Portland, OR companies Last Mile<\/em> and Triton<\/em> shut business down due to unsustainable demands by their sole contractor[^1], Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos thanks Amazon employees and customers for paying for his trip to “space”<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The government\u2019s stay-at-home lockdown order issued last year during a state of emergency was unconstitutional, Spain\u2019s Constitutional Court ruled on July 14, AP reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the far-right Vox party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wildfires continue to burn actively across 13 states where 78 large fires and complexes [are burning] 1,346,736 acres. [that is, more than a million acres of fire in America right this very moment. 2,636,109+ acres total have burned this year alone.<\/strong>] More than 20,700 wildland firefighters and support personnel are assigned to incidents. New large fires were reported in California, Montana and Wyoming.<\/p> States experiencing large fires right now include: Montana (17), Idaho (16), California (8), Oregon (7), Washington (7), Alaska (6), Wyoming (6), Arizona (6), New Mexico (1), Colorado (1), Utah (1), Minnesota (1), Nevada (1). Fires currently contained: 3 out of 78 total.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n There are about 4,644 active wildfires across Western Canada as well<\/a>, totaling more than 5 million acres. Most of those are also out of control according to government sources. You can find an interactive map of active wildfires in Canada at https:\/\/cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca\/interactive-map . British Columbia is currently under a state of emergency as of July 20 and will remain so for at least 14 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n submitted to the FAO in 2005: Boreal forest fires: an increasing issue in a changing climate<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The area burned in Canada has doubled during the past 20 years compared to most of the twentieth century, with wide interannual fluctuations. Global and regional climate models suggest that the area burned and severity of boreal fires will increase as a result of climate change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n California Department of Fish and Wildlife staff are on the ground monitoring drought impacts \u2014 and among the alarming findings is “the possibility of a near-complete loss” of young, winter-run Chinook salmon on the Sacramento River this fall due to a dwindling water supply and persistent dry, hot weather.<\/p>via SFGate<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. It\u2019s all the stuff that\u2019s dependent on it. The ice is really just the canary in the coalmine. To have 97, 98 degrees in Glacier national park for days on end is insane. This is not just some fluke.<\/p> There are many years where the snow is gone so early that you just don\u2019t see it in the mountains. And water getting that warm is absolutely devastating to fish and algae.<\/p> Life doesn\u2019t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn\u2019t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they\u2019re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked.<\/p> There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just can\u2019t take the heat. Year after year of that and you lose your birds.<\/p> People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It\u2019s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they\u2019ve moved too far off shore. They\u2019re emaciated, they\u2019re starving to death. We are at the point that there\u2019s nothing untouched.<\/p> I\u2019m also an artist. I recently finished a 10-week art course called Identity in America where the instructor made us use a medium we had not worked with before, because he felt we couldn\u2019t go back to old habits. I ended up drawing myself morphing from being an ecologist to the guys who walked around during the plague to bring out the bodies<\/p> When I was forced to actually confront my identity, I realized that I\u2019m no longer doing what I thought I was. My whole life has been documenting how life works, how we can conserve species that are in trouble. I was no longer cataloging life and finding ways to prevent ecosystems from reaching tipping points. I had actually hit my own tipping point. Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I\u2019m describing loss, decline, death. And that is what is accounting for my kind of overwhelming sense of grief.<\/p> This is what really brought home to me that my entire job has changed. I don\u2019t like my new job, but I can\u2019t quit. Even if I quit being a professor and doing research, I\u2019m always going to be a coroner now.<\/p> When I started work, I didn\u2019t think about climate change. It was far enough back that people were still kind of wondering, is it really happening? Then pretty early in my career as a professor, I realized I had to incorporate climate change into most of what I was doing. These tree-killing bark beetles I study have always had outbreaks. It\u2019s not anything new. But when mountain pine beetle developed this most recent outbreak, it was so far out of the norm in size and severity, we couldn\u2019t ignore that.<\/p> I would walk through these forests and almost everything was dead. When you see a beetle kill 70 acres of trees across North America, you just have to change your research questions. My focus had to shift from the beetles to how we can help our forests survive this. You have to come at these systems from a completely different direction now.<\/p> We\u2019re coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you aren\u2019t going to the root cause of the problem it\u2019s still going to happen. That\u2019s not to say that if we didn\u2019t just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldn\u2019t save some of this. We just can\u2019t do it one species at a time.<\/p>Diana Six<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nClips:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Sources:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nSpain\u2019s top court ruled COVID lockdown unconstitutional<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Fire Season 2021<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
‘Near-complete loss’ of young salmon in Sacramento River possible, California officials say<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Top US scientist on melting glaciers: \u2018I\u2019ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n