There's too much nitrogen and phosphorus in U.S. waterways

by Chrystian Tejedor, Florida International University

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Even minor amounts of human activity can increase nutrient concentrations in fresh waters that can damage the environment, according to a new study.

These findings suggest most U.S. streams and rivers have higher levels of nitrogen and phosphorus than is recommended. Although nutrients are a natural part of aquatic ecosystems like streams and rivers, too much of either nutrient can have lasting impacts on the environment and public health.

In Florida, toxic blue-green algal blooms have been triggered by releases of phosphorus-laden waters from Lake Okeechobee. Algal blooms produce a foul odor along waterways, decrease dissolved oxygen, threaten insect and fish communities and can even produce toxins that are harmful to mammals and humans.

"Ecosystems are being loaded with legacy and current nitrogen and phosphorus, and their capacity to hold these nutrients in many cases is decreasing," said FIU associate professor John Kominoski, an ecologist and co-author of the study. "Not only are they being overwhelmed by nutrients, but they also have and continue to undergo hydrological and land use alterations."

As human populations and demands increasingly grow, more land—including wetlands—is converted to agricultural and urban uses. This can introduce more nitrogen and phosphorus onto the land, which eventually makes its way into bodies of water. To make matters worse, soil erosion and climate change are also impacting nutrient pollution, leading to nutrient export to coastal waters, Kominoski said.

Nitrogen is most likely to come from transportation, industry, agriculture and fertilizer application, while increased phosphorus is more commonly the result of sewage waste, amplified soil erosion and runoff from urban watersheds.

"High concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus in our waterways are concerning because they threaten both human and ecosystem health," said David Manning, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and lead author on the paper. "Nutrients are essential for all life, but when they get too high in our waterways, they can fundamentally change the way a stream looks and operates."

In addition to causing algal blooms, these elevated nutrient concentrations can lead to a lack of species diversity and oxygen depletion. High nutrient concentrations can also affect the purity of the water we drink.

Nutrient pollution is a complex problem. While there's still a lot of work to be done to develop management tools and set thresholds for nutrient concentrations in streams and rivers, better understanding of how nutrients are transported through the interconnected network of waterways can help lead to solutions. Kominoski emphasized the importance of management solutions at local-to-global scales required to effectively manage various sources of nitrogen and phosphorus.

"Water is a shared resource that connects communities, landscapes, and continents across the globe," Kominoski said. "We must increase the protection and rehabilitation of ecosystems and water resources throughout the world, especially as human populations increase and climate changes."

The study was published in Ecological Applications

Researchers review environmental conditions leading to harmful algae blooms

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More information: David W.P. Manning et al. Transport of N and P in U.S. streams and rivers differs with land use and between dissolved and particulate forms, Ecological Applications (2020). DOI: 10.1002/eap.2130

Journal information: Ecological Applications

Provided by Florida International University 

Communicating the effectiveness of flood-mitigation plans

by University of Leeds

The graphic shows one of those hypothetical scenarios. With colour-coded overlays, it reveals how higher flood walls, more flood plains and river widening could provide the additional capacity to stop a repeat of the scale of flooding seen in 2015. Credit: University of Leeds

A team of Leeds mathematicians and French civil engineers has developed a new way of visualizing and analyzing complex flood-protection schemes.


They have steered away from equations and scientific language and have instead devised a graphical display that shows, as a hypothetical lake 2-meters deep, the amount of water that needs to be contained in a river valley to prevent flooding.

The graphic is overlaid with the various options necessary to hold back or to capture the flood waters, and how much each option will cost.

The work is a collaboration between applied mathematicians Professor Onno Bokhove, Professor Mark Kelmanson and Dr. Tom Kent from the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds; and civil engineers Dr. Guillaume Piton and Dr. Jean-Marc Tacnet from Université Grenoble Alpes.

Professor Bokhove said: "This work started from a challenge thrown down by a representative of the Environment Agency in the UK who said mathematicians always produce equations and he wanted something that was more accessible, a way of communicating complex ideas clearly and simply, to allow the science underlying flood mitigation to be understandable to the wider fraternity involved in policy making."

The scientists revisited a concept at the heart of flood analysis. Known as flood-excess volume (FEV), it is the amount of water in a river system that cannot be contained by existing flood defenses, expressed as so many millions of cubic meters of water. However, for most people, including Professor Bokhove, that is an effectively meaningless measure that people cannot visualize.

They have described their approach in a paper, A cost-effectiveness protocol for flood-mitigation plans based on Leeds' Boxing Day 2015 floods , published in the journal Water.

To illustrate the idea, they used data from the floods on Boxing Day 2015, when the River Aire burst its banks in Leeds and caused extensive damage to homes and businesses estimated at around half a billion pounds.

Around 9.34 million cubic meters of water flooded from the River Aire.

That volume of flood water translates into a hypothetical square lake, 2 meters deep and with sides of 2.16 km in length. In comparison, the upper River Aire is about 50 miles long, with a valley width that varies roughly between 200 and 600 meters along its path.

Professor Bokhove added: "To have prevented the flood, you would have to somewhere deal with that volume of water. It is not inconceivable that, along the course of the river that additional water could be accommodated, either by increasing the size of flood plains, or by removing obstructions in the river, widening the river channel in places or by building higher flood walls: or, more likely, by combining some or all of those measures.

"Seeing flood mitigation this new way makes it easier for people to understand not only the interventions that are possible and the impact they are likely to have but also the costs associated with each such measure."

The researchers then used their novel graphical approach to analyze and communicate a hypothetical scheme for increasing the flood defenses in the center of Leeds to cope with not only a major flood that would be expected once in 100 years but also a one-in-200-year flood. They looked at several mitigation scenarios, their costs and their impact on river dynamics, an area of science known as fluid dynamics in which Leeds is a world leader.

Over the six years to 2021, the Government will have spent £2.6 billion on flood schemes in England, and further investment is expected.

Professor Bokhove said: "Our approach is intended to offer a means of comparing and choosing between flood-mitigation scenarios in a quantifiable and visual manner, thereby offering a better chance of them being understood by a wide audience including the general public, stakeholders and planners."


Explore furtherFlood alert: Researchers devise powerful new flood monitoring system for Japan
More information: Onno Bokhove et al. A Cost-Effectiveness Protocol for Flood-Mitigation Plans Based on Leeds' Boxing Day 2015 Floods, Water (2020). DOI: 10.3390/w12030652
Provided by University of Leeds

Insight into how insects sense and process pain and other negative stimuli

by Gina E. Mantica, Tufts University

“These findings are an important milestone for developing the tobacco hornworm as a new model system to help us understand the neural mechanisms of nociception and pain,” said Barry Trimmer, right, here with Daniel Caron in February. Credit: Anna Miller

Scientists know that most organisms react to things that cause them pain, but they know more about some species than others. Take the fruit fly—it's a favorite species to do all sort of research on, from genetics to, yes, how they detect pain.

But there is little known about how other insects sense harmful stimuli. Scientists at Tufts, including an undergraduate biology major, recently discovered that tobacco hornworm caterpillars, which range throughout the Americas, can sense and respond to different noxious stimuli using a single cellular mechanism. The researchers published a paper about the findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology in January.

Daniel Caron—a senior honors thesis student who worked in the lab of Barry Trimmer, the Henry Bromfield Pearson Professor of Natural Science—first set out to test whether the caterpillars respond differently when either struck with infrared lasers or prodded with narrow stainless steel rods.

Caron, with the help of Martha Rimniceanu, watched as the tobacco hornworm caterpillars quickly and precisely contorted their bodies around and touched where they felt pain, responding similarly to the heat from the lasers and the pressure from the rods.

Caron was curious why the caterpillars respond so similarly to two very different sensations. The team pursued a hunch that cells under the caterpillar's skin might be able to detect both types of heat and pressure, just like a group of cells in fruit flies that react to changes in pressure, temperature, and light.

Trimmer recalls Caron's passion for the project. "Like all good scientists, Dan built on others' work, in this case the pioneering senior thesis work of Martha, and carried out thoughtful and meticulous experiments to characterize these neurons," he said.

In order to study how the caterpillars' cells respond to heat and pressure, Caron had to learn a technique to examine the activity of caterpillars' miniscule cells. He spent an entire semester learning how to attach tiny glass electrodes to cells, to be able to record their electrical activity. After months of frustration, he successfully recorded the activity of cells under the caterpillar's skin while simultaneously poking the skin around the cells with either lasers or metal rods.

As predicted, the same cells could respond to both heat and mechanical pressure—just like a group of cells in fruit flies.

To make sure that he really had looked at responses from just a single cell rather than a group of similar cells, Caron prodded the area again with his lasers and rods, but now at a much faster rate. That tested whether a singular cell would respond to both types of noxious stimuli, rather than two similar cells responding separately to each stimulus. If it was a single cell, the activity of that cell should decrease over time as it got used to the repeated stimulation.

At first, Caron could not see any change in how the cells responded, so he tried striking the cells at a very rapid rate.

His perseverance once again led to a novel discovery. In these cases, the cells under the skin didn't just decrease their responsiveness to both types of stimuli; sometimes the cells didn't respond at all.

To ensure that this change wasn't from simply having damaged the cells, Caron made sure that the cells eventually reacted again to both heat and pressure. Not only did this confirm that he recorded from single cells, but it also is the first piece of evidence of a cellular "depression" in insects in response to harmful repeated poking.

Since the fruit fly and the tobacco hornworm are separated by more than 260 million years of evolution, this finding suggests that the cellular mechanism underlying how pain is sensed might be highly conserved across species. This means that other species might also have similar mechanisms for sensing pain.

Trimmer concurs. "These findings are an important milestone for developing the tobacco hornworm as a new model system to help us understand the neural mechanisms of nociception and pain," he said. Caron's discovery of the similarities between tobacco hornworms and fruit flies could inform future research on pain and nociception in other animals, including humans.

"This shows how Tufts undergraduates are making significant contributions to science," said Trimmer. "I am proud of Dan and Martha's hard work and intellectual accomplishments."

First treatment for pain using human stem cells a success

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More information: Daniel P. Caron et al. Nociceptive neurons respond to multimodal stimuli in Manduca sexta, The Journal of Experimental Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1242/jeb.218859

Journal information: Journal of Experimental Biology 

Study shows large ocean predators are more active in temperate regions

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

a Global map depicting median annual relative predation between 1960 and 2014 at 5° × 5° resolution. The tropics are defined as the region between latitudes 23.5°S and 23.5°N. b Partial effect of latitude on variation in relative predation in a generalized additive mixed-effect model (GAMM) run separately for each of four ocean basins (P-values for the partial effect of latitude are below 0.0001 in all four GAMMs; see Supplementary Table 4 for details). This analysis accounted for the effects of both time and spatial autocorrelation in the data. Blue lines depict the GAMM-predicted function with 95% confidence intervals (gray shading). Gray circles indicate median relative predation per latitude within 5-year time intervals. Credit: Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15335-4

An international team of researchers has found that large ocean predators such as tuna, marlin and sharks are more active in temperate regions. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes their analyses of data on attacks by predators on fishing bait in the open ocean over more than a half-century, and what it showed them.


Over the past several decades, Earth scientists have developed a theory called the "biotic interactions hypothesis," which suggests that species interactions (such as predation) are the driving force in creating biodiversity in different parts of the ocean—large predators such as sharks and tuna prey on smaller marine creatures, resulting in biodiversity. The theory has been used to explain why the greatest biodiversity in the world's oceans is near the equator—because there is more predation by large predators. But in recent years, support for the theory has begun to wane as scientists report evidence of exceptions. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence that will likely overturn the theory completely.

The work involved analyzing data describing attacks on fishing bait by large ocean predators in the open ocean for the years 1960 to 2014. In all, the researchers studied 900 million recorded incidents of large predators trying to steal bait off fishermen longlines.

The researchers found the opposite of what they expected in the data—attacks were more prevalent in temperate regions than they were nearer to the equator. More specifically, they found that most attacks occurred in the mid-latitudes in the 30- to 60-degree range. They also found that the number of attacks was not associated with the degree of biodiversity in a given region.

The researchers wondered if their findings might be tied to industrial fishing, so they compared predator hits over time with fish tallies. They found that predation did drop as more prey were taken from the ocean, but it did not change the ratios of hits between regions—large predators still preferred the mid-latitudes. They suggest their findings will lead to new efforts to explain why there is greater diversity at the equator than in other regions of the oceanIndustrial fishing behind plummeting shark numbers

More information: Marius Roesti et al. Pelagic fish predation is stronger at temperate latitudes than near the equator, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15335-4

Journal information: Nature Communications

Ocean deoxygenation: A silent driver of coral reef demise?

by University of Technology, Sydney

Coral reefs are constantly under threat from environmental stress. Credit: David Suggett

The existence of coral reefs, in all their abundant biodiversity and beauty, relies largely on a complex symbiosis between reef-building corals and microalgae. This finely tuned, fragile, partnership is constantly under threat from environmental stress—most notably the twin effects of warming waters and ocean acidification caused by climate change. But scientists say a third driver, that of ocean deoxygenation, could pose a greater and more immediate threat to coral reef survival. 

A perspective paper published in Nature Climate Change brings together existing biological, ecological, and geochemical evidence to consider the broader role for ocean deoxygenation in global coral reef degradation. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) led study has found that the threat of ocean deoxygenation to coral reefs has largely been ignored and remains unaccounted-for in predictions about future reef health. This is despite reef-building corals underpinning both the ecological and economic value of the world's coral reef ecosystems.

Lead author, Dr. David Hughes, a Research Associate at the UTS Climate Change Cluster, said that measurements taken over the last 50 years showed oxygen levels in the world's oceans have already declined by around 2% "largely due to the dual forces of global climate change and coastal pollution caused by nutrient runoff."

"Our oceans are slowly suffocating and although we have some understanding about deoxygenation in the open ocean this process has been largely overlooked in coastal tropical reef systems.

"Although oxygen is a relatively easy environmental variable to measure, there is surprisingly very little data available for coral reefs," he said.

The authors, who also include scientists from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and University of Konstanz, Germany, say this lack of data makes it very difficult to assess what normal oxygen levels are on coral reefs or the dissolved oxygen threshold at which areas might become "dead zones."

"We simply don't know what constitutes lethal or sub-lethal oxygen thresholds within coral reefs or the role such thresholds will play in determining what future reefs will look like," Dr. Hughes said.

Associate Professor David Suggett, senior author and leader of the Future Reefs Research Program at UTS said it's likely that understanding the impact of deoxygenation for places like the Great Barrier Reef "holds the key to being able to more accurately predict the future for coral reefs."

"Oxygen fundamentally sustains reef life.

"It's possible that declining oxygen availability has amplified, and will continue to amplify, the impact of catastrophic events such as heat-wave driven mass coral bleaching. Capacity for organisms to resist stressors is severely compromised under reduced oxygen availability. It's why we give oxygen to humans under trauma," he said.

"Identifying thresholds of low oxygen tolerance and how they vary across coral reef-associated species and environmental history is arguably the key step in understanding

how reef communities will respond to continued ocean deoxygenation," Associate Professor Suggett said.

The authors say that unlike the deep knowledge gained over the past 30 years around the twin impacts of temperature and pH levels, there wasn't the same depth of knowledge about ocean deoxygenation and, therefore, how this will shape reef ecologies.

Suggett and Hughes say establishment of an oxygen sensor network on the GBR would be a good place to start and could help develop an oxygen inventory of the reef to enable new approaches and management practices.

A positive outcome from the study is the sign that local management is crucial to preventing further deoxygenation in coastal waters.

"The resources being mobilized to improve agricultural and catchment management on the GBR are good examples of practices to ensure the oxygen stocks of coastal reefs," Associate Professor Suggett said.

"Everyone has a role to play to ensure our reefs don't suffocate further," he said.

Coral reefs: Centuries of human impact

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More information: David J. Hughes et al. Coral reef survival under accelerating ocean deoxygenation, Nature Climate Change (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0737-9

A World Alive: Green Politics in Europe and Beyond

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MARCH 2020
This edition maps the different worlds of green politics today, exploring the movements and ideas driving its development. Zooming out, the edition asks what wider changes in politics and society mean for political ecology as it faces interlocking environmental and social crises in the 21st century.

As much as a way of understanding the world as a movement to change it, political ecology is on the rise. A reckoning with our society’s position in a wider ecological system is taking place. Faced with irrevocable damage that makes life everywhere more insecure, from Italy to Finland, people are organising for a change of course at the ballot box and through insurgent street protests. From concepts such as ecofeminism and the Green New Deal to questions of narrative and institutional change, this edition maps the forces, strategies, and ideas that will power political ecology, across Europe as around the world. The 2020s can be a decade of change for the better, or the worse. Every political force will have something to say on what were once green issues. A diverse movement with a unique approach to society and politics, as this edition shows, Greens will be central to the fight for a sustainable and just future.

Articles in this edition

11.03.2020

Facing Our Future
BY Laurent Standaert
Time is running out, but political ecology has the answers. A different world, a good life for all.

EN FR  READ MORE

The Three Tribes of Political Ecology
BY Pierre Charbonnier
A call for the convergence of struggles between green socialism, the radical critics of modernity, and elite technocracy.
EN FR READ MORE

Quality of Life Before Sustainability: Questioning Contemporary Green Discourse
BY Sherilyn MacGregor, Tine Hens
A Green New Deal is good, but an ecofeminist one is even better.
EN READ MORE

Hooked on Growth: Rewiring Institutions for Wellbeing
BY Éloi Laurent, Laurent Standaert
A new policy paradigm needs to emerge that is capable of thinking broadly and ecologically about wellbeing, sustainability, and justice.
EN FR READ MORE

A Green Deal for a Geopolitical Age
BY Roderick Kefferpütz
The European Green Deal is being pursued as an economic matter. In a geopolitical world, it needs to be geopoliticised.
EN PL READ MORE

The Return of the Green New Deal: Ecosocialism in the USA
BY Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen
In the USA, the inequality and climate crises are increasingly seen as one and the same and the Left has seized on the Green New Deal as the answer.
EN PL READ MORE

Another State Is Possible: Greening the Levers of Power
BY Lucile Schmid
Modern states were not built to protect the environment but today are essential institutions for building a sustainable future.
EN FR READ MORE

Notes from a New Europe
BY Edouard Gaudot
What if the Green Wave of 2019 kept on going? What if the Greens become a major player in political majorities?
EN FR READ MORE

All Ground Is Fertile Ground: Attitudes to Ecology across Europe
BY European Data Journalism Network
Selected infographics offer a data-driven snapshot of ecological perceptions and realities and across Europe.

EN READ MORE

From the Street Up: Founding a New Politics in Spain
BY Cristina Monge, Esteban Hernández, Florent Marcellesi
Is political ecology able to push for real transformation and to offer a convincing narrative that transcends class lines?
EN ES READ MORE

Breaking Hard Earth: A Social History of Green Politics in Poland
BY Adam Ostolski
Green politics has long been part of Polish politics and, despite its ups and downs, it certainly has a future.
EN READ MORE

A Step Up for the German Greens
BY Peter Unfried
How the Greens managed to become a key player in German politics. Part of our four-part "Green Wave" series.
EN READ MORE

The Wild World of Belgian Politics
BY Luc Barbé

Understanding where Belgium's two Green parties, Groen and Ecolo, sit in a divided political landscape. Part of our four-part "Green Wave" series.
EN READ MORE

The Greens in a New Ireland
BY Dan Boyle
With government negotiations still up in the air, we hear how the Irish Greens bounced back in 2019 and 2020. Part of our four-part "Green Wave" series.
EN READ MORE

A Polarised Finland
BY Simo Raittila
Where do the Finnish Greens stand after entering a progressive coalition government in 2019? Part of our four-part "Green Wave" series.
EN READ MORE

Building Blocs in Northern Europe: The Greens in Government
BY Jenni Karimäki, Sanna Salo, Simon Otjes
In political systems based on cooperation, determining who to ally with and when always raises critical questions of identity, tactics, and strategy.
EN READ MORE

The Carbon Divide: The Material Basis of Polarisation
BY Jamie Kendrick, Mark Blyth
Far-right populism and green politics are now rivals in opposite corners of a polarised political ring.
EN READ MORE

Generation Climate Speaks: Politics for a Warming World

BY Adélaïde Charlier, Annabelle Dawson, David Wicker, Eyal Weintraub, Helena Marschall, Jesse van Schaik, Johanna Hartmann, Laura Kolehmainen, Lily Fitzgibbon, Linus Steinmetz, Lucie Renoud-Grappin, Luigi Ferrieri Caputi, Michał Kiwerski, Patsy Islam-Parsons, Petr Doubravský, Remy Zahiga, Sophia Mathur, Tomás Castillo Claver
The Green European Journal turned to young activists to ask how they envisage political change in this time of climate crisis.
EN READ MORE

Resettling Villages, Unsettling Lives
BY Hannah Porada, Paula Castro
Villagers have mobilised to fight both for their homes and for more ambition in German energy policy.
EN READ MORE

United We Stand: The Green Industrial Revolution in Italy
BY Francesca Re David, Lorenzo Marsili
Unions and new ecological movements need a frank exchange to find elements of synergy and mutual growth.
EN PL READ MORE

United We Stand: Labour Environmentalism and the Climate Movement
BY Lorenzo Marsili, Stefania Barca
Looking at the climate crisis in class terms means reframing class conflict in terms of capital versus life.
EN READ MORE

After Industrialism: Reviving Nature in the 21st Century
BY Reinhard Olschanski
Ecological thinking situates the human in the modern world far more accurately than old industrialism ever did.
DE EN READ MORE

A Legal Revolution for the Rights of Nature
BY Valérie Cabanes
A legal system that prioritises the conservation of the living world over private property would be a powerful tool for ecological transition.
EN FR READ MORE

The Melodrama of Climate Change Denial
BY Cara Daggett
Melodrama is the genre of choice of the far right, through which it pays special attention to fights with environmentalists, feminists, and minorities.
EN READ MORE

Threads of Political Ecology: A Review
BY Annabelle Dawson, Cyrielle Chatelain, Edouard Gaudot, François Jarrige, Roderick Kefferpütz
The Green European Journal has put together a selection mapping some of the major currents that have shaped political ecology in recent years and which continue to do so.
EN READ MORE

Emancipation in the Neoliberal Era: Rethinking Transition with Karl Polanyi

BY Dirk Holemans
After 40 years of neoliberalism tearing at the social fabric, what form will the 21st-century counter-movement take?

GREEN TRANSITION
The Return of the Green New Deal: Ecosocialism in the USA

As it stands, the United States will effectively withdraw from the Paris Agreement on November 4th 2020, one day after the upcoming presidential election. Thankfully, in the US as around the world, resistance to fossil capitalism is growing. In a country where three billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – own more wealth than half the population, the inequality and climate crises are increasingly seen as one and the same and the Left has seized on the Green New Deal as the answer. We spoke to Alyssa Battistoni and Daniel Aldana Cohen, two of the authors of A Planet to Win 1, about their vision for a better, healthier, more equal way of life in a post-carbon society.

Green European Journal: How did the Green New Deal (GND) get back on the agenda in the US? How have different social movements come together around this vision?

Alyssa Battistoni: A resurgent left-wing politics and an increasingly militant climate movement had been operating on parallel tracks for a few years in the US. The climate movement was focused on “keeping it in the ground” and stopping new fossil fuel extraction projects in places like Standing Rock or along the Keystone XL pipeline, while the Democratic Socialists of America [a socialist organisation active inside and outside of the Democratic Party] and the trade unions concentrated on political projects away from the climate. But over the past year, these forces have come together in quite an organic way. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), probably the politician most associated with the GND, ran for office because she went to Standing Rock and was inspired by the Sunrise Movement. Immediately after she was elected in November 2018, she joined Sunrise Movement protests and opened up a new discourse around the GND. Its revival allows the growing Left to flesh out a broader programme that’s not just about stopping carbon-intensive infrastructure but thinking about what to build in its place.

Daniel Aldana Cohen: The Sunrise Move­ment consciously fuses two strands of American social movements: structured movements like labour unions and community groups, and explosive street protests such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Sunrise’s effort to combine the strengths of each tendency has paid off. In two or three years, they’ve come out of nowhere to become one of the most important movements in the country.

Environmental movements in the US have not always done a great job of working with other social movements. Sunrise, in comparison, has taken it upon itself to be an ally to labour and racial and community justice groups. When Sunrise occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office in November 2018 and AOC gave the GND worldwide publicity, Sunrise was there with green jobs signs, not pictures of wind turbines or solar panels. It shows an increasing sophistication of political alliance-building.

How does this revived GND differ from the left-of-centre promise of green jobs that has been around for years?

Alyssa Battistoni: The core idea is the same, but the differences are scope and commitment. The GND would see the federal government guarantee a green job to anyone that wants one. Renewing the Civilian Conservation Corps from the original New Deal programme, a job guarantee would give people the opportunity to work in nature, on soil conservation or building hiking trails, to become a care worker, expanding the idea of a green job, or to work traditional green jobs in the energy sector. A large-scale commitment to jobs combats labour’s justified suspicion that green jobs will never materialise. Employment in green energy has been rising in the United States but the government has never been prepared to commit to more than the retraining offered under Obama. Fossil fuel workers that lose their jobs need retraining, but most importantly they need jobs. A federal commitment to major infrastructural spending and public works will generate those jobs at scale.

What role does housing play in the GND?

Daniel Aldana Cohen: Eviction from your home and climate breakdown are the two existential threats of our times for many people. Housing is the most expensive line item in most people’s budgets. Housing is responsible for a sixth of the emissions in the US and transportation by car, mostly to and from homes, is another sixth. Our overall vision is to reduce the use of energy and other resources while improving the quality of people’s lives. The idea is of housing as temples of public luxury: rebuilt infrastructure that will physically and concretely improve and decarbonise lives in the same places and at the same time.


A story about an affordable, comfortable, more modern, and better located home is inspiring.

Housing is not usually considered as a key piece of climate policy in the US but, once explained, it is an intuitive story that people can connect to. Concrete is responsible for 8 per cent of global emissions, but describing the most egalitarian way to decarbonise cement production will not strike an emotional chord. A story about an affordable, comfortable, more modern, and better located home is inspiring. For the third of Americans or the almost half of black Americans who cannot afford their energy bills, the GND for housing would make an immediate improvement to everyday life. To avoid future dependence on mining and extraction, the house, the home and where homes are located are central to a less resource-intensive version of prosperity.

The Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK have built winning coalitions based outside of big cities. Can the GND appeal across the country and in rural areas?

Daniel Aldana Cohen: Quantitatively the Left has already won, as with the popular vote in the US, so geography is now the key: we have to win outside our urban strongholds. The result of the last UK election wasn’t so good, but the Left has the same basic problem of needing to do better with working-class people in disinvested regions outside cities. Building a more geographically extensive coalition will require concrete proposals and negotiations with the people who live in these places. The benefits of GND policies will extend beyond cities. Care work is a placeless concern. Housing matters in towns, suburbs, and rural areas as well as in cities. Flexible public transport that works outside of cities could overcome the fetish for denser modes of living and help people in rural areas move around in a far less expensive way, freeing up their mobility. And moving beyond a top-down model could help to overcome the resistance of rural communities to clean energy developments, which is a pressing political issue in the US.

Alyssa Battistoni: The GND plan for infrastructure spending will hit the ground across the country and the effects will be felt everywhere. The GND can also be used to imagine green sustainable agriculture and how federal funds can support that vision rather than subsidising environmentally destructive practices. Planting prairie grasses, for example, is critical for carbon absorption and the huge potential of the Midwestern states could be a boon for farmers.

Some have criticised the GND as productivist green capitalism, while others say that degrowth-type perspectives call for mandated eco-austerity. Is your call for “one last stimulus” an attempt to move beyond these positions?

Alyssa Battistoni: The GND has at times been used to greenwash public policy. 10 or 15 years ago, the phrase “Green New Deal” was used as a way for America to retain its economic dominance by becoming a leader in green tech. But while the more recent February 2019 GND Congress resolution does talk about developing technology, most of it is oriented towards people’s social needs and decarbonisation, not towards dominating a new growth area for capitalism.


The objective is to build a world that we want to live in and that we can live in for the long term. Then we can transition into a slower groove.

Degrowth advocates make a significant critique but it is imperative to avoid the belt-tightening green politics of sacrifice. At a time of extreme inequality, many people have been sacrificing for a long time already, while another small group of people get to live lavish lifestyles. More sacrifice to fix climate change is just not a winning political message, which is why a vision of public luxury and non-austere ways of living is important. We argue for what we call a last stimulus – that the GND will be an all-out push that will cost a lot of money, generate jobs, and stimulate industrial production. However, the objective is not to restart the post-war growth engine and re-embark on the 20th-century project. The objective is to build a world that we want to live in and that we can live in for the long term. Then we can transition into a slower groove.

Isn’t the GND a return to the 20th-century top-down bureaucracies that were often inefficient and unresponsive?

Daniel Aldana Cohen: In certain areas such as the electricity grid, the GND represents a truly national project. The most sophisticated electricity grids in the world are in Brazil and China: for decades, Brazil has been able to move the renewable energy its dams generate between regions. Managing intermittency requires national coordination and control of the electricity grid and the same is true for rail networks. But for the most part, federal investment will be targeted towards communities of colour and working-class communities through providing funds to local organisations. Democratic ownership can take many forms: worker cooperatives getting preferential contracts, local public banks, racial and community justice groups, or municipal government agencies. Fundamentally, the story is about federal financial resources feeding local self-control and autonomy as the most effective way to achieve a large expansion.

Affordability is often an effective right-wing attack line against progressive proposals. Why do you stress the importance of organising support over the question of financing?

Alyssa Battistoni: “How will you pay for it?” is an effective attack line because a wider narrative around public spending means that there will never be a convincing counter-argument, even if a plan is fully costed. Whether funded through taxes or monetary policy, spending on people’s social needs or environmental protection is always presented as impossible. But half the American federal budget is spent on the military and nobody asks questions. Let’s question that and organise around climate action to invest in communities and build resilience rather than spending billions responding to terrible disasters after they have happened.

When people think about the GND, steelworkers building windmills come to mind. Why do you emphasise organising workers in the education and healthcare sectors?

Alyssa Battistoni: We’re trying to reframe green jobs, as well as the whole growth debate, to make clear we can live good lives in ways that are less resource intensive than the status quo. Decarbonising does not have to mean that your life will get worse. Green energy cannot be ignored but, at the same time, the transition cannot only be about coal miners and oil refinery workers installing infinite amounts of wind turbines. We need to imagine the world that we want to live in once we have enough wind turbines.


The first step is getting the US’s own house in order. Climate change is a global problem, but it is too simplistic to say that the solution must be global.

Education and healthcare workers in the US have been at the forefront of a revitalised labour movement in recent years. Both sectors are low-carbon and oriented towards improving people’s lives. Teachers’ unions have been organising community support and linking traditional struggles around wages and benefits to improving services and the quality of education. The reason that Medicare for All is so popular is because America is in a crisis of care. Overdose and suicide rates are rising, and older people struggle to get the care they need. America currently has a very resource-intensive way of delivering a remarkably low quality of life to many people, and the GND is a political counter that offers a different direction.

A Planet to Win mentions that Sara Nelson, chair of the flight attendants’ union, is one of the GND’s most prominent supporters. What explains her enthusiasm for a transition that could put airline workers out of a job?

Daniel Aldana Cohen: Sara Nelson is one of the best things that has happened to the labour movement in the US in a long time. She understands the relationship between her workers, the broader working class, and the global political economy, and her arguments are all the more powerful because she is rooted in the concrete labour struggle. The next round of global investment is going to be green and she knows that. Instead of getting drawn into the long-term future of flight attendants, her response is to ask whether it will be the bosses or a movement from below that decides what that green transformation looks like.

The US does have an isolationist streak and, if it wanted to, it could impose the costs of transition onto the rest of the world. What does an internationalist GND look like?

Daniel Aldana Cohen: An internationalist GND would see the US slash its consumption of energy, both fossil and renewable, to make room for the rest of the world to enjoy prosperity. The first step is getting the US’s own house in order. Climate change is a global problem, but it is too simplistic to say that the solution must be global. Climate treaties, building on the Montreal Protocol, are based on the notion that every country could come to a sensible agreement, tweak the material substructure of energy, and everything will be fine. But the global economy cannot be reconfigured through negotiation in a room.

Organising along the supply chains of the really existing global economy is essential. Groups fighting over local energy utilities in Rhode Island in the north-eastern US need to forge alliances with the communities contesting lithium mining for rechargeable batteries in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, for example. Global solidarity campaigns such as the Via Campesina food sovereignty movement are precedents for this kind of action. Our view of internationalism is based on looking at how the economy is physically, economically, and legally organised and making interventions at every one of those points.

FOOTNOTES

1. Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (2019). A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. New York/London: Verso.

Cooperative male dolphins match the tempo of each other's calls

by University of Bristol

Trio of male dolphins. Credit: Dolphin Alliance Project sharkbaydolphins.org

When it comes to working together, male dolphins coordinate their behaviour just like us. New findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by an international team of researchers from the Universities of Western Australia and Bristol, provide insight into the importance of physical and vocal coordination in alliance forming animals.

In humans, synchronised actions can lead to increased feelings of bonding, foster cooperation and diminish the perceived threat of rivals. Outside of humans, very few animals coordinate both vocal signals and physical movement when working together.

The study used long-term acoustic data collected from the famous population of dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, to show that allied male dolphins also match the tempo of their partner's calls when working together, and would sometimes even produce their calls in sync.

It was previously thought that only humans used both physical and verbal synchronised actions to strengthen bonds and enhance cooperative effort.

Lead author Bronte Moore, who carried out the study while working at UWA's School of Biological Sciences said: "Allied male bottlenose dolphins are also well known for this kind of behaviour and can form alliances that can last for decades.

"To advertise their alliance relationships and maintain their social bonds, they rely on synchronous movements. We wanted to know whether they would also synchronise their vocal behaviour."

The study showed that male bottlenose dolphins not only synchronise their movements, but also coordinate their vocal behaviour when cooperating together in alliances.

Such behaviour suggests this might help reduce tension between the males in a context that requires them to cooperate successfully.

Dr. Stephanie King, Senior Lecturer from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences who guided the research, added: "Male dolphins need to work together to herd a female and defend her from rival alliances, but they are also competing to fertilise her.

"Such synchronous and coordinated behaviour between allied males may therefore promote cooperative behaviour and regulate stress, as it has been shown to do in humans."

In male dolphin alliances, 'everybody knows your name'

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More information: Acoustic coordination by allied male dolphins in a cooperative context, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or … .1098/rspb.2019.2944

Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B 

ALL OUR RELATIONS

Chimpanzees found to age in ways similar to humans

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers from the University of New Mexico and the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda has found similarities between the way chimpanzees and humans age. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their 20-year study of chimps living at Kibale National Park and what they learned about the ways they age.

Prior research has shown that as people age, they undergo changes to their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—a biological system that plays a major role in how people respond to stress. One of those ways is bumping up levels of cortisol production. Cortisol is a hormone that plays a role in regulating metabolism and blood pressure. Prior research has also shown that excess cortisol can lead to problems such as a reduction in clear thinking, a weakened immune system and inflammation—all symptoms of aging in humans. But now, it appears that chimpanzees undergo a similar process.

The work by the team was part of a large overall effort to study physical and behavioral traits of chimpanzees in a near-natural setting. As part of that effort, team members placed plastic bags in the trees where the chimps reside in the park to collect urine samples from 59 adults. The team has been collecting urine samples from the chimps for approximately 20 years. In analyzing its composition, the researchers have found that the chimps also experience elevated levels of cortisol as they grow older—and furthermore, the higher levels of the hormone could not be attributed to reproductive activity or social status. They claim the increased levels of cortisol suggest chimps age similarly to humans.

The researchers found that cortisol levels were highest in the males when they were making moves on sexually receptive females. They also found that cortisol levels were highest in the females when they were sexually receptive—a time when females are under stress from competing males. They also suggest that rising cortisol levels in hominids are an ancient attribute, and are thus not a byproduct of aging.

More information: Melissa Emery Thompson et al. Wild chimpanzees exhibit humanlike aging of glucocorticoid regulation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1920593117

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Cashing on cryptocurrencies

by David Bradley, Inderscience

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Heed the words of their profits—In uncertain times, uncertain things can happen. Writing in the International Journal of Business Performance Management, a team in the United Arab Emirates asks whether cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is perhaps the most infamous, might ultimately overtake conventional currencies, the fiat money.

Avaneesh Jumde and Boo Yun Cho of the Higher Colleges of Technology on Dubai Women's Campus, Al Nahda, Dubai, point out how Bitcoin made the terms "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain" familiar to financiers and investors the world over. The technological roots of these terms quickly attracting those who live by the words of their profits. At first, there was a cryptocurrency bubble, which has waxed and waned, but always in the background and barely acknowledged by the bankers and financial regulators is the idea that such forms of money might somehow usurp hard cash.

The team has now used statistical analysis to hedge their bets as to which of the cryptocurrencies might eventually predominate following the proliferation of such forms of money and whether there might be a displacement of fiat money. There is, of course, the possibility that cryptocurrencies would exist in parallel with the fiat in a similar way to gold bullion existing alongside folding paper money, for instance. They have looked at the likes of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether, and Ripple and compared and contrasted their characteristics against the fiat money of different countries.

At the moment, fiat money remains the main contender in the battle for dominance in terms of accessibility, utility, the ability to convert to the currency of other nations, liquidity, volatility, and even financial speculation. Fiat money is more amenable to these requirements and remains preferable for the vast majority of people. However, major uncertainty about human behaviour driven by disease, climate change, and other uncontrollable factors, could lead to gradual or sudden change in our perception of money, its worth, and its utility.Is Bitcoin the new gold standard or another fiat?

More information: Avaneesh Jumde et al. Can cryptocurrencies overtake the fiat money, International Journal of Business Performance Management (2020). DOI: 10.1504/IJBPM.2020.106107