#Green news

[wojtekxp]

The "mini forest" revolution is here 🙂👍💗

[p-rainybee]

I wish I could take your pain away. I'm sorry.

I love you. Please, take care of yourself.

[cinader]

Fresh Today, July 24, in the Audio Garden

Open Mic 7-9pm, Democracy Minute, Anna Jinja, Green News Report, Nuestra Música, Box of Visions

Open Mic 7-9pm, Democracy Minute, Anna Jinja, Green News Report, Nuestra Música, Box of Visions Fresh Today: Open Mic Night – L&BH Open Mic on WLBH. Sign the list to join us live this Wednesday at 7pm. 2hr American Democracy Minute – At the Republican National Convention, Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that Democrats tolerated illegal immigration so noncitizens would fraudulently vote.  Such claims…

[reasonsforhope]

"With “green corridors” that mimic the natural forest, the Colombian city is driving down temperatures — and could become five degrees cooler over the next few decades.

In the face of a rapidly heating planet, the City of Eternal Spring — nicknamed so thanks to its year-round temperate climate — has found a way to keep its cool.

Previously, Medellín had undergone years of rapid urban expansion, which led to a severe urban heat island effect — raising temperatures in the city to significantly higher than in the surrounding suburban and rural areas. Roads and other concrete infrastructure absorb and maintain the sun’s heat for much longer than green infrastructure.

“Medellín grew at the expense of green spaces and vegetation,” says Pilar Vargas, a forest engineer working for City Hall. “We built and built and built. There wasn’t a lot of thought about the impact on the climate. It became obvious that had to change.”

Efforts began in 2016 under Medellín’s then mayor, Federico Gutiérrez (who, after completing one term in 2019, was re-elected at the end of 2023). The city launched a new approach to its urban development — one that focused on people and plants.

The $16.3 million initiative led to the creation of 30 Green Corridors along the city’s roads and waterways, improving or producing more than 70 hectares of green space, which includes 20 kilometers of shaded routes with cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.

These plant and tree-filled spaces — which connect all sorts of green areas such as the curb strips, squares, parks, vertical gardens, sidewalks, and even some of the seven hills that surround the city — produce fresh, cooling air in the face of urban heat. The corridors are also designed to mimic a natural forest with levels of low, medium and high plants, including native and tropical plants, bamboo grasses and palm trees.

Heat-trapping infrastructure like metro stations and bridges has also been greened as part of the project and government buildings have been adorned with green roofs and vertical gardens to beat the heat. The first of those was installed at Medellín’s City Hall, where nearly 100,000 plants and 12 species span the 1,810 square meter surface.

“It’s like urban acupuncture,” says Paula Zapata, advisor for Medellín at C40 Cities, a global network of about 100 of the world’s leading mayors. “The city is making these small interventions that together act to make a big impact.”

At the launch of the project, 120,000 individual plants and 12,500 trees were added to roads and parks across the city. By 2021, the figure had reached 2.5 million plants and 880,000 trees. Each has been carefully chosen to maximize their impact.

“The technical team thought a lot about the species used. They selected endemic ones that have a functional use,” explains Zapata.

The 72 species of plants and trees selected provide food for wildlife, help biodiversity to spread and fight air pollution. A study, for example, identified Mangifera indica as the best among six plant species found in Medellín at absorbing PM2.5 pollution — particulate matter that can cause asthma, bronchitis and heart disease — and surviving in polluted areas due to its “biochemical and biological mechanisms.”

And the urban planting continues to this day.

The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners like Pineda, who come from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, with the support of 15 specialized forest engineers. Pineda is now the leader of a team of seven other gardeners who attend to corridors all across the city, shifting depending on the current priorities...

“I’m completely in favor of the corridors,” says [Victoria Perez, another citizen-gardener], who grew up in a poor suburb in the city of 2.5 million people. “It really improves the quality of life here.”

Wilmar Jesus, a 48-year-old Afro-Colombian farmer on his first day of the job, is pleased about the project’s possibilities for his own future. “I want to learn more and become better,” he says. “This gives me the opportunity to advance myself.”

The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning...

In addition, the project has had a significant impact on air pollution. Between 2016 and 2019, the level of PM2.5 fell significantly, and in turn the city’s morbidity rate from acute respiratory infections decreased from 159.8 to 95.3 per 1,000 people [Note: That means the city's rate of people getting sick with lung/throat/respiratory infections.]

There’s also been a 34.6 percent rise in cycling in the city, likely due to the new bike paths built for the project, and biodiversity studies show that wildlife is coming back — one sample of five Green Corridors identified 30 different species of butterfly.

Other cities are already taking note. Bogotá and Barranquilla have adopted similar plans, among other Colombian cities, and last year São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in South America, began expanding its corridors after launching them in 2022.

“For sure, Green Corridors could work in many other places,” says Zapata."

-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, March 4, 2024

[littleboynamedplatypus]

[petnews2day]

Cat Torture Ring in China is Sweeping Across the Internet – One Green Planet

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/pYelu

Cat Torture Ring in China is Sweeping Across the Internet – One Green Planet

The issue of cat torture in China has gained international attention, with distressing reports and footage highlighting the severity of the problem. Across the internet, there are horrendous communities of people who are sharing their depraved instances of cat torture through videos and photos. In response, groups like Feline Guardians Without Borders and PETA are taking […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/pYelu #CatsNews #AnimalConservation, #AnimalRescues, #ConsciousConsumerism, #ConsciousConsumers, #ConservationNews, #CrueltyFree, #EcoFriendlyLifestyle, #EcoFriendlyPetProducts, #EcoFriendlyFashion, #EcofriendlyShopping, #EnvironmentalNews, #GlutenFreeRecipes, #GMOFREE, #GoGreen, #GreenFashion, #GreenLiving, #GreenNews, #GreenTips, #PlantBasedHealth, #PlantBasedLifestyle, #PlantBasedRecipes, #RawLifestyle, #RawVeganRecipes, #Recycling, #SocialJustice, #Sustainability, #VeganDesserts, #VeganDiet, #VeganFashion, #VeganHealth, #VeganMeals, #VeganProducts, #VeganProteinPowders, #VeganRecipesVeganFood, #VeganSupplements, #Veganism, #VegetarianFood

[hinamie]

I'll give them shelter like you've done for me

[politijohn]

Source

Begging everyone to stop asking this rhetorical question and, instead, demand our elected officials do something about it

[icarusxxrising]

Horrible fact of the day: Chevron just released a new boat fuel that WILL give you cancer.

Not "might", not "could", WILL. It has a cancer ratio of 1.3:1, as in, in a group of 10 people, 10 would contract CANCER.

(Edit: apparently some articles are now saying 1.4:1, and some are saying a little under that. Either way, the consensus seems to be anywhere between a 95-100+% of contracting cancer, with some expectations of this fuel not even needing a full lifetime of exposure for you to get Cancer.)

The EPA's safety limit is 1:1,000,000 as in 1 in a million people get cancer.

The EPA approved it anyways. I am not joking. The EPA approved a boat fuel that has a near 100% chance of giving someone cancer. It has such a good chance of giving someone cancer that if you DIDN'T get cancer YOU WOULD BE AN OUTLIER.

Fuck the oil industries.

Edit: If you find this (rightfully) horrifying, have you considered industrial sabotage? /hj

This isn't something we can vote away. This isn't something the rich are gonna apologize and make a 10 minute apology video for this. They don't care if you starve or wither in hospitals or get blown up in their wars.

If you don't know where to get started:

If you already know what to do, then it's time to do it. Participate in mutual aid, raise awareness in real life as well as online, participate in or train in self defense and emergency medical training classes.

[razzafrazzle]

I think that I've only drawn Ford like. 3 times in my entire life. so here's some Fordsy (and some Fiddsy. and a Bill I guess)

[image description: a page of drawings of ford, mcgucket, and bill cipher from gravity falls. near the top are two portraits of ford, one in the gravity falls style and the other in a more realistic style. next to that is a simple doodle of ford and mcgucket smiling and embracing with the caption "old man yaoi!" beneath them. in the bottom left is a simple drawing of a younger ford, and next to that is a drawing of bill with a speech bubble saying "i'm here too! also i'm hatless for spacing reasons". next to that is bill's hat, as well as mcgucket in an orange and brown 70s-style outfit and a braided beard, and he is sitting on the ground, lost in thought. end id]

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Arw you really the author John Green? The same person who wrote The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska?

Yes, but I published one of those books 19 (?!?!?!) years ago and the other 12 (!?!?!?!?) years ago. What have I been up to since then?

My brother Hank and I started Good.store, which delivers high-quality socks, coffee, and soap to your home and donates 100% of its profit to charity. Through good store, we've raised over $7,500,000 to support efforts to radically reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, where as recently as 2019, one in seventeen women could expect to die in pregnancy or childbirth.

(In fact, technically I am here on tumblr as an unpaid intern for the awesome coffee club, which you should really sign up for if you like ethically sourced coffee that tastes delicious and doesn't enrich billionaires.)

I wrote the novel Turtles All the Way Down and then had a little existential crisis and wrote a nonfiction book called The Anthropocene Reviewed, the latter of which is my first book for adults and my first attempt to write as myself.

I helped produce made a movie adaptation (streaming now on Max!) of Turtles all the Way Down.

I helped raise my kids and supported my spouse as she wrote her book You Are An Artist and created a PBS show about art called The Art Assignment.

I ran the educational media company Complexly and the merch company dftba.com while my brother had cancer.

I bought around 2% of a fourth-tier English football team called AFC Wimbledon. Wimbledon are different from most football clubs because they are owned by their fans, each of whom gets one vote in the club's leadership regardless of how much money they put into the club.

I became obsessed with tuberculosis, the world's deadliest infectious disease (it will kill over a million people this year despite being curable), and how TB both exemplifies and reinforces human-built structures of injustice, which is the subject of a book I'm writing that will come out next year.

[tpwrtrmnky]

priorities

[ID: A two-panel "Pills that make you green" comic, showing two crudely drawn stick figures for people.

First panel: Two stick figures, one drawn in black, on the left, one green, on the right. The black one says: "You think I'm "unreasonably obsessed" with green people?" The green one replies: "Well yeah, our lives sort of barely affect yours at all." black: "Barely affect? This is by far the most important issue in politics right now!"

Second panel: Zoom in on green stick figure, which says: "…There is a literal portal to hell in Strasbourg and an Armageddon Beast rampaging through the infinite torment crucible." End ID.]

Start - Previous - Next

[cinader]

Today, July 19, on WLBH.org

Today on WLBH.org: Aging Matters, Choose to Be Curious, Flower Power, Green News Report, Out of the Woods, Nuestra Musica, What's the Frequency Kenneth?, The Listen & Be Heard Hour for Readers & Writers

Testing out Programming We’re still in beta testing here at WLBH.org. For today we are playing the following radio shows from the Pacifica Affiliate Network, on a 24 hour loop. Please let us know what you like and what you don’t like! Aging Matters: Music Education and Therapy CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS: A Mile in Their Shoes: A River Runs through Us Flower Power Show Hour Three: Its a double…

[reasonsforhope]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

[ghosted-jazz]

Species Swap AU! Retired couple gets a fairy godchild to help repair their relationship

[petnews2day]

Three-Legged Dog Rescued by a Woman with Another Disabled Rescue Dog – One Green Planet

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/LqCp3

Three-Legged Dog Rescued by a Woman with Another Disabled Rescue Dog – One Green Planet

Pippa, a resilient three-legged dog, has captured hearts after her remarkable journey from the streets to a loving home. Found in 2017 with severe injuries in New Orleans, Pippa was rescued by the Southern Animal Foundation. Following the amputation of her leg and tail, and months of rehabilitation, she was ready for adoption. Lydia Crochet, […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/LqCp3 #DogNews #AnimalConservation, #AnimalRescues, #ConsciousConsumerism, #ConsciousConsumers, #ConservationNews, #CrueltyFree, #EcoFriendlyLifestyle, #EcoFriendlyPetProducts, #EcoFriendlyFashion, #EcofriendlyShopping, #EnvironmentalNews, #GlutenFreeRecipes, #GMOFREE, #GoGreen, #GreenFashion, #GreenLiving, #GreenNews, #GreenTips, #PlantBasedHealth, #PlantBasedLifestyle, #PlantBasedRecipes, #RawLifestyle, #RawVeganRecipes, #Recycling, #SocialJustice, #Sustainability, #VeganDesserts, #VeganDiet, #VeganFashion, #VeganHealth, #VeganMeals, #VeganProducts, #VeganProteinPowders, #VeganRecipesVeganFood, #VeganSupplements, #Veganism, #VegetarianFood