Minnesota’s Lower Sioux Indian Community is pioneering green building with its fully integrated hempcrete facility – a first in the country
When Earl Pendleton first heard about building houses out of hemp more than a decade ago, it seemed like a far-fetched idea.
To start, it was still illegal to grow hemp – the non-psychoactive strain of Cannabis sativa – in the US. Importing it from overseas was prohibitively expensive. But Pendleton, a member of the Lower Sioux Indian Community, was intrigued by early research that showed hemp could be transformed into non-toxic construction materials that allow for faster build times and result in low-carbon, energy-efficient houses.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/16/2024 - 08:00
04/16/2024 - 06:00
As the soundscape of the natural world began to disappear over 30 years, one man was listening and recording it all
Read more: World faces ‘deathly silence’ of nature as wildlife disappears, warn experts
The tale starts 30 years ago, when Bernie Krause made his first audio clip in Sugarloaf Ridge state park, 20 minutes’ drive from his house near San Francisco. He chose a spot near an old bigleaf maple. Many people loved this place: there was a creek and a scattering of picnic benches nearby.
As a soundscape recordist, Krause had travelled around the world listening to the planet. But in 1993 he turned his attention to what was happening on his doorstep. In his first recording, a stream of chortles, peeps and squeaks erupt from the animals that lived in the rich, scrubby habitat. His sensitive microphones captured the sounds of the creek, creatures rustling through undergrowth, and the songs of the spotted towhee, orange-crowned warbler, house wren and mourning dove.
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04/16/2024 - 06:00
Loss of intensity and diversity of noises in ecosystems reflects an alarming decline in healthy biodiversity, say sound ecologists
Read more: No birdsong, no water in the creek, no beating wings: how a haven for nature fell silent
Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.
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04/16/2024 - 06:00
The 2013 documentary Blackfish turned orca trainers into pariahs in the US. Now some are hitting it big in China
Some people spend a long time deciding what they want to do in life. Hazel McBride feels lucky that she’s always known. As a child in Scotland, she watched a VHS tape of Free Willy on repeat. That was the first time she felt a connection with killer whales. The second time was at age eight, on a trip to SeaWorld Orlando in 2000. Shamu was the animal world’s greatest celebrity, and in the US, SeaWorld ads were ubiquitous. Kids wanted to see the killer whales, and after they saw them, they told their parents they wanted to become killer whale trainers. McBride actually did it.
It wasn’t easy. Scotland didn’t have a SeaWorld, or warm water, or anywhere, really, where McBride could get experience with marine mammals. She had horses she cared for, and she was on the national swim team – a modest start. She sent out volunteer applications to local zoos and worked with California sea lions at a safari park. She reached out to trainers online and one told her a psychology degree would help, so she got one.
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04/16/2024 - 05:00
Heavy rain likely to cause low yields in Britain and other parts of Europe, with drought in Morocco hitting imports
Which UK foods are at risk?
The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.
Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.
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04/16/2024 - 05:00
Many products consumed by Britons could be hit by floods and droughts driven by climate crisis
UK facing food shortages and price rises after extreme weather
From floods to droughts, extreme weather driven by human-caused global heating has become the new normal, causing havoc with the global food supply system.Many products bought and consumed in the UK are at risk of low supply and increased prices.
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04/16/2024 - 03:27
Seven months after an El Niño associated with hotter and drier weather got under way, conditions have returned to neutral
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The Bureau of Meteorology has declared the El Niño weather event of 2023-24 to be over, with odds increasing that its cooler counterpart, the La Niña, will return by the coming spring.
Conditions in the central equatorial Pacific have now returned to neutral conditions, about seven months after the El Niño had got under way, the bureau said on Tuesday.
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04/16/2024 - 02:39
Tanya Plibersek says two new agencies will be established but a commitment to rewrite national environment laws has been pushed back
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The Albanese government has further delayed a commitment to rewrite Australia’s failing national environment laws.
The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government would introduce legislation in coming weeks to create two previously announced bodies – an environment protection agency and a second organisation called Environment Information Australia, which will provide public data on ecosystems, plants and animals.
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04/15/2024 - 23:30
Scientists have recorded widespread bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef as global heating creates a fourth planet-wide bleaching event. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch, 54% of ocean waters containing coral reefs have been experiencing heat stress high enough to cause bleaching
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Global heating pushes coral reefs towards worst planet-wide mass bleaching on record
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04/15/2024 - 23:01
Supreme court ruling left more than 90% of state’s surface waters with no pollution protections, since they don’t run continuously
New Mexico’s rivers, which include the Rio Grande, Gila, San Juan and Pecos, are America’s most threatened waterways, according to a new report. This is largely due to a 2023 US supreme court decision that left more than 90% of the state’s surface waters without federal protections from industrial pollution, according to state officials.
“Virtually all the rivers in New Mexico are losing clean water protections,” said Matt Rice, the south-west regional director of American Rivers, the conservation group that publishes the annual list. “It has the most to lose, and the threat is particularly acute there.”
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