1. Climate Researchers Push Changes In Diet. Climate experts meeting in Geneva recommend changes in the foods people eat and farm in the effort to stave off the disruptive effects of rising global temperatures, while growers and major food producers attempt to adapt.
People should consider eating more vegetables and less meat, the researchers said. The switch may help slow greenhouse-gas emissions because farming vegetables release fewer greenhouse gases than livestock production.
Diets that are rich in plant-based foods have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than diets heavy inred-met consumption, said climatologist Cynthia Rosenzweig, who studies climate change and agriculture at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Farming and other land uses account for nearly a quarter of greenhouse-gas emissions while half of the methane emissions in the atmosphere are released from cattle and rice fields, the researchers said.
Plant-based meat replacement products could spur an increase in vegetable consumption and a drop in eating beef say companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Inc. Making imitation ground beef using proteins from yellow peas or soy require less grain production and water and could help curb emissions from livestock themselves, the companies say.
Last year was the fourth warmest year since 1880 according to the NASA and NOAA which track annual climate trends Source: Wall Street Journal
Contribution to global emissions by sector, 2010
24% Agriculture, Forestry, land use
25% Electricity and heat production
10% Other
21% Industry
14% Transportation
6% Buildings
2. EnviroInsight.org To Participate In City Of Glendale’s G.A.I.N Event. The people who bring you this newsletter will be hosting a canopy at the City of Glendale’s “Getting Arizona Involved in Neighborhoods“ event on November 2, 2019 at the Glendale, AZ Sahuaro Ranch Park, 9802 N. 59th Ave. Meet the people behind EnviroInsight and possibly learn something about recycling in Glendale by interacting with EnviroInsight’s staff. The event runs from 1:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m.
3. One-Third of Our Food Supply Relies on a Very Sick Species: Honeybees
“The Pollinators” highlights problems for the managed honeybee
The Pollinators opens under a predawn thread of red light along a highway near California’s almond orchards. Hundreds of wooden boxes, stacked like dresser drawers on the back of tractor trailers, are surrounded by a soft veil of honeybees. Bob Harvey, a beekeeper at Bob’s Bees, estimates 18,000 honeybee hives or 40 truckloads will arrive that day. Our food economy, at least $20 billion of it, relies on the movement of the managed honeybee—a domesticated import from Europe—pollinating about one-third of our entire food supply.
From the almond groves of the west to the apple orchards of Pennsylvania and the blueberry fields of eastern Canada, honeybees are shipped around the nation based on bloom time. The migration happens at night, after the bees tuck into their pale blue and white boxes for the evening. California has well over a million acres in almonds. Dave Hackenberg, of Hackenberg Apiaries, says to pollinate this area during the winter bloom requires nearly all of the US honeybee supply.
“Chemical companies figure we should eat corn, soybeans, and rice,” says Davey Hackenberg, a beekeeper at Hackenberg Apiaries, “and those don’t need to be pollinated, and that’s what they think we ought to live on. But if you like your fruits, your vegetables, your nuts, a lot of that stuff needs to be pollinated.”
Farming’s reliance on the managed honeybee is a growing problem as the honeybee population continues to decline. Samuel Ramsey, an entomologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, estimates 33 to 50 percent of all honeybee colonies in the United States are dying every year. The population is only held steady by splitting colonies. But Ramsey is clear: This method isn’t sustainable. Splitting honeybee hives is triage. It’s not a long-term solution.
While theories around honeybee losses used to focus on colony collapse disorder— worker bees abandoning their hives—the film, and the EPA, say this is no longer the major cause of hive losses. Instead, a trifecta of problems is leading to honeybee losses: pesticides, parasites, and poor nutrition. Ramsey says honeybees could deal with one issue, but not all three at once.
In 1996, Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act, reevaluating the use of pesticides that poisoned farmworkers. But instead of removing pesticides from agricultural use altogether, the chemical compositions were simply replaced. Neonicotinoids, first registered in 1994, rose in use, and according to organic chemist and farmer Susan Kegley, these chemicals are “everywhere now.” They’re so deadly to bees, in 2016, the US Fish and Wildlife stopped using them on national wildlife refuges, and in the European Union, certain varieties of neonicotinoids are illegal to use on bee-attractive crops. The chemicals take years to degrade in the environment—even untreated plants can absorb the chemicals from soils treated the year before—and they continue to poison bees long after application.
In the film, which screened at the recent San Francisco Green Film Festival, Bret Adee of Adee Honey Farms receives a call that a bee kill is happening at his hives in an almond grove. When he arrives, thousands of bees are piled like rugs at the edge of their hives. He suspects someone sprayed a pesticide, but he says these things are hard to track. “If we put the same economic value on a honeybee as cattle, we wouldn’t have a pesticide investigator out here for these kinds of losses,” Adee says. “We’d have the FBI out here.” Alongside pesticides, there are parasites, particularly the invasive varroa mite. This vampiric pest sucks the blood of honeybees, severely weakening them and shortening their life. Ramsey calls the mite “public enemy number one.”
The most widespread culprit in the death of the pollinators might be the poor nutrition that stems from industrialized agriculture. Large-scale cattle and corn operations create food deserts for pollinators. Without moving managed honeybees after bloom time, they’d be in a land of pesticides and densely populated crops that no longer require pollination. After bemoaning the loss of agricultural diversity and resiliency, the film also points to some solutions within industrial agriculture. Two farmers at Criswell Acres, while still growing commodity crops like corn, soy, and small grains, do so while incorporating more sustainable farming practices. They plant cover crops, providing forage for native pollinators, and they limit their tillage, building healthier soils less dependent on chemical additives. They’ve cut down on pesticide use, even though most of their crops are self-pollinating and therefore don’t require native pollinators. The farmers describe themselves as part of an ecological system.
The film only briefly touches on native pollinators. Kegley says that pollinators—like bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, and beetles— are no longer around in large enough quantities to do the pollination necessary for huge agricultural fields. While honeybees have human- powered migration, native pollinators can’t move away as quickly after farm fields pillage their habitat corridors. According to the film, the decline of native pollinators isn’t monitored to the same extent, and doesn’t receive the same media attention, as the decline of the managed honeybee—likely because, unlike native pollinators, honeybees are an income stream.
The movie points fingers in sometimes unflattering ways. The chef of an organic farm just outside New York City blames the consumers for our current food system, calling it “a reflection of us.” A loss in seasonality and imperfect fruits and vegetables mean consumers expect unblemished produce, and they expect it year-round. In order to provide these fruits, producers are dependent on chemicals. But this doesn’t highlight the influence of big seed, chemical, and energy businesses whose pocketbooks are lined by the industrialized food system. Do individual, consumer-conscious choices matter? Of course. But it’s not the reason corn covers 5 percent of all terrestrial land in the world.
It harkens back to debates circling climate change: Should we use plastic straws? What burgers should we consume? What cars should we drive? These questions are important. But as Elizabeth Warren pointed out during 2019’s climate town hall, they’re not striking at the heart of the problem: how corporations control the narrative of our food and energy systems. When the film focuses on industrialized agriculture and how it’s impacting all native pollinators, it really buzzes.
Dear Stakeholder,
You are receiving this message for your engagement in ADEQ’s water quality initiatives.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that they intend to publish a new definition for Waters of the United \States (WOTUS) by early 2020. If published as proposed, the definition change would remove federal environmental protections for many Arizona waters.
As stated in a 2017 letter to the EPA, Governor Ducey welcomes this clarification in jurisdictional authorities, as well as the opportunity to provide consistent state-runprotection of Arizona waters.
Waters of Arizona Updates
This fall, ADEQ will launch a community engagement program and Tribal consultations to hear from people throughout Arizona about how “Waters of Arizona” should be protected.
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5 . Before The Flood: System To Predict Rising Water Is Tested In Phoenix And Flagstaff By Jordan Elder, Cronkite News. Although this monsoon season was one of the driest on record, parts of Arizona were pummeled with rain in late September, leading to intense flooding in Apache Junction and other cities.
“I don’t like to over dramatize things when we say rescue,” said Richard Ochs, a longtime member of the Superstition Fire and Medical District. “It’s really more of a citizen-assist call in most cases.”
Apache Junction has mountains on two sides, which increases the runoff that flows down into the city. Ochs said this creates “notorious washes” when water rises, making it easy for residents to get swept up. Superstition Fire was one of several East Valley departments that plucked people from swift waters last month.
“This is an area where the water is moving fast enough to create harm … potentially life threatening,” he said.
Rescues like these potentially could be avoided by using FloodAware, a new system developed by Arizona researchers to monitor rising water levels. The system is being tested in Phoenix and Flagstaff, but Ochs thinks it eventually could be used by smaller cities like his to keep residents and first responders safe.
When the skies opened in late September, several Apache Junction residents were caught in Weekes Wash, including an elderly couple.
“They were both kind of clinging to trees,” Ochs recalled.
The rushing water carried tires, pieces of trees and cactuses – all things that could have caused severe harm. First responders pulled the woman to safety – but then the citizenassist call turned into a rescue.
“Before they could even reach the man, he actually slipped in,” Ochs said, adding that the man was swept underwater for a short distance before he reemerged to grab another steady object, clinging to it until rescuers arrived. “There was some real fear for about 20 minutes that morning,” he said.
FloodAware was designed by researchers from Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona who want to avoid those “sink or swim” moments. Their system uses technology and data as a potential solution for urban flooding. Engineers and hydrology experts finished installing traffic cameras and rain gauges at five intersections in Phoenix and six in Flagstaff at the end of September.
Margaret Garcia, an assistant professor at ASU and a leader in developing FloodAware, said flooding is a serious concern in urban areas because of the high concentration of people, but data about hydrology and water resource engineering in these areas is slim. “We have locations where we have lots of people … and that’s where we have our least information about flood flows,” Garcia said.
Garcia, along with other scientists and engineers, developed FloodAware to use imageprocessing technology to collect information about how much water is standing in roadways. It all starts with a traffic camera, a rain gauge and a curb or a gutter.
The camera takes a photo in full color in the daytime and infrared during the night. After the image is processed, “we can detect wet and dry, and we can also read the level of the water on that gauge,” Garcia said. FloodAware can detect where and when floods will occur before they happen by combining the water depth with knowledge about nearby storm systems.
This information will be used in a mobile hydrology app, which distributes and collects information from users. On the FloodAware website, it states that the app will feature visualizations of rainfall and flood histories, encourage users to collect data during heavy precipitation events and notify city residents when floods are imminent or present.
The camera system is new, but gauges have been used in Arizona for many years. The Maricopa County Flood Control District already has more than 355 gauges actively transmitting data. Many of those gauges are housed in 400 or so “alert stations,” but Lisa Blyler, spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Flood Control District, thinks FloodWatch will be valuable in keeping people safe because they have similar missions.
“We don’t send out the road closures or evacuations, but we provide the information to first responders and those that are responsible for those things,” Blyler said. “I think it could be a good companion.”
FloodAware also partnered with the Phoenix Public Works Department to determine which intersections of Phoenix and Flagstaff would pilot the program. The chosen locations were “identified as areas that flooded frequently in the past,” Garcia said.
Garcia noted that cities like Phoenix have storm-sewer systems that are already well established and difficult to change, but FloodAware could help prevent injuries when those systems are overwhelmed.
“We can do that by getting information to people, either citizens that are trying to navigate the city, get home from their commute, or first responders to be able to clear areas that are dangerous,” Garcia said.
Researchers are hoping for more rain in Phoenix this fall and winter to collect additional preliminary data. When all the kinks are worked out, Garcia hopes FloodAware will expand to other urban areas.
“We’ve had interest from New York City Department of Resilience,” Garcia said. “They’re interested in technologies to better understand where their flood risks are.” But Ochs thinks the system has small-town potential as well. He said it can be difficult to keep the public safe during and after rains purely because of human curiosity.
“When the rain stops, they look up and the sky is relatively clear,” Ochs said. “They don’t want to be stuck at home, or they want to go out and adventure and see what kind of water damage may have occurred.”
Ochs has been a first responder for more than 30 years, and he sees recurring trends during rescues. He said it can take up to two hours for all the rain to work its way down the mountains and through the city, which catches Apache Junction residents off guard. “People see water crossing the road and they think, ‘Well, I can navigate that,’” Ochs said.
For now, FloodAware is a three-year collaborative project in Phoenix and Flagstaff only. In the meantime, Apache Junction and other small cities are training first responders to respond on short notice to water both still and moving.
“We’re ready for it,” Ochs said. “It’s just that you can never really judge when and how fast it will come.”
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