In a new study led by researchers at Wuhan University, scientists have developed a filter, made with cotton and squid bone, that can be used to adsorb certain microplastics in aquatic environments. Further, they determined the filter was about 98% to 99.9% effective in filtering microplastics.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, explored the development of a foam filter made with cellulose, from cotton plants, and chitin, a type of natural biopolymer found in the exoskeletons of arthropods and mollusks, as well as in some cell walls of fungi and algae, according to Science Direct. Both cellulose and chitin are considered “two of the most abundant polysaccharides found in nature,” according to the study, and they are already used frequently for removing larger pollutants from wastewater.

The researchers are applying the use of cellulose and chitin in a novel way to tackle microplastic pollution in water, which has typically been addressed with magnets, surface-engineered adsorption methods or coagulation methods, all of which can be difficult and expensive to scale.

However, the researchers noted that using cellulose and chitin, which for this study they sourced from cotton and squid bone, respectively, would result in a cost-effective and scalable foam known as Ct-Cel that could effectively filter out microplastics such as polystyrene, polymethyl methacrylate, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate, according to the study. The foam can also be produced in a readily available way using freeze dryers or mechanical stirrers, The Guardian reported.

As Phys.org reported, the resulting filter was effective on several different types of plastics, including 100-nanometer polystyrene particles to microplastics spanning about 3 microns in size.

In addition to the impressive 98% to 99.9% adsorption rate, the scientists were also surprised by the reusability of the filters. After going through five filtration cycles, the filters were still effectively adsorbing microplastics in irrigation waters, lake water, still water and coastal waters at a rate of 95.1% to 98.1%.

“The favorable recycling ability of biomass foams in organic solvents can further reduce the cost of feedstock and disposal of waste biomass, thereby enhancing their potential for dealing with microplastic contamination on a large scale,” the authors wrote in the study. “Moreover, the recycling process could prevent microplastics from re-entering the environment during the natural degradation of biomass foam.”

According to The Guardian, an industrial-scale model of the Ct-Cel filter could be ready within several years. After testing that model, the filter could be designed and scaled for filtering microplastics for residential and municipal water systems.

The post New Microplastics Water Filter Made With Cotton and Squid Bone Could Be 99.9% Effective, Scientists Report appeared first on EcoWatch.

The approval of plans for an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the outgoing Biden administration on Monday will keep the door open for drilling in the pristine wildlands.

The sale, to be held on January 9, will include a smaller portion of the total land that was made available for bidding about four years ago during the Trump administration, reported The Associated Press.

“Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is all risk with no reward,” said attorney for Earthjustice Erik Grafe, who has been a leader in litigation to protect the wildlife refuge, in a press release from Earthjustice. “Oil drilling would destroy this beautiful land, held sacred by Gwich’in people, and would further destabilize the global climate, but it offers zero benefit to taxpayers or consumers.”

In his promise to expand oil and gas drilling in the United States, President-elect Donald Trump referenced a law passed in 2017 that enabled the announcement.

The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act — passed during Trump’s first term as president — included a requirement that two lease sales in the Arctic Refuge be held by the U.S. Department of the Interior before the end of this year, the press release said. The sale just approved by the Biden administration will be the second.

The first was held in 2021 by the Trump administration and generated just one percent of the estimated revenue promised to U.S. taxpayers when the leasing mandate was approved by Congress.

“Few oil companies bid, since banks and insurance companies wary of the high risk refused to back drilling programs there. Although the volume of recoverable oil in the Refuge is unknown, climate scientists have warned for decades that extracting and burning any amount of oil will accelerate climate change consequences such as droughts, heat waves, wildfires and extreme storm events,” Earthjustice said. “Pumping oil from the Arctic Refuge won’t result in lower oil prices, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, and building the necessary infrastructure would take decades.”

After a review of the leasing program by the Biden administration, seven leases made during the first sale were canceled, The Associated Press reported. Litigation around the cancellation is still pending.

The first lease sale is still being delayed by ongoing lawsuits, with environmentalists promising to bring them to court in order to stop drilling in the refuge.

“Congress should restore protections for the coastal plain rather than continue allowing these lands to be used as a political pawn,” said Brook Brisson, Trustees for Alaska senior staff attorney, as reported by the Anchorage Daily News. “We will stand with our clients, partners, and the majority of Americans in opposing the leasing of these lands and if that means challenging unlawful decisions in court, we’re prepared to do that again.”

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said a formal decision to approve the lease sale has been issued for the refuge’s 1.6-million-acre coastal plain. The coastal plain is a vast wildlife refuge bordering the Beaufort Sea. The refuge is the habitat of caribou, polar bears, musk oxen and an array of bird species. The debate about whether to make the coastal plain available for oil drilling has been going on for decades.

Business groups, North Slope leaders and Alaska state politicians have been hoping for oil exploration in the delicately balanced ecosystem of the refuge. However, they complained that the amount of land being offered for lease — the minimum permitted by law — was not enough and could hamper bidding.

Some of the state’s political leaders have also expressed frustration with constraints on the planned lease sale. President of advocacy group Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat Nagruk Harcharek referred to the lease sale as “a deliberate attempt by the Biden administration’s Interior Department to kneecap the potential of development” in the wildlife refuge, as The Associated Press reported.

Some Alaska Tribes and conservation groups criticized the decision as having the potential to ramp up global heating if it means oil production in the region, while also putting caribou and other wildlife species at risk.

RaeAnn Garnett, Tribal government first chief of the Native Village of Venetie, said drilling in the refuge would amount to a “direct threat” to the Porcupine caribou herd and the Neets’ajj Gwich’in way of life.

“Our people have relied on this herd for our subsistence practices since time immemorial and expect to be able to rely on it for generations to come,” Garnett said, as reported by the Anchorage Daily News. “Any oil and gas development poses an undeniable threat to the caribou migration routes, which will impact our traditional subsistence-based way of life.”

According to the BLM, plans for potential development or exploration made after any oil leases are issued for the refuge would be subject to environmental review, The Associated Press reported.

“We’re committed to going to court as often as necessary to defend the Arctic Refuge from oil drilling and will work toward a more sustainable future that does not depend on ever-expanding oil extraction,” Grafe said in the press release.

The post ‘All Risk With No Reward’: Outgoing Biden Admin Approves Oil and Gas Lease Sale in Alaska’s Pristine Arctic Wildlife Refuge appeared first on EcoWatch.

According to a new report from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), more than three-quarters of the world’s land has become permanently dryer over the course of recent decades.

A combined area half as big as Australia has gone from being humid lands to drylands – an arid area with less rain for nature, pastures, crops and people.

“For the first time, scientists within UNCCD Science-Policy Interface have clearly documented current and future drying trends and impacts that reveal a global, existential peril previously shrouded by a fog of scientific uncertainty. Its name is aridity — the climatic and enduring condition of too little life-supporting moisture — and its effects threaten the lives and livelihoods of billions across almost every region of the globe,” the report said.

Forty percent of all the lands on Earth, excluding Antarctica, are now made up of drylands, reported The Guardian.

These changes over the past three decades are likely to be permanent because, as the report points out, “droughts end, and recovery is possible.”

“Droughts happen when the rain doesn’t fall or falls too little for extended but nevertheless limited periods,” the authors of the report wrote. “Rising aridity is different — it is an unrelenting menace that requires lasting adaptation measures. The drier climates now affecting vast regions across the globe will not return to how they were.”

Currently, one-quarter of the world’s population inhabits expanding drylands. Aridity projections suggest up to five billion people could live in drylands by 2100. All these people are either at risk of desertification or will be in the future. This can leave water scarce and people dehydrated or hungry, with ecosystems totally transformed.

“Human-caused climate change is the culprit; known for making the planet warmer, it is also making more and more land drier. The result is poor soil fertility, crop losses, biodiversity declines, intense sand and dust storms, frequent wildfires and, of course, greater food and water insecurity. Aridity-related water scarcity is causing illness and death and spurring large-scale forced migration around the world,” the report said.

Roughly 12 percent of Africa’s gross domestic product was lost from 1990 to 2015 due to increasing aridity.

“Unlike droughts – temporary periods of low rainfall – aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, UNCCD executive secretary, as The Guardian reported. “Droughts end. When an area’s climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost.”

The drying landscape will affect some crops more than others. For instance, if current trends continue, maize output is predicted to be cut in half in Kenya by mid-century.

Drylands are areas where most of the rainfall — 90 percent — is lost to evaporation. This leaves just 10 percent to support vegetation. By 2050, two-thirds of lands worldwide will store less water, the report said.

The failure of humans to adequately mitigate greenhouse gas emissions has contributed to the global water crisis.

“Rising aridity deepens poverty, forces over-exploitation of fragile resources and accelerates land degradation, creating a vicious cycle of resource scarcity, water insecurity and diminished agricultural potential,” Kate Gannon, a London School of Economics Grantham Institute research fellow, told The Guardian. “These communities, with the least capacity to adapt, face dire consequences to health, nutrition and wellbeing from risks of food shortages, displacement, and forced migration. This is not only a profound injustice, but also a global challenge.”

Those inhabiting drylands across the world have doubled in recent decades from 1.2 billion in 1990 to 2.3 billion in 2020. If carbon emissions are not significantly reduced by the end of the century, that number is projected to double.

“For the first time, a UN scientific body is warning that burning fossil fuels is causing permanent drying across much of the world, with potentially catastrophic impacts affecting access to water that could push people and nature even closer to disastrous tipping points,” said UNCCD chief scientist Barron Orr, as reported by The Guardian. 

Mark Maslin, a University College London Earth system science professor, who was not part of the study, said the report was a warning, as well as “a call to politicians that there are solutions.”

“First: we can curb greenhouse gas emissions, which will reduce climate change and global aridification. Second, we can acknowledge the world is drying and take measures to slow it down and to adapt to it,” Maslin said, as The Guardian reported. “We now have so many solutions: sustainable agriculture, water management, reforestation and rewilding to education and awareness building. Ultimately good local and national governance is required to deal with the desertification of our precious life-giving planet.”

The post 40% of Earth’s Land Is Now Drylands, Excluding Antarctica, Research Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Burning Earth is Yale history professor Sunil Amrith’s fifth book, and his first that focuses his academic eye on the climate crisis. 

“As a citizen and then as a parent,” he says, “the climate crisis just became unavoidable in my mind.”

His first books, notably Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Unruly Waters, focused on the history of migration and ecology in Southeast Asia. The Burning Earth takes a global tack, covering the history of the climate crisis from hundreds of years ago, when the Industrial Revolution ignited the mass commodification of natural resources, to now, with the elimination of CFCs and recent climate tech. He sees history through the lens of human needs and desires, and specifically, the luxurious wants of a small slice of elites. 

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. 

“The desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet,” Amrith says. As he writes in the prologue: 

I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place. 

What is the main focus of the book?

The core question in The Burning Earth is really: How much is human freedom dependent on the destruction of our planet? I do not think that human flourishing necessitates the sheer and irreparable harm that we have done to our planet. I think a lot of that has been driven more by the desires and the consumption of a small elite amongst human beings. 

You write about need, want and desire and how it relates to the climate crisis. How have those base human traits contributed to the climate breakdown? 

I see two long-term paths towards our climate crisis. One is the story of human need. Food and shelter account for a significant part of our impact on the planet — the search for food and shelter, both of which are still very unequally accessed. And that is a long-term story, that the search for food contributes not just to greenhouse gas emissions, but overwhelmingly to biodiversity loss.

The second story we need to tell is that for at least 500 years, the desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet. It is the vast and disproportionate resources consumed by those with wealth and power in the world. Their identity has changed over time. For several hundred years, it was mostly Northern Europeans. And now that group of people is certainly much more distributed across the world. 

You write in the book that elites looked at groups of people who are close to nature as being less human. 

I think one of the questions we ask ourselves as we face this climate breakdown is, how did we ever come to believe that the health of the planet didn’t matter to all of us? And yet I think that there has been a period in global history where proportions of people around the world have acted as if it wasn’t true – that we could disregard the health of rivers and forests and simply consume at any rate we chose. That is a mentality that I do also associate with a mentality that imposes a hierarchy on other human beings. 

If you look at, for example, the early colonization of the Americas, the language that the Iberian colonizers used to talk about Indigenous people is very often: they are close to nature. They are not fully human like we are. That legitimizes plunder and exploitation and violence, but it also legitimizes mass deforestation and extraction. 

Was there any way, historically, to stop the inevitable march towards our climate crisis? 

The motivations that are driving people to want to expand their lifespans, to improve the conditions and the security with which their families live – I never want to lose sight of those kinds of baseline human aspirations. 

There are deep human dreams which you can see shared across cultures to simply want one’s descendants to have a better life, to want one’s family to continue. I do see that there is a progression in human beings’ ability and power to mold their surroundings, to make those surroundings more hospitable or more habitable for the human societies.

Then there are parts of the story which I think weren’t inevitable. There was nothing ordained about plantation production, for example, which is a very particular kind of cultivation which has to do with exploiting nature as quickly as possible for rapid gain. I think that is a very specific kind of innovation. 

I think there are technologies that could have had multiple different kinds of uses. And what we’ve tended to see is that their use has been towards maximum extraction. 

You write about silver mining and sugar plantations. How were these some of the earliest environmental catastrophes?

There’s no question that silver mining in the Americas was an environmental catastrophe, and we now have archaeological and genetic evidence that suggests just what a catastrophic impact that had on the health of workers. It was the use of mercury in extracting silver that was so devastating to both the landscape and above all to people’s health. That silver is at the root of what becomes a global economy. 

One could probably make the argument that no single crop has caused greater harm than sugar both to human beings and to nature. Sugar began as a very, very rare luxury. It was treated as one of the fine spices in medieval Europe. And it’s only when you start to get large-scale plantation production combined with the social and economic transformations of early modern Europe that it becomes an item of mass consumption. 

What effect did large scale steel and iron production have?

It’s largely a 19th century story. The age of industrialization coincides exactly with the fossil fuel era, because if we begin with coal in the second half of the 18th century, we start to see widespread use of coal first in England, then in northwestern Europe and in North America. 

I think what changed more than anything else is scale – both the scale of resources that are needed for factory production, and the scale of impact that can be had. I think the story of the railroads is a classic example of this. One of my favorite works of environmental history is Bill Cronin’s book Changes in the Land, which shows how the city of Chicago really reshapes the entire American Midwest. And it does so through the rail lines. Suddenly, Chicago’s markets and exchanges become accessible. And that hastens the destruction of forests, that hastens the expansion of wheat production and monocrop production. And I think we see similar stories all over the world, which is what happens is that as people can travel further, as goods can travel further, you start to get global markets for commodities. And that pushes forward the commodification of nature, the idea that this is not a forest, this is timber, that shift in mentality. 

You describe how the “war machine” is a mechanism of climate destruction. 

That is the part of the book that was the biggest surprise to me. I did not expect that I would conclude that of all the forces driving climate breakdown, warfare is possibly number one. I think the two world wars came to strike me as being pivotal transformative moments, not just because of the scale of resources which went into both of those wars, but also because of the scale of destruction that those wars then made possible, culminating in atomic weapons by the end of the second world war.

Military emissions are not counted in most of our climate targets and most international contributions that have been agreed to. The best estimate we have is that military missions account for about 5% of greenhouse gas emissions, but that is a guess because we don’t know.

You write about the data project of 1957 and 1958, one of the first climate data projects. Tell me about the through line between that and the sheer amount of data we have now. 

This is the International Geophysical Year, and it was this year that the Mauna Loa Observatory was set up in Hawaii, which is, to this day, sort of the gold standard that we have for measuring cumulative concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 2008. Ken Dewey / University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources

This data came during the height of the Cold War. This project is drawing in countries from both sides, drawing in countries that don’t necessarily get along. This is the data that first makes us aware that we are living through a period of unprecedented climate change.

With the acceleration the amount of data today, does it not seem to reason that more data would help our imperiled planet? 

More data is undeniably important to climate scientists as they make projections and formulate their models. But more data hasn’t necessarily led to more consensus. More data has not necessarily changed the overall narrative about climate change. I think the data is essential, but I’m not sure that we’re at a point where more data is going to change more people’s minds. Those are political questions, those are cultural questions, and those are much harder to shift.

Why won’t more – and better – data change more people’s minds?

Firstly, I think in the U.S. more than anywhere else, there has been a politically motivated skepticism of that data. We know that the fossil fuel companies have been directly involved in promoting that sort of distrust all over the world. We’re in a broader populist moment of distrust of expertise. That is one reason why I think more data won’t necessarily change people’s minds.

Another is that data is complicated, and the way in which climate scientists and other earth scientists think about uncertainty doesn’t necessarily translate very smoothly into broader general consciousness. 

And finally, the data is sometimes on a scale that is just unfathomable for all of us, so detached from our everyday lived experience, that I think we need more translation. And maybe that is where a creative artist, or a novelist like the great Richard Powers, have had more impact on shifting people’s awareness and consciousness perhaps than more data. 

As an educator at Yale, how did researching and writing this book change what you bring to the classroom? 

I’ve been teaching environmental history for about 15 years. And there are classes I’ve taught where the questions students have raised, the projects they’ve done, the conversations we’ve had in the classroom have just stayed with me. So, it’s not just what I bring to the classroom, but really what I get from the classroom that is translated directly into this book. 

I think we need to bring the environment into everything, not just into environmental history, but I think we need to be thinking about these questions across our humanities curriculum. I mean, in that sense, that’s partly what I was trying to do with The Burning Earth, which was to say, let’s not separate the environmental story from perhaps more familiar stories about the rise and fall of empires, about unfree labor, about migration, about global transformations. And I think more broadly, that’s what I would love to see happen, which is a kind of weaving in of the more-than-human, the planet, the ecology into how we study literature, into how we study philosophy. 

Might one of the hopes of this book be for people to look at the world around them and to realize that everything that’s made here possibly comes from a place of environmental destruction? 

I would love readers of The Burning Earth to make connections between the material that I present, especially that which is most unfamiliar in their everyday lived experience. My aspiration is not to make people feel guilty. Quite the opposite. I want to give readers the impression that everything is interconnected. 

This is about looking at choices with a sense of hopefulness that that means that a shift in consciousness or new forms of collective action can bring about change and perhaps even bring about change quite quickly. 

As a historian, any predictions for the future? 

I think we are living through a period, you know, just this decade, I think, of such unpredictable change that I think there are so many different trajectories that could lie before us, some of them terrifying, and some of them more hopeful.

The post ‘Everything Is Interconnected’: Author and History Professor Sunil Amrith on Facing the Climate Crisis appeared first on EcoWatch.

Wisdom, a 74-year-old Laysan albatross, is the oldest-known wild bird on the planet. First fitted with a band in 1956, the Hawaiian seabird has laid her first egg in four years, according to United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) officials.

Wisdom returned to the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to lay what could be her 60th egg, USFWS said, as reported by The Guardian.

“We are optimistic that the egg will hatch,” Jonathan Plissner, Midway Atoll’s supervisory wildlife biologist, said in a statement, as The Associated Press reported.

Wisdom, at left with red leg tag, stays close to her recently laid egg as her new mate settles down to incubate from their ground nest on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge on Nov. 27, 2024. Dan Rapp / USFWS volunteer

Millions of seabirds come back to Midway Atoll each year to nest and rear their chicks.

Wisdom and lifelong mate Akeakamai had been returning to the Hawaiian atoll to lay and hatch their eggs since 2006. However, it has been several years since Akeakamai has been seen, and Wisdom started interacting with another male upon her return last week, officials said.

Laysan albatrosses lay one egg each year, and, according to Plissner, Wisdom has raised up to 30 chicks.

October and November represent mating season at the refuge. Albatross parents share the incubation of an egg for roughly seven months. They then fly thousands of miles over the ocean in search of food to bring back to their young.

Wisdom stands at right with red leg band, facing her new partner at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge on Nov. 26, 2024. Dan Rapp / USFWS volunteer

About five or six months after they hatch, chicks fly out to sea, where they will spend most of their lives soaring above the ocean feeding on fish and their eggs, crustaceans and squid.

Adult Laysan albatrosses fly as much as 50,000 miles each year, so USFWS said Wisdom would by now have flown multiple trips to the moon and back, reported CNN.

“It’s really amazing to encounter the world’s oldest known wild bird and see her add to the record year after year, but it fascinates because of its apparent uniqueness and not for any scientific or conservation or management implications. It’s interesting that the next oldest bird here that we know about is currently just 45+ years old. Almost thirty years apart in age is a big gap, especially with the tremendous number of albatross that were banded here in the 1960s,” Plissner said, according to USFWS.

Laysan albatrosses typically live to be 68 years old, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration has said.

As many as three million Laysan albatrosses travel to the Midway Atoll wildlife refuge to breed, Plissner told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. The atoll is not part of the state of Hawaii, but is an unincorporated U.S. territory. The largest albatross colony on Earth lives at the refuge.

“It’s really been remarkable,” Plissner said, as BBC News reported. “Wisdom seems to pique the interest of people across the world. We wait each year with bated breath for her return.”

The post World’s Oldest Known Wild Bird Lays Egg at 74 appeared first on EcoWatch.