CURRENT NEWS ON ECOLOGICAL WELLNESS AND GLOBAL HEALTH

 Volume 7, Number 52      https://planetaryhealthweekly.com      December 30, 2021

HI,

With one day to go before the end of the year so many thoughts are swirling. Having now fortunately recovered from Covid-19 and spending most of my time during this episode finishing a book chapter on leadership and the climate crisis, I feel compelled to come to s type of year-end conclusion. While I had been chastened for producing a dreary Christmas card this year, my predisposition, unfortunately, clearly reflects the tone of the swirling. I used to travel proudly as a Canadian, always happy to express my citizenship. But lately with hundreds of dead Indigenous children being found in unmarked graves and coming to a better understanding of Canada’s dismal role in the climate crisis, which is most obviously getting worse, I feel great disappointment and even a sense of anger with our society and politics. How can it be that we are so rich, so laden with every resource on earth, and great education, that we can be a pariah among nations with respecting human rights and the Earth.

Witness all the extreme weather events in just Canada alone in 2021. Six months ago we were witnessing the highest temperatures in the world and watching towns and forests burn relentlessly. Then a few months later atmospheric rivers downed life and caused chaos and hardship on a grand scale, only to be followed one month later (i.e. this week) by the coldest temperatures on Earth, not anywhere near the norm for this time of year. In all this we can hear the loud echo of the climate crisis. But where are the politicians and other leaders, especially from business (and insurance)? We hardly hear a peep in reaction and admission of what's happening and what we need to do; another giant disappointment. 

I hope 2022 will be different, though one thing is for sure. We’ll still have Covid-19 (which Greek letter is next?) and leadership showing continued indifference to life by not working harder to get everyone vaccinated. It’s no secret that those unvaccinated are many times more likely than a person fully vaxed to be admitted to the hospital, and often taking a bed from another person in need and exhausting our dear health care workers.

Read on about: 

• COP26 FOLLOW-UP: 
  • Canada, US, Italy among 20 countries to stop financing fossil fuels internationally, 
  • After tense huddles in Glasgow, countries strike ‘uncomfortable’ climate deal, 
  • We are now heating the world to a degree not seen since millions of years ago, 
  • A global breakdown of greenhouse gas emissions by sector, 
• CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: 
  • When it comes to controlling Covid, it’s the ventilation,
  • WHO chief warns Omicron, Delta forming ‘tsunami’ of COVID cases
  • Omicron is now unstoppable, 
  • As Covid-19 evolves, so should your mask game, 
  • New Zealand links 26-year-old man’s death to Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, 
  • Study turns up amazing evidence of how mask mandates save lives and is immediately covered up, THEN 
• Is there something amiss with the way the EPA tracks methane emissions from landfills? 
• Coal powered the Industrial Revolution. It left behind an ‘absolutely massive’ environmental catastrophe, 
• Getting off gas: a how-to guide to get fossil fuels out of your home, 
• These 11 cities are sinking. They could be gone by 2100, 
• St. Lawrence estuary is swimming with abundance of whales, 
• No need to ‘live through darkness’: award honouree fights for energy, 
• Desmond Mpilo Tutu (7 October 1931 – 26 December 2021), So long Arch, thanks for the love, 
• Complacency and alternative medicine policy (in Ontario), 
• Some northern residents vow to oppose federal regulations to release treated oilsands tailings water, 
• Quote by Desmond Tutu on Love, 
• New event: 5^th International African Conference of Science, Technology & Social Sciences (Feb. 2-5), 
• Visualizing women’s economic rights around the world, 
• Global warming can set the stage for deadly tornadoes, 
• Finally, a fusion reaction has generated more energy than absorbed by the fuel, 
• Major New York energy provider signals pivot to renewables, 
• New book: “Post Warrior: A Memoir” by Joy Hargo, 
• Human Rights Reader by Claudio Schuftan, and lastly 
• ENDSHOTS of ….amid the latest Covid-19 stats and charts from Canada and around the world.

Good Reading. 

HAPPY HAPPY NEW YEAR and ALL THE BEST IN 2022

Best, david
David Zakus, Editor and Publisher

                                                                                                                                       The Sasol gas pipeline in Temane, Mozambique (Pic: SASOL/Wikimedia Commons)  Government     

Four major economies have agreed to end their support for fossil fuel projects internationally in an announcement campaigners hailed as a “historic breakthrough”.

At an overflowing event on the sidelines of COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow, Canada, the US and Italy joined the UK in promising not to commit any new finance for unabated coal, oil and gas projects in other countries by the end of 2022. Read more at Climate Change News.

See Dec. 16's PHW Editorial for a summary of COP26 Highlights

See Also:

At Climate Change News: After tense huddles in Glasgow, countries strike ‘uncomfortable’ climate deal

At NY Times: We are now heating the world to a degree not seen since millions of years ago

At Visual Capitalist: A Global Breakdown of Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector

Source: Johns Hopkins University https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ma...

The Omicron and Delta variants continue spreading like wildfire in many countries. Globally, the situation is getting worse, with still too many resisting vaccination because of false or wildly exaggerated beliefs. As we approach the end of 2021, is there an end in sight? No.

Over the last week there were about 8 million new cases (up about 50%) and 48,000 deaths (down slightly). About 231 million people received a vaccine, down substantially, while distribution though still remains grossly distorted, favouring wealthy countries and the rich. Cases in Canada are up about 140% this week! See many more stats and charts in ENDSHOTS.

Credit:

We’ve long known improving indoor air quality is key to not only controlling COVID-19, but preventing transmission of other viruses, as well. While vaccines and rapid tests are certainly important, they are only part of the puzzle. There will always be people who choose to forgo vaccines, and that percentage is likely to increase if booster shots are required on a continuing basis. Laziness, skepticism and indifference will eventually set in. Rapid tests, while certainly the trending solution at the moment, aren’t a panacea, either. Read more at National Post

READ MORE COVID-19 STORIES:

At DW: Omicron is unstoppable now

At Aljazeera: WHO chief warns Omicron, Delta forming ‘tsunami’ of COVID cases

“I’m highly concerned that Omicron, being more transmissible [and] circulating at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at an online news conference on Wednesday.

“In the huge waves of cases currently seen in Europe and in many countries around the world, misinformation which has driven vaccine hesitancy is now translating to the unvaccinated disproportionally dying,” he said.

At CBC: As COVID-19 evolves, so should your mask game, experts say

At Yahoo: New Zealand links 26-year-old man's death to Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine

At DailyKos: Study turns up amazing evidence of how mask mandates save lives and is immediately covered up

       Credit: University of Arizona, Arizona State University, NASA JPL and Carbon Mappe

Remote sensing of methane from high altitude aircraft reveals plumes of the gas coming from the open face, on the left, and from a vent, on the right, at the River Birch landfill outside New Orleans in April 2021. Researchers from the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Carbon Mapper calculate the rate of methane venting at approximately 2,000 kilograms per hour, which would be 48 metric tons per day.  Read more at Inside Climate News.

                                                                                                               Credit: Inside Climate News

Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines.

Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun.

The first sign of the devastation above is a glimpse of a treeless mesa, a landform more appropriate in the West. Neece's experience is emblematic of coal’s accelerating demise in the United States and the environmental devastation its use has left behind. One environmental scientist, Emily Bernhardt of Duke University, said the damage would last “millennia.” A law professor in West Virginia, Pat McGinley, said there are coal areas in his state where “everything is contaminated, environments are wrecked and there’s no responsibility or no consequences.” Read more at Inside Climate News.

Seth Klein on the right, with son Aaron and wife, Vancouver city councillor Christine Boyle, pose with the external heat pump. Credit: David Bishop / Bring it Home 4 The Climate

This column is a little different from my usual fare. It’s more of a “how-to guide” to decarbonize one’s home. While my writing and public talks generally focus on how to press our governments into emergency mode, ironically, one of the followup questions I am most frequently asked is, “How do I swap my gas furnace for an electric heat pump, and who was your contractor?” So, this one’s for all you folks. Read more at National Observer.

PHOTO: meunierd/Shutterstock

Cities are sinking due to climate change and human activity.

There’s no denying the fact that climate change is real. The sea levels are rising and the global temperature is increasing at an alarming rate. More than 200 medical journals have published a statement underscoring that the results of an increase in global temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius will be catastrophic. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that extreme sea levels will become more common by the end of the century around the world and the rise will be 1-2 meters by 2100. NASA predicts that high tide floods will also cause severe flooding in the U.S.’s coastal areas. The findings aren’t mere predictions; the U.S. has fought back-to-back extreme weather crises this year. Read more at Fodors.

A whale breaches in the St. Lawrence River in this undated photo. The Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals has counted at least 100 humpbacks this year — more than double last year. Credit: Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals

The captain of the Grand Fleuve is aboard his vessel looking out at the St. Lawrence River off the shores of Tadoussac, Quebec. "As I'm talking to you," Marc Hébert said on his phone, "I've got three humpbacks about 500 feet away from me jumping in the air."

The best whale-watching season of Hébert's 25-year career will wrap up in two weeks — and he intends to cherish every moment until then. Read more at CBC.

 Credit: Pixfuel

Driven by her personal experience with energy poverty, a recent Energy News Network 40 Under 40 honoree is working hard as a senior policy associate at a U.S. community solar developer to ensure that ethnicity, language barriers, and income do not bar homeowners from accessing renewable energy.

Recently interviewed by ENN publication Centered, Nexamp’s Theodora Okiro spoke of how her own childhood experiences in Nigeria, where she and her family lived with energy poverty, were the inspiration behind her career in renewable energy, and her fight for a world with greater energy access and equity. Read more at The Energy Mix

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu on 6 May 2019. Credit: ESA ALEXANDER/SUNDAY TIMES/Gallo Images

The defining moment in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s life, according to the Arch himself, famously took place in a street in Munsieville township, in Krugersdorp, western Johannesburg, in the mid 1930s.

A passing white man in a peculiar dress, whom he later knew to be the English priest, Father Trevor Huddleston, doffed his hat and respectfully greeted his beloved mother, Mrs Aletta Tutu.

What made the event remarkable was its context. Generally speaking, white men who ventured into segregated black townships were either police or government officials. For them to acknowledge the dignity of members of the local population was unheard of. Read more at Daily Maverick

Credit: Article

A policy regulating the use of complementary or alternative medicine states that the higher the potential risk to the patient for a particular treatment, the higher the level of evidence required.

The Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) policy approved by Council requires complementary or alternative treatments be informed by evidence and scientific reasoning to mitigate the risks associated with providing these treatments.

“We believe that when physicians depart from conventional medicine, their practice must continue to be informed by sound clinical reasoning, one where patient risk does not outweigh potential benefit,” said Dr. Keith Hay, a family physician and a member of the Policy Working Group.

On the basis of the available evidence, some complementary or alternative treatments appear to pose little risk in themselves; however, some can present significant, even life-threatening, health risks. This may be, for example, because the treatment itself is inherently risky, or because it is interfering with or replacing the administration of a more effective conventional medical treatment, especially for serious illness.

Before providing any treatment, physicians must think carefully about the strength of evidence there is for its efficacy, and how providing a particular treatment could impact a patient and their health care decisions. For example, where the evidence for a treatment is modest, but the risk of harm to the patient is low and it may be offered alongside conventional treatment, it is likely appropriate for a physician to provide such treatment. However, where the evidence for the treatment is modest, the risks to the patient are potentially high and it would be provided instead of conventional treatment, the treatment may be inappropriate. Read more at eDialogue from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario

Oil goes into a tailings pond at the Suncor tar sands operations near Fort McMurray, Alta., in September 2014. The federal government is now working toward setting standards for releasing treated tailings water back into the environment. Credit: Todd Korol/Reuters

Northerners say the federal government's plan to regulate the release of treated oilsands tailings water will be met with opposition by communities downstream.

As the N.W.T. Environment minister gears up for a diplomatic approach with Alberta and Canada, Dene leaders like Smith's Landing First Nation Chief Gerry Cheezie are prepared to take legal action with Dene Nation, and to bring their opposition to the release of tailings water all the way to Ottawa. Read more at CBC.

  Credit: Visual Capitalist

In recent years, many economies have made women’s rights a priority by eliminating job restrictions, working to reduce the gender wage gap, or changing legislation related to marriage and parenthood.

Still, many laws continue to inhibit women’s ability to enter the workforce or start a business—and even to travel outside their homes in the same way as men. In fact, on average globally, women have just three-quarters of the economic rights of men.

Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal and Sweden are rated highest; while Qatar, Sudan, Kuwait, Yemen, and West Bank and Gaza are at the bottom of 190 countries.

This map uses data from the Women, Business and Law 2021 report by the World Bank, to visualize women’s economic rights around the world.

Emergency workers search through what is left of the Mayfield Consumer Products Candle Factory after it was destroyed by a tornado in Mayfield, Kentucky, on Dec. 11, 2021. Credit: John Amis/AFP via Getty Images

Adding a grim exclamation point to a year of deadly climate extremes, the early December tornadoes that killed at least 90 people in the U.S. Southeast were some of the most intense storms on record so late in the year.

The storms fired up in Arkansas the night of Dec. 10, during weather far too hot and humid for the season, and raced across Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky on Dec. 11. It will take weeks of analyzing data to make final classifications of the tornado outbreak’s intensity. But some of the mega-twisters that destroyed lives, livelihoods and communities may have raked the ground for 250 miles and thrown debris 30,000 feet high into the atmosphere.

After a Northern Hemisphere summer of floods, droughts, smoky wildfires and heat waves, climate scientists and meteorologists on social media and in broadcast interviews placed the December tornadoes squarely in the context of global warming.

Credit: LLNL / Damien Jemison

Researchers at a lab owned by the U.S. government have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion.

On Aug. 8, 2021, an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) made a significant step toward ignition, achieving a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules. Researchers said this advancement puts them at the threshold of fusion ignition, which is defined as a sustainable and never-ending powerful energy source, similar to the Sun.

Credit: Energy Gov Article

One of New York City’s largest power suppliers, Eastern Generation, is ditching its plan to refurbish a fossil fuel “peaker” plant in Brooklyn and is proposing to build 350 megawatts of carbon-free battery storage in its place. It’s a bold pivot for an industry that has been reluctant to take the state’s climate law seriously, surprising even some environmentalists who have been fighting the peaker plant plan—and other fossil fuel projects in the state—for years. Today’s Climate breaks down what could be a watershed moment for the state’s fight against climate change.

  Credit: BooK Cover

After her mother died, Joy Harjo inherited an iron cooking pot—the only such family heirloom she wished to receive. For some, such an everyday object might take on no more significance than any other. In Poet Warrior: A Memoir, the cooking pot becomes a powerful totem that calls forward the rich history of the Native peoples east of Mississippi, “the one that was passed through generations of women” via the cooking pot that Harjo’s grandmother carried, then her mother, and now Harjo herself. “The pot is sitting by my feet while I am writing,” she tells us. “It was pressed with fury and fire. It was made of the same materials as weapons. It made soup and fed those who gathered around it to eat.…My mother planted flowers in it.”

“Some of the most important stories are not in words, not in poems or other forms of speaking, but in objects of use and beauty,” Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the 2019 poet laureate of the United States, writes. “This cooking pot is one of the most potent stories I carry.”

In stories of war and survival, domestic violence and fragile motherhood, colonial oppression and Native sovereignty, Harjo mixes memoir with tribal history, poetry with ceremonial song in a richly told coming-of-age tale about exile and belonging, and the power of verse. Along the way, she traces her evolution as a poet through the lineage that inspired her to put pen to paper—choosing poetry at first as a lens through which to channel moments of beauty, or fragments of time and longing; and eventually, as a tool for justice.

Harjo grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, often spending days hiding within earshot as her mother, Wynema, gabbed with a girlfriend in the kitchen, fascinated by “the ebb and flow of women-talk.” Wynema was Harjo’s first teacher—she introduced poetry to her daughter through recitations of William Blake. Her father was also a first teacher of a kind—he was Harjo’s introduction to domestic violence, a pattern of abuse she would encounter in her stepfather as well and many men to follow. While their acts are monstrous—her father tells Wynema to "shut that baby up" or he would kill her when young Harjo cries with colic—she pulls back the lens to consider the intergenerational traumas that get passed on to these men from their fathers and their predecessors. “Here is a lullaby for that baby who was my father, whose mother died when he was still nursing, when he was left bereft and cried and cried, until his father shut him up.”

Much of the narrative tissue in Poet Warrior connects back to Wynema, a doting mother too often left alone to pick up the pieces from a life full of broken promises and abandoned dreams. “The house enabled my mother to unfold the chest of her dreams, which included being a singer, a songwriter, and a mother of four children. A few years into the dream, everything was broken, no matter her efforts to hold everything together with love songs.”

As Harjo went on to pursue her craft, teach, and have children of her own, these early encounters of abuse graduate to the broader realities of life as a Native woman in a country rife with patriarchy and racism. “I was the girl with the hair in her eyes, her head down as she focused on making her way through the labyrinth of gender and race while she raised children, got an education, created, and worked.” Through it all, her sustenance and her revelation was poetry. “I wanted to be an artist, free to create without the weight of societal expectation to doom me.” Simon Ortiz, an Acoma poet; Leslie Marmon Silko from Laguna Pueblo; Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanian poet of the Ewe people; and Okot p’Bitek of Uganda—along with Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Meridel Le Suer, Adrienne Rich, and many others—were just some of the writers Harjo discovered throughout her journey as a writer, who adrenalized Harjo’s imagination and expanded her understanding of what poetry could be.

Layered throughout this beautifully rendered, often heart-wrenching memoir is a series of Harjo’s own poems that at times iterate her life story in verse and at others, call the reader forward into other realms, where memory can transcend into metaphor and break free into myth. In one poem, “A Map to the Next World,” she considers a life of exile and wandering, where “flowers of rage spring up in the depression” and “monsters are born there of nuclear anger.” But here, in this rich reality of light and dark, the way is not lost. The power of cartography is in her hands, and she calls on us to share it: “In the last days of the fourth world, I wished to make a map for those who could climb through the hole in the sky.… Fresh courage glimmers from planets/And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.… You must make your own map.”

                                                        Credit: Claudio Schfutan

IN THE CASE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IT IS CRUCIAL TO THINK AND NOT ‘LET-ONESELF-BE-THOUGHT’ BY WHAT THE CORRIDORS OF POWER DICTATE. (Gloria Clavero)

This Reader is about how science and intellectuals are either for or against the ruling paradigm and what implications this has for human rights to bring about a paradigmatic break. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text.

Most societies marginalize their dissident intellectuals when they deviate from those in power and try desperately to act as human beings, as moral agents. (Noam Chomsky)

1. The current development paradigm is not content with sustaining dated theories. It uses said theories with the purpose of acquiring new powers, in particular by developing and pushing new technologies. (adapted from Yuval Harari)

PENULTIMATE DAY, 2021

HIGH PARK, TORONTO, ONTARIO

DECEMBER 30, 2021

Amid Latest Covid-19 Stats and Charts from Canada and Around the World

Source of  Covid-19 info below: (Dec. 30, 2021): https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

Source of data below, December 30, 2021:  https://www.worldometers.info/...

Source of data below (December 30, 2021):

https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/

Source of comparative data below (Dec. 30, 2021: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/...

Source of Canadian Data Below (Dec. 29, 2021): https://newsinteractives.cbc.c...