New York Times
by Cara Buckley

The tiny forest lives atop an old landfill in the city of Cambridge, Mass. Though it is still a baby, it’s already acting quite a bit older than its actual age, which is just shy of 2. Its aspens are growing at twice the speed normally expected, with fragrant sumac and tulip trees racing to catch up. It has absorbed storm water without washing out, suppressed many weeds and stayed lush throughout last year’s drought. The little forest managed all this because of its enriched soil and density, and despite its diminutive size: 1,400 native shrubs and saplings, thriving in an area roughly the size of a basketball court.

It is part of a sweeping movement that is transforming dusty highway shoulders, parking lots, schoolyards and junkyards worldwide. Tiny forests have been planted across Europe, in Africa, throughout Asia and in South America, Russia and the Middle East. India has hundreds, and Japan, where it all began, has thousands. Now tiny forests are slowly but steadily appearing in the United States. In recent years, they’ve been planted alongside a corrections facility on the Yakama reservation in Washington, in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park and in Cambridge, where the forest is one of the first of its kind in the Northeast.

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The Guardian
By Leyland Cecco

Stark images of an ancient tree cut down in western Canada expose flaws in the government’s plan to protect old-growth forests, activists have said, arguing that vulnerable ecosystems have been put at risk as logging companies race to harvest timber.

The last great tree: a majestic relic of Canada's vanishing rainforest

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As part of an effort to catalogue possible old growth forests, photographer TJ Watt and Ian Thomas of the environmental advocacy group Ancient Forest Alliance travelled to a grove of western red cedars on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. But when they arrived to the forest in Quatsino Sound, they found hundreds of trees that has recently been logged.

“It’s absolutely gut-wrenching to see a tree lying on the ground, and to think that it had lived for more than 500 years and then it can be gone in the blink of an eye, never to be seen again,” said Watt, who photographed the forest as part of a grant from the Trebek Initiative, a partnership between the National Geographic Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society named after the late Jeopardy host.

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Inside Climate News
By Victoria St. Martin

Roughly one in five Americans lives in counties that have high, unhealthy daily levels of pollution from manufacturing soot, vehicle exhaust and other fine particles, according to a new report from the American Lung Association.

The findings, part of the lung association’s annual “State of the Air” report, also indicated that more people are residing in such high-pollution areas nationwide than at any other time in the past decade. The report, which the lung association calls a “national report card on air quality,” is based on data compiled from electronic air quality monitors across the country.

The report also found that people of color disproportionately reside in communities with harmful air. About 64 million people of color live in areas that have received at least one failing grade from environmentalists for ozone or fine particle pollution, the report found.

The lung association’s review also found that more people are being exposed to high levels of fine particle pollution for longer periods, especially in the Western United States. Among the 25 American cities that have the unhealthiest air, the average number of days that residents were exposed to high levels of particle pollution increased to about 18 days from about 16 days since last year’s report. All but two of the 25 worst cities for daily particle pollution were located in the Western U.S.

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Minnesota Reformer
BY: DEENA WINTER

3M toxicologist Richard Purdy did a study in 1998 to see whether any of the company’s perfluorochemicals showed up in the blood of eagles and albatrosses.

That seemed unlikely, given the birds’ diet consists mostly of fish. So Purdy was surprised and disturbed when he found levels in their blood similar to those found in human blood. It even showed up in bald eagle nestlings whose only food was fish their parents fed them from remote lakes.

That indicated what Purdy later called “widespread environmental contamination” — the likelihood the manmade, toxic chemicals were moving through the food chain and accumulating in animals.

Purdy warned 3M that if wild birds’ blood contained the chemicals, then fish-eating mammals — like otters, mink, porpoise and seals — could have it, too. A study of rats found they had significant levels of a 3M chemical in their livers, likely from eating fishmeal. 

He told company officials in an email there was a significant risk of ecological harm, which should be reported to the EPA.

In response, 3M managers dispersed the team collecting the data, Purdy alleged.

Purdy resigned in 1999 and sent his resignation letter to the EPA, informing them that while 3M had disclosed to the EPA that a chemical called PFOS “had been found in the blood of animals,” it didn’t mention that it was found in the blood of eaglets.

The EPA began investigating the chemicals that year. But by then, 3M had reaped billions of dollars in profits from chemicals that the company had been warned were harming the environment and risking human health. 

The per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) had spread — through groundwater and products like Scotchgard stain repellent, Teflon cookware, food wrapping and fire retardant — and were showing up in the blood of people and animals in every corner of the world. They were in nearly every living thing, from house dust to human blood, in wildlife in the Arctic circle and drinking water, rivers, streams and breast milk. 

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The Conversation
By Amy Rand

Cosmetics and personal care products enhance the way we look and feel. During the pandemic, I started a self-care facial routine. It helped me cope with lockdown orders, while simultaneously adjusting to my new identity as a mom. I applied toner, serum and cream to brighten mornings and relax evenings.

But many of these products contain chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as 'forever chemicals.' They are used as ingredients that can make products waterproof, long-lasting and help them spread smoothly across skin.

European data indicates there are about 170 PFAS ingredients for use in cosmetics and personal care products. Each year, upwards of 80,000 kg of PFAS may be released after product use to wastewater and solid waste streams, a significant source of PFAS to the environment.

Persistent contaminants

PFAS are persistent environmental contaminants. The properties that make them commercially useful, particularly their stability, also means that there is no environmental mechanism to degrade them, and so they accumulate. PFAS have been found across the globe, including remote regions like the Arctic.

PFAS also accumulate in the body. The Canadian Health Measures survey sampled blood from thousands of people and found several PFAS in all participants.

Major sources of PFAS exposure to people are through diet, from drinking contaminated water or ingesting food, such as fish or meat. Agricultural fields can contain PFAS from biosolids used as fertilizer, as wastewater treatment plants cannot remove them.

Therefore, PFAS are transported via biosolids to crops and animals. Similarly, PFAS are added to personal care products, applied, then washed off to enter wastewater treatment plants, contributing to a global environmental problem.

PFAS in personal care products

In our study, we measured PFAS in cosmetics and personal care products purchased in Canada. Products included bronzers, concealers, foundations, shaving creams, sunscreens and moisturizers.

PFAS were extracted from each product and measured using mass spectrometry instrumentation. These instruments identify individual PFAS present in the products, at high milligram amounts or down to a trillionth of a gram.

Particularly high levels stemmed from products containing the following ingredients: C6-16 perfluoroalkyl ethyl phosphates, perfluorooctyl triethoxysilane, and perfluorobutyl ethers. The Canadian government has prohibited some PFAS from products, including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and any chemical that degrades to produce PFOA.

New proposed Canadian PFAS regulations will set a threshold level at one microgram per gram in products. This means that PFAS at or below this level would be incidental and the prohibition would not apply. Yet we found that some products contained PFAS—including those prohibited from use—at levels a thousand times higher than the incidental level—pointing towards a lack of oversight when it comes to managing PFAS in the personal care product industry.

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CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ALREADY know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own. But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure a “hidden vulnerability” that will make matters far worse: The coastline is also sinking. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and it’s poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems.

New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds that the Atlantic Coast—home to more than a third of the US population—is dropping by several millimeters per year. In Charleston, South Carolina, and the Chesapeake Bay, it’s up to 5 millimeters (a fifth of an inch). In some areas of Delaware, it’s as much as twice that.

Five millimeters of annual sea-level rise along a stretch of coastline, plus 5 millimeters of subsidence there, is effectively 10 millimeters of relative sea-level rise. Atlantic coastal cities are already suffering from persistent flooding, and the deluge will only get worse as they sink while seas rise. Yet high-resolution subsidence data like this isn’t yet taken into account for coastal hazard assessments. “What we want to do here is to really bring awareness about this missing component, that based on our analysis actually makes the near-future vulnerability a lot worse than what you would expect from sea-level rise alone,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and coauthor of the new paper.

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The Atlantic
By Andrew Aoyama

The people who live and work in Appalachian coal country tend to be viewed as climate-change villains rather than victims. But the deadly floods that swept a pocket of eastern Kentucky last summer challenge common preconceptions about which Americans are vulnerable to environmental disasters, and what—or who—is to blame.

The Weight of the Rain

To understand how a freak summer rainstorm could kill 44 Appalachian residents and leave thousands more displaced across eastern Kentucky, you could consider the moment in the early morning hours of July 28, 2022, when the floodwaters that swelled from local creeks darkened from muddy brown to charcoal gray, rising high enough to loosen mobile homes, trucks, and trees from their perches and hurl them through the valleys like missiles. You could recall how the weight of the rain forced families to seek shelter in the hills and watch as their communities washed away down the hollows.

Or you could read an Atlantic article from April 1962. Written by a Kentucky lawyer named Harry Caudill, “The Rape of the Appalachians” was a broadside against a relatively new method of coal extraction—strip mining—and it managed to predict precisely the environmental catastrophe that befell eastern Kentucky this past summer.

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