The Chinese government says it will investigate allegations that fuel tankers have been used to transport cooking oil after carrying toxic chemicals without being cleaned properly between loads.
Transporting cooking oil in contaminated fuel trucks was said to have been so widespread it was considered an “open secret” in the industry, according to one driver quoted by the newspaper.
We require strict regulation throughout the world for the food industry to protect us from this kind of potentially mass poisoning. Yet many corporates in the food industry lobby hard to deregulate so as to not “waste time and money” on compliance.
Many compared it to the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal, in which some 300,000 children became sick and at least six died after drinking powdered milk contaminated with high levels of the industrial chemical melamine.
The concern is taken very seriously by the Chinese government and trust must be regained.
The above happened in China, but throughout the global food industry there is always a tendency to loosen, not tighten, regulation.
But we must determine accurate information through scientific study and not make unfounded claims as in the allegation against Chinese produced garlic, see details here:
It is up to all governments tighten up and carefully police all products sold to unwitting consumers to ensure trust in health and safety methods in the line of production, supply and delivery.
Here in the UK we are informed as to the constant monitoring of food safety:
Lead, for which there is no “safe” level of exposure, was found in each of the 60 tampon samples, which were made up major and own-brands bought in New York, London, and Athens.
My granddaughter asked me what I thought, and my immediate reaction was, “I am horrified”.
The reported piece goes on to ask an expert in women’s health:
Ideally, we want no arsenic, cadmium, or lead, but the reality is that they’re in the soil and will ultimately creep into all kinds of products. This is one reason we need regulation: so people can understand their cumulative risks.”
More regulation needed
Obstetrician and gynaecologist Banafsheh Bayati told Vogue: “The surprising factor is not that there are heavy metals in tampons, but that we are only now aware of this fact.
“Women’s health is historically underrepresented, understudied, and underfunded.
“This study is incredibly important in highlighting the need to push funding for women’s health.”
The historical harm of products has been documented here:
This article points out that substitutes for cotton are used:
Most tampons and pads are not made with cotton, however. Instead, synthetic fibers are used that feel like cotton but are much more absorbent. So absorbent, in fact, that they led to a huge increase in cases of toxic shock syndrome. In turn, this prompted the FDA to insist that companies such as Rely (who were sued by customers) used lower absorbency materials (more on this below).
Although it’s hard to find exact materials listings for tampons and pads, some of the likely ingredients in these products include:
Low density, highly absorbent, open-celled foam
Adhesives
Perfumes
Polyethylene
Hydrogel (sodium polyacrylate or polyacrylate absorbents)
Chlorine-bleached Rayon, made from wood pulp (of which dioxin is the by-product)
Genetically modified cotton
Polypropylene
Polyester
Dyes
Another article gives lists of suggested safer products to purchase in the UK:
All women who menstruate have a right to obtain safe products to manage their monthly flows.
I am alarmed to find this important area of research is still not providing definitive reassurance on the safety of tampons and pads. Yet the manufacturers must have high profits from selling this essential medical item to menstruating women.
Why must we be blinkered humans, stumbling through with trial and error, rarely learning from our mistakes?
We complain that we have over 7 billion people on the planet and that we don’t have enough to feed and shelter us all. Yet we have only begun to increase our populations exponentially since the Industrial Revolution which gave us tools to pollute and destroy our environment.
Take a recently reported travesty of human activity where knee-jerk problem solving caused consequential extinction of one of our most valued birds, the Vulture. Without these great scavengers feeding on dead livestock and waste matter we humans are exposed to bacterial dangers causing us to catch life threatening disease.
They have played a beneficial role in the ecosystem by consuming carcasses and rotting flesh, keeping the disease transmission rate low. Some parts of the world, especially Asia, allow carcasses of domestic animals to be disposed of by these birds.
These vultures are a vital part of our ecosystem. We humans tend to think in small step solutions and rarely consider adverse reactions down the road.
So, as the Science Direct article reveals, in Sudarshan, India the population of vultures dropped to near extinction and researchers tried to find out why. They explained this near extinction occurred in the 1990s:
The near-extinction of the birds across India in the 1990s led to the spread of disease-carrying pathogens from an excess of dead animals, killing more than a half-million people from 2000 to 2005.
Half a million people died as the Vulture population was unable to clean up excess dead animals! The answer was in front of them; people passively watched the rotting carcasses were not getting eaten by the vultures, a sight which had been common and reassuring. Why had the vultures disappeared?
The financial cost then raised important questions.
the monetary damage from the related public health crisis at nearly $70 billion a year.
And the researcher was a young boy when he saw the death toll growing and he grew up to gain the skills to do the research and found the suspected cause:
In 1994, farmers began giving a drug called diclofenac to cattle and other livestock for pain, inflammation, and other conditions. But it was poisonous to the vultures that fed on these animals, destroying their kidneys. In just a decade, Indian vulture populations fell dramatically, from 50 million individuals to just a couple thousand.
This research is one example of how we humans develop pharmaceuticals (another industrialised threat tied to industrialised farming) to treat livestock and do not consider the interplay with our ecosystem.
A starting point for understanding more about the ancient pristine carbon sink boreal forest of the northern hemisphere is to read through the following link:
We humans are now into the final phase of destroying our planet, we are finding excuses to see the permafrost melt, releasing methane from the once hard frozen land, as an opportunity (thus in denial about the threat)
Treehugger
As the permafrost retreats, millions of acres will be logged then ploughed, drilled on, built on, polluted into and soon destroyed by human greed. We will be told it is to ‘feed the world’ as resources once relied upon become untenable in other parts of the world. Plenty of clean, fresh water just waiting for us to pollute, like we always do.
As we log the forest, we lose the carbon capture and send it up to intensify the greenhouse gas blanket overhead, which is already killing us with extreme weather.
We will drill for oil of course. “We need it as we transition away from fossil fuels.” They will tell us to keep calm, that climate change is a hoax and all extreme weather is once in 500 years, but we all know it is now every year, even more than once a year across the globe.
We never listen to the wisdom of those who respect everything on this beautiful planet.
Vigliotti, in his book ‘Before It’s Gone’, talks to an indigenous woman who may be the last of her generation as parcels of the boreal forest are sold off around her territory in Alaska:
“Agriculture is probably something we need to get into as a state, but what does it look like? It doesn’t look like this,” she said, referring to the state’s new auction. “Have you read the terms of the sale? Basically, anyone can buy the land and do whatever they want with it.” Those terms were sprinkled over seventy-two pages in the “2022 Alaska State Agricultural Land Offering” brochure, alongside maps of each of the twenty-four parcels up for grabs. And Eva was right—nowhere in the fine print were buyers required to actually cultivate the land. Instead, they only had to commit to clearing at least 25 percent of the parcels within five years and keeping it in “farmable” condition, meaning free of trees. The auction was open to anyone from anywhere in the world, including businesses and corporations, and there was nothing stopping a single person, business, or corporation from buying all twenty-four parcels. “When I hear that, I think many things. Land grab, for starters, but then, what will that land be used for? What’s to stop big factory farms from moving in or massive housing developments from being built?” asked Eva. “This is the boreal forest we’re talking about. It’s sacred land.” Eva’s concerns were valid, and not eased by what Erik told me when I had spoken with him during our tour. “We want real farmers. We want to provide opportunities. We can’t tell them exactly what to do with those opportunities,” he said. It all sounded like a take-me-at-my-word “handshake deal,” and those rarely end well.
It’s a sad fact that around 85% of farmed animals are confined in factory farms here in the UK. This intensive method of farming is the single biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet, and yet in our latest data we can reveal the number of intensive factory farms is on the rise, instead of in decline.
Our new interactive Factory Farming Map plots the number of farmed animals confined across the UK by county. Overall, there has been a 12% increase in the number of UK factory farms from 2016 to 2023. Even more concerning, is the 20% increase of large factory farms in pig and poultryunits over this seven-year period. “
……………………….
Cruelty to animals is therefore on the rise in the UK.
However, agriculture is a major source of methane emissions and suggestions by the UN to decrease emissions may be too expensive for small farmers to implement.
See:
Livestock emissions – from manure and gastroenteric releases – account for roughly 32 per cent of human-caused methane emissions.
Apparently, with more mouths to feed in the world, there is an unprecedented demand for animal protein. Factory farming has been happening in the US for decades. Rural farmers are unable to compete with world trade prices, and simply sell up or become slave workers under harsh factory farm conglomerates.
Vigliotti (book, Before It’s Gone) tells us how corporates rig the game in the US:
The first step is usually obtaining low-interest, federally backed loans to establish a foothold in an agricultural region. Once enough land is secured, the corporate farm then floods the market with everything from meat and milk to produce and grain. The resulting surpluses reduce the value of commodities so much it’s nearly impossible for their less-funded and smaller family-owned competition to break even. And here’s another added layer of fucked-up: Corporate farms know the government will eventually buy their surplus in an effort to stabilize prices for the smaller guys. But by the time such a stabilization does happen—and the reality is these factory farms are constantly overproducing and thus always driving down prices—the small farm can no longer hold on. And for those who can manage to squeak by, another layer of unfair competition awaits. Entire sectors of the industry have grown around big corporate players, including megawholesalers and slaughterhouses, which put smaller main street operations known for competitive pricing out of business and treat the small farmer that walks through their new doors like a beggar off the street. It’s no surprise Chapter 12 bankruptcies were up nearly 13 percent in the Midwest from July 2018 to 2019 and 50 percent in the Northwest, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. The vast majority of these losers are the small guys. Now back to that earlier question of how much land their Goliath competitors control. We’ll never truly know. Under the Obama administration, the EPA began to take stock of the nation’s factory farms, but halted the effort after industry groups sued. “[The industry] has avoided any effective regulation and accountability for a long time,” former EPA lawyer Michele Merkel told PBS shortly after quitting over the agency’s reluctance to take action against megafarms. This unregulated monopolizing of American agriculture explains why, even as more than four million small farms have disappeared since 1948, total farm output has more than doubled, according to the USDA, carried out largely by corporate-backed factory farms who hollow out main streets and overwork the land. “You can only abuse the land so much before it stops giving back,” warned Barb. Factory farms, though, are showing no sign of slowing down. While these megaproducers only account for around 10 percent of all American farms, they produce around 80 percent of the food in supermarkets, according to the USDA. Put another way: While around 90 percent of America’s farms are classified as “small,” they only provide about 20 percent of the country’s food. “This doesn’t just impact us. Less competition also means less variety, which ultimately hurts you,” Barb said, pointing at me as we continued our tour by car, coming to a stop sign that looked as if it hadn’t seen traffic in years. “When more of our food comes from a single source, what happens to our food security if there’s a recall and the factory farm is forced to shut down? We’re getting to the point where a few corporations control who eats and who doesn’t.” And the threat is even greater than that. As the family farmer disappears, along with them goes the generational knowledge of the earth that corporate farms don’t have. Family farmers know the weather and its impact on everything from seeds to the soil they’re planted in. Studies show family farms also use less pesticide and fertilizer, and produce higher yields per acre than factory farms. The research suggests if more land was owned by family farms, it would be healthier and produce more. The lessons from the Dust Bowl, while a century old, are part of every small farmer’s DNA. “Factory farms, especially the ones that raise livestock, are often automated facilities operated remotely with minimal staff, and don’t have the same knowledge and certainly not the same community investment. A lot of the equipment is run by a computer,” Barb said as we passed land that had recently been purchased by a corporate farm. “So, in some cases, you’ve got a guy in an office somewhere in Timbuktu, not even on the farm, running the land remotely. Now you’ve lost the innate understanding of the land. What happens when all that wisdom is gone for good? Most farmers aren’t in this line of work to make money, and that’s a good thing, because most don’t. We’re just trying to look after the land for the next generation.” They sounded like the fading words of farmers from more than a century ago.
Powerful food industry lobbyists threaten to sue governments if they try to regulate them to reduce methane, improve and protect soils, reduce fertilizers and pesticides and, essentially carry out the careful guardianship necessary to protect the land.
“We are a uniquely destructive species, and the only one on the planet capable of pushing another one to extinction.”
So says Vigliotti, in his book, Before It’s Gone”.
Later, when talking about bad land management whilst the huge expansion of farming tore up the balanced ecosystem and resulted in the Dust Bowl tragedy of the 1930s, he quotes Dr. Hugh Bennett, born 1881 whose research led him to say:
“Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people, barbaric or civilized. “
With Hugh at the helm of the newly created “Operation Dust Bowl,” he enlisted farmers and ranchers, backed by federal assistance, to plant rows of trees and grasses to form wind brakes. People were trained in soil retention and crop rotation techniques (which Native Americans practised long before the settlers drove them off this precious land).
Americans don’t tend to appreciate Hugh now and so bad practices have returned, disrespecting caring for the earth beneath their feet.
And when it was fashionable to sport a beaver hat, hunters eradicated the beavers with an insane eagerness. Yet the beavers were an asset to the land, controlling water and preventing extensive flooding as they worked so hard in waterways in wild land.
We humans have built hydroelectric dams which are yet another ecological disaster. We seem to pride ourselves in finding ways to thwart Nature.
Vigliotti sought out knowledgeable people to answer vital questions:
“How are beaver dams better than, say, hydroelectric dams that provide clean energy?” I wondered. “That energy comes at a cost,” Emily said. “Hydro dams are walled-off concrete fortresses that can cut off the entire flow of a river, leading to droughts downstream and disrupting species migration and freshwater biodiversity. I think of beaver dams as speed bumps,” she said. “Beaver dams are nature’s way.” As Emily explained, when a beaver builds a dam, the structure slows rainwater and snowmelt from rapidly draining down rivers into oceans. The result is a natural reservoir capable of storing water for years while still supporting wildlife migration. “When the beavers move in here and they slow this water down, a lot of it goes into recharging the groundwater, and that’s what we’re pumping for irrigation. That’s what we use for our food, that’s what we use for our lawns. And these beavers are recharging it for us. So they’re sort of depositing water into the bank that we take out at a later date.” The drier an area is, the more critical dams are because soil, over extended periods of time without water, becomes too brittle to retain water when it eventually arrives. It’s like watering parched soil in a potted plant. The water simply flows right out of that hole at the bottom, not giving the roots time to hydrate. But if you obstruct that hole, the water sticks around, replenishing the soil and the roots. The results in the natural world are wetlands, which are breeding grounds for about 80 percent of animal species in the American West. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, California’s wetlands have shrunk by 90 percent since the 1800s, around the time beavers started vanishing from the landscape. “The desertification of California aligns with the loss of our beaver population. The science isn’t clear, but I think it’s safe to assume wildfires wouldn’t be as bad as they are today if we had more beavers,” Emily said. “And if we can keep vegetation alive and prevent fires, we can also prevent other related environmental disasters like mudslides and extreme flooding.”
Nick is the head of the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and oversees a team of volunteers who travel across the West building “starter dams,” what’s technically known in the emerging industry as beaver dam analogues. That’s how I found myself waist deep in a babbling creek on a mountainous ranch in Coalville, Utah, slinging handfuls of mud over layers of tree branches and sticks. The landowner had heard about Emily Fairfax’s research and Nick’s relocation project and wanted in. “Too much water can be a bad thing, but when there’s none of it and crops are dying and ranchers are selling off their cattle and there’s no end in sight, well, that’s enough to change people’s opinions,” Nick said as he grabbed a pile of mud from the bank of the creek. “Beavers, what they do is they get in here and they scoop the mud up, they just come and grab a whole bunch, push it with their chest and hand and it into the crevasses. I would get on my belly and push it in, but I don’t want to do that yet,” he chuckled.
More than one thousand beaver dam analogues have been successfully resettled in the West, with hundreds of more requests coming in from farmers and ranchers. “At some point in history people just accepted beavers were commodities and pests and never stopped to ask what removing them would mean for the environment and our own lives. We trapped and killed them out of some kind of necessity and now we’re working twice as hard to reintroduce them because we’ve run out of all other ways of restoring our planet,” Nick said.
As we invest in the future by cutting back greenhouse gasses, we can also invest in strategies that have near immediate impact. As I watched our two beavers bob in the water of their new home like they had lived there all their lives, it was clearer than ever that restoring the land and learning to coexist with nature could be the fastest, most cost-effective, and lasting way to make our communities—our ecosystems—resilient to failure.”
After wildfires destroyed homes across California, innovative, but expensive, intensely fire-resistant homes have been designed. Some are already in place in the still sparsely rehomed community of Paradise.
These are modular, pre clad built homes and 12 month round produce protecting units. So you can live and farm remotely, protected from Nature’s ravages.
When Yellowstone Park suffered a catastrophic sudden snow melt during a storm and unleashed boulders as the violent waters cut through the land below, the assessment of the situation by engineers left many heads shaking with anxiety that maybe solutions were out of reach.
In a section of the book entitled “Hwy 89”, Vigliotti says:
The NPS is now drafting ways to adapt their hardest-hit parks to climate change, and they’ve had help from the federal government. For all the criticism President Trump’s environmental policies have received—and most of it is well deserved—in 2020, he flooded the National Park Service with money. The Great American Outdoors Act allocated $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and provided up to $9.5 billion over five years to help maintain the country’s national parks. President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, passed in late 2021, set aside an additional $1.7 billion to specifically help upgrade roads and bridges and support environmental adaptations. It all sounds like a lot of money, until you do the math. According to National Park Service records, the agency manages more than 12,600 miles of roads nationwide, 40 percent of which were in need of repairs according to a 2019 park study. In Yellowstone, the price tag for roadwork in 2019 was $1 billion. That was before the flood hit. Highway 89, the one that would cost an estimated $1 billion to repair, wasn’t even on the park’s to-do list. In 2020, after the first round of funding was approved, John Garder, the senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan advocacy group for the NPS, said the money was “helping stem the tide, but certainly not enough.” Similar financial hurdles are also hitting America’s concrete forests. In New York City, erosion from floods and inadequate drainage led to a 38 percent spike in sidewalk and street sinkholes in 2021 compared to the previous year, according to the mayor’s office. City leaders linked the problem directly to climate change and said repairing the sunken holes to last another fifty to one hundred years would be expensive but save taxpayers money in the end. They pointed to a report from the National Institute of Building Sciences that found that, for every dollar a community invests on climate adaptation, they save six dollars on needing to rebuild again. But as our extreme elements outpace humanity’s ability to adapt to them, not all problems can be solved by throwing money at them. While asking for more funding for sinkhole repairs, Rohit Aggarwala, NYC’s chief climate officer and the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, warned money would only help so much because they were quickly exhausting all available engineering solutions. “The issue right now is we don’t know exactly what we would do with more money that would systematically reduce the likelihood of sinkholes,” Rohit said at a city council meeting on the topic in 2022. Protecting modern-day Rome and places like Yellowstone (Mother Nature’s Notre Dame) from ecosystem collapse will require more than just dollars. Fortunately, there is another lifeline, but it too has started to fray. The Clean Air Act (CAA) was passed in 1970 and is considered by legal experts to be the most powerful environmental law in the world. Overseen by the EPA, which was established around the same time, the CAA monitored and restricted harmful air pollution in American cities. The act initially targeted gasses including carbon monoxide, lead, and nitrogen dioxide, but expanded over time to include carbon dioxide as concerns over global warming grew. The act gave the EPA the power to place hefty fines on companies that emitted these gasses at toxic levels and is partly credited with keeping annual emissions in the United State’s relatively stable since the 1990s, despite the nation’s population growing by nearly 80 million people. Even so, there’s still plenty of room for progress.
And what did Vigliotti explain about the clipping of the wings of the Environmental Protection Agency by the Supreme Court? He tells us here:
The U.S. remains one of the highest emitters of CO2 per capita in the world, and collectively, the global community emits around 36 billion tons annually, according to Global Carbon Project. That’s a more than 200 percent spike since the 1960s. While the CAA was seen as a blueprint for developing nations, the landmark policy hit its own major roadblock in 2022 when the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, which alone are responsible for around 25 percent of the United States’s total CO2 output each year. The vote was 6 to 3, with the courts three liberal judges in dissent saying the majority had stripped the EPA of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.” They weren’t exaggerating. Our air controls everything from summer highs to winters lows and has the power to throw Earth’s natural cycle into a tailspin of extreme and unpredictable reactions. The same radicalized air that caused a freak spring snowstorm followed by a freak steamy downpour in Yellowstone was also linked to a series of heat waves that killed 339 people in Arizona. The summer of 2022 was the state’s deadliest on record, and the summer of 2023 was the hottest, with temperatures in Phoenix exceeding 110 degrees for an entire month. Overnight lows never dropped below 95. ER doctors showed me how they treated a wave of patients suffering from heatstroke by slipping them into body bags full of ice and water. My team and I also rode along with paramedics who were injecting patients with ice-cold IV to rapidly cool them off. It’s not just heat. This destabilized air is also responsible for transforming a typical blizzard in Buffalo, New York, into an apocalyptic winter storm that entombed entire neighborhoods in walls of ice and snow. Dozens of people died, and many of the victims were found trapped in their cars. The deep freeze quickly engulfed the city like a fast-moving wildfire, and you could almost hear the crackle of ice forming when looking at the pictures of the frozen still life.
Anyone left doubting the challenges ahead of finding resilience solutions fast enough, must surely be persuaded by now….for it is “events, dear boy, events” (as said by Harold Macmillan, PM of UK, 1957 – 63).
In the UK, Scotland has been building resilience against flooding, spending millions on future proofing towns such as Hawick, Scottish Borders. The progress report is shown in the image above. The Hawick community have been kept informed by detailed construction reports like these posted to residents in the surrounding area over the years. The project is nearing completion and it has added aesthetic walks, cycle ways and gardens to the picturesque tourist town.
Our power grids are so supportive to our human existence that we cannot afford to ignore future proofing them against extreme demands or attacks from cyber warfare. Sadly, weapons of war can destroy these infrastructures in minutes, no matter how much investment we have ploughed in. However, where research exists to point to resilience being designed in to old grid networks to cope with extreme weather, there is no time to be lost.
Here is an extract from one area of research which governments will use to help them plan infrastructure upgrades:
The rise of power outages caused by extreme weather events and the frequency of extreme weather events has motivated the study of grid resilience. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of existing research on the study of grid resilience, which focuses on the point of view of power system engineering with respect to extreme weather events. Firstly, it investigates confounding terminologies used in the study of grid resilience, such as the definitions, the differences with grid reliability, the extreme weather events, and their extreme impact on the power systems. Secondly, it presents a grid resilience framework as a general provision to understand the subjects in the study of grid resilience. Thirdly, it describes several methodologies of grid resilience assessment and some quantitative indices. Finally, various grid resilience enhancement strategies implementations are discussed.
In the US First Responders are exhausted and are operating at 65%. There is an urgent need to train and hire more.
And as countries lose their freshwater supply and watch their crops fail and livestock die, the funds must be focused on these drought areas to rescue them, especially using modern, tried and tested techniques such as:
In the book, ‘Before It’s Gone’ by Jonathan Vigliotti, I read of the consequences of extensive loss of whole communities in Western States of America, plus the memorable loss of the old community of Lahaina in Hawaii, due to out of control wildfires.
I live in a Scottish Glen, high in the fells of the Scottish Borders. The fells were over grazed by sheep and cattle when we first moved here. In Autumn the grasses yellowed and in sunshine they looked golden. In winter they were often covered in snow, and in Spring and Summer they sprang to life with multitudes of grass types and wildflowers. Wildlife consisted of deer, wild goats, mountain hares, beavers, badgers, rodents of all types. Fish swam in the clean burns and the ecology was as pure and devoid of poisons as could be.
But the landowner of the estate took up a lucrative offer from the Forestry Commission to cover a percentage of his land in mostly Sitka Spruce. These have grown into a dense forest and killed off the natural flora as no light penetrates the forest floor. The process of planting damaged the hydrology so, as we are on the Watershed, rainfall rushes faster down the slopes, especially when an older forest was felled not long after the new forests were in sapling stages. Many wild animals and birds were displaced when the old forest was logged.
Then a new landowner arrived and planted hardwood forest wherever it was still possible to plant trees. These are most welcome and consist of a variety of trees native to Britain, but avoiding Ash, as these were already dying across Britain due to a fungus infection on imported saplings from Asia. These had been planted by the previous landowner as ‘screen’ of the pine forest and have since died.
I looked up related documents to help me understand the threat to Scotland of wildfires:
Climate change is leading to warmer, drier weather conditions in spring and summer, and more frequent, prolonged droughts, which increases the risk of wildfires startingandspreading.
Wildfire risk also increases with disease outbreaks, windthrow damage, and changes to climatic suitability affecting vigour, which increase the level of standing and fallen deadwood and litter. According to the UK Climate Risk CCRA3 Wildfire Briefing, the risk of wildfire could double in a 2 °C global temperature-increase scenario and quadruple in a 4 °C scenario.
Threats to forests and woodland
Wildfires are a semi-natural hazard, with most started accidentally from recreational or land management activities, or deliberately. Wildfires can start within forests or spread in from adjacent areas, such as grassland, heathland or moorland. Wildfires start more frequently in areas with high visitor numbers, near areas of socio-economic deprivation, and in areas close to public rights of way. Potential ignition sources include campfires, BBQs, hot oil or particles from machinery and vehicles, or power lines.
There are two periods of high wildfire risk: late winter-spring when there is dead-dry ground vegetation present (e.g., grass, bracken), overnight-frosts, dry periods with low daytime relative humidity; and summer, with hot and dry weather, including heatwaves and droughts. Wildfires during the latter are usually more intense and more damaging. The changing climate is likely to increase the risk of wildfires in both the late winter-spring and summer periods, and may extend the high-risk season into the autumn.
There are three main types of wildfires: surface fires, ground fires and crown fires. The most common is the surface fire, burning fuels such as heather, grass, bracken and gorse. Surface fires can burn fiercely, spread fast with long flames and at high fire intensity. There can be substantial growth of these fuels along roads and rides, before canopy closure, and after woods have been thinned. Ground fires consume peat and soil organic matter and threaten carbon stores. Smouldering peat fires are hard to extinguish and can re-kindle frequently.
Crown fires occur less frequently, during hot and dry summers, but are the most dangerous. They spread from surface fires, with ladder fuels, including tall shrubs, low tree canopies, standing deadwood and trees in poor health, and leaning windblown trees increase the risk of canopy fires.
Where I live we have ample heather, grass, bracken – and now gorse, imported with the forestry activity. There are large peatlands in these fells.
I deliberately planted hardwood trees in what had been the sheep dowsing area which was attached to a bothy and pens – the bothy had been rebuilt as a well insulated small cottage. All the sheep facilities were made available as potential garden once we arrived to live here.
I love trees. I can’t get enough of them. Over the time we have lived here, I have watched our garden trees mature, along with the surrounding estate forests.
But we have had some serous drought periods over recent years.
Last year the Scottish government issued a fire warning for all the country. Indeed the BBC ran a shocking piece about a wildfire in the Highlands:
Local councillor Chris Ballance said the community of Cannich had been “traumatised” by the incident and praised the efforts of firefighters.
Image caption,The fire affected a large area of moor and woodland near Cannich
In a letter to the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Mr Ballance, said: “Thirty square miles of moor and woodland, 25 years-worth of conservation work destroyed. I smelt the smoke 12 miles away, and it was visible from space.
“On behalf of the City of Inverness area committee, and in particular my ward of Aird and Loch Ness, I have to thank you, and ask you to give our thanks to all your team, for your work in overcoming the fire at Cannich.
“As the earth burns, I can think of no better definition of the word ‘hero’ than ‘firefighter’.”
RSPB Scotland said it was still assessing the full-scale of the fire’s impact on its Corrimony reserve.
A spokeswoman said: “But it is clear that it is extensive and will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and take many years to restore.”
So many people had invested their money, labour and much of their lives in ecological restoration of this conservation area….see
The need for carbon capture has been the underlying motivation to plant trees, preserve wetlands and peat bogs wherever we can. To conserve and rewild with flora and fauna to regain an ecological balance which supports life on Earth.
It was about hope that we could reduce the impact of carbon emissions and save living things from extinction. But global temperatures have exceeded the limit of 1.5 degrees above recommended levels. Fossil fuels are still being mined and they drive world trade and economic growth, whilst their emissions from use rapidly trap heat creating the greenhouse effect. It is a vicious circle ultimately tipping the balance away from a habitable world.
As fast as we try to conserve land and use the trees to capture carbon, we see our efforts go up in smoke in an even faster moment. As the fire burns, so the trapped carbon is released, adding to the greenhouse effect, especially as these fires have consumed vast acres of land globally over the past few years. Indeed, it is, sadly, the new normal.
The burning of natural vegetation emits huge quantities of released carbon which once were captured by the trees and plant life. Those global fires simply increased the temps past the limit in a vicious circle, intensifying year on year.
Methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, has been shown to produce roughly 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The gas is released from pipelines, storage tanks and energy facilities. It also wafts from landfills and the cattle industry. Scientists say a substantial reduction in the emissions is among the changes that could make the swiftest impact on climate change.
For those hoping to rebuild their homes in Lahaina, they have been advised to use no combustible building materials. They must create defensible space around their home – so no grass, trees or plant life which could dry out and catch fire.
I don’t know about you, but if my view from inside my home lacked the lush greenery I now see this summer, I could not endure a single day there.
Vigliotti tells us about John Mercer, who, back in 1968 focused on Antarctica, and was first to realise over his lifetime research:
that human activity was driving CO2 levels to rates not seen in millions of years, so fast there was no time for Mother Nature or humanity to adapt to the unintended consequences.
In Vigliotti’s book, ‘Before it’s gone’ he describes looking into the Helheim Glacier, being informed by Dr. Gordon Hamilton* of University of Maine. He was told of the rapid change the data they collected had revealed. “My colleague almost fell out of his chair. It’s that alarming.” The scientist was obviously greatly troubled as they saw a line in a rock where the surface ice used to reach. Helheim had thinned by more than 300ft in just over a decade and the glacier had retreated by more than 4 miles. Trackers showed one part of Greenland’s ice sheet was moving at 8.7 miles a year with insufficient snowfall to rebuild what was lost. Hamilton commented,”Humans have never witnessed this scale of loss before, and not enough people are worried as they should be.”
Vigliotti was also told by Hamilton that warmer air and water were melting the icebergs at both ends. “We’re witnessing the possible collapse of a critical regulator of our planet,”Hamilton told him.
Vigliotti points out the oceans are now 1.5 degree warmer after absorbing 90 percent of excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect. More heat reduces oxygen for marine life living to a depth of 700 metres. In the Arctic the ocean temperature has increased by 3 degrees.
The arctic is losing control of its rhythm of holding freshwater in a frozen reservoir that helps regulate ocean temperature and salinity. But now the freshwater escapes in a flood, decreasing salinity, reducing the density of the Atlantic, and thus slowing the conveyor belt of underwater currents that circulate colder arctic water and vital nutrients to the warm south. It is estimated this rapid melting of Antarctica and Arctic major icebergs will shut down this critical conveyor belt by 2050.
And politically we are failing:
My second beef is with the epic failure of Green politicians in Germany and elsewhere to target and tax the continent’s Big Bad Polluters – the top 10% – corporations, private jet and superyacht owners included. If the top 10% of global emitters were required to slash their annual carbon emissions to that of the average EU citizen, other things being equal, that would cut global emissions by around 1/3 – and would be FAIR.
Instead, the Greens and other policy-makers imposed the cost and delivery of decarbonisation on to the shoulders of millions of insecure, low-paid Europeans enduring a cost-of-living crisis.
From Substack, Ann Pettifor, on Europe failing to finance cutting emissions, June 2024
*Dr Gordon Stuart Hamilton of Maine University, died in 2016 carrying out his dangerous research which showed us all we have no time to debate the issue, he found the evidence:
Gordon Hamilton was a glaciologist at the University of Maine. (Laure Noualhat)
In the US, after WWII, the way to peaceful coexistence between North and Southern States was to exclude any benefit to African Americans, despite their contribution during World War II.
The Republican Right had been opposed to Franklyn D Roosevelt’s “socialist” programs, from Social Security to marginal tax rates above 90 percent (See reference in Fareed Zakaria’s book ‘Age of Revolutions’), but Dwight Eisenhower supported almost all of his predecessor’s programs. These enabled democracy plus markets plus the welfare state.
The polarization of left vs right, so apparent today, was avoided by Roosevelt’s policies. Government involvement in the economy, after the war and Great Depression, was welcomed. The result was white supremacy, minimising Black voting rights to 4 percent.
All non white and southern European immigrants were banned.
The Southern states interpreted the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic and farm workers (largely Black) from joining unions or obtaining Social Security benefits. In 1936, Roosevelt won 97 percent of the vote in Mississippi and 99 percent in South Carolina.
This harmonious North/South utopian American Dream continued into the 1950s as legal segregation led to the Black communities being marginalised, so they could not benefit from booming economic growth.
The Right and Left concepts were meaningless in politics, all whites were enjoying increasingly improved lives and, in 1952, the Black novelist Ralph Ellison wrote “I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
The plight of Palestinians might also be equated to a refusal to see them as when the League of Nations mandates were enacted, purported to ensure a path to peace in the region.
In 1920 the Conference of San Remo in Italy created two mandates; one, over Palestine, was given to Great Britain, and the other, over Syria, went to France. This act effectively separated the area now occupied by Israel and Jordan from that of Syria. In November 1920 Abdullah, Faisal’s brother, arrived in Maʿān (then part of the Hejaz) with 2,000 armed supporters intent on gathering together tribes to attack the French, who had forced Faisal to relinquish his newly founded kingdom in Syria. By April 1921, however, the British had decided that Abdullah would take over as ruler of what then became known as Transjordan.
Effectively, Turkish rule in Transjordan was simply replaced by British rule. The mandate, confirmed by the League of Nations in July 1922, gave the British virtually a free hand in administering the territory. However, in September, the establishment of “a Jewish national home” was explicitly excluded from the mandate’s clauses, and it was made clear that the area would also be closed to Jewish immigration. On May 25, 1923, the British recognized Transjordan’s independence under the rule of Emir Abdullah, but, as outlined in a treaty as well as the constitution in 1928, matters of finance, military, and foreign affairs would remain in the hands of a British “resident.” Full independence was finally achieved after World War II by a treaty concluded in London on March 22, 1946, and Abdullah subsequently proclaimed himself king. A new constitution was promulgated, and in 1949 the name of the state was changed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Throughout the interwar years Abdullah had depended on British financial support. The British also assisted him in forming an elite force called the Arab Legion, comprisingBedouin troops but under the command of and trained by British officers, which was used to maintain and secure the allegiance of Abdullah’s Bedouin subjects.
On May 15, 1948, the day after the Jewish Agency proclaimed the independent state of Israel and immediately following the British withdrawal from Palestine, Transjordan joined its Arab neighbours in the first Arab-Israeli war. The Arab Legion, commanded by Glubb Pasha (John [later Sir John] Bagot Glubb), and Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi troops entered Palestine. Abdullah’s primary purpose, which he had spelled out in secret discussions with Jewish envoys, was to extend his rule to include the area allotted to the Palestinian Arabs under the United Nationspartition resolution of November 1947. Accordingly, he engaged his forces in the region of Palestine now popularly known as the West Bank (the area just west of the Jordan River) and expelled Jewish forces from East Jerusalem (the Old City). When the Jordan-Israel armistice was signed on April 3, 1949, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—an area of about 2,100 square miles (5,400 square km)—came under Jordanian rule, and almost half a million Palestinian Arabs joined the half million Transjordanians. One year later, Jordan formally annexed this territory. Israel and Britain had tacitly agreed to Abdullah keeping the area, but the Arab countries and most of the world opposed the king’s action; only Britain and Pakistan recognized the annexation. The incorporation into Jordan of the West Bank Palestinians and a large refugee population that was hostile to the Hashemite regime brought severe economic and political consequences. On the other hand, Abdullah gained such Muslim shrines as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem’s Old City, which compensated for his father’s loss of Mecca and Medina to Ibn Saud a generation earlier.
Abdullah was assassinated at Al-Aqṣā Mosque in Jerusalem on July 20, 1951, by a young Palestinian frustrated by the king’s hostility toward Palestinian nationalism. In August 1952 the parliament declared Abdullah’s son and successor, Ṭalal, mentally unfit to rule, and he abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Hussein ibn Talal, who was crowned king on his 18th birthday, May 2, 1953.
For interest here is a 1917 map, the importance of the Suez Canal was uppermost in the minds of the Allies.
Description English: Map of the Northern and Central Sinai area in World War I. Date 1917 Source “The Times History of the War” Volume X, page 368. Author British Government
As humans we struggle to find a consensus to gain peace as reactionaries trigger war all too often. Yet in the 1800s Kant had a vision of peace which is possible if we all put away our brutal measures. In Fareed Zakaria’s latest book (see above reference) he presents Kant’s vision:
the paradigmatic Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, writing amid the bloodshed of the French Revolution, published an essay titled “Toward Perpetual Peace.”11 Kant described what was needed to achieve the conditions of permanent peace, not just the temporary absence of war. His ideas sound strikingly contemporary. He argued for a world of economically interdependent republics, where citizens preferred trading to fighting and had the power to determine policy. He sought a federation of free nations governed by law rather than might, a precursor to the idea of international organizations like the UN. Kant envisioned a future that was rooted in the rights of human beings as opposed to the self-interest of states.
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