Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

New study reveals climate change toll on Maine's kelp forests

Parts of the warming Gulf of Maine have become inhospitable for kelp forests, according to new research from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay

https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2024-09-23/new-study-reveals-climate-change-toll-on-maines-kelp-forests

#Maine #USA #US #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #GlobalBurning #ClimateDestruction #ClimateSuicide #MassExtinction #pollution #ecology #environment #climate

Motherhood paradox: Be a good mother but work like you don't have kids. Note that there is no "fatherhood paradox." https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-women/202409/the-silent-struggle-inside-the-motherhood-paradox

Roberto has been working in Salinas area fields for 13 years. He is currently weeding and thinning lettuce. He shares, "This work is hard on my body. I get very tired from walking and hoeing the crop 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. But the work feeds my family." #WeFeedYou

So many sex scandals!

(I actually wrote a long piece about the Right’s blood-and-soil nationalism, how it connects to the “history wars” and and how it fuels Trump’s mass deportation plans as well as JD Vance’s attempts to incite a pogrom.)

But also: So. Many. Sex. Scandals.

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/blood-and-soil

The NYT sees a “fault line”…

Well, yes, the fault line is between those who believe these are personal decisions and the ethno-nationalists in charge of the GOP who fundamentally reject the idea of privacy and instead insist women accept their duty to bear children in service of the “homeland.”

The new Georgia election-night ballot counting law is ill-advised for many reasons (it will create chaos, solves no actual problems, and creates a logistic nightmare to implement this late in the game, for starters). But the thing that bothers me the most is that it will put ground-level election workers - who were already viciously targeted in 2020 - in the spotlight and at the center of partisan disputes.

We need to do better by these dedicated public servants.

Pregnancy deaths rose by 56% in Texas after 2021 abortion ban, analysis finds

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna171631

#IndigenousActivists are risking their lives for #butterflies

In #CentralMexico’s forests, armed community members defend an iconic butterfly from cartel-backed logging.

By Anjan Sundaram Dec 20, 2023

"Every winter, northwest of Mexico City, the branches of the Oyamel fir trees ignite in orange, colored by the wings of #MonarchButterflies that have made the epic journey south from Canada and the United States.

"The forest is home to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, created by presidential decree in 1986 and designated as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2008. The reserve shelters nearly 90 percent of the region’s over-wintering monarch butterfly population.

"Despite the fact that the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve is internationally protected, decades of degradation of the forest have posed an existential threat to this fragile ecosystem. Over the past four decades, the number of winter roosting sites for the butterflies in the reserve has fallen by over 50 percent, driven in part by illegal logging.

"After researchers found that 10 percent of total canopy cover had been lost between 2001 and 2012, the Mexican government ramped up enforcement of laws prohibiting logging. Government raids on illegal sawmills in the reserve sharply reduced logging. Yet according to an analysis by the World Wildlife Fund, the rate of forest degradation in the reserve tripled in 2022.

"To protect these forests — one of the few remaining wintering refuges for migrating monarchs — the local #Mazahua Indigenous community in Crescencio Morales has established its own security force.

"As these self-described forest defenders from Crescensio Morales fight to protect the monarch butterfly’s refuge, Indigenous leaders took the global stage at the United Nations annual climate change summit in Dubai to wage this battle on a second front: to convince world leaders to recognize the dangers environmental land defenders, particularly in Latin America, face and to build stronger mechanisms to support them.

"Around the world, environmental activists face increasing violence

"As their weapons indicate, the world’s environmental defenders need defending. Every day, the councils of Crescencio Morales’ guardia comunales work in shifts, patrolling their community as well as the boundary of the Monarch Biosphere Reserve. They say they are threatened by #sicarios, cartel #hitmen, who also benefit from the #IllegalTrade, and are allied with clandestine loggers who camp in the surrounding forests. The guardia comunales run well-armed patrols through their territories to prevent the sicarios from expanding their territories and cutting down the precious Oyamel fir trees.

"These conflicts put environmental #activists at great risk. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promised to stop such violence, but the country remains among the world’s deadliest for those defending its pristine ecosystems. In January 2020, the body of the anti-logging activist and monarch butterfly defender #HomeroGómezGonzalez was found in a community near Crescencio. Activists suspect his death was connected to illegal logging disputes, the Guardian reported.

"The pressures that Mexico’s Indigenous activists face are emblematic of similar conflicts arising globally. Communities like Crescencio Morales are on the front lines of a battle to protect their local environment from a mounting scramble for natural resources, amplified by corruption.

"Members of Crescencio Morales’s community told me that in addition to fighting the illegal loggers, they also protect their forested mountains from #mining companies seeking to extract #gold, #silver, and #copper — #minerals now in high demand as the world transitions to clean energy technologies.
Land defenders around the world — in countries including Mexico, #Brazil, The Democratic Republic of the #Congo, and the #Philippines — face increasing violence as they defend their territories, according to #GlobalWitness, an accountability nonprofit that studies the link between #NaturalResources, #conflict, and #corruption. A 2023 investigation by the organization found that nearly 2,000 #activists have been killed over the last decade for their efforts to protect the planet, many of them from Indigenous communities trying to preserve their ecological heritage.

"The majority of recorded killings of #LandDefenders in 2022 took place in #LatinAmerica, making the continent perhaps the most dangerous place for #EnvironmentalDefense.

"#IndigenousLands include some of the planet’s most threatened landscapes

"The Mexican constitution protects the right of Indigenous communities’ self-determination — which, among other forms of #sovereignty, allows them to govern their land communally. In 2023, more than 50 percent of Mexico’s land fell under these legal regimes, termed #TierraComunal or #TierraEjidal — which roughly translates to communal land. This, according to a study by the Rights and Resources Initiative, is the highest percentage of land collectively owned by Indigenous and local communities of any country in the #Americas.

"This unique aspect of #MexicanIndigenous heritage means that broad swaths of land in Mexico remain protected. Yet mounting effects from climate change as well as political and economic pressures mean that some of Mexico’s Indigenous communities have been forced to block highways in protest and appeal for help to protect themselves, their communities, their ecosystems, and their way of life.

"#Mexico’s unique legal regime is especially important for Crescencio Morales because it offers communities in the area, with deep historical and cultural ties to the monarch butterflies, the legal authority to protect the reserve. But the law can only do so much to protect the refuge and its migrating butterflies from illegal logging pressure.

"To prevent destruction of the Monarch Biosphere Reserve, Indigenous activists have taken their security and that of the butterflies’ precious trees into their own hands. When I visited Crescencio Morales earlier this year, I walked with a community policeman named Aurelio during an armed patrol along his community’s border. (We are withholding his identity and using a pseudonym to protect him from being targeted by local violence.) At the summit of one of the hills surrounding the community, Aurelio told me Crescencio Morales had been forced to arm itself to protect its people, butterflies, and #Forests.

"The security situation in towns such as #CrescencioMorales is complex. According to other community leaders I spoke with this year, who wished to remain anonymous due to security risks, the locals did not trust the army or the state police, which they often suspected of cutting business deals with the cartels. Armed security volunteers who protected the community from #taladores, the illegal loggers, patrolled their town in pickup trucks.

"These hyperlocal battles — on highways and in open warfare by the #GuardiasComunales — have larger stakes: Mexican Indigenous environmental activists are defending landscapes that have implications for global #biodiversity. Without their efforts, environmentalists fear systemic #deforestation from illegal logging, which would not only destroy habitat for vulnerable species but also increase the #GreenhouseGas emissions that further drive #ClimateChange. And without the preservation of the Crescencio Morales Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, an important chain in a migration that connects ecosystems from Canada to Mexico would be severed."

Full article:
https://www.vox.com/climate/24006471/cop28-rising-danger-environmental-activism

#ForestDefenders #JusticeForHomero #DirectAction #CriminalizingDissent #DefendTheForest #IndigenousRights #Extinction #EnvironmentalActivists #ClimateActivists #ClimateJustice
#Fascism #DirectAction #SilencingDissent #CorporateColonialism

Undocumented immigrants paid $97B in taxes in 2022.

T-Mobile, Office Depot, and Duke Energy made billions in profits but paid nothing in federal income taxes between 2018 and 2022.

Remember this the next time the undocumented are called "freeloaders."

US food producer poison meat outbreak: Boar's Head knew they had a problem but refused to take the necessary action.

‘It was too late’: Former Boar’s Head sanitation manager breaks down where Jarratt plant went wrong

https://www.wric.com/news/taking-action/jarratt-plant-sanitation-manager

#Boar'sHead #USfood #listeria

A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631

#Election interference (expect more): Rs in MT sent out ballots electronically for absentee voters w/o Harris' name listed:

Election officials were notified of the error shortly after the system that allows certain voters to cast their ballot electronically went live on Fri at 8 AM.

“Our team & the vendor quickly investigated & found: only a few voters may have been impacted" -SOS’s Office. “As a precaution, the Electronic Absentee System has been taken off-."

#USPol https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2024/sep/20/ballot-error-shuts-down-montana-online-absentee-voting-system/

NEW: The Justice Department sues two #Wisconsin towns for banning electronic voting machines in their elections. The DOJ argues that the towns violated federal law by failing to provide voting equipment accessible to voters with disabilities. https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/wisconsin-town-voting-machine-access-challenge/

Cruelty & #fascism know no bounds in TX:

"A razor wire fence on the TX border w/NM isn’t about border sec., it’s about monitoring/reg. travel of TX women seeking abortion care."
G Hinojosa

Gov Abbott announced on 9/14 that his state would be “TRIPLING our razor wire border barriers to deny illegal entry into our state & country.

Rather than installing the razor wire along the Rio Grande river bank that faces MX, TX NG troops installed it along a bank that faces NM.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/texas-new-mexico-border-wire-b2615743.html

“As a supporter of fmr President Donald #Trump & Senator #JDVance, I am saddened by how they & others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence & disparage the #legal migrants living in Springfield,” #MikeDeWine wrote. “This rhetoric #hurts the city & its people, & it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”

#StochasticTerrorism #terrorism #racism #WhiteNationalism #extremism #FactCheck #TrumpLies #immigration #VoteBlue #HarrisWalz
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/springfield-haitian-migrants-ohio.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb&ngrp=mnp&pvid=B1417922-EDFB-4B33-94AD-CEDC6B9D34BB

📣 UPDATE: Given today's news out of NC & how much help we need in Montana, I've decided to remove Josh Stein from my State Executive Endgame page and replace him with BEN ALKE for MT AG and JESSE MULLEN for MT SoS!

(image may take a day or two to update)

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/endgamestateexecs2024?refcode=masto

In #books: ”Jessica Pishko describes today’s American sheriff as an increasingly powerful elected figure who runs the nation’s massive infrastructure of local jails and is nearly always a well-funded incumbent with access to increasingly sophisticated weapons.” https://www.texasobserver.org/lawmen-above-the-law/

#politics #USpol #bookstodon #police #CriminalJustice #democracy #elections #HumanRights #GunViolence

So we’re in a care crisis in America. Think of the burdens of child and elder care alone in your life. #KamalaHarris is the only one talking about this. https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/01/kamala-harris-policies-caregiving-care-economy-an-issue-other-candidates-should-promote/