Earth – Ecology Global Network

Down to Earth: The Emerging Field of Planetary Health

Guest — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 22:45:07 +0000

By Nate Seltenrich
Environmental Health Perspectives

Human impacts on our planet have become so profound that many researchers now favor a new name for the current epoch: the Anthropocene.¹ The underlying premise of this term is that essentially every Earth system, from the deep oceans to the upper atmosphere, has been significantly modified by human activity.

Photo: Carl Jones/flickr/cc

This idea, and related concepts like the great acceleration, planetary boundaries, and tipping points may be of interest, even grave concern, to ecologists, biologists, and climatologists. Yet viewed through an environmental health lens—which recognizes the critical links between human health and the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe—humans’ growing influence on the planet threatens the very long-term survival of our species.

“There’s a bit of a paradox that we’re seeing for the last 100 to 150 years,” says Michael Myers, managing director for health at the Rockefeller Foundation. “Exploitation of the environment has contributed to human health. By exploiting Earth resources we have a more comfortable existence, and our life spans have increased considerably. But we’re now at a tipping point in which the exploitation of the environment is beginning to have a negative impact on human health.” The same natural systems that have benefited us for so long, he says, are now beginning to collapse.

From this realization has come another new term: planetary health.² There is significant overlap between planetary health and traditional environmental health; both examine the relationship between human health and conditions and exposures originating outside the body, be they extreme temperatures, chemicals and biological agents, vector-borne diseases, or any number of other potential factors. However, planetary health, by definition, explicitly accounts for the importance of natural systems in terms of averted cases of disease and the potential harm that comes from human-caused perturbations of these systems—a consideration that has not necessarily factored into environmental health research to date.

“The size of humanity’s ecological footprint has ballooned so rapidly over the last few decades that we’re impacting the structure and function of natural systems in ways that are now making us vulnerable all over the world,” says Samuel Myers, a principal research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Yet our influence can also be a force for good, he says. Implicit in the planetary health framing is the acknowledgment that sustainable environmental stewardship on a global scale can directly benefit human health.

Many of the concepts central to planetary health have been around for decades in fields including global health,³ conservation medicine,⁴ OneHealth,⁵ and EcoHealth.⁶ Similar dynamics play a role within the evolving field of climate change and health. But the framework of planetary health gives these ideas cohesion.

A 2013 paper outlined the core connections and concepts behind planetary health without ever using the term.⁷ “Human activity is rapidly transforming most of Earth’s natural systems,” wrote the authors, who were part of a research program called HEAL (Health and Ecosystems: Analysis of Linkages⁸) supported by the environmental organization Wildlife Conservation Society. “How this transformation is impacting human health, whose health is at greatest risk, and the magnitude of the associated disease burden are relatively new subjects within the field of environmental health.”⁷

The paper described an urgently needed new branch of environmental health focused on characterizing the health impacts of anthropogenic alterations in the structure and function of Earth’s natural systems, says senior author Steven Osofsky, a professor at Cornell University and HEAL founder. Osofsky is also science policy director for the Harvard-based Planetary Health Alliance, a consortium of nearly 100 universities, NGOs, government entities, research institutes, and other partners committed to advancing the field.

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the journal The Lancet, is credited with coining the term “planetary health” in a March 2014 article titled “From Public to Planetary Health: A Manifesto.”⁹ “The harms we continue to inflict on our planetary systems are a threat to our very existence as a species,” Horton wrote. “The gains made in health and well-being over recent centuries, including through public health actions, are not irreversible; they can easily be lost, a lesson we have failed to learn from previous civilisations.”⁹

The following year, The Lancet published a second seminal piece in the field, the result of a year-long analysis by the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health. In a podcast published alongside the report, commission chairman Andy Haines, a professor of public health and primary care at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, explained that “the aims of the commission really are to review the many global changes taking place and to outline implications for human health, and also to assess potential ways forward that could both improve environmental sustainability and human health.”¹⁰ The report, titled “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch,”¹¹ served as a simultaneous rallying cry, proof of concept, and literature review for the nascent field.

Later still, at a 2017 conference organized by the Planetary Health Alliance,¹² Howard Frumkin of the University of Washington further rallied the students and researchers in attendance. “This is not just an academic exercise,” he said. “We need planetary health. We need it because our house is on fire. We face urgent threats to our survival, to the health of human civilization, and to the natural systems on which we depend. Planetary health is a radically innovative step forward.”¹³

Examples of Planetary Health Studies

The easiest way to understand how planetary health differs from yet also encapsulates related fields is through the research itself. Harvard research scientist Christopher Golden, who in 2017 helped teach the world’s first course on planetary health at Harvard and who serves as associate director of the Planetary Health Alliance, shares one example.

Golden is leading an investigation on ways that human-caused changes to global fisheries affect diet, nutrition, and thus human health around the planet, especially in low-income nations near the equator.¹⁴ The project involves dozens of researchers with specialties as diverse as ecosystem services, nutritional epidemiology, and fisheries ecology, and is one of 19 funded since 2013 through the Wellcome Trust’s expansive new research portfolio, Our Planet, Our Health.¹⁵ Wellcome was among five cosponsors of the 2017 Planetary Health Alliance conference, although it has never funded or joined the alliance, says portfolio lead Saskia Heijnen.

A 2016 Nature commentary by Golden and colleagues describes how declining numbers of marine fish and changes in their distribution could increase the number of malnourished people in developing nations.¹⁶ The authors estimated that 845 million people (11% of the global population) risk becoming undernourished if they lose access to seafood as a result of declines in fisheries. That’s because they already live near a threshold of being deficient in zinc, iron, or vitamin A, and they get more than 10% of their vitamin A or zinc or more than 5% of their iron from wild harvested fish.

Some of these declines are due to the usual suspects of overfishing, pollution, and human population growth. But Golden’s research also considers a less direct factor in fish declines that is far less widely known: the gradual migration of native species toward cooler waters, driven by rising sea temperatures.

Earlier work by a group at the University of British Columbia projected that warming ocean temperatures will drive remaining fish and shellfish stocks toward the poles,¹⁷ reducing fish catch in the tropics by as much as 30% by 2050.¹⁸ In British Columbia, although far from the equator, marine fish and invertebrates of commercial and cultural significance to coastal First Nations will migrate at a median rate of 10–18 km (6–11 mi) per decade by 2050, relative to 2000, the authors estimated.¹⁹ Across all 98 species studied, population cores are projected to shift northward by an average of 50–90 km (31–56 mi) during the first half of the 21st century.

Golden’s team is building upon these findings by conducting regional case studies in Bangladesh, Madagascar, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and British Columbia. Homing in on each locale individually, the researchers will seek to understand a long chain of reactions linking human influence on natural systems to potentially unexpected health outcomes: climate change and ocean warming causes the migration of fish species, which leads to demand for alternative food sources, contributing to nutritional vulnerabilities and health effects. Whatever replacement foods people might adopt, whether meat, eggs, or local agricultural products and processed foods, Golden says they are likely to be nutritionally inferior to seafood, which he calls “nature’s superfood.”

According to Golden and coauthors of the 2016 Nature commentary, this factor alone could have major implications for human health given the importance of off shore fish stocks to diet and nutrition in low-latitude developing nations. The 2016 commentary concludes with what Golden considers its main point: a call for policy makers and international agencies to pay more attention to human health when deciding how to manage marine environments and fisheries. The team’s subsequent case studies are critical if its message is to affect policy at the necessary scales, Golden says.

Sam Myers is exploring another angle of access to nutritious food as a planetary health issue. Myers’s research at Harvard has assessed the potential impact of rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels on the nutrient content of staple food crops and the consequent nutritional impact on hundreds of millions of people.²⁰^,²¹^,²²^,²³

For instance, in a 2017 paper in EHP,²⁰ Myers and colleagues estimated that more than 148 million people could become newly at risk for protein deficiency by midcentury if CO₂ emissions continue at roughly 2010²⁴ levels. Additional work estimated that declines in insect pollinators could cause up to 1.4 million excess deaths annually.²⁵ Myers is also investigating the health impacts of fires used for land clearing in Indonesia. Last year, his team estimated that such fires caused around 100,000 excess deaths in 2015 alone.²⁶

Funding the Field

Research so broad in scope as Golden’s fisheries work would likely not have been possible without the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health program, he says. The project is representative not only of the general ethos of collaboration in the field of planetary health, Golden says, but also of the specific role that funders must play in supporting research.

“The interesting thing is that holistic approaches require interdisciplinary teams, but interdisciplinary teams don’t have a lot of funding opportunities,” Golden says. “Interdisciplinary research is not something that happens naturally; it’s something that you really need to work for. There needs to be money at the table to create and enable that kind of cooperation, because it doesn’t happen naturally. Something being intuitive does not mean it is easily executed.”

Interestingly, Our Planet, Our Health initially struggled to get off the ground, says Heijnen, because its holistic approach stood in such contrast to the Wellcome Trust’s traditional focus on funding biomedical health research. “People were not coming to us with ideas because it was not known that we were interested in it,” she says.

Instead of backing down, Wellcome redoubled its efforts, issuing two calls for proposals over 2 years that simply asked researchers to examine links among nutrition, urbanization, climate change, and health. “By casting that net very, very wide, we received many applications,” Heijnen says—about 900, in fact. During the initial round, 15 of those projects were funded.

Other projects funded through Our Planet, Our Health explore environmental and nutritional interventions for improving cardiovascular health in rural China; the potential role of insects as a sustainable global food source providing vital nutrients such as protein, iron, and zinc; and ways of better factoring human health into urban planning so that managers can account for acute impacts like heat stress and air pollution as well as long-term factors like altered weather patterns and noncommunicable diseases.¹⁵

These efforts will incorporate both social science and public interventions. For example, after evaluating region-specific determinants of cardiovascular disease, the team in rural China will study cultural, social, and behavioral factors influencing which interventions may be most successful and where. The “insect farming” team will investigate not only cultivation methods and human uptake of minerals from insects, but also, over the long term, ways to encourage cultural acceptance of insects as a food source.

The Planetary Health Alliance acknowledges the field’s breadth and interconnected nature by identifying 15 subareas or themes that may be mixed and matched in research projects, many of which encompass entire academic disciplines. Nine of these deal with health effects of human-driven ecosystem transformations such as pollution, urbanization, and climate change, and six refer to the role of environmental change in public health topics including infectious disease, mental health, and civil strife.²⁷ The ultimate purpose of such transdisciplinary work, the Planetary Health Alliance emphasizes, is to mitigate the negative human health impacts of global environmental change.

Spreading the Science

Planetary health now has to its credit three new journals dedicated solely to the emerging discipline: The Lancet Planetary Health,²⁸ the American Geophysical Union’s GeoHealth,²⁹ and Nature Publishing Group’s Nature Sustainability.³⁰

In addition, soon after the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission published “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch,”¹¹ the field began making headway into educational and governmental institutions worldwide. “There’s been very rapid penetration and adoption of this framework, I think because it has been compelling to people,” says Myers. “Human activity is disrupting our planet’s natural systems at accelerating rates and driving a very large share of the global burden of disease, and one that is growing.”

The University of California system launched a Planetary Health Center of Expertise in late 2016.³¹ Doane University, a private liberal arts college in Nebraska, followed suit in May 2017 by creating its Institute for Human and Planetary Health.³² Meanwhile, the University of Sydney has appointed the world’s first professor of planetary health, public and environmental health expert Anthony Capon,³³ and the University of Toronto has launched a master’s-level pilot course in planetary health, says Planetary Health Alliance education fellow Sara Stone. Cornell University has just launched the first master of public health program based on planetary health principles, notes Osofsky.

In all, nearly 20 universities worldwide have introduced planetary health concepts through courses, lectures, seminars, and other formats at the graduate or undergraduate level over the last couple of years, according to Stone. She says new programs are coming all the time.

In 2017, the Rockefeller Foundation launched a second commission on planetary health, this time to investigate the economic rationale for the field. Hosted by the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University and chaired by former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, now a professor of economics, politics, and international studies at Yale University, the effort signals the field’s expanding reach and seeks to strengthen its economic and policy case.³⁴

Even the United Nations is embracing planetary health as a concept. Together with the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat launched Momentum for Change: Planetary Health in November 2016. This three-year venture is designed to identify new ways of balancing human and ecosystem health in part by highlighting community-level efforts that have produced tangible benefits from applying planetary health principles.³⁵

Frumkin—who chairs the funding committee for Our Planet, Our Health, serves on the steering committee of the Planetary Health Alliance, and contributed to the original Rockefeller–Lancet report—believes the field’s ongoing success will hinge in part on its ability to impact higher education and interrupt disciplinary siloing before it occurs. Myers’s undergraduate-level course at Harvard offers a good model because “it sets out its scope not by reference to disciplines, but by reference to big challenges, big problems—a transdisciplinary approach,” says Frumkin. “We’re seeing young people who combine the insights of different fields very fluidly, and that’s exactly what we’ll need in this field in coming years.”

To achieve its goals, adds Osofsky, the field will also need to play an active and deliberate role in shaping policy and decision-making. For example, he recommends formally including public health considerations in environmental impact assessments for major development projects.

“When we think about large infrastructure projects like a dam on the Mekong, and millions of people are depending on fisheries for micronutrients and protein, that’s really important—and yet we don’t do robust public health impact assessments,” says Osofsky. “If you’re building a highway through the Amazon, you need to methodically look at what that means for vector-borne disease. And today, we don’t do that. We have to look at the pros and cons of these actions in terms of economic impact, social impact, environmental impact, and public health impact.”

Raffaella Bosurgi, editor of The Lancet Planetary Health, agrees that the field is inherently political. “We need to build the scientific evidence, and then once we build it, it must help us strengthen the case for policy action,” she says. “In that way, we can revise and practically change the way we interact with the environment.”

Ultimately, Osofsky says, the field of planetary health is an optimistic one. It makes the case that complex relationships between human modification of the environment and human health outcomes can be understood and thus more thoughtfully and proactively addressed. “If you measure something, then you can really hold people—ourselves—accountable,” he says. “The planetary health message gives one prospect for hope.”

Nate Seltenrich covers science and the environment from the San Francisco Bay Area. His work on subjects including energy, ecology, and environmental health has appeared in a wide variety of regional, national, and international publications.

References

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Santa Fe National Forest Spared From Fracking

Guest — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 19:20:22 +0000

WildEarth Guardians Press Release

Federal Court Overturns Leasing of Lands to Oil and Gas Industry

SANTA FE, NM — In a victory for New Mexico’s air, climate, and water, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico today rejected a 2015 oil and gas lease sale covering 19,788 acres of oil and gas leases on the Santa Fe National Forest within the Greater Chaco region.

Santa Fe National Forest, Jemez Mountain Trail – Photo: USDA

The federal court held the Bureau of Land Management failed to quantify the full life cycle of air pollution from oil and gas, including their indirect and cumulative effects on people and the environment. Likewise, the court found the agency failed to disclose the water quantity impacts of fracking a region currently suffering extraordinary drought that has closed the forest to public use altogether.

The court set aside the leases as illegal, effectively invalidating them. Click here to see an online interactive map of where the now-illegal leases are located.

“The law requires the government to look before they leap into fracking on our public lands, which includes an honest look at how the continued exploitation of oil and gas will impact our climate and future generations” said Kyle Tisdel of the Western Environmental Law Center. “This decision rejects the rubber stamp mentality of our public land managers on the Santa Fe National Forest, even as the government continues to approve unstudied fracking throughout New Mexico’s Greater Chaco region.”

“We are happy with the court’s decision that supports our assertion that federal agencies are failing to adequately uphold environmental protections intended to ensure the health of the land, people and cultural landscapes on public lands,” said Carol Davis of Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment.

“With the Santa Fe National Forest being targeted for fracking, it’s clear the oil and gas industry believes there is no place sacred in the American Southwest,” said Jeremy Nichols with WildEarth Guardians. “With our climate and our future at stake, we’re pleased the court agrees we can’t blindly sacrifice our public lands for fossil fuel extraction.”

Citizens and organizations submitted more than a hundred protest letters opposing the lease sale, which perpetuates a dangerous pattern of federal agencies erroneously relying on the 15-year-old Farmington RMP to facilitate a rush to frack New Mexico’s Mancos Shale without proper environmental analysis. BLM is currently writing an amendment to the RMP to reflect these new technologies—admitting that the 2003 RMP is obsolete.

Horizontal wells have double the surface impact (5.2 acres) of vertical wells (2 acres) and emit over 250 percent more air pollution, including toxic volatile organic compounds and greenhouse gases. Horizontal wells also require 5-10 times more water — a significant concern in the arid Southwest.

Horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracking use hundreds of thousands of gallons of highly pressurized water and toxic chemicals to shatter underground geology. This toxic cocktail includes known carcinogens and chemicals harmful to human health. If a wellbore is not properly sealed and cased, or its integrity is otherwise compromised, these chemicals can escape as they move through the wellbore, risking groundwater contamination.

“The Bureau of Land Management is the agency that oversees oil and gas leasing on these parcels of the Santa Fe National Forest. The judge’s decision affirms that BLM has ignored significant adverse impacts known to occur from oil and gas development in their quest to approve new oil and gas projects,” said Mike Eisenfeld, Energy and Climate Program managerof San Juan Citizens Alliance.

“Today’s ruling sends a strong message that this administration cannot ignore the effects on water, climate, and communities in their reckless attempts to sell off America’s public lands to the fossil fuel industry,” said Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter Director Camilla Feibelman. “We will continue to fight to prevent BLM from allowing any new fracking in the Greater Chaco region.”

“Unwise oil and gas development in our headwaters can destroy key water resources – such as high priority wetlands – and puts the future water supply for downstream New Mexico communities and ecosystems at risk,” said Rachel Conn, projects director for Amigos Bravos. “Instead of being ripped up for short term profits, the headwaters found in the Santa Fe National Forest should be maintained so they continue to provide water for wildlife, agriculture, and families.”

The groups involved in the lawsuit include the San Juan Citizens Alliance, Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, Amigos Bravos, WildEarth Guardians, and the Sierra Club. The challenged leases would have expanded oil and gas drilling and fracking into previously undeveloped areas of the Santa Fe National Forest on the remote and steep west side of the Jemez Mountains north of Cuba and near the San Pedro Parks Wilderness.

A copy of the decision is available here.

Contacts:

Kyle Tisdel, Western Environmental Law Center, 575-613-8050, tisdel@westernlaw.org

Carol Davis, Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, 928-221-7859, caroljdavis.2004@gmail.com

Jeremy Nichols, WildEarth Guardians, 303-437-7663, jnichols@wildearthguardians.org

Mike Eisenfeld, San Juan Citizens Alliance, 505-360-8994, mike@sanjuancitizens.org

Rachel Conn, Amigos Bravos, 575-770-8327, rconn@amigosbravos.org

Gabby Brown, Sierra Club, 202-495-3051, gabby.brown@sierraclub.org

The Hopeful Work of Turning Appalachia’s Mountaintop Coal Mines Into Farms

Guest — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 23:22:00 +0000

By Catherine V. Moore
YES! Magazine

In the post-coal economy, life-skills training helps employ people and restore the savaged land.

On a surface-mine-turned-farm in Mingo County, West Virginia, former coal miner Wilburn Jude plunks down three objects on the bed of his work truck: a piece of coal, a sponge, and a peach. He’s been tasked with bringing in items that represent his life’s past, present, and future. “This is my heritage right here,” he says, picking up the coal. Since the time of his Irish immigrant great-grandfathers, all the males in his family have been miners.

“Right now I’m a sponge,” he says, pointing to the next object, “learning up here on this job, in school, everywhere, and doing the best I can to change everything around me.”

Then he holds up the peach. “And then my future. I’m going to be a piece of fruit. I’m going to be able to put out good things to help other people.”

Jude works for Refresh Appalachia, a social enterprise that partners with Reclaim Appalachia to convert post-mine lands into productive and profitable agriculture and forestry enterprises that could be scaled up to put significant numbers of people in layoff-riddled Appalachia back to work. When Refresh Appalachia launched in 2015, West Virginia had the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation.

When he’s not doing paid farm work on this reclaimed mine site, Jude is attending community college and receiving life skills training from Refresh. “I’m living the dream. The ground’s a little bit harder than what I anticipated,” he says of the rocky soil beneath his feet, “but we’ll figure it out.”

On this wide, flat expanse of former mountaintop, the August sun is scorching even through the clouds. In the distance, heavy equipment grinds away on a still-active surface mine site—the type of site where some of the Refresh crew members used to work, blowing up what they’re now trying to put back together.

Crew leaders drive out to an undulating ridge where we can see a 5-acre spread of autumn olive—a tough invasive shrub once heavily seeded on former mine sites as part of coal companies’ reclamation plans. It’s summer 2016, and the crew for this particular Reclaim Appalachia site is awaiting the arrival next week of a forestry mulcher that will remove and chew up the shrubs into wood chips. By the next spring, the clearing will have been replanted by this Refresh crew with over 2,000 berry, pawpaw, and hazelnut seedlings. During my visit, everyone’s clearly excited for the mulcher to arrive.

“It’s almost like a continuous miner head,” explains Nathan Hall, “but instead of mining coal, it’s mulching autumn olives.” Hall is from Eastern Kentucky and worked for a short time as a miner before attending the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies; now he heads up Reclaim Appalachia, which focuses on repurposing mine land.

A few small agriculture projects are on other former surface mines in the area, but Refresh and Reclaim are the only outfits attempting anything of this scale while also operating a job-training project. One crew member, former miner Chris Farley, says he’s stoked to be a part of “the first bunch” to attempt to farm these rugged lands.

“It’s a long-term science project,” says Ben Gilmer, Refresh’s president.

Southern West Virginia nonprofit Coalfield Development runs Refresh, Reclaim, and a family of three other social enterprises. In an environment where finding secure employment is hard, Coalfield offers low-income residents a two- to two-and-a-half-year contract to undergo training in sustainable construction, solar technology, and artisan-based entrepreneurship. Trainees also earn stipends to work on their associate’s degrees and receive life skills mentorship before Coalfield assists them in finding full-time work.

Since 2012, Coalfield Development has created more than 40 on-the-job training positions and grown financial wealth for low-income people by over $3.1 million (calculated in wages, benefits, and savings). At current levels of participation, they project hiring 320 crew members and graduating 215 over the next nine years.

Ultimately, they hope that their model will spread to other parts of Appalachia, creating quality jobs that enable hardworking people to stay and make a living in this economically depressed region, where one in four children live in poverty.

They want to help people such as James Russell, a former coal truck driver who now serves as the site’s crew chief. He gathers me up in a donated pickup truck for the full farm tour, where I meet goats, pigs, and chickens with a dual purpose: to provide food and land management. Their rooting and scratching removes invasive plants and their waste helps build the soil back. Eventually the hope is to create a closed loop between the animals and plants, where one nourishes the other, cutting down on feed and fertilizer costs.

This year during peak season, Refresh expects to sell 2,800 eggs per week to restaurants and produce 1,500 meat birds across all sites. This past spring, the first piglets and kids were born, and crew members harvested honey for the first time. In addition to fruits and nuts, they’re also experimenting with hops, lavender, and greenhouse-grown vegetables.

Besides growing food themselves, Refresh wants to help other startup farmers access markets and technical assistance. This year the organization will offer a mobile poultry-processing trailer to local producers, for example, and then help sell the chickens through their burgeoning food hub. Refresh recently hired Savanna Lyons, a leader in West Virginia’s sustainable agriculture movement, to manage the hub. The organization wants to provide people with the whole package—step-by-step guides, management documents, and workshops.

They are also getting creative about markets targeting low-income people, thinking about not only where they can sell their fresh product, but also how they can make it accessible to the communities that need it. They are piloting a community supported agriculture program, for example, with a sliding scale that also accepts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

The Mingo County Redevelopment Authority, a rare and exceptional governmental resource for economic diversification in the coalfields, owns the land and leases it to Refresh for free. The authority’s director, Leasha Johnson, says that though many people in the region have already been forced to move away to look for work, “there are a lot of people who are staying and who believe that we can survive this transition.” That makes projects like Refresh worth the investment, she says. A former land manager for the coal industry, Johnson is one of the only economic development leaders here who will utter once-taboo terms such as “post-coal economy.”

“It’s an uphill battle,” she adds, “from both an acceptance perspective as well as an economic and capital investment perspective.”

This is not easy work. The groves of autumn olives sometimes seem impenetrable, and there are other aggressive invaders, like multiflora rose and tall fescue. The soil is compacted, composed of blasted rock, and lacks organic matter. Refresh doesn’t know how long it will take to bring it back to life. “The soil scientists say, I don’t know, you guys are charting new territory here,” Gilmer says. Virginia’s Division of Mined Land Reclamation estimates that it costs about $2,400 per acre to re-establish a foot of topsoil on previously mined ground. These sites also don’t hold water very well—they were engineered to drain into valley fills, the terraced slopes where rubble from mountaintop removal is dumped.

But they are not barren moonscapes. Appalachia is a temperate region with heavy rainfall. “[These sites] will definitely grow things,” says Carl Zipper, a professor of crop and soil sciences at Virginia Tech specializing in restoration of mine lands. “They just need some care and management appropriate to their characteristics.”

And in this mountainous region, where it’s hard to find large tracts of flat pasture and croplands, figuring out how to use the more than 2 million acres of previously mined land that’s not currently producing anything could unlock a whole new industry. “If [the Refresh project is] able to make a go of it and provide a model for others,” Zipper says, “I think that’s great.”

So far, soil testing hasn’t revealed any worrisome contaminants. While the water that runs off such sites can contain concentrations of heavy metals like selenium and manganese, which cause problems for aquatic life in headwater streams, Hall says, the concentration is undetectable on any given square foot of soil material.

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question, though, is whether Refresh’s crew members can really make a living through agriculture in the long term. Russell preaches diversification—shoot for five ventures that produce $10,000 each per year. Jude wants to go the value-added path and combine his wife’s love for cooking with his love for growing to open up a farm-fresh restaurant. Farley is hedging—if coal makes a comeback, he may go back to the mines, but if not, he’s sticking with agriculture.

The can-do spirit of this crew works in their favor. And like most people in the region, many of them can draw from their native expertise growing vegetable gardens to feed their families. Jude grew up hoeing corn, raising hogs, and growing pumpkins on his family’s 4-acre farm. And during a recent workshop on marketing produce, crew member Lola Cline piped up that her father ran a produce wholesale business for 35 years.

Whatever the future holds, for now these workers are clearly laboring over something they love in an environment that encourages learning, mutual support, and giving back to their community—all qualities that build resilience over the long haul. And in an economically struggling region where hope runs in high demand, this is no small thing.

This article was funded in part by a grant from the One Foundation, and is republished from YES! Magazine under a Creative Commons License.

Heavily Used Pesticide Linked to Breathing Problems in Farmworkers’ Children

Guest — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 20:52:19 +0000

By Brett Israel
UC Berkeley News

Elemental sulfur, the most heavily used pesticide in California, may harm the respiratory health of children living near farms that use the pesticide, according to new research led by UC Berkeley.

In a study of children in the Salinas Valley’s agricultural community, researchers found significant associations between elemental sulfur use and poorer respiratory health. The study linked reduced lung function, more asthma-related symptoms and higher asthma medication use in children living about a half-mile or less from recent elemental sulfur applications compared to unexposed children.

The Environmental Protection Agency generally considers elemental sulfur as safe for the environment and human health, but previous studies have shown that it is a respiratory irritant to exposed farmworkers. Elemental sulfur’s effect on residential populations, especially children, living near treated fields has not previously been studied despite the chemical’s widespread use and potential to drift from the fields where it is applied. This study is the first to link agricultural use of sulfur with poorer respiratory health in children living nearby.

The study was published August 14 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The research was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the EPA. Rachel Raanan, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and the study’s lead author, was supported by the Environment and Health Fund in Israel. Research protocols were approved by the UC Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.

Elemental sulfur is allowed for use on conventional and organic crops to control fungus and other pests and is very important to both systems. It is the most heavily used agricultural pesticide in California and Europe. In California alone, more than 21 million kilograms of elemental sulfur were applied in agriculture in 2013.

“Sulfur is widely used because it is effective and low in toxicity to people. It is naturally present in our food and soil and is part of normal human biochemistry, but breathing in sulfur dust can irritate airways and cause coughing,” said co-author Asa Bradman, associate director of the Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health at Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “We need to better understand how people are exposed to sulfur used in agriculture and how to mitigate exposures. Formulations using wettable powders could be a solution.”

For the study, the research team examined associations between lung function and asthma-related respiratory symptoms in hundreds of children living near fields where sulfur had been applied. The children were participants in the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS) study, a longitudinal birth cohort that is a partnership between UC Berkeley and the Salinas Valley community. CHAMACOS is the longest running longitudinal birth cohort study of pesticides and other environmental exposures among children living in an agricultural community. The cohort participants were primarily born to families of immigrant farmworker families.

The study found several associations between poorer respiratory health and nearby elemental sulfur use. A 10-fold increase in the estimated amount of sulfur used within 1 kilometer of a child’s residence during the year prior to pulmonary evaluation was associated with a 3.5-fold increased odds in asthma medication usage and a two-fold increased odds in respiratory symptoms such as wheezing and shortness of breath.

The study also found that each 10-fold increase in the amount of elemental sulfur applied in the previous 12 months within a 1-kilometer radius of the home was associated with an average decrease of 143 milliliters per second (mL/s) in the maximal amount of air that the 7-year-old children could forcefully exhale in one second. For comparison, research has shown that exposure to maternal cigarette smoke is associated with a decrease of 101 mL/s after five years of exposure.

The researchers used regression models to control for maternal smoking during pregnancy, season of birth, particulate matter air pollution, breast feeding duration, child’s sex and age, height, technician and other covariates.

“This study provides the first data consistent with anecdotal reports of farmworkers and shows that residents, in this case, children, living near fields may be more likely to have respiratory problems from nearby agricultural sulfur applications,” said senior author Brenda Eskenazi, Berkeley professor at the School of Public Health.

Given elemental sulfur’s widespread use worldwide, the study authors call urgently for more research to confirm these findings and possible changes in regulations and application methods to limit impacts of sulfur use on respiratory health.

The Value of Nature

Guest — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 19:46:48 +0000

By Julie Cohen
UC Santa Barbara

UCSB researchers develop a model that marries ecology and economics to determine how much species protection can be achieved from managing ecosystem services.

Money may not grow on trees, but trees themselves and all that they provide have a dollar value nonetheless.

At least, that’s the view of those seeking to quantify the myriad ways humankind benefits from nature’s ecosystem services: clean air and water, food, even paper from trees. But it’s complicated.

What financial value should be ascribed to, say, plants that improve water quality or wetlands that reduce flooding and property damage from storms? Many ecology and conservation organizations advocate for making such determinations in the interest of land management. Conservation biologists, meanwhile, argue that putting a price tag on nature could weaken the protection of threatened species that have a lower dollar value.

Therein lies the core issue in the debate: To what degree will biodiversity be protected by managing for ecosystem services?

To address this question, a team of UC Santa Barbara researchers has developed a new modeling framework that blends a novel mix of ecology and economics. Their findings appear in the journal Ecology Letters.

“We sought to assess the likely consequences of growing efforts to manage for the economic benefits of ecosystems rather than protecting species for their intrinsic value,” explained co-author Steve Gaines, dean of UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

Because nature is so complex, scientists rarely know the roles all species play in providing benefits to people. This uncertainty is magnified by the fact that the environment is changing. Not all species contribute to ecosystem services, yet critical ones could be lost without conservation. And scientists don’t know for sure which species are critical.

Still, conservation decisions for ecosystem services must be made today, and, as lead author Laura Dee noted, they incur financial costs. “The framework we developed balances the currents costs of protecting species with the future risk of losing ecosystem services,” said Dee, who earned her Ph.D. at UCSB and is now an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology. “In this way, we can determine the optimal number of species to protect.”

Co-author Christopher Costello, a professor at UCSB’s Bren School, said: “We found that it is always optimal to protect more species than are considered ‘economically critical.’ You can think of this as insurance: If you lose a species that is critical to providing an ecosystem service, then the losses can be substantial and irreversible.”

The team’s framework generates simple criteria for determining how much the value of the service must exceed the costs of management to financially justify protecting all species. This defines the settings whereby protecting all species is the economically optimal choice. The group examined this criterion for six different services and ecosystems, ranging from the pollination of watermelon to carbon storage along coastlines or in tropical dry forests.

In some cases, protecting all species in an ecosystem is financially motivated. In others, management solely for financial benefits may leave many species at risk.

“Our results define when managing for ecosystem services alone could leave significant biodiversity unprotected,” Dee explained. “The analysis also helps identify when additional policies such as endangered species regulation will be needed to avoid biodiversity losses.”

Organic is Only One Ingredient in Recipe for Sustainable Food Future

Guest — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:22:12 +0000

By University of British Columbia

Many people choose organic thinking it’s better for humans and the planet, but a new UBC study published today in Science Advances finds that might not always be the case.

“Organic is often proposed a holy grail solution to current environmental and food scarcity problems, but we found that the costs and benefits will vary heavily depending on the context,” said Verena Seufert, a researcher at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES).

In their study, Seufert and her co-author Navin Ramankutty, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change and Food Security at UBC, analyzed organic crop farming across 17 criteria such as yield, impact on climate change, farmer livelihood and consumer health.

It is the first study to systematically review the scientific literature on the environmental and socioeconomic performance of organic farming, not only assessing where previous studies agree and disagree, but also identifying the conditions leading to good or bad performance of organic agriculture.

Take two factors that are top of mind for many consumers: synthetic pesticide use and nutritional benefits of organic. Seufert and Ramankutty argue that in countries like Canada where pesticide regulations are stringent and diets are rich in micronutrients, the health benefits of choosing organic may be marginal.

“But in a developing country where pesticide use is not carefully regulated and people are micronutrient deficient, we think that the benefits for consumer and farm worker health may be much higher,” said Ramankutty, professor at IRES and the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC.

Another important measure of the sustainability of farming systems is the yield of a crop. To date, most studies have compared the costs and benefits of organic and conventional farms of the same size, which does not account for differences in yield.

Previous research has shown that on average, the yield of an organic crop is 19 to 25 per cent lower than under conventional management, and Seufert and Ramankutty find that many of the environmental benefits of organic agriculture diminish once lower yields are accounted for.

“While an organic farm may be better for things like biodiversity, farmers will need more land to grow the same amount of food,” said Seufert. “And land conversion for agriculture is the leading contributor to habitat loss and climate change.”

While their findings suggest that organic alone cannot create a sustainable food future, they conclude that it still has an important role to play. Buying organic is one way that consumers have control over and knowledge of how their food is produced since it is the only farming system regulated in law.

“We need to stop thinking of organic and conventional agriculture as two ends of the spectrum. Instead, consumers should demand better practices for both so that we can achieve the world’s food needs in a sustainable way,” said Seufert.

Mojave National Preserve – Find Your Voice

Guest — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 18:26:32 +0000

By The National Parks Conservation Association

In 2016, to celebrate the National Park Service centennial, 150 people experienced the wondrously dark night skies of Mojave National Preserve. Since 2008, these bi-annual star parties — courtesy of NPCA, Mojave National Preserve, the Mojave National Preserve Conservancy, and the Pasadena Old Town Sidewalk Astronomers — have connected thousands of desert lovers and new guests to the brilliant nighttime displays of this park. Many of the attendees, including youth groups from Los Angeles and the Coachella and Imperial Valleys, had never seen such a sky. Many had never even visited a national park. Watch this video to hear their stories and be inspired by our national parks.

Find Your Voice Mojave National Preserve from NPCA on Vimeo.

To add your voice, visit: www.FindYourVoice.camp

Getting the Urban Into Nature: New Research and New Thinking

Guest — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 12:14:16 +0000

By Susan Bales
Courtesy of Children & Nature Network

Some years ago, I worked as a “nature lady” at a Y camp in the San Bernardino Mountains above Los Angeles.

Urban kids who had no experience in nature came to Big Bear for a week to learn a new way to be in the world by touching a tree, singing a song, and riding a horse. The latter often proved challenging, as the culture of Los Angeles followed them to the camp and played havoc with the mundane world of natural tasks.

Photo: PublicDomainPictures.net

It came home to me one morning when the hay hooks were stolen and I had to improvise to feed the horses. So I put myself in their shoes and tried to find a bridge. The morning after the theft, I posted a sign in the dining hall: “A Hay Hook is A Horse’s Fork – Give It Back!”

By noon, I had restitution. It was, perhaps, my first experience in what was to become my life’s work: understanding the way people bring culture to bear on new experiences and how using a reframing strategy, in this case, a metaphor, can help them engage with the world in a new way. It would have helped, of course, if we had more time with those kids and more diverse experiences.

Today, the young people I nurtured in that forest above Los Angeles are voters, bankers, parents, teachers, plumbers, Rotarians, Methodists, union members, football fans and Twitter users. They have a lot more culture under their belts than they did when I knew them — media, films, stories, news — that provide even more comfortable and automatic assumptions about how the world works. Their lived experience has been shaped a thousand times by narratives about the difference between the city and nature.

While they might long for similar experiences for their children, they will likely seek them in Big Bear — not South Central. Without further explanation, they are likely to leave their elected officials unaccountable for the state of local parks and zoning fiascos. And they will likely undervalue the role that exposure to nature could play in the health and long-term well-being of their children and their children’s children.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The good news is that my instinctive trick pony of long ago — a linguistic and conceptual provocation to rethink an issue — remains valid today. And even better, social science research offers us new tools and techniques to make sure that the metaphors we choose are not rejected (“What does a horse need with a fork?”, my campers might have asked) but actually open up new thinking.

About 16 years ago, I founded the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit think tank that uses original, multi-method social science research to advance public understanding of social problems. Full disclosure: Rich Louv was part of early discussions and conceptual meetings for the Institute, and we have been good friends and sounding boards for 20 years.

Today, I have a finer-grained understanding of what I might say to a new weekend crop of would-be horseback riders, hikers and nature enthusiasts. This time, I am not pulling it out of my rucksack but rather out of a new study that FrameWorks has conducted for the TKF Foundation to figure out what gets in the way of Americans taking that appreciation home with them, down the mountainside and into the streets, parks and arroyos of the city.

“Nature Doesn’t Pay My Bills” compares the way that experts who study health and urban environments understand the role of nature with the everyday understandings of ordinary Americans. Based on a series of interviews conducted by FrameWorks researchers with experts and the public, the report offers important advice to anyone who wishes to deepen public appreciation for urban nature and health.

1. Yellowstone Syndrome. While we might all struggle to define nature, most Americans are sure about one thing: you have to “escape” to get there. Fundamental to nature’s definition is its contrast with cities. FrameWorks’ researchers write: “While experts argue that a small garden or grove can bring health benefits to people, the public thinks about nature on a grander scale, far removed from cities, as that which provides respite from the stressors of modern urban life through its position as far away from daily life.” Reducing the size and scope of ideal nature such that it can be imagined within an urban radius is an important prerequisite to practical thinking about how we get more of it in our daily lives. Given this, nature advocates would do well to show smaller scale illustrations of nature — backyards, urban hillsides, etc.— as well as the more iconic memes.

2. Black Box. While experts speak to “specific immune, nervous, and cognitive benefits that come from experiencing nature, the public has little understanding of these underlying mechanisms, which undermines their valuing of urban nature and its contributions to well-being.” The benefits of nature cannot be reduced to “getting away from it all” without creating a tautological mess in which stress = the modern city, and nature = the anti-city. If we want more nature in cities, we have to explain how nature interacts with human health and development. Nature, experts say, “opens a breathing space for the mind and the nervous system.” And these moments of high quality, neurological rest can happen wherever there is space to breathe and attend to things in a fluid, non-intentional way. It also boosts immune function and strengthens community as people cross paths in relaxed environments. Giving people a working knowledge of how nature gets under the skin must be a key goal of engagement.

3. Dosage. Experts argue that a single “dose” of nature has limited and short-term effects. You need, as one said, “continual infusion of the stuff. And [having nature] nearby is the only way to do that.” Nature advocates know that we need to build exposure to nature into our existing natural infrastructure. Poor maintenance of parks and other green spaces, bad zoning decisions, and short-sighted transportation policies all work to undermine Vitamin N’s effects. But the real challenge for nature advocates is to show how accessibility can be built into the urban landscape and our education system so that nature is “at everyone’s doorstep.”

Of course, these three observations cannot substitute for the deep-dive into people’s cultural models of nature that FrameWorks’ report offers. I hope you will read the full report and find it useful to some robust conversations about how we engage and sustain potential nature advocates. But just addressing these three challenges would greatly improve public understanding: get nature nearby, get under the hood and explain how it works on human health, and populate our imaginations with accessible nature.

Susan Nall Bales is founder of and senior advisor to the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute, one of nine recipients worldwide of the 2015 MacArthur Foundation’s Award for Creative & Effective Institutions. Each year, FrameWorks trains thousands of policy leaders, scientists and advocates in narrative techniques based on sound social science. Bales has published widely on framing, science translation and communications for social good, in peer-reviewed and popular journals, and has lectured at institutions from Harvard University to the White House.

Taking the Pulse of Underwater Forests

Guest — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 13:46:46 +0000

By UC Santa Barbara News

A new study from UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis finds
kelps are doing better than other key coastal ecosystem-forming species

Kelp Forest – Photo Laura Francis, NOAA

Like all marine ecosystems around the world, kelp forests are threatened by human activities. However, a new study reports that kelp ecosystems are in fact faring relatively well in the face of those dangers.

A working group from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis collected nearly all of the existing kelp-monitoring data sets from
around the world and analyzed them to identify long-term trends. The researchers,
including UCSB marine ecologists Jennifer Caselle and Daniel Reed sought to determine
whether kelp forests — like corals, sea grasses and other key coastal ecosystem-forming
species — are in decline. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.

“We were surprised to discover that while one-third of the kelp regions for which
we had data are in decline, one-quarter of them are increasing in size,” said Caselle, a
research biologist at UCSB’s Marine Science Institute and lecturer in the Department of
Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. “For the remainder we were unable to detect a
signal. This shows that we simply cannot understand how global change will affect
globally distributed taxa without understanding how global stressors interact with local
human pressures and environmental conditions.”

The international team of 37 scientists analyzed trends in kelp abundance from 34
regions of the globe, representing 1,138 sites that had been monitored over the past half
century. Despite amassing such a comprehensive database, the scientists found little to no
data for many regions of the globe, making it impossible to determine whether kelp
abundance is on an increasing or decreasing trajectory in those areas.

The investigators reported that while kelp in 38 percent of the analyzed regions
showed clear declines, 27 percent of regions posted increases and 35 percent had no net
change. However, the range of trajectories seen across regions far exceeded a small rate
of decline — 1.8 percent per year — at the global scale.

The research team suggests that this variability reflects large regional differences
in the drivers of local environmental change and that global factors associated with
climate change vary by region, depending on the kelp species, the local environmental
conditions and other sources of stress. This contrasts with many other species, such as
corals and seagrasses, whose abundances are declining on the global scale. According to
the scientists, this difference is likely in part due to the unique capacity of kelp to recover
quickly from disturbances.

“Kelp is a rock star of resilience; in many places, it’s managed to hold its own
against environmental change,” said co-author Jarrett Byrnes, a former postdoctoral
associate at NCEAS, now at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “Kelps may well
not be the canary in the coal mine for the effects of global environmental change for our
oceans. Rather, their loss may be a sign that we have finally tipped over the edge of a
precipice.”

The team’s findings highlight the importance and opportunity for managing kelp
forests on a local scale. Indeed, regions where declines were documented were often
those experiencing multiple local and global stressors acting together to harm forests.
These sometimes included the combination of fishing and climate change.

“Kelp forests support an incredible diversity of species and are of rich economic
and cultural value to humans,” said lead author Kira Krumhansl of Simon Fraser
University in British Columbia. “Our study highlights that maintaining the health of kelp
forests relies on understanding what is happening on local scales. Each region is unique.
In fact, each forest is unique. Managing stressors on local scales has a key role to play in
maintaining the health of kelp ecosystems in the face of increasing global pressures.”

The Anthropocene Is Here: Humanity Has Pushed Earth Into a New Epoch

Guest — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 10:00:32 +0000

By Deirdre Fulton
Common Dreams

The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity set global systems on a different trajectory

Credit Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler NASA Earth Observatory

The Anthropocene Epoch has begun, according to a group of experts assembled at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa this week.

After seven years of deliberation, members of an international working group voted unanimously on Monday to acknowledge that the Anthropocene—a geologic time interval so-dubbed by chemists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000—is real.

The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity, namely rapid industrialization and nuclear activity, set global systems on a different trajectory. And there’s evidence in the geographic record. Indeed, scientists say that nuclear bomb testing, industrial agriculture, human-caused global warming, and the proliferation of plastic across the globe have so profoundly altered the planet that it is time to declare the 11,700-year Holocene over.

As the working group articulated in a media note on Monday:

Changes to the Earth system that characterize the potential Anthropocene Epoch include marked acceleration to rates of erosion and sedimentation; large-scale chemical perturbations to the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements; the inception of significant change to global climate and sea level; and biotic changes such as unprecedented levels of species invasions across the Earth. Many of these changes are geologically long-lasting, and some are effectively irreversible.

These and related processes have left an array of signals in recent strata, including plastic, aluminium and concrete particles, artificial radionuclides, changes to carbon and nitrogen isotope patterns, fly ash particles, and a variety of fossilizable biological remains. Many of these signals will leave a permanent record in the Earth’s strata.

“Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet,” said Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and secretary for the working group. “The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change together.”

Indeed, the Guardian compiled more “evidence of the Anthropocene,” saying humanity has:

Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is now on course to see 75 percent of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.
Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.
Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.
Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with our fertilizer use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.
Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.

Now, scientists must commence their search for the “golden spike”—explained in the Telegraph as “a physical reference point that can be dated and taken as a representative starting point for the Anthropocene epoch.” This could be found in anything from layers of sediment in a peat bog to a coral reef to tree rings.

“A river bed in Scotland, for example, is taken to be the representative starting point for the Holocene epoch,” the Telegraph reports.

The Guardian points out: “For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth.”

However, Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the working group, told the paper that while “the radionuclides are probably the sharpest—they really come on with a bang,” humanity has left no shortage of signatures.

“We are spoiled for choice,” he said. “There are so many signals.”

According to the Telegraph, once one or more golden spike sites have been selected, a proposal for the formal recognition of an Anthropocene epoch will be made to a series of commissions, culminating at the International Union of Geological Sciences. The process is likely to take at least three years.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License