National Geographic
By Douglas Main

If you’ve been to Disney World in Orlando, you’ve been to the Northern Everglades. Much of the water within the famous “river of grass” originates in Central Florida and flows south via the Kissimmee River—one of the more important and lesser-known waterways nationwide.

Sixty years ago, the Kissimmee meandered for more than 100 miles from the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes to Lake Okeechobee, and its floodplains were home to seasonal wetlands rich with life. But in the 1940s, in response to flooding and hurricanes, the state asked the federal government to help build a sprawling network of canals and waterways to drain the land.

The Army Corps of Engineers complied and, beginning in the 1960s, turned the meandering Kissimmee into a 30-foot-deep, channelized canal. Within a few years, populations of waterfowl dropped by 90 percent, bald eagle numbers by 70 percent, and some fish, bird, and mammal species vanished. The channel acted like a pipe, moving water quickly off the landscape to Lake Okeechobee, and then to the ocean. While that helped prevent some flooding in the short term, it robbed the stream of oxygen, which decimated the fish community and gave nutrient pollution no time to settle and be absorbed by the wetlands.

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The Washington Post
By Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis

The acceleration, while relatively short-lived so far, could have far-reaching consequences in an area of the United States that has seen massive development as the wetlands, mangroves and shorelines that once protected it are shrinking. An already vulnerable landscape that is home to millions of people is growing more vulnerable, more quickly, potentially putting a large swath of America at greater risk from severe storms and flooding.

The increase has already had major effects, researchers found. One study suggests that recent devastating hurricanes, including Michael in 2018 and Ian last year, were made considerably worse by a faster-rising ocean. Federal tide gauge data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that the sea level, as measured by tide gauge at Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, is eight inches higher than it was in 2006, just after Hurricane Katrina.

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Yahoo News!
Carla Hall

The Shasta District Fair last year ended disastrously for a 9-year old girl and her goat. And it didn’t end so well for the Shasta County fair officials who sent law enforcement hunting with a search warrant for the animal after the girl decided she didn't want it killed. The goat got slaughtered. But the fair officials got pretty beat up on social media.

Jessica Long’s daughter — identified in a pending lawsuit only as E.L. — raised the big-eyed, floppy-eared Cedar as part of a 4-H youth project. She entered him in the Shasta District Fair junior livestock auction, which happens to be something called a terminal auction. The animals that are bought are killed and their meat is turned over to the winning bidders. Just before the auction, the young girl told her mother that she couldn’t go through with sending Cedar to slaughter and wanted out. Fair officials refused, according to the lawsuit. After the auction, with her daughter sobbing in Cedar’s pen, Long took Cedar and, as she later wrote to fair officials, decided to suffer the consequences later. Mother, daughter and goat left the fair and went to a farm more than 200 miles away in Sonoma County.

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NY Magazine
By Tom Scocca

The lightbulb was flickering over my head. Not the idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb. I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome.

LED bulbs do this to me all the time. The two in my youngest son’s bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them. When I left them alone for a week, they inexplicably came back on at full blast. At story time, the LED in the clamp light on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power too fast. It sits there feebly glimmering, its perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean light blobs, until you turn it off and wait a while.

For most of my life, I expected energy-saving lighting to be bad. Traditional fluorescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, were synonymous with institutional austerity and migraines. A new generation of streetlamps somehow made city nights seem darker; CFLs shattered into mercury-flecked shards. New lighting tech was something people resented and worked around. My generation, presented with thrifty overhead fluorescents in ’90s dorms, countered by plugging in the newly popular halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts would incinerate wayward moths or occasionally a stray curtain along with the university’s planned energy savings.

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WIRED

ALASKA ISN’T SUPPOSED to be an inferno—but its summers are now so warm that apocalyptic wildfires are almost inevitable. In June 2022, lightning strikes set the drought-stricken land ablaze, winds whipped up flames, and long curtains of fire soon ripped through previously untouched tundra, pushing plumes of thick smoke up into the atmosphere. Firefighters were powerless to contain the blazes. More than 1.8 million acres were scorched in just a month. 

Now, less than a year later, US president Joe Biden has just approved a massive, 600-million-barrel oil-drilling project in the north of the state, which will further heat the world and deepen Alaska’s descent into an age of fire. Fuels extracted by the Willow Project on Alaska’s north slope will generate emissions equivalent to 66 coal-fired power plants.

The incongruity is hard to stomach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has this month spelled out unequivocally that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is rapidly becoming impossible, and that staying under 2 degrees will require “deep and rapid reductions” in CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC’s new synthesis report, which pulls together the findings of its most recent scientific reports, underlines that Alaska’s fate is just a fragment of the picture of what’s happening worldwide. Emissions continuing to rise will mean more heat waves, floods, droughts, and sea level rises—more biodiversity losses, epidemics, and food insecurity. 

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National Geographic
BYNINA STROCHLIC

A few years ago as Ineza Umuhoza Grace watched news footage of families in Rwanda evacuating their flooded homes, a memory surfaced: her mother waking her up at night and dragging her out of the house as torrential rains crashed through the ceiling and water rose from the floor. “I remembered the sense of being powerless,” she says. “And I could not believe that other children could be living that same fear.” (Rwanda is referred to as the “land of a thousand hills.”)

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