is continuous, without gaps between words. Three decades of statistical learning  has shown that babies figure this out by listening for sounds with a surprising context, such as those between words.

The study, “Whale song shows language-like statistical structure,” was led by Dr. Inbal Arnon, a psychology professor at Hebrew University; Dr. Ellen Garland, a principal research fellow in the School of Biology at University of St. Andrews; and Professor Simon Kirby, a British cognitive scientist who currently holds the Chair of Language Evolution at The University of Edinburgh.

“Using insights and methods from how babies learn language allowed us to discover previously undetected structure in whale song,” Arnon said in the press release. “This work shows how learning and cultural transmission can shape the structure of communication systems: we may find similar statistical structure wherever complex sequential behaviour is transmitted culturally.”

“It raises the intriguing possibility that humpback whales, like human babies, may learn their song by tracking transitional probabilities between sound elements, and using dips in those probabilities as a cue to segment the song,” Arnon said.

In the study, the research team’s analysis of whale song data used the same method.

“Unexpectedly, using this technique revealed in whale song the same statistical properties that are found in all languages. It turns out both human language and whale song have statistically coherent parts,” the researchers wrote in The Conversation. “In other words, they both contain recurring parts where the transitions between elements are more predictable within the part. Moreover, these recurring sub-sequences we detected follow the Zipfian frequency distribution found across all human languages, and not found before in other species.”

These recurring language properties illustrate the “deep commonality” between whales and humans, two unrelated species united by their culturally transmitted communication systems.

The findings demonstrate the important parts learning and transmission play in the structure of such systems. They reveal that the foundational characteristics of human language could be found across evolutionary distant species.

“Revealing this hidden language-like structure in whale song was unexpected, but it strongly suggests this cultural behaviour holds crucial insight into the evolution of complex communication across the animal kingdom,” Garland said in the press release. “Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language.”

“Whether the units we detected using the infant-inspired method are salient to the whales themselves remains an open question,” Garland added.

Kirby said the findings suggest that it can be useful to look not just to our closest primate relatives to understand the evolution of language, but to also examine examples of “convergent evolution elsewhere in nature.”

“Looking beyond the way language is used to express meaning, we should consider how language is learned and transmitted culturally over multiple generations,” Kirby said in the press release. “These findings challenge long held assumptions about the uniqueness of human language, uncovering deep commonalities between evolutionarily distant species.”

Proud supervisor moment! Ella's masters thesis paper on Okinawa humpback #whale #song complexity and evolution is out today in RSOS. Awesome collaboration with Nozomi Kobayashi et al. @francae.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social doi.org/10.1098/rsos…

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— Ellen Garland (@ellengarland.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 9:33 PM

The post Humpback Whale Song Has Striking Similarities to Human Language: Study appeared first on EcoWatch.

Fulfilling current land restoration pledges in 115 countries would require only a small amount of the global annual GDP, a recent analysis has found. Successful implementation would require about 0.04% to 0.27% of global annual GDP, totaling about $311 billion to $2.1 trillion.

The researchers analyzed costs of 243 land restoration projects happening globally and found that the median cost ranged from $185 per hectare to $3,012 per hectare, with an overall median cost of $1,691 per hectare. Lower-cost opportunities include forest management for $185 per hectare, passive regeneration ($513 per hectare), grazing management ($631 per hectare) and assisted natural regeneration ($804 per hectare).

“Passive regeneration is basically just fencing off an area and leaving it alone,” Dewy Verhoeven, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at Wageningen University & Research, told Mongabay News. “Those costs are very low, maybe you have to install a fence and that’s it. But the opportunity costs are very large because you cannot use the land anymore.”

Projects with the highest median costs include agroforestry ($2,390 per hectare), cross-slope barriers ($2,562 per hectare), irrigation ($2,886 per hectare) and silvopasture ($3,012 per hectare), which integrates trees and pasture for grazing livestock on the same land.

In total, land degradation projects would add up to about 0.38% to 2.65% of global GDP for one year; however, the authors noted that spreading the cost out over a decade would lower the annual cost to just 0.04% to 0.27% of global GDP. The authors published these findings in the journal Land Degradation & Development.

While the total percentage is small, an even distribution of costs or distributing costs by project location would place a higher burden on lower income countries. The report authors found that most projects are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa as well as South and Southeast Asia, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for almost half of all global land restoration pledges.

“From a global perspective, it’s very efficient to do a lot of restoration in lower income countries, because that’s where it’s relatively cheap. But they need help,” Verhoeven told Mongabay News.

The report recommended financing frameworks for more equitable distribution of costs, including establishing Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), tapping the private sector and incorporating public financial support.

“Furthermore, it is essential to gain more insight in who bears the cost of landscape restoration. A better assessment of the costs and benefits from different actor perspectives (farmers, governments, private investors), including opportunity costs, is key in the design of new financing mechanisms to ensure their participation in landscape restoration practices,” the authors wrote in the study.

Land degradation is increasing rapidly. According to a report by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the amount of land degradation is increasing by about 1 million square kilometers per year, an area roughly the size of Egypt.

There are major economic incentives to invest in land restoration. UNCCD reported that for each dollar invested in land restoration, there are economic returns between $7 and $30. 

As the authors of the recent land degradation study concluded, land restoration also improves ecosystem health and furthers progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The post Successful Land Restoration Results Would Require Less Than 0.27% of Global Annual GDP, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The United Kingdom has announced new reduced subsidies for its controversial Drax power station, which had been previously converted to burning wood biomass from coal.

The North Yorkshire plant is an important source of energy for the country, but has received criticism because of sustainability concerns, in addition to Drax Group plc’s enormous profits, reported Bloomberg.

“Biomass currently plays an important role in our energy system, but we are conscious of concerns about sustainability and the level of subsidy biomass plants have received in the past,” said Michael Shanks, UK energy minister, in a statement. “We believe that [the subsidies] simply did not deliver a good enough deal for bill payers and enabled Drax to make unacceptably large profits.”

Drax has received criticism for burning wood pellets that were sourced from Canadian and United States forests, The Guardian reported.

Subsidies for Drax have been cut in half, and the UK government has ordered the power station to use only sustainable wood, rather than the 70 percent of woody biomass it is currently getting from sustainable sources.

🚨The DIRTIEST power station is about to get a bit LESS dirty! 😮‍💨 The UK government has announced LIMITS on Drax power station's ability to BURN TREES and POLLUTE our air. They will ALSO start FINING Drax if the wood burnt doesn't come from WASTE products. 🔥

— Greenpeace UK (@greenpeaceuk.bsky.social) February 10, 2025 at 9:45 AM

The new agreement specified that “material sourced from primary and old growth forests” would not be subsidized, reported the BBC.

The government has threatened Drax with “substantial penalties” for noncompliance, The Guardian reported.

The new deal halves subsidies from 2027 to 2031, saying the plant will provide power only at times when it is “really” necessary. It is estimated the strategy will save customers $210.5 million each year.

Drax is the largest renewable power generator in Britain by output, with its plants making up roughly six percent of the UK’s supply of electricity. The company’s last coal-fired power plant was shut down near Selby in 2023 after 50 years.

The revised arrangement includes a “clawback mechanism” to keep the company from making excessive profits should there be a steep rise in electricity costs, reported the BBC.

“Under this proposed agreement, Drax can step in to increase generation when there is not enough electricity, helping to avoid the need to burn more gas or import power from Europe, and when there is too much electricity on the UK grid, Drax can turn down and help to balance the system,” said Chief Executive Will Gardiner, as the BBC reported.

Green activists had been afraid UK ministers would give Drax, which has received billions in past subsidies, unrestricted support despite concerns over the impact burning biomass has on the environment.

“Continuing to subsidise huge biomass imports is not a step on the road to a cleaner future, but a dirty compromise with past failures. Trees should be left to grow and not be burnt in a major subsidy-fuelled bonfire,” said Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK policy director, as reported by The Guardian. “The new criteria should, hopefully, limit the damage done both by restricting its operations and reforming its supply chain, but the government is still far too trusting of big polluters asking for big subsidies to decarbonise. We have cheap, clean power sources available, and we shouldn’t be left to gamble on schemes like this any more.”

The post UK Cuts Subsidies for Drax Power Station in Half, Saying It Must Burn 100% Sustainable Biomass appeared first on EcoWatch.