"There was a large gathering on Tuesday in Longmeadow as people voiced their opposition to a proposed Eversource natural gas pipeline. State environmental protection officials were at Longmeadow Country Club and they were greeted by neighbors, as well as a number of elected officials, who have been strongly opposed to this proposal for years and are continuing to fight it. [...]  The planned route is from Longmeadow Country Club to West Columbus Avenue in Springfield and would serve 58,000 customers. 'It’s terrifying. They shouldn’t be allowed to build it. It’s not needed,' said Jane Winn with the Berkshire Environmental Action Team. On Tuesday, officials from the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act visited the site and answered questions from the large group of protestors about environmental and health concerns. 'This is a good part of the process. It’s a robust conversation and we’re listening,' said Eversource spokesperson Priscilla Ress. Ress told Western Mass News the current pipeline is over 70 years old and there’s no backup system currently in place. 'We evaluated the entire system for safety and this is a project that rose right to the top. This is a priority for us,' Ress added. State Senator Eric Lesser, a candidate for lieutenant governor, was also in attendance and said he’s drawing up formal opposition to the project. 'I would much rather see us investing in alternative forms of energy, whether that’s wind weather, that’s solar…ways we can power homes and provide energy to people and a renewable way,' Lesser explained. Another point of concern is placing a pipeline in a residential neighborhood after natural gas explosions in the Merrimack Valley killed an 18-year-old and injured 22 others in 2018. 'We’ve already seen what happens in the Merrimack Valley when their nice little station doesn’t correctly assess what the pressure is…There’s obviously a lot of anger at an unnecessary project that’s being proposed,' Winn added. There is a virtual meeting scheduled for Tuesday at 7 p.m. where you can have your questions answered by MEPA officials. For more information on how to access it, contact Alex Strysky at (857) 408-6957 or via email at least one hour before the meeting begins to receive a link." Read More

"In the video, a 7-year-old boy with missing front teeth talks about how much plastic there is in the world, including his plastic toy dinosaurs. 'By the time I’m my Dad’s age, like in 30 years, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish,' he says. 'And it makes me feel bad.' The solution, the boy says, lies in the 'advanced recycling' plant where his father works in Ashley, Indiana, a small town best known for a water tower painted with a bright-yellow smiley face. 'I saw plastic getting turned back into oil,' the boy says on a tour of the plant. 'It will keep plastic from going into landfills, incinerators, and our oceans, reducing greenhouse gas, which will help us from going extinct like the dinosaurs.' Senator Frank Lombardo III, a Johnston Democrat, showed the video to the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, saying it simplifies the argument for his bill to clear the way in Rhode Island for “advanced recycling” plants, which use the high-heat process known as pyrolysis to turn plastic into fuel. The Senate passed the bill on Tuesday by a vote of 19 to 14. But environmentalists say the Brightmark corporate video does more than simplify the matter – they say the gee-whiz narrative attempts to paint a smiley face on a 'toxic industry' that would set back Rhode Island’s progress in addressing climate change and matters of environmental justice. 'This bill is the biggest legislative threat to our environment this year,' said Kevin Budris, staff attorney for the zero waste project at the Conservation Law Foundation’s Rhode Island office. 'The Brightmark video shown to the Senate Judiciary Committee was incredibly misleading.' He said Brightmark does not recycle plastic or manufacture products. Rather, he said, Brightmark uses a two-step pyrolysis process to burn plastic waste. He said 90 percent of the output from its Ashley, Indiana, plant is plastic-derived fuel, most of which it burns onsite, and the other 10 percent is toxic char, which must go to a landfill." Read More

"It’s no secret that Earth’s biodiversity is at risk. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 26% of all mammals, 14% of birds, and 41% of amphibians are currently threatened worldwide, mainly due to human impacts such as climate change and development. Other forms of life are also under pressure, but they are harder to count and assess. Some scientists have warned of mass insect die-offs, although others say the case hasn’t been proved. And then there are fungi – microbes that often go unnoticed, with an estimated 2 million to 4 million species. Fewer than 150,000 fungi have received formal scientific descriptions and classifications. [...] Fungi play essential ecological roles worldwide. Some have been forming critical partnerships with plant roots for hundreds of millions of years. Others break down dead plants and animals and return key nutrients to the soil so other life forms can use them. Fungi are among the few organisms that can degrade lignin, a main component of wood that gives plants their rigidity. Without fungi, our forests would be littered with huge piles of woody debris. Still, other fungi form unique mutualistic partnerships with insects. [...] We can only partially appreciate the benefits fungi provide, since scientists have a narrow and very incomplete view of the fungal kingdom. Imagine trying to assemble a 4-million-piece jigsaw puzzle with only 3% to 5% of the pieces. Mycologists struggle to formally describe Earth’s fungal biodiversity while simultaneously assessing various species’ conservation status and tracking losses. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species currently includes 551 fungi, compared to 58,343 plants and 12,100 insects. About 60% of these listed fungal species are gilled mushrooms or lichenized fungi, which represent a very narrow sampling of the fungal kingdom. [...] Mushrooms are 'fruiting bodies,' or reproductive structures, that only certain fungi produce. But a majority of fungi don’t produce fruiting bodies that are visible to the eye, or any at all, so these 'microfungi' go largely overlooked. [...] Even with limited knowledge about the status of fungi, there is increasing evidence that climate change threatens them as much as it threatens plants, animals and other microbes. [...] Recent studies of aquatic fungi, which play all kinds of important roles in rivers, lakes and oceans, have raised concerns that little is being done to conserve them. [...] It is hard to motivate people to care about something they do not know about or understand. And it’s difficult to establish effective conservation programs for organisms that are mysterious even to scientists. But people who care about fungi are trying. In addition to the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, which coordinates global fungal conservation initiatives, various nongovernment organizations and nonprofits advocate for fungi. [...] Delegations from most of the world’s countries will meet in China this fall for a major conference on protecting biodiversity. Their goal is to set international benchmarks for conserving life on Earth for years to come. Mycologists want the plan to include mushrooms, yeasts, and molds." Read More

"...Americans have a love affair with lawns. They are pristine, weed-free, large expanses of perfect green. And yet, they are essentially biological deserts – partly because of what we do to them and partly because they are a giant monoculture. Here are some of the appalling facts related in the article:・Lawn covers 40-50 million acres in the continental United States, almost as much land as in our national parks.・Lawns consume nearly 3 trillion gallons of water per year・50 million pounds of pesticides per year are applied to lawns which can seep into waterways.・Gas-powered lawn and garden equipment used roughly 3 billion gallons of gas last year – equivalent to nearly 6 million passenger cars running for a year. This astronomic number is partly a result of poor efficiency.・Lawn care equipment (mowers, blowers) are responsible for 5% of the air pollution in the United States because lawn equipment motors are not regulated by EPA. [...] Two years ago, when we were encouraged to stay home due to the pandemic, I decided to kill part of my lawn. [...] Once the plants began to grow and the partridge pea began to flower, I did almost no weeding! [...] I was so happy with the garden that in the fall, I expanded it towards the back of the property – around the saucer magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana) connecting to the shade garden along the property line." Read More

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announces significant investments to support urban agriculture, including $43.1 million for grants and cooperative agreements as well as six new urban county committees to help deliver key USDA programs to urban producers. These actions support USDA’s efforts to strengthen the food supply chain and transform the food system to be fairer, more competitive, and more resilient. Specifically, USDA is investing $10.2 million in new cooperative agreements to expand compost and food waste reduction efforts and $14.2 million in new grants to support the development of urban agriculture and innovative production projects. Additionally, $18.7 million will fund 75 worthy grant proposals from the 2021 application cycle, which was oversubscribed. [...] These investments build on USDA’s Food Systems Transformation Framework unveiled earlier this week. The goals of USDA’s Food System Transformation Framework include:・Building a more resilient food supply chain that provides more and better market options for consumers and producers while reducing carbon pollution.・Creating a fairer food system that combats market dominance and helps producers and consumers gain more power in the marketplace by creating new, more and better local market options.・Making nutritious food more accessible and affordable for consumers.・Emphasizing equity by creating wealth that stays in small towns and underserved communities. [...] USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) is also standing up six more urban county committees, which help deliver farm loans, disaster assistance, safety net, and conservation programs. [...] This is the third year of USDA’s Composting and Food Waste Reduction (CFWR) cooperative agreements, and so far, USDA has invested $3 million in community composting in urban areas across the country. The $10.2 million to be awarded in 2022 will fund pilot projects that develop and implement strategies for municipal compost plans and food waste reduction plans." Read More

"When Kate Lucy saw a poster in town inviting people to learn about something known as peecycling, she was mystified. 'Why would someone pee in a jug and save it?' she wondered. 'It sounds like such a wacky idea. 'She had to work the evening of the information session, so she sent her husband, Jon Sellers, to assuage her curiosity. He came home with a jug and funnel. Human urine, Sellers learned that night seven years ago, is full of the same nutrients that plants need to flourish. It has a lot more, in fact, than Number Two, with almost none of the pathogens. Farmers typically apply those nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — to crops in the form of chemical fertilizers. But that comes with a high environmental cost from fossil fuels and mining. The local nonprofit group that ran the session, the Rich Earth Institute, was working on a more sustainable approach: Plants feed us; we feed them. Efforts like these are increasingly urgent, experts say. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened a worldwide fertilizer shortage that is driving farmers to desperation and threatening food supplies. Scientists also warn that feeding a growing global population in a world of climate change will only become more difficult. Now, more than 1,000 gallons of donated urine later, Lucy and her husband are part of a global movement that seeks to address a slew of challenges — including food security, water scarcity and inadequate sanitation — by not wasting our waste. [...] 'We make this amazing fertilizer with our bodies, and then we flush it away with gallons of another precious resource,' Lucy said. 'That’s really wild to think about.' Toilets, in fact, are by far the largest source of water use inside homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Wiser management could save vast amounts of water, an urgent need as climate change worsens drought in places like the American West. It could also help with another profound problem: Inadequate sanitation systems — including leaky septic tanks and aging wastewater infrastructure — overload rivers, lakes and coastal waters with nutrients from urine. Runoff from chemical fertilizer makes it worse. The result is algal blooms that trigger mass die-offs of animals and other plants. [...] Beyond the practical benefits of turning urine into fertilizer, some are also drawn to a transformative idea behind the endeavor. By reusing something once flushed away, they say, they are taking a revolutionary step toward tackling the biodiversity and climate crises: moving away from a system that constantly extracts and discards, toward a more circular economy that reuses and recycles in a continuous loop. Chemical fertilizer is far from sustainable. The commercial production of ammonia, which is mainly used for fertilizer, uses fossil fuels in two ways: first, as the source of hydrogen, which is needed for the chemical process that converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia, and second as fuel to generate the intense heat required. By one estimate, ammonia manufacturing contributes 1% to 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Phosphorus, another key nutrient, is mined from rock, with an ever-dwindling supply. Across the Atlantic, in rural Niger, another study of urine fertilization was designed to address a more local problem: How could female farmers increase poor crop yields? Often relegated to the fields farthest from town, the women struggled to find or transport enough animal manure to replenish their soils. Chemical fertilizer was far too expensive. A team including Aminou Ali, director of the Federation of Maradi Farmers’ Unions in south-central Niger, guessed that the comparatively fertile fields closer to people’s homes were getting a boost from people relieving themselves outside. They consulted with medical doctors and religious leaders about whether it would be OK to try fertilizing with urine and got a green light." Read More