28 August 2017, Desmog, 12 Years After Katrina, Hurricane Harvey Pummels Gulf Coast and Its Climate Science-Denying Politicians. As the remnants of Hurricane Harvey (now a tropical storm) continue to flood Houston — just days before the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — I visited Shannon Rainey, whose house was built on top of a Superfund site in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Rainey is worried about family members in Houston. She knows all too well how long it can take to get back what is lost in a storm. “I still live with Katrina every day,” she told me. New Orleans remains threatened by bands of rain extending from Harvey, causing many residents with fierce memories of Katrina to remain on edge. Earlier this month, the city proved it was ill-prepared for hurricane season nearly a year after Baton Rouge’s 1,000-year flood. Rain inundated New Orleans, with more than nine inches falling in only three hours, exposing that the city’s pump system could not operate at full capacity. The city is still scrambling to make the needed repairs and clean the sewer system’s catch basins, which remain clogged in many places. Read More here
Category Archives: People Stress
12 August 2017, New York Times, Portugal Forest Fires Worsen, Fed by Poor Choices and Inaction. When Portugal’s deadliest wildfire killed more than 60 people in June not far from the hamlet where Daniel Muralha lives, it was just the pensioner’s latest brush with death. 2003, Mr. Muralha, 77, narrowly survived a huge forest fire that engulfed his house. In 2015, a fire destroyed his field. And this July, he watched anxiously as fire burned the trees above his property. fires are getting worse and worse, which means this place is going to become a desert,” he said. “I’m too old to move elsewhere, but more people, of course, decide to leave after every fire.” What he describes is an increasingly urgent problem for his country. Hotter, drier summers are setting off more forest fires, which are accelerating a decades-old migration from rural areas, leaving lands untended. That, in turn, helps fuel new and more intense fires that spread and burn even faster. deadly spiral, forestry experts and environmentalists say, has been worsened by political inaction, a history of poor land management and the prioritizing of firefighting over fire prevention, even in the face of more frequent tragedies. But Portugal has become a particularly stark case of what the future may hold if changes to land, climate and economies go mismanaged. The deaths in June provoked a fresh round of soul-searching and spurred an investigation, still continuing, into how and why the wildfire engulfed Pedrógão Grande, about 10 miles from where Mr. Muralha lives, close to Oleiros. Oleiros and its environs are a prime example of the changes to the landscape that have rendered Portugal ever more vulnerable to fire. Read More here
9 August 2017 By Dr Haydn Washington for Dick Smith Fair Go,The Insanity of Endless Growth, . The world is faced with a predicament of grave enormity – yet one rarely spoken of. The United Nations (UN), almost all governments, business, and media and both the political Left and the Right are busy extolling (even praising) ‘endless growth’. Yet we live on a finite planet, so clearly endless physical growth is impossible, unsustainable and, in fact, insane. I often give public talks on sustainability and ask the audience: ‘On a finite planet who thinks we can keep growing physically forever?’ Nobody raises their hands. So why then is our economy and society based on what many individually know is impossible? An excellent question – but one hardly ever asked in mainstream economics (Daly, 2014). Even the UN forgets to ask the question – and to answer it. Read More here
21 July 2017, Climate Home, Indian farmers mourn dead after debt crisis turns violent. Six protesters were killed in the Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh in June. Meet the bereaved families driven to despair by erratic weather and a tough market. Abhishek Patidar was 17 years old when he died. A farmer’s son, he had planned on becoming a doctor. “Abhishek studied in the 11th grade,” said his mother Alka Patidar, proudly. Her eldest son had only finished 8th grade before he started working the family farm. Abhishek, the youngest of four children, looks like his mother. His eyes follow the same curvature; his skin is the same shade of tan. Abhishek was killed at a protest on 6 June, 2017, when Indian police opened fire on the crowd. India’s farmers are in crisis. Their frustrations, simmering quietly after the harvest, became palpable in a 10-day long protest in June. Thousands of farmers in the Mandsaur district of central India’s Madhya Pradesh had turned up in the towns of Piplia Mandi and Bahi Phanta to demand fair prices for a season’s worth of work. Abhishek went along with several other young men from his village. The protests started out peacefully, but turned ugly a few days in, when a scuffle broke out between better-off business owners in the area and debt-ridden farmers. On the sixth day, the violence climaxed when police, trying to control the crowd, fired their weapons. Five protesters were killed on the spot and a sixth man later died of injuries sustained in the clash. Read More here