#Environmental Service

[robbincenijn]

Stena / Future Vision / w. GiantAnt / 2019

[siglo-group]

Siglo Group - Ecologists association in Austin, Texas

Siglo Group integrates ecology into land management and design, community planning, and geographic assessments.

[environmental-service]

Environmental Services - Key to a Wonderful World

Our lives have been made easier by the new technology we have now because of our great intelligence. We all work hard to have a good life and enjoy all the things we can have. Having huge houses full of appliances is the most comfortable thing for us because with it all we have to do is to relax and live the life to the fullest. We can even go to beautiful places no matter how far it is from our homes because of different ways transportation that we had invented. Humans are indeed the most intelligent being in this world that deserves to have the best way of living this life.

New technology had changed our lifestyle like our ways of transportation. We can travel by land, sea or air depending on what we like and what we can afford. Appliances have also been invented to give ease in our daily works at home and at work. We can even have enough time to spend with our family like having a vacation with them in the most beautiful places. On the other hand, more destructive disasters are occurring because of the effects of the new technology in the environment. Some of it has marked in our memories like the tsunami in Thailand and lately the earthquake in Haiti. These things should give us a clue to realize what we would do now to prevent more disasters to occur.

Environmental Service

Seeing through the photos and videos of the worst effects of the disasters both in humans and in the nature will make us think of why did this happen and what can we do to resolve this. Helping the victims is what we can do after the disasters happen but the fact is that we can help them more before a tremendous thing would happen. We can join non-profit organizations in their activities for a better world like providing good environmental services that our mother nature needs now.

 It is good that we are worrying with others but what we should also be worrying about is the worst problem of our planet. Our environment needs our help in retaining its healthiness because our fault caused this destruction. Some of us are engaged in illegal logging which cause flash floods, dynamite fishing that caused polluted water and most of all our carelessness even caused spills that are harmful to all living things. These things we did can make help us earn a lot but it causes a lot of trouble and worst of it is that our family can even be a victim of these disasters. Vist https://www.ecowastecompacting.com/

  Now is the time for us to act to prevent more tremendous things to happen because we do not know it can be worst. There are a lot of ways we can do which are part of environmental services that our environment needs. Housewives can practice proper disposal at home and recycle the non-biodegradable garbage. Teens can now join some organizations in their eco-friendly activities while factories can practice proper disposal of toxic wastes. By this, our environment will be clean and we can enjoy bountiful fruits and vegetables. We can even have great amount of potable water and prevent epidemic illnesses as well. Healthy environment can cause a healthy body and life to all of us. All we need to do is help the planet because it provides all we need to live.

Resource

[adhdandcomics]

whoever needs to hear this: if you got a disability, if you don’t know if you have something, if you ever think “it’s not that bad” if you have a thing about guilt, if you’re ill, Anything: listen. it is okay to throw things away.

you can throw it away. if it sucks and it stresses you the fuck out, if you just “need the right time to fix it” for the past 3 months. or years. if you loved it once upon a time but it makes you feel kinda weird and guilty now. if it’s a jacket youve reaaaally been meaning to mend and then donate. a jar of sauce that “all you have to do” is clean out to recycle but it’s been a week and now there’s a small colony growing in it. slowly shredding to bits fabric scraps you plan to use to fix something. busted picture frame. cracked mug. old shoes. extra box. an entire pack of granola bars that you hate so much but don’t want to waste.

life is already so goddamn difficult for us. i know you still care about recycling and the environment and sustainability. but it’s okay, i promise. sometimes you have to take care of your space. sometimes you have to cut your losses so you can actually have energy to recycle the next thing. get rid of the old shirt before it turns into a tornado pile of guilt under the bed. you’re not a bad person. you can throw this one away.

[byler-alarmist]

Do people know most paper receipts are harmful to their health?

I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a minute, but do people realize how pretty much everyone is being overloaded with endocrine disruptors like BPA/BPS on a near-daily basis??

I don't think many people understand that ever since most of the world transitioned to thermal paper receipts (cheaper than ink), almost every receipt you handle from the gas station to the grocery store to the Square terminal printer at the local co-op is coated with Bisphenol-A (BPA) or its chemical cousin Bisphenol-S (BPS).

These chemicals have not only been proven to cause reproductive harm to human and animals, they've also been linked to obesity and attention disorders.

Not sure if your receipt is a thermal receipt? If you scratch it with a coin and it turns dark, it's thermal.

BPA/BPS can enter the skin to a depth such that it is no longer removable by washing hands. When taking hold of a receipt consisting of thermal printing paper for five seconds, roughly 1 μg BPA is transferred to the forefinger and the middle finger. If the skin is dry or greasy, it is about ten times more. 

Think of how many receipts you handle every day. It's even worse for cashiers and tellers, who may handle hundreds in a single shift. It is also a class issue, since many people who work retail and food service are lower-income and will suffer worse health consequences over time from the near-constant exposure.

Not only that, receipts printed with thermal ink are NOT recyclable, as they pollute the rest of the paper products with the chemicals.

People don't know this and recycle them anyway, so when you buy that "green" toilet paper that says "100% recycled"? Yup, you are probably wiping your most sensitive areas with those same chemicals (for this reason, I buy bamboo or sugarcane toilet paper as a sustainable alternative to recycled paper).

This page from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has some good links if you want to learn more.

As consumers, we need to demand better from our businesses and from our governments. We need regulation of these chemicals yesterday.

If you are a buyer or decision-maker for a business, the link above also contains a shortlist of receipt paper manufacturers that are phenol-free.

If you work at a register, ask customers if they want a receipt. If they don't and you can end the transaction without printing one, don't print one!

As a consumer, fold receipts with the ink on the inside, since that's where the coating is. Some more good tips here.

And whatever you do, DO NOT RECYCLE THERMAL RECEIPTS

[nyxelestia]

Environmental Storytelling

[er-cryptid]

Sphenopsida

-- often called "horsetails"

-- tracheophytes

-- only 25 living species

-- true land plants

-- vascular

-- true roots, stems, and leaves

-- small leaves

-- scale-like pattern on leaves

-- grow in tropical and temperate climates

-- use alteration of generations

-- cell walls in leaves and stems contain silica

.

Patreon

[organicmatter]

vintage woodsy owl poster

[landgraabbed]

i know that generative ai is today's boogeyman but i really wish that people were more precise when discussing it. ai is a huge field that isn't just "create thing based on stolen assets", there's many legitimate uses in medicine, research, etc. your beef is with generative ai, not ai in general.

[vampmilf]

second tour also was super niiiice although less eventful than the first one but everyone laughed at my jokes and told me they had fun and that i was very entertaining to listen to yippee <333

[robbincenijn]

Stena / Future Vision / w. GiantAnt / 2019

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Keren Landman, MD at Vox:

Anybody can be a part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign. On his MAHA website, shoppers can buy shirts identifying themselves as a surfer, snowboarder, skier, sailor, marine, soldier, veteran, chiropractor, artist, fisherman, diver, nurse, doctor, pharmacist, paramedic, engineer, trucker, therapist, lawyer, teacher, millennial, Gen Z, Gen X, Boomer, mom, warrior mom, dog mom, or grandmother — who, like Kennedy, opposes the public health or factory farming or pharmaceutical corporate establishment.

Over the 16 months he campaigned for president, and ever since he quit to endorse President-elect Donald Trump in August, Kennedy has been making strange bedfellows in a divided nation. Voters across the partisan spectrum can find at least one thing he’s said or done that resonates with their values. Opponents of industrialized agriculture and people who want easier access to unpasteurized milk can convince themselves he’s an ally. Public health authorities and fact-based journalists may clash with Kennedy for his inaccurate representations of biomedical science, but many Americans sympathize with his comments on the drug industry, and a growing number share his negative views on vaccine mandates. Trump’s decision to pick Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t a conventional choice. Kennedy represents a movement that has long been outside the mainstream but now finds itself in the halls of power. Soon after Kennedy traded his endorsement for an appointment by then-candidate Trump in August, his platform took on a more Trumpian branding: Make America Healthy Again, often shortened to MAHA.

But what does that really mean? What would the consequences be for people’s health? By articulating a few big, noble goals in alluringly plain language — without getting into the weeds about how to achieve them — MAHA has drawn what were once distinct causes together under one banner. But it’s in between the lines where its dangers lie: MAHA’s calculated omissions allow people to project their own priorities onto the platform, without having to think too hard about the trade-offs.

The historical origins of Make America Healthy Again

From the beginning, Kennedy’s career has blended a connection to the counterculture with his august surname and a professed commitment to noble goals. During court-ordered community service for a drug offense in the early ’80s, he wound up renovating a building owned by the Open Space Institute, a land preservation organization. The building was later taken over by Hudson Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to rehabilitating the befouled Hudson River, and he embraced the cause: After his admission to the bar in 1985, he took on multiple corporate polluters in high-profile cases over the next few decades as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He styled himself as a crusader for the Earth, and so did the media; in 1999, Time magazine named him a Hero for the Planet.

In the early 2000s, Kennedy got interested in thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative then often used to produce vaccines. American anti-vaccination advocates, primed to fear vaccines due to a now-discredited 1998 publication by British scientist Andrew Wakefield, had seized on bungled communications about the ingredient’s safety. Despite the weight of the evidence confirming vaccine safety and the immense global benefits of childhood vaccinations, it became Kennedy’s most important cause. He spent the next two decades at the helm of Children’s Health Defense, one of the leading organizations in spreading anti-vaccination messages.

It represented a break from his activism on behalf of a more conventional and scientifically sound cause to one on the biomedical fringes. Environmentalism “is a shockingly mainstream movement overall” rooted in a faith in science, expertise, and a belief in an active federal government that can implement solutions, says Brian Drake, a historian of environmental movements at the University of Georgia. In contrast, the anti-vaccination movement is grounded in a distrust of science and government, and relies on deliberate misreadings of scientific evidence to support its positions.

But there is a common thread: Both movements appeal to people with an intense distrust of authority, whether government, scientific, or corporate. People with these values have historically used environmental causes as a vehicle to express them, Drake says. For example, when anti-fluoridation advocates gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, their most prominent leaders in the US were anti-communists and organic farmers. For those environmentalists who like Kennedy, there is similarly “a real emphasis on bodily integrity, fears of poisons getting into your body,” Drake says. “There’s a really strong individualistic strain to it.” [..]

The Kennedy supporters Buck has spoken with often tell her they’re “fed up” with mainstream approaches to climate action like carbon offsets and alternative energy sources. Rather than push for scalable big-government solutions like investments in renewable energy, she says, people in this subgroup favor more individualistic approaches that don’t restrict their freedom, like strengthening regenerative agriculture for small local farms. Kennedy has done the same. In the mid-2000s, he opposed an effort to build a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, framing the issue as a clash between corporations and local economies. During the 2024 campaign, he said soil regeneration and clean water are higher on the list of his environmental priorities than, for example, investments in carbon capture technologies that literally suck carbon dioxide out of the air. (Kennedy left the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2014; his former colleagues there say his anti-science views became incompatible with the organization’s work.)

Vaccine deniers and RFK Jr.-style environmentalists are highly skeptical of corporate power and the scientists they perceive to be in collusion with those nefarious entities. By 2015, historically left-leaning anti-vaxxers were using social media to grow their movement across political and special interest lines. The pandemic further galvanized their efforts and brought in new adherents: Conservatives fearful of government overreach found common cause with vaccine deniers, says Sara Gorman, a public health researcher and author whose latest book is about medical distrust and conspiracy theories. A generation of right-wing politicians and media commentators had primed them to be deeply skeptical of the so-called liberal bias of conventional expertise and academia.

What is MAHA, and who’s behind it?

Kennedy has been articulating elements of what eventually became the MAHA platform for years. His agenda acquired shades of MAGA only recently, when he effectively dropped his doomed presidential bid in exchange for influence over Trump’s health care agenda and over the president-elect himself. The first murmurs of MAHA, the brand, started in early September with an op-ed Kennedy authored in the Wall Street Journal. The effort eventually articulated five key aims:

Combat America’s chronic disease epidemic — especially cancer, diabetes, and heart disease — by tackling its root causes: poor diet, environmental toxins, and inadequate health care.

Promote regenerative agriculture, an organic-style farming approach that promises to slash agricultural carbon emissions and conserve nature while reducing chemical use, with the aim of producing healthier food.

Restore natural ecosystems to benefit human and animal health and mitigate the environmental harms of US industry and agriculture.

Reduce corporate influence in government, especially in its public health and environmental agencies.

Remove chemicals and toxins from the country’s food, water, and air.

On the surface, these priorities don’t look that different from those of the American Public Health Association or the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They share elements of the One Health approach to ecosystem health embraced by leading health authorities worldwide. [...] Siblings Calley and Casey Means have also shaped the MAHA plan. Casey is a Stanford-educated surgeon turned wellness influencer, while Calley was at one point a political insider interning for John McCain’s presidential campaign and lobbying Congress on behalf of the food and pharmaceutical industries. Now authors of a bestselling book on metabolism and health, they bring a deep distrust of those industries and of the medical establishment to Kennedy’s coalition, as well as an insider’s understanding of how they work. Del Bigtree, founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, a prominent anti-vaccination organization, is the MAHA PAC’s CEO, and the group’s social media director previously worked closely with Aubrey Marcus, a podcaster and founder of the Joe Rogan-endorsed fitness and supplement brand Onnit.

[...]

Who is MAHA for?

Taken together, these apostles display impressive credentials. But they are also fluent in the right-leaning influencer-slash-podcaster subculture that has grown around “healthy” eating and exercising; Kennedy himself has gone viral for his weightlifting clips. This movement has one distinguishing feature that unites its disparate threads: People who go from curious to supportive of MAHA, whatever its specific draw to them is, also embrace an intense individualism combined with a “really knee-jerk, angry anti-elitism,” Drake says.

After reciting a falsehood about abortion to a Washington Post reporter — that it’s “never medically necessary to save the life of the mother” — conservative wellness influencer and MAHA stan Alex Clark summarized the ethos: “I know you’ll cite experts who tell me I’m wrong about this, but this is my view.”

Not all vaccine-hesitant people fit this description. But many of those who are suspicious of vaccines on ideological grounds do, and Kennedy’s work resonates with them. Moms are among those drawn to his promise to hold accountable American health care and the federal agencies that regulate it: American mothers’ skepticism about vaccinating their own children is associated with having their own negative experiences in health care, and more than half of Americans report encounters with health care providers bad enough to undermine their trust. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine campaign has coincided with a rise in anti-vaccine attitudes among the US public over the last few decades. More parents are opting out of giving their children vaccinations recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Over the last decade, the percentage of kindergartners who hadn’t received routine immunizations increased by 2 to 3 percent. In more than three-quarters of states, measles immunization rates were below the 95 percent coverage threshold needed to prevent outbreaks in the event of a school-based exposure.

Kennedy also appeals to people who broadly distrust government and to “double-haters” — those who think institutions and both mainstream political parties need to be dismantled and either rebuilt or replaced. Despite his lifetime affiliation with the Democratic Party, Kennedy styles himself as a bridger of partisan divides: An early graphic on his now-revamped website read, “Left isn’t better. Right isn’t better. Better is better.” Some of his politically unaffiliated supporters see themselves as outsiders whose skepticism was underappreciated by big-party candidates, and whose perspectives are maligned by mainstream media.

Vox takes a look at the MAHA movement and how it appeals to the low-trust and conspiratorially-minded people.

[environmental-service]

Environmental Services

Environmental services are available to keep your family and living space safe. Not only can they protect the condition of your home, but they can help keep your air quality clean and protect your home from molds and asbestos. Here are a few useful environmental services you may be interested in for your home or business.

Environmental Service

 1. Mold remediation is one of the top environmental services there is. Molds are formed in moist areas and should not be left alone or ignored. You cannot wipe or paint over mold to solve the problem. A professional mold remediation service needs to be done if you want to successfully rid your home of the fungus. A few dangers of mold are heightened allergies, an unstable building foundation, and an unhealthy air quality. The last thing you want is to live in a poor air quality, and it is certainly not a condition that should be exposed to infants and small children.

 2. Asbestos abatement is another important environmental service. Asbestos can be found in a number of places like pipes and furnace insulation, floor tiles, old homes, and more. It is a dangerous mineral fiber that is used in a number of fire-retardant insulation materials. It is constantly warned that only a licensed person should remove asbestos from a building. If asbestos is disturbed or improperly removed, serious health risks are at hand. The last thing you want is the fibers getting into your breathing air. Special materials and knowledge of the substance are required in order to safely and thoroughly guarantee the problem is permanently removed from a building.

 3. Being that every building has a certain amount of radon in it; radon mitigation is a very useful service. This is an easy and practical service that helps home and business owners maintain a safe level of radon in their building. Since radon is odorless and colorless, it is nearly impossible to locate the radioactive gas without the help of a trained home inspector. In order to obtain a healthy air quality, there should be no more than 4pCi/L of radon present. Vist https://www.ecowastecompacting.com/

 These are just a few of the top environmental services there are available. It is not worth it to leave mold, radon, or asbestos in your home. Not only can they be hazardous to your health, but the condition of your home is at risk. These are practical services that go a long way to provide a safe living environment.

Resource

[tomorrowusa]

More climate news that Republicans will tell you to ignore.

This is by Jeff Masters, a professional meteorologist and co-founder of Weather Underground – a pioneering weather site started in 1995.

September 2023 smashed the record for the most extreme month for heat in Earth’s history, recording the highest departure from average of any month in analyses dating back to 1850, said NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information on October 13. NOAA, NASA, Berkeley Earth, and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service all rated September 2023 as the warmest September on record, crushing the previous September record by a huge margin. And famed climate scientist James Hansen warned today that the world is on the verge of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold seen as key to protecting the world’s people and ecosystems — a claim still hotly contested within climate science. According to NOAA, September global temperatures spiked to a remarkable 1.44 degrees Celsius (2.59°F) above the 20th-century average. The September 2023 global temperature anomaly of 0.46°C (0.83°F) surpassed the previous record-high monthly anomaly from March 2016 by 0.09°C (0.16°F). Using NASA data, September 2023 was 1.7 degrees Celsius above the temperature of the 1880-1899 period, which is commonly called “preindustrial” (the difference between the 1951-1980 baseline reported on the NASA website and the 1880-1899 period is 0.226°C). This is the first time that a monthly temperature has exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperature threshold in the NASA database.

Rightwingers make up bizarre excuses to keep us using fossil fuels. It's not unexpected that religion would make an appearance on the climate-denial stage. In the 2010s, hate monger Bryan Fisher told listeners and viewers that it was an insult to God not to use fossil fuels.

Back to reality...

The year-to-date period of January-September is the warmest on record globally. According to NOAA’s latest Global Annual Temperature Rankings Outlook and the statistical model it uses, there’s a greater than 99.5% chance of 2023 being the warmest year on record. At the start of this year, few experts foresaw 2023 as being a contender for Earth’s warmest year, as the bulk of El Niño’s warming comes during the second year of each El Niño rather than the first — so it’s possible that 2024 will be even warmer than this year.

There's a climate-denial industrial complex with deep pockets willing to spend big to buy politicians to keep fossil fuel corporations cranking out carbon.

We need to support viable candidates and politicians at every level of government who favor the transition to Earth-friendly energy.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

People in First Nations are 10 times more likely to die in a fire than people from other communities in Canada, according to the Indigenous Fire Marshal Service.

On Saturday, Jan. 28, a 10-year-old girl from the remote Cree community of Peawanuck, Ont. died in a house fire. The incident has renewed calls for a national fire protection strategy to prevent fatal fires in the future.

In an email to CBC News, Indigenous Services Canada said it is working with the Assembly of First Nations to finalize such a strategy.

Its goal would be to "better inform program and policy decision-making and guide federal investments to promote fire protection on reserves and to reduce the risk of fire-related deaths and injuries, as well as infrastructure losses." [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[age-of-moonknight]

“An Unquiet Grave,” Moon Knight: City of the Dead (Vol. 1/2023), #4.

Writer: David Pepose; Penciler: Marcelo Ferreira; Inker: Jay Leisten; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit