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“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up.” — BioScience, Oct 24, 2023, State of the Climate Report. 

Humpback whale off the US Atlantic coast.  (By Pierre Gleizes, © Greenpeace). Audio: Songs of the Humpback Whale, 1972, recorded by Roger Payne.

By Chris Greenberg,  Source: Greenpeace 

Whales could always speak for themselves. Humans just didn’t hear them.

Roger Payne changed that with a simple, empathetic act: He listened. And then we all did.

In 1970, Payne (1935-2023) made sure the world finally paid attention to the “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” Payne’s landmark 35-minute album of recorded whale song in the wild deepened humanity’s connection with the natural world, catalyzed the global movement to stop commercial whaling, and had a lasting impact on the growing ecology movement, including Greenpeace.

Payne, who passed away in June 2023 at age 88 at his home in Vermont, founded Ocean Alliance in 1971 and was an inspiration and friend to Greenpeace activists during and far beyond the iconic “Save The Whales” campaign that garnered international in the 1970s and played a key role in the adoption of an commercial whaling moratorium in 1986.

Born in New York City, educated at Harvard and Cornell, Payne’s pioneering whale song recordings and decades of study of their communications have arguably done more to dispel the Moby Dick myth of the violent and solitary whale than anything else. His first record of what he described as an “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound,” made with the help of researcher Scott McVay, would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies, making it the bestselling environmental album of all time.

“My idea was, if you can move people emotionally, you can also get them to act,” Payne told Nautilus in 2021. “To see if I was right, I started playing humpback whale sounds to friends and other small audiences, and soon it became very clear that these sounds moved people deeply. In fact, some friends wept when they heard them—they’re that powerful.”

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Excerpts from a Paul Krugman opinion piece in the New York Times about the June 30, 2022 Supreme Court climate decision:

“Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests… Ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action… The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?

“It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations… The United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.”

Patrick Parenteau

Professor of Law, Vermont Law School

In a highly anticipated but not unexpected 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2022, that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

The ruling doesn’t take away the EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, but it makes federal action harder by requiring the agency to show that Congress has charged it to act – in an area where Congress has consistently failed to act.

The Clean Power Plan, the policy at the heart of the ruling, never took effect because the court blocked it in 2016, and the EPA now plans to develop a new policy instead. Nonetheless, the court went out of its way to strike it down in this case and reject the agency’s interpretation of what the Clean Air Act permitted.

Having said what the EPA cannot do, the court gave no guidance on what the agency can do about this urgent problem. Beyond climate policy, the ruling poses serious questions about how the court will view other regulatory programs. Continue reading →

Keith Johnson (Jamaica), Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference (left), United Nations Secretary-General U Thant (center) and Maurice F. Strong, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (right). (UN photo).

By Peter Dykstra
Environmental Health News

In 1972, world leaders had gathered in Stockholm in an unprecedented acknowledgement that we were running into trouble. The gathering hammered out a weighty Statement of Principles. It was the first draft of an owner’s manual for planet Earth, but it left much to do.

Two decades later, the site was Rio de Janeiro. World leaders addressed the hopes for Rio:

“There are those who say economic growth and environmental protection are not compatible. Well, let them come to the United States.″ – U.S. President George H.W. Bush

″The ecological debt should be paid, not the foreign debt. Hunger must disappear, not man.” – Cuban President Fidel Castro

“We are ready to assume our share and hope other industrial countries will do the same. … We are determined to live up to our responsibilities to developing countries.” – German Chancellor Helmut Kohl

″Developed countries have a greater obligation to find solutions and to transfer technology. … Protection of the environment must respect the sovereignty and independence of each country.” – Chinese President Li Peng

Journalist George Monbiot was a tad more cynical about Rio’s rhetoric and intentions:

“It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It could be illustrated with rainbows and psychedelic unicorns and stuck on the door of your toilet. But without any

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By Bill Kovarik 

From The Conversation, Dec. 9, 2021

On the frosty morning of Dec. 9, 1921, in Dayton, Ohio, researchers at a General Motors lab poured a new fuel blend into one of their test engines. Immediately, the engine began running more quietly and putting out more power.

The new fuel was tetraethyl lead. With vast profits in sight – and very few public health regulations at the time – General Motors Co. rushed gasoline diluted with tetraethyl lead to market despite the known health risks of lead. They named it “Ethyl” gas.

It has been 100 years since that pivotal day in the development of leaded gasoline. As a historian of media and the environment, I see this anniversary as a time to reflect on the role of public health advocates and environmental journalists in preventing profit-driven tragedy.

Lead and death

By the early 1920s, the hazards of lead were well known – even Charles Dickens and Benjamin Franklin had written about the dangers of lead poisoning.

When GM began selling leaded gasoline, public health experts questioned its decision. One called lead a serious menace to public health, and another called concentrated tetraethyl lead a “malicious and creeping” poison.

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The Trump administration’s impact on environment and health policy, brought to you by the The Earth Institute of Columbia University and the Society of Environmental Journalists.

There is something perverse and peevish about the anti-environmental movement that current US president Donald Trump exemplifies. Yet if there is anything we can learn from environmental history, it is that willful ignorance and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality is not unique in history.

Consider, for example, the sort of arrogance that led the Times of London to proclaim, in 1854, that it would “prefer to take our chance of cholera … than be bullied into health.” Other famous examples include: denial of the germ theory of disease in the mid- to late-19th century; resistance to mosquito control at the start of the US Panama Canal project in 1904; acceptance of deadly leaded gasoline in 1926; denials that tobacco caused cancer in the 1960s; and objections to reducing ozone-depleting CFC refrigerants in the 1980s.

So it’s not just our president and his minions, and it’s not just the climate change issue. Trump has amplified a self-destructive tendency that lurks in human nature and affects many issues.

This week, a New York Times editorial entitled “Trump Imperils the Planet” explained that in terms of endangered species and climate change, the Trump administration “is taking the country, and the world, backward.” For the stout of heart, the Times provides a long, depressing list of environmental standards that are being rolled back, not just in the US, but in many other countries as well, following the American lead.

Central to Trump’s thinking – or lack thereof – is the notion that sustainability is not compatible with economic growth. Nothing could be more naive or short-sighted, of course, but even if others see him cutting a figura ridicola, Trump’s brazen arrogance shows he is determined to carry through to the end. And what an end.

Consider Planet Trump, year 2100. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision just how lifeless earth could become in less than a century. If we do not act soon, we will get Planet Trump instead of the great blue earth; we have dead seas and not living oceans; we have silent springs rather than flocks of birds; we have a dead world, a world that is no longer home.

We only have a short time to stop Planet Trump if this world is going to survive in any recognizable form. To be clear, the struggle ahead is one that must use the more powerful force of persuasion and non-violent resistance. No one should dream that any real change will come from the barrel of a gun. That, too, would be a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the reality of our precarious situation.