Environment

When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter. Maps of the pistes were left stacked beside a stapler; the staff rota pinned to the wall.

Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side, as if someone has just flicked through it during a quiet spell. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table.

The Céüze resort in the southern French Alps had been open for 85 years and was one of the oldest in the country. Today, it is one of scores of ski resorts abandoned across France – part of a new landscape of “ghost stations”.

More than 186 have been permanently closed already, raising questions about how we leave mountains – among the last wild spaces in Europe – once the lifts stop running.

On the banks of the Yukon River, after arriving by canoe only a few miles from the Canadian border, I shared some salmon with Karma Ulvi, the chief of the Native Village of Eagle in Alaska. But the fish we ate wasn’t caught locally: A plane had delivered the salmon from Bristol Bay, in the southwest corner of the state, over 1,000 miles away. For the Native tribes that have lived along the Yukon for millennia, importing is the only option. “We haven’t been able to fish for seven years,” said Ulvi.

In the last stronghold for wild salmon on earth, these tribes are fighting to save the fish. But it’s a war with many fronts, none of them simple: climate change, federal funding, competing scientific narratives, and, ultimately, corporate greed. Heat stroke during the summer has left scores of dead fish on the banks, unable to reach their spawning grounds. And over the last few decades, Alaska has seen more rain in the fall, causing floods that wash out salmon eggs. “They’re not managing for sustainability,” said Ulvi of fisheries management that allows billions of dollars of commercial fishing to take place while Native villages face malnutrition. “They’re managing for maximum profit.”

At the village’s first “culture camp,” attendees cleaned and processed fish while speaking their own language—a rare dialect of Hän Athabascan—and practiced traditional dances. First Nation tribes in Canada have been doing these camps for years, as have some Alaska villages on the Yukon, creating a place for Indigenous practices to be taught and applied.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/32799122

I have issues with this article, but the point about the environment is interesting.

More than a decade after regulators promised to improve reporting standards for this waste, an Inside Climate News investigation found huge discrepancies in state records.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31642064

A new study finds that repression of environmental protest is rising worldwide and Indigenous land defenders face the greatest risk.

The study: The global criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest – a repertoire of repression

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ca/post/56421451

I added the additional quote to the title in order to add context > >

A 2000 study that concluded the well-known herbicide glyphosate was safe, widely cited since then, has just been officially disavowed by the journal that published it. The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto. > > Related news: > >

• Trump admin backs Monsanto effort to limit Roundup lawsuits over glyphosate

The rewilded orchards at Lesesne might seem commonplace to an uninformed trekker. But if you know their backstory and telling characteristics, strolling through one of these groves feels like a real-life miracle.

“When the European colonists got here, American chestnut trees were a dominant species throughout most of the eastern piedmont and Appalachian Mountain range,’’ says veteran forester and TACF board member, John Scrivani, 72. Their trunks could grow to be 10 feet wide and stretch upward of 105 feet into the canopy; limbs spanned an equally wide footprint. The trees could live for three or more centuries and covered an estimated 300,000 square miles of land from Maine to Mississippi.

“This was the tree of early America,” writes author Susan Freinkel in her book, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. Carpenters prized their strong, straight-grained, and decay-resistant wood. Farmers praised their ability to feed and produce world-class livestock. Sportsmen revered them as a primary food source for wildlife. Gourmands celebrated their dry fruit as the world’s tastiest variety of chestnut.

Then came a virulent, invasive fungus from east Asia called Cryphonectria parasitica. Better known as chestnut blight, it was accidentally introduced in New York by way of imported Japanese varieties in the late 19th century and spread like wildfire through eastern forests.

“The fungus enters a tree through a wound in the bark, spreads laterally around stems and limbs, destroying the vascular system and killing growth above the point of infection,” says Scrivani. “The tree eventually dies back to the ground and, while new sprouts often emerge, they rarely grow large enough to flower. Reproduction and natural evolution halt.”

By 1941, the blight had eradicated 3.5 billion American chestnut trees and rendered the species functionally extinct.

While most 1940s biologists forecasted permanent doom for the American chestnut, some clung to a wily optimism. [...] A loose cadre of agronomists, foresters, biologists, university researchers, and interested citizens took shape. Some studied the blight fungus and looked for clues to how it could be stopped. Others scoured forests for nuts and surviving trees, or gleaned clippings from sapling sprouts that they grafted onto Chinese rootstock for study.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31433260

Indigenous and other Ecuadorians have lived with millions of gallons of toxic pollution from Texaco’s operations for decades. Now, those victims’ tax dollars will go to Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001.

Over a quarter century in the Ecuadorian Amazon, oil giant Texaco (now Chevron) perpetrated an ecological disaster: It dumped 3.2 million gallons of toxic waste, spilled 17 million gallons of crude oil and flared nearly 50 million cubic feet of methane gas. The company also collaborated with U.S. evangelical missionaries to forcibly displace Indigenous peoples from their oil-rich lands. The victims have received no compensation.

The international arbitration panel in the case of Chevron v. the State of Ecuador determined on November 17, 2025 that Ecuador should pay the company $220 million. The Office of the Attorney General of Ecuador (PGE) made this information public 21 days later.

It is difficult to understand why the Ecuadorian government, or rather the current administration, is celebrating this defeat. According to the PGE, Ecuador “saved” $3.13 billion because Chevron had originally demanded $3.35 billion, and will now “only” receive $220 million.

My argument is simple: for the first time in history, we can improve human wellbeing while reducing our environmental impact.

It’s common to think that sustainability — or, rather, our lack of sustainability — is a new problem. For most of human history, our ancestors lived sustainably, and only recently has that been knocked off-balance.

Coming from an environmental background, I would have said the same. Look at any series of graphs on environmental pressure, and it’s not hard to see why people would frame it as a new problem. Plot global curves of carbon dioxide emissions, land use, air pollution, global temperatures, or fertiliser use, and they all rise sharply in the last century. It creates the impression that things were fine, but now they’re really not. It’s these curves that often make people — especially young people — feel fatalistic about the future. I was certainly one of them.

By this definition of environmental pressure, it is true that the world has become much less sustainable in modern history. But that only captures half of the story.

To me, sustainability means more than that. Yes, I care deeply about the environment: to protect opportunities for future human generations that come after us, but also to preserve a liveable world for other species and ecosystems. But I also care about the billions of people who are alive today. I want them to be able to live a good life; healthy, well-fed, poverty-free, content, and with opportunities to flourish in whatever way they wish.

By this broader definition, humans have never been truly sustainable. Yes, many generations of our ancestors had a lower environmental impact than we do today. But by many basic metrics of human wellbeing, life was not good.

For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90m acres – about the size of Montana – and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.

But a growing body of research reveals that the US’s obsession with corn has a steep price: the fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.

Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.

Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when the nitrogen in the fertilizer breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.

The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol – which now consumes 40% of the US corn crop – is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.

Archive link

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30265112

MOCOA, Colombia—This isn’t the first time foreigners have shown up here, where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon rainforest, insisting they needed what was under the ground.

archived (Wayback Machine)

“People are just amazed and wowed at the optical blue that you see from pure water itself,” said Sudeep Chandra, a limnologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who collaborates with Girdner. “That blueness is the reflection of the hydrogen and oxygen hanging out together without any material in it.”

Since 2010, however, Girdner and his colleagues have noticed an unexpected change in the Secchi data: Despite the day’s slightly cloudy reading, Crater Lake’s clear water is getting even clearer.

This might sound like a good thing. After all, the lake’s remarkable, glasslike transparency and brilliant hue are major draws for the half-million tourists who visit every year. But it might also indicate that something is going wrong with the lake’s physics, chemistry and ecology, and it could be a harbinger of changes to lakes across the world in the age of climate change.

As the planet warms, summers are growing longer and winter nights aren’t getting as cold as they used to. As a result, the surfaces of many deep, temperate lakes are warming even faster than the air. This shift to the energy flux of the top layer of water can set in motion a series of physical changes that add up to a breakdown of lake mixing — a fundamental process that acts like a heartbeat for deep, temperate lakes that don’t freeze in winter. Lake mixing is driven by physical properties such as wind, air temperature, water temperature and salinity, and on seasonal or annual cycles it circulates water between the surface and the depths. When mixing stops, oxygen and nutrients don’t get distributed throughout the water column, which can kill fish, trigger unsightly and dangerous algal blooms and invite invasive species to take over.

Begun, the water wars have.

State negotiators embroiled in an impasse over how to manage the imperiled Colorado River were unable to agree on a plan before a federally set deadline on Tuesday, thrusting deliberations deeper into uncertain territory.

Stakeholders have spent months working to iron out contentious disagreements over how to distribute water from this sprawling basin – which supplies roughly 40 million people in seven states, 5.5m acres of farmland, dozens of tribes and parts of Mexico – as the resources grow increasingly scarce.

Long-term overuse and the rising toll from the climate crisis have served as a one-two punch that’s left the system in crisis.

Enough progress was made to warrant an extension, according to a joint statement issued by federal officials and representatives from the seven western states. But the discussions – and the deadline set for them – were set to an urgent timeline; current guidelines are expiring and a new finalized agreement must be put in place by October 2026, the start of the 2027 water year.

Regulations make it hard to introduce organisms that quash invasive species. Some experts see missed opportunities.

Interesting and somewhat compelling. I'm torn between the value of using biological control to reduce the burden of invasive species without chemicals and the fear of runaway unintended consequences.

I guess the current system of tight regulation means I'm on the same page as the regulators:/

Climate scientists agree that tackling methane emissions is the fastest way to slow near-term climate change. That’s because methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a warming potential 84 times stronger than that of carbon dioxide over the 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control.

Tásmam Koyóm, a high Sierra meadow in California, U.S. returned to the Mountain Maidu people in 2019, is once again wet where once it had been dry. Rivulets now snake through hip-high grasses and willow thickets, feeding a beaver pond where a family of beavers released in 2023 has built a chest-high lodge. This was California’s first beaver translocation in decades, part of a tribal effort to restore the health of the landscape, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon after a site visit.

Once deeply incised by snowmelt channels that sent water rushing downslope, the meadow now holds water longer into the summer. Melt from the ridges slows and spreads, clear streams meander out from the pond, and a mosaic of habitats has begun to return. Advocates say such changes show how beavers can help blunt droughts, lower fire intensity, and create refuge for plants and animals, offering a template for restoration in a warming, drying state.

California officials had long denied that beavers ever ranged widely across the state. Fur trapping in the 19th century all but eliminated them, and the survivors were treated as pests. Advocacy, research and policy shifts have since produced a state restoration program. Before the Maidu reintroduction, tribal crews built dozens of structures that mimicked beaver dams to prepare the site. “We knew that the habitat was, for the most part, just ready to receive and support beavers,” Valerie Cook of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) told Cannon.

The project has increased the surface area of water at Tásmam Koyóm by more than 22%, according to an April 2025 report from the department. Yet expectations remain tempered.

“We’re always going back to the whole systems piece, honoring beaver for the work beaver can do, but not turning them into this silver bullet,” says Brock Dolman of the nonprofit Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.

Other pilot relocations, such as on the Tule River Reservation, also in California, have had mixed results, underscoring the need for careful planning and coexistence strategies before translocation. Still, the Mountain Maidu site shows how returning beavers can also return sovereignty. Centuries-old dams and acorn mortars testify to a time when beavers and people shaped this valley together.