Read the full story at The Bridge.
In coastal communities around the state, the mounting cost to repair or relocate threatened public infrastructure has collided with fiscal belt-tightening tied to COVID-19. An economic downturn caused by the pandemic has punched a $6.2 billion hole in Michigan’s budget and done extensive damage to federal and local budgets, leaving less available to respond to high lake levels.
Read the full story at e360.
When Guatemala created a major reserve 30 years ago, environmentalists complained that too much land was entrusted to local people and not converted to parks. Now, the parks have been overrun by ranches linked to drug traffickers, while the community-run lands are well preserved.
Read the full post at Inside Science Resources.
Scite.ai is a so-called Smart Citation platform that aims to provide researchers with additional context for a publication’s citation metrics. Scite uses artificial intelligence to analyze citation statements, and classifies them based on whether the work supports, contradicts, or just mentions the original work. This allows researchers a greater insight into the importance and accuracy of the original work.
Read the full story at NPR.
Along central Maine’s Sebasticook River, the first thing you’ll notice are the birds. Eagles are everywhere, wading on gravel bars and chattering from the trees.
“A whole bunch of birds, they’re bald eagles, those are all bald eagles!” says conservationist Steve Brooke.
It’s a dramatic sight, as the bald eagles swoop to catch fish from the river. And it’s a sight that Brooke predicted for this region, more than 20 years ago. That’s when he began advocating for the removal of a large hydroelectric dam downstream, on the Kennebec River. The Edwards Dam came down in 1999 after the federal government ordered its removal, saying the ecological costs outweighed the benefit of the power it provided.
That was the first such order and it boosted what is a growing trend. Now, dozens of aging dams are removed from U.S. rivers every year.
Read the full story at The Bridge.
New regulations that aim to reduce pollution in Michigan waterways from farm animal manure are in legal limbo, after an appeal from farming groups who argue the measures go too far.
Read the full story from NPR.
The club was supposed to meet once a week. But for many of the members of Men in Color, Wednesday afternoons turned into Monday afternoons and Thursdays too.
“After school, we were always in Mr. C’s room,” says Jaheim Birch-Gentles, a recent graduate of the High School for Innovation in Advertising and Media in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. He’s referring to one of the club’s advisors, Mischaël Cetoute. The club served as a safe space for students to talk through issues and ideas.
Those afternoon meetings gave rise to the Flossy Podcast, where the students tackle big social issues mixed in with their lived experiences.
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Unilever has announced it will invest €1 billion (about $1.12 billion based on exchange rates this week) over the next decade in efforts to tackle climate change and deliver on a new goal to ensure net zero emissions across its value chain by 2039.
Read the full story at The Conversation.
The New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned recently after the paper published a controversial opinion essay by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton that advocated using the military to put down protests.
The essay sparked outrage among the public as well as among younger reporters at the paper. Many of those staffers participated in a social media campaign aimed at the paper’s leadership, asking for factual corrections and an editor’s note explaining what was wrong with the essay.
Eventually, the staff uprising forced Bennet’s departure.
Cotton’s column was published on the opinion pages – not the news pages. But that’s a distinction often lost on the public, whose criticisms during the recent incident were often directed at the paper as a whole, including its news coverage. All of which raises a longstanding question: What’s the difference between the news and opinion side of a news organization?
It is a tenet of American journalism that reporters working for the news sections of newspapers remain entirely independent of the opinion sections. But the divide between news and opinion is not as clear to many readers as journalists believe that it is.
And because American news consumers have become accustomed to the ideal of objectivity in news, the idea that opinions bleed into the news report potentially leads readers to suspect that reporters have a political agenda, which damages their credibility, and that of their news organizations.
Read the full story at The Energy Mix.
British Columbia is dramatically overestimating the size of productive old growth forests that have all but vanished across the province, according to an independent science report that warns of serious climate impacts if remaining forests aren’t protected.
This story map from the Illinois State Water Survey illustrates the extent of the flooding in DePue, Illinois in May 2020, which was cause by high intensity rainfall.
Environmental News Bits 