Dutch TV reporter who was dragged away during live Olympic segment: 'We followed their orders'

Jay Busbee

Sat., February 5, 2022, 

ZHANGJIAKOU — Two words no journalist wants to hear in connection with their name are “dragged away,” and yet that’s exactly what happened to Dutch broadcaster Sjoerd den Daas. Chinese authorities hauled Den Daas, who was in the middle of a live broadcast at the Opening Ceremony for Dutch station NOS, away from the camera and shut down filming operations on live TV.

Den Daas and his camera operator were not injured in the incident, which only lasted a few seconds but was a stark reminder of the potential problems of reporting even innocent broadcast coverage from China. Den Daas was able to set up and resume his broadcast shortly after the incident.

The IOC downplayed the incident, placing the blame on an “overzealous” security official.

“It was an unfortunate circumstance,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said at a later daily news briefing. “These things do happen, and I think it’s a one-off. I hope it’s a one-off.” The IOC indicated it had reached out to NOS about the incident, but NOS officials told local Dutch media they had not heard from the IOC.

The media in Beijing and surrounding venues are operating in a strict “closed-loop” system, with no freedom of movement beyond the edges of competition venues, official headquarters and hotels. Fences envelop every building within the “bubble,” and guards stand at every checkpoint and gate. Chinese authorities say the bubble is intended to contain the spread of COVID and protect the Chinese population from potential foreign infection, but the obvious effect is that Western media are prevented from connecting with anything outside the sharply regulated and sanitized bubble.

Early Saturday morning Eastern time, Den Daas took to Twitter to give his version of events.

“Shortly before 7 o’clock, we began filming around the Bird’s Nest,” Den Daas wrote. “The police kindly directed us outside the area that was being cordoned off around that time. We followed their orders. We then spent some time setting up to film a TV live at the place the police had just referred us to.

“However, just after we had gone live, I was forcefully pulled out of the picture without any warning by a plainclothes man wearing a red badge that read, ‘Public Safety Volunteer.' He did not identify himself.

“At the same time, another man took our light installation. When asked, they couldn’t say what we had done wrong. We were able to continue our TV live from a parking lot around the corner.”

In an event as sprawling as the Olympics, with tens of thousands of police officers, volunteers and Olympic officials patrolling their own spaces, it’s not unusual for one enforcement hand not to know what the other is doing. Just hours before the Opening Ceremony, a police officer outside the Main Media Center was not aware of the location for media to board shuttle buses to the ceremony … even though the location turned out to be within sight, about 10 yards away.

The air around the Bird’s Nest during the Opening Ceremony was already charged with both anticipation and nerves. Reporters were not permitted to bring items as routine as charging blocks into the Bird’s Nest. Volunteers pointed reporters arriving at the Opening Ceremony toward designated press, broadcast and photography locations, though gaps between the volunteers meant wandering off — whether for a broadcast live shot or for something as innocent as a selfie — was entirely possible. After the fireworks concluded, groups of spectators who’d been bused into the site actually crossed paths with departing media … which was exactly what the Chinese Olympic planners’ bubble had been designed to prevent.

Procedural confusion isn’t uncommon at the Olympics, and borders between permitted and non-permitted spaces often aren’t clearly marked, so it’s not unusual that the reporter and camera operator could have been guided to a place they weren’t permitted to be. The intense and, yes, “overzealous” on-camera crackdown, however, is a harsh-but-clear lesson that the respect for a free press that exists in the Western world is nonexistent in China.

“In recent weeks, we, like several foreign colleagues, have been hindered or stopped several times by the police while reporting on subjects related to the Games,” den Daas tweeted. “Therefore, it’s hard to see [Friday] night’s incident as an isolated incident, as the IOC claims, although such interference rarely happens live on broadcast. And now back to work.”

The Olympics run through Feb. 20.

Flag bearers Kjeld Nuis and Lindsay van Zundert of Team Netherlands lead the Dutch team beside the Olympic rings during the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. (Elsa/Getty Images)

Fuel changes the biggest since 2014, say Mercedes

Date published: February 5 2022 - Jamie Woodhouse


Mercedes see the switch to E10 fuel for the 2022 power units as the biggest engine regulation shift in the V6 turbo-hybrid era.

Since 2014, Formula 1 has gone racing with these power units, an era very much dominated by Mercedes, who have collected all eight Constructors’ Championships on offer as well as seven Drivers’ titles.

These V6 turbo-hybrid engines are expected to remain until 2026, at which point the new generation of power units are set to be rolled out.

That said, 2022 is the final opportunity to make major gains in the engine department as a freeze on development will then come into place once these versions are put into action.

While Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault and Honda are working to pack every drop of performance possible into their new engine, they have also had to do so while contending with the introduction of a new fuel.

Previously, 5.75% of the fuel used had to come from bio-components, but the new E10 fuel features 10% ethanol, a set requirement, whereas previously the manufacturers could choose the bio-components.

And this is no small change – in fact, Hywel Thomas, managing director of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains, believes this marks the most significant change yet for the turbo-hybrids.



“The change this year, going to the E10, is probably the largest regulation change we’ve had since 2014,” he said in a Mercedes YouTube video.

“It was a sizeable undertaking to make sure we really developed that fuel. The number of candidates we had, the single-cylinder running, the V6 running, it shouldn’t be underestimated how much work that took.

“The engine will react slightly differently to the fuel. Some areas of the performance we are really happy with and [there are] other areas where honestly we are less happy.”

Adding to the challenge is the fact that as well as the fuel, the cars themselves have also been designed to new regulations, which Mercedes’ chief technical officer James Allison believes represent the biggest change in F1 history.

And so Mercedes are expecting a different dynamic between the power unit and chassis.

Innocent becomes latest brand to be accused of greenwashing by climate activists

By Ellen Ormesher - February 3, 2022

The ‘Little Drinks, Big Dreams’ campaign was designed to remind ‘a new generation of drinkers’ about Innocent’s social drive

Innocent Drinks has become the latest brand to fall foul of climate activists.

Direct action group Plastic Rebellion has accused the brand of greenwashing in its ‘Little Drinks, Big Dreams’ marketing drive.

In the spot, which has since been removed from the brand’s YouTube channel, cartoon characters sing of the dangers of “messing up the planet” before beginning to clean up rubbish in an effort to “fix up the planet.”

At the time, Kirsty Hunter, Innocent’s marketing director, said the brand hopes the ad would turn consumers into “recycling activists,” but Plastic Rebellion argue it is misleading to suggest that purchasing single-use plastic (as Innocent drinks use) does not have an adverse effect on the environment.

Innocent – often touted as ‘the original purpose-driven drinks brand’ – is owned by Coca-Cola, which was recently found to be in the top three of the world’s biggest corporate plastic polluters according to Break Free From Plastic’s 2021 global brand audit report.

Matt Palmer of Plastics Rebellion said: “Greenwashing is dangerous – in the case of Innocent it’s one thing to hide your ecocidal practices, that’s bad enough, but to go to the next level and pretend you’re ‘fixing up the planet’ is far worse. It means that people will willingly – and unwittingly – opt in to support your project in the belief that they are doing good for the planet.”

The activist group has now lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which recently tightened up its advertising regulations on environmental comms, alongside the CMA’s Green Claims Code, which came into effect at the start of this year.

Brands such as Alpro and Oatly have been among the first to fall foul of the new guidelines, with a verdict on Innocent’s campaign expected imminently.

The Drum reached out to Innocent for comment but had received no response at the time of writing.

University of Lethbridge faculty vote in favour of strike action

Author of the article:  Dylan Short
Publishing date: Feb 05, 2022 •

University of Lethbridge campus. PHOTO BY POSTMEDIA ARCHIVES

Members of the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) have voted overwhelmingly in favour of going on strike.

The vote for strike action that took place this week saw over 90 per cent of votes cast in favour of taking strike action, with more than 80 per cent of members casting a ballot. Joy Morris, with the ULFA said they are unable to provide any information on the vote until Monday, stating they cannot confirm or deny any reports until then. The association told their members informally of the result Friday night.

Multiple people have confirmed to Postmedia the vote was for strike action. One member said they were surprised how one-sided the vote was but said it gives a strong mandate to union leaders and sends a strong message to the university.

Morris said the bargaining teams met twice this week and are scheduled to meet on Monday.

“We remain optimistic that the remaining issues can be resolved through negotiations,” said Morris.

The earliest a strike could take place is Thursday.

The faculty association and university are currently involved in collective bargaining agreements with the faculty association looking to resolve issues around pay and a number of other concerns. Statements previously issued by ULFA have said they do not want to go on strike if it can be avoided.

The University of Lethbridge did not respond to requests for comment Saturday afternoon.

A notice posted to the school’s website Feb. 3 shows the university filed a bad faith negotiations complaint against ULFA. The claim states the employer has been willing to engage in conversations and says the two sides were one per cent away on salary proposals when the faculty association left the bargaining table.

“The university bargaining team has been willing to engage in substantive discussions with the very clear intent of avoiding a labour disruption. We recognize that a ULFA strike will threaten the academic semester and the education of University of Lethbridge students,” reads the online statement. “A strike of any duration will have a negative impact on our culture, community, and the livelihoods of many not associated with the Faculty Association.”

NDP Advanced Education critic David Eggen and Lethbridge West MLA Shannon Phillips issued a statement Friday evening saying the strike vote is a byproduct of funding cuts to post-secondary institutions from the provincial government.

“The lack of support and deep budget cuts to this school from the UCP will cause major disruption for Lethbridge residents and students,” said Eggen and Phillips.

The operating expenses for the Ministry of Advanced Education in the provincial 2021-24 fiscal plan shows the government budgeted $5.046-billion in expenses for post-secondary institution operations in 2019-20. In 2021-22 that the government estimated expenses at $4.608 billion. The budget shows that the amount of post-secondary schools budgets will come from own-source funding — funding outside of the province — is expected to increase from 47 per cent in 2019-20 to 52 per cent by 2023-24.

The province did not respond to requests for comment Saturday but Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides has previously stated his government has worked hard to bring spending in line with other provinces.

The first faculty strike in Alberta’s history took place last month at Edmonton’s Concordia University, where faculty took to the picket line at the start of the winter semester. They ratified a tentative agreement with the university on Jan. 15.

Meanwhile, Mount Royal University faculty members are also currently locked in negotiations with the university over a new collective bargaining agreement.

dshort@postmedia.com

— With files from Jason Herring

Calgary

MRU student leaders blame Alberta government cuts to post-secondary for potential faculty strike

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Province says it is not involved in the negotiations with the university and its faculty association

Lucie Edwardson · CBC News · Posted: Feb 04, 2022 7:15 AM MT | Last Updated: February 4

Mount Royal University has been in contract negotiations for nearly two years with the faculty association, and students are concerned that a potential work stoppage could disrupt their semester. (easyuni.com)

Mount Royal University student leaders are blaming the provincial government for a potential faculty strike or lockout.

The university has been in contract negotiations for nearly two years with the faculty association. Last week, the association told CBC News that the two parties were in a deadlock — and a work stoppage is likely in the weeks ahead.

The government says it's not involved in the negotiation process, but Students' Association of Mount Royal University president Spirit River Striped Wolf says he disagrees.

• Strike or lockout possible at Mount Royal University as contract negotiations stall

"The provincial government has allowed these institutions to increase their tuition and fees, by an average of 7 per cent, so this is a ripple effect," he said. 

"The government ultimately controls the structures and the foundations of the post-secondary education system. Otherwise, why call it a publicly funded institution? The government has a huge part to play when it comes to tuition and when it comes to collective bargaining."

In 2021, MRU's Campus Alberta base grant was reduced by 2.5 per cent, which was a loss of $2.3 million for the institution.

The previous year, in 2020, the province cut its funding for post-secondary grants by a total of 6.3 per cent.

• Classes could cease at University of Lethbridge as strike vote looms

Striped Wolf said students are exhausted, and in addition to the back and forth between in-person and online learning, they now have to face the possibility of a paused semester. 

"It has to do with the government policy. When we talk to them about tuition increases, they say the same thing, 'Oh, it's your board of governors who are increasing your tuition. We're making cuts to their grants, but it is the institutions.' But universities are publicly funded," he said.  

• Mount Royal University cuts 40 positions, warns more layoffs likely

In a written statement, Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said he shares students' concerns about the possibilities of a delayed semester.

"Which is why we are encouraging both parties work together at the bargaining table and create a deal that is fair to faculty members, a reflection of the fiscal realities in the province, but also take into consideration the impacts of a strike on student learning," he said. 

"In the event strike action should take place, I expect the institutions would have contingency plans to address any impact to students."

Striped Wolf said the students' association is calling on the Alberta government to restore post-secondary funding to "appropriate levels" and for the MRU Board of Governors to revoke the tuition increases.

"So Albertans can continue to easily access and benefit from a high-quality system of higher learning," he said. 

 

Unions reach pattern contract with Canfor paying 8% wage increase, signing bonus

Unions, Canfor reach deal

The Canadian Press - Feb 4, 2022 / 3:17 pm | Story: 359104

Photo: The Canadian Press

A stack of lumber and sawdust piles are seen at Teal-Jones Group sawmill in Surrey, B.C., on Sunday, May 30, 2021. Two of Canada's largest pulp and paper unions say Canfor employees have ratified a new collective agreement it hopes will set the pattern for 18 contracts in British Columbia and Alberta. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Two of Canada's largest pulp and paper unions say Canfor employees have ratified a new collective agreement it hopes will set the pattern for 18 contracts in British Columbia and Alberta.

Unifor and the Public and Private Workers of Canada say the four-year deal for 900 workers at Canfor will provide a $5,000 signing bonus plus wage increases of 2.5 per cent, 2.5 per cent, and three per cent in the following three years.

They say the deal also includes improvements to the temporary and indefinite curtailment language, and an improved benefits package, including an increase in the annual clinical psychologist benefit.

The agreement covers unionized employees at Unifor Locals 603 and 1133, and PPWC Local 9 in Prince George, B.C.

Scott Doherty, Unifor executive assistant to the president and lead forestry negotiator, says the agreement sets the standard for other forestry agreements at companies employing 5,500 workers across the western region.

The collective agreement comes as Canadian forestry companies are benefiting from high lumber prices.

Two-Thirds of Pre-Pandemic Jobs That Remain Lost Were in the Travel Industry

IMPACTING TRAVEL LAURIE BARATTI FEBRUARY 04, 2022

Checking into a hotel. 

(photo via monkeybusinessimages/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

The U.S. Travel Association (U.S. Travel)—the non-profit organization that represents the interests of the nation’s travel industry—today issued its reaction to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) revised January employment report.

The report reveals the past several months’ worth of corrected data, which confirms that 10 percent of pre-pandemic leisure and hospitality jobs remain lost due to the impact of COVID-19. That 10 percent of sector employment represents a whopping 61 percent of overall jobs in the U.S. that have been lost on account of the pandemic.

“While the overall jobs report today may be good news for some, the revised BLS data now confirms an even bigger revelation, that 61 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of all jobs still lost due to the pandemic are in the Leisure & Hospitality sector,” Executive Vice President of Public Affairs and Policy at U.S. Travel, Tori Emerson Barnes, said in a statement. “The uneven recovery of the travel sector is due in large part to the lack of inbound international travelers, and the deep reduction in business travel, and professional meetings and events.”

She added, “There could not be a more pressing time for Congress to implement short-term priorities to stimulate this vital contributor to the U.S. economy and rebuild American jobs.” For months now, U.S. Travel has been petitioning Congress to provide further financial relief and incentives that would help to bolster the ailing travel sector.

The organization has already put measures before Congress that would aid the travel industry’s recovery, including:

— A higher cap on H-2B visas, to ease the absence of labor for the over one million job openings in the leisure and hospitality industry.

— The Restoring Brand USA Act, which would provide $250 million in emergency funding for Brand USA.

— Targeted, temporary tax credits and deductions to stimulate spending on business travel, live entertainment and in-person events.

— Additional funding for relief grants to severely impacted travel businesses.

Larsen B Embayment Breaks Up

January 26, 2022

After more than a decade fastened to the coastline, a large expanse of sea ice has broken away from the Antarctic Peninsula. The ice, which had persisted in the Larsen B embayment since 2011, crumbled away over the span of a few days in January 2022, taking with it a Philadelphia-sized piece of the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aquasatellites acquired these natural-color images of the embayment and ice shelf. The right image shows the embayment on January 26, 2022, shortly after the sea ice broke up. For comparison, the left image shows the same area on January 16, 2022.

Scientists are still investigating the reason for the breakup, but the early clearing of seasonal sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula suggests that the austral summer has been warm and wet. Scientist Rajashree Tri Datta of University of Colorado, Boulder, noted that foehn winds, influenced by a large atmospheric river, helped destabilize the ice pack. The phenomenon is apparent in this animation composed with images from NOAA’s GEOS-16 satellite.

The breakup is the latest in a series of notable events in the Larsen B embayment over the past 20 years. Prior to 2002, glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula flowed toward the sea and fed into a vast floating ice shelf known as Larsen B. The shelf helped buttress inland tributary glaciers, pushing back against them and slowing their seaward flow. But in early 2002, the shelf abruptly fractured. With 3,250 square kilometers (1,250 square miles) of ice suddenly gone, glaciers thinned and flowed more quickly into the open water.

Following the collapse of Larsen B, landfast sea ice grew atop the seawater each winter and melted away entirely in most summers. But the sea ice that started to grow in late March 2011 stuck around. “It was the first time since the early 2002 shelf collapse that the Larsen B embayment was seen to freeze up and stay frozen through multiple austral summers,” said Christopher Shuman, a NASA/UMBC glaciologist. The sea ice retreated slightly at its edges during summers, and its surface occasionally became coated with blue meltwater, but the ice persisted until this January.

Satellite images of the often-cloudy region show the breakup occurred between January 19-21, 2022. Sea ice splintered and floated away from the coast, along with icebergs from the fronts of Crane Glacier and its neighbors to the north and south. Shuman thinks strong outflows of ice from the Flank and Leppard tributary glaciers likely widened a rift that led the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf—the southern remnant of the Larsen B Ice Shelf—to shed several large icebergs.

Compared to a massive ice shelf (like the original Larsen B), sea ice adjacent to land is less effective at holding back the seaward flow of glaciers, but it still plays a role. This summer’s breakup of the sea ice in the embayment is important because—unlike the meltwater from an ice shelf, icebergs, and sea ice (already floating)—the meltwater from a glacier adds to the ocean’s volume and contributes directly to sea level rise. With the sea ice now gone, “the likelihood is that backstress will be reduced on all glaciers in the Larsen B Embayment and that additional inland ice losses will be coming soon,” Shuman said.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

There’s a new gold rush in the American West. But is it safe?

Demand for gold has risen in recent years, but the environmental cost of mining remains high.

BY BECKI ROBINS / UNDARK | PUBLISHED FEB 1, 2022 

The site of an abandoned mine near Grass Valley, California, is marked by a weathered concrete silo. Becki Robins / Undark

Becki Robins lives in California’s gold country and writes about science and nature, history, and travel. Her work has appeared in Earth Island Journal, Lonely Planet, and on the YouTube series SciShow.

This story originally featured on Undark.

On the outskirts of the northern California town of Grass Valley, a massive concrete silo looms over the weeds and crumbling pavement. Nearby, unseen, a mine shaft drops 3,400 feet into the earth. These are the remains of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine, a relic from the town’s gold mining past. Numerous mines like this one once fueled Grass Valley’s economy, and today, Gold Rush artifacts are part of the town’s character: A stamp mill, once used to break up gold-bearing rock, now guards an intersection on Main Street, and old ore carts and other rusty remnants can be spotted in parking lots and storefronts around town.

Gold still exists in the veins of the abandoned mine, and Rise Gold, the mining corporation that purchased the mine in 2017, has reason to believe that reopening it makes financial sense. When the mine shut down in 1956, it wasn’t because the gold was drying up; it was because of economic policy. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement had established a new international monetary system to create stability in exchange rates. As part of the effort, the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce. Gold mining became unprofitable in the U.S.

Today, the price of gold is no longer fixed, and prices have risen in response to the economic uncertainty wrought by COVID-19. At the start of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in an effort to stimulate the US economy and encourage borrowing money. But those record-low rates decreased the returns on bonds and savings accounts, making gold a relatively more attractive business investment.

Now, with inflation rising and renewed economic uncertainty over the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, demand for gold remains high, even despite some recent dips. In 2020, roughly 43 percent of gold consumed globally went towards exchange-traded funds and central banks. As prices have risen and mining technology has become more sophisticated, mines are opening and reopening in places where mining was once thought economically unfeasible.

Still, mining isn’t as simple as it used to be. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that of the world’s known gold, roughly 63,000 tons are still in the ground, compared with roughly 206,000 tons that have already been mined. And the world’s unmined gold is generally only unmined because it’s deeper underground and thus less accessible. To obtain it, companies have to figure out what to do with huge amounts of mining waste, some of which contains heavy metals and other toxic substances.

Rise Gold has pledged to mitigate the environmental impact of its new mining operation in part by employing a technique called paste backfilling, which involves injecting a mixture of water, mine waste, and a binder (often cement) into mining tunnels. The practice helps provide structural support and reduce the amount of aboveground mine waste. There is some science to support the benefits of this approach, but it’s only a partial solution, and there are lingering uncertainties about its long-term impact. While Rise Gold reports that there is strong support for the project throughout Nevada County, where Grass Valley is located, some local residents remain skeptical. Among other things, they are concerned that the new mining operation will not be able to adequately contain its waste.

Given these challenges, some economists are asking whether it makes sense to mine gold when the precious mineral is merely destined for a bank vault. “The cost of mining is high,” says financial economist Dirk Baur. Much of the value of gold is tied up in the cost of just digging it out of the ground, he says. “There’s some profit for the mining company, but a big, big chunk is just an expense.”

Over the past couple of decades, proposals to develop or expand gold mining facilities have popped up across Europe and North America. In Northern Ireland, Dalradian Gold plans to open a mine in the Sperrin Mountains. In Newfoundland, Marathon Gold is slated to open an open-pit mine that the company says will be the largest gold mining operation in Atlantic Canada. In the United States, which, as of 2020, had the fourth-largest gold mine reserves in the world, mining operations have expanded in northwestern Arizona in recent years, and there are plans to reopen a mine in central Idaho. Many companies seeking to find new riches in old places face community pushback similar to what is happening in Grass Valley.

Gold mine opponents have good reason to be wary. Mining creates a lot of waste, including the rock that doesn’t contain enough gold to extract (called “waste rock”) and also the slurry left over after gold has been extracted from ore (called “tailings”). Both waste rock and tailings can contain toxic substances that threaten to pollute groundwater and surface waters if not properly mitigated.

Grass Valley has been dealing with the fallout of Gold Rush-era mining for decades. Arsenic, which occurs naturally in the gold deposits of the Sierra Nevada foothills, remains an ongoing problem in the area. Old tailings can still leach heavy metals decades after mining operations have ceased. In Grass Valley, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board documented high concentrations of arsenic in a pile of tailings nicknamed “the Red Dirt Pile.” In 2020, high concentrations of lead, mercury, and arsenic were found in samples taken from a former mine waste disposal area that now supports approximately 4.5 acres of wetland habitat. That disposal area, known as the Centennial site, is owned by a subsidiary of Rise Gold called Rise Grass Valley.

Equipment labeled “Rise Gold Corp” sits at the Centennial site. The area now supports 4.5 acres of wetland habitat and was considered for listing as a federal Superfund site. Becki Robins / Undark

The Centennial site was polluted enough to warrant consideration for listing as a federal Superfund site, but Rise Gold avoided federal regulation by agreeing to undertake its own cleanup. Ralph Silberstein, president of the Community Environmental Advocates Foundation, a local environmental organization, says his group welcomes Rise Gold’s plan to address the hazardous substances that currently mar the area. But, he says, the group is troubled by what might come next. According to Rise Grass Valley’s Remedial Action Plan, the company may take the freshly cleaned-up site and use it for dumping waste from “future mining operations,” though they’ll first have to get permission from the state.

Rise Gold’s plans to minimize the mine’s impact are outlined in a draft environmental report, which Nevada County released this month, and which the company describes as “favorable.” In an interview with Undark, Rise Gold’s CEO, Ben Mossman, defended his company’s plan to use the Centennial site for some of the waste produced in conjunction with the reopening of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine. This particular mine is unique, said Mossman, because the company found “very little metal content” in the areas where it plans to dig. Because the waste will largely consist of non-toxic materials such as sand and rock, he says, “there’s no geochemical concerns to the environment or human health”—a claim that activists question.

Even when rock has little or no heavy metals, disposing of it can be a significant challenge. According to Rise Gold’s website, the Idaho-Maryland mining operation historically had to remove a ton of rock for every half ounce of gold it recovered. “These mining companies come along and they want us to not notice that they’re going to have a huge amount of mine waste rock,” says Elizabeth Martin, who recently retired as CEO of the Sierra Fund, a local conservation group based in nearby Nevada City. Rise Gold’s draft environmental impact report says the plan will result in approximately 182,500 tons of material produced per year that will need to be transported then used as engineered fill. By comparison, a large dump truck can carry about 14 tons. Multiply that by more than 10,000, and the visual is “beyond most people’s imagination,” says Martin.

Rise Gold plans to reduce its aboveground footprint at the Grass Valley mine with cemented paste backfill, which was first used in the 1970s as a way to recycle mine materials and help stabilize the underground workings. In essence, the mine becomes safer and the waste goes back to where it came from.

Paste backfilling is widely regarded as a more environmentally friendly way to dispose of mine waste. There is evidence that locking tailings up in cement decreases their permeability and stabilizes any heavy metals within them. There are still questions, though, about whether or not arsenic and heavy metals will stay put in the paste backfill material over the long term. The leaching behavior of arsenic depends on a lot of different factors, including the binder used in the backfill and the chemical content of the tailings. The biggest unknown is what happens in the future, when the mine closes and the pumps shut down, which will let groundwater flow into the backfilled tunnels. Some studies have noted that even low levels of leaching could continue for years, potentially contaminating drinking water or nearby rivers and streams.

Heavy metal leaching is high on the list of concerns in Grass Valley. Rise Gold promises their operations will be clean, but even so, the company’s hydrology report does note arsenic leaching from some test samples. The leaching tests, meant to simulate what might happen to a waste rock pile when it rains, found that arsenic leached at concentrations 17 times greater than the water quality standards from samples of the mineral type serpentinite. Rise says that’s not a concern since there will be very little serpentinite in the waste rock. Its report also notes that tests on tailings indicated arsenic leaching, but only at concentrations that would not exceed regulatory limits.

A sign in the East Bennett neighborhood of Grass Valley reads “NO MINE.” Several community groups in the area, concerned about heavy metal pollution and the vast amount of waste rock, are opposed to the mining project. Becki Robins / Undark

Underground mining operations also intersect with the water table, which means the existing tunnels have to be dewatered, and the water that’s pumped out of the tunnels has to be treated before it’s released aboveground. “The water coming from these mines that they’re dewatering is full of arsenic, manganese, iron, and other heavy metals,” says biologist Josie Crawford, executive director of the Wolf Creek Community Alliance, another local group that opposes the mine. “It will be treated, but it needs to be treated forever.”

The water also has to go somewhere after it’s been treated. Rise Gold plans to flush it down nearby South Fork Wolf Creek, a move that Crawford fears could cause damage to the riparian habitat. “It’s a trout stream, so it’s sensitive,” she says. “If the dewatering starts scouring the creek, they could lose a lot of those invertebrates and ruin the trout habitat.”

Conservationists and community opposition groups often see gold mining as a battle between nature and greed, and question whether the pursuit of gold is really worth so much environmental destruction. So does Baur, the financial economist, who says it makes sense from both an environmental and economic perspective to just not mine for gold at all. Much of the gold that already exists above ground, he says, is held by banks and investment companies. Investors can buy shares of gold they’ve never even seen. Baur says they might as well just buy shares of gold that companies promise to leave in the ground. “You buy something that doesn’t disrupt the land as much,” he says, “and you don’t have all the negative effects of the actual gold mining.”

Baur recently explored this idea with a couple of his colleagues at the University of Western Australia Business School. In a 2021 paper, they proposed leaving unmined gold in the ground and letting “nature act as a natural vault and custodian legally protected by gold firms and the government.” In this scenario, investors could buy stock in gold exploration companies that have identified underground gold but have no plans to mine it. This would give investors an alternative to purchasing shares of the aboveground gold that currently sits in bank vaults around the globe.

Would the unmined gold, which the paper calls “green gold,” actually earn money for its investors? Baur and his coauthors considered the costs of gold exploration and gold mining, and the uncertainty of the quality and amount of gold that might exist in any given underground location. They then ran an empirical analysis, and concluded that unmined gold can still be a valuable investment.

Baur says his paper has, unsurprisingly, received negative feedback from the gold industry. “They hate the idea, of course,” he says. “It’s the end of their business, essentially.” He thinks investors, though, may be more willing to entertain the idea, especially those who are looking for green investments. “But there’s also a lot of greenwashing,” he says, adding that investors may say they want to invest green, but may not be as willing to try new ideas when the time comes.

These questions will take time to sort out. In the meantime, the Grass Valley mining project still needs to overcome public opposition and significant financial hurdles. Opening a mine is expensive. Before Rise Gold bought the mineral rights in 2017, EmGold Mining Corporation had plans to reopen the mine. They spent $1 million just on consultants, according to one estimate, and the project never got past the preliminary stages. Locals like Silberstein hope Rise Gold’s plans will meet a similar fate.

“They’re talking about bringing gold up from 3,000 feet below the surface,” he says, “which means restoring a badly damaged, probably collapsed-in gold mine to get less than an ounce per ton of gold out.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he adds. “It’s not a smart thing to do if we want to have a sustainable, livable world.”

A new database reveals how much humans are messing with evolution

Some animals and plants are rapidly adapting to our warming, polluted world.

AMIT KATWALA, WIRED.COM - 2/5/2022, 5:44 AM

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Natalie Fobes | Getty Images

Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection.

But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong—at least about the timescale. Peppered moths living in industrial areas of Britain were getting darker, better for blending in against the soot-blackened buildings and avoiding predation from the air. House sparrows—introduced to North America from Europe—were changing size and color according to the climate of their new homes. Tufted hairgrass growing around electricity pylons was developing a tolerance for zinc (which is used as a coating for pylons and can be toxic to plants).

In the late 1990s, biologist Andrew Hendry noticed similarly quick changes in phenotype while studying salmon. (Phenotype refers to the trait that actually exists in the animal, even if it’s not reflected by a change in its underlying genetic code.) “We had this impression that, well, actually, maybe this rapid evolution thing is not so exceptional,” says Hendry, now a professor at McGill University in Montreal. “Maybe it’s actually occurring all the time, and people just haven’t emphasized it.”

With a colleague, Michael Kinnison (now at the University of Maine), Hendry pulled together a database of examples of rapid evolution and wrote a 1999 paper that kickstarted interest in the field. Now, Hendry and colleagues have updated and expanded the original data set with more than 5,000 additional examples: everything from the cranial depth of the common chaffinch to the lifespan of the Trinidadian guppy. Scientists are using this data to answer questions about how fast and far the natural world is changing and how much of the change is due to humans.

In an initial paper published in November 2021 using the new data set (which is called Proceed, for Phenotypic Rates of Change Evolutionary and Ecological Database), Hendry and colleagues reexamined five key questions raised by previous work. They confirmed, for instance, that on average, all over the world, animal species seem to be getting smaller. This runs contrary to a theory of evolution called Cope’s rule, which posits that species should increase in size over time. “It’s better to be larger,” says Kiyoko Gotanda, a coauthor on the paper who is now at Brock University in Ontario. “You’ll get more mates, you have a better survival rate.” But when they analyzed the new data, the results confirmed a finding from a previous paper by Gotanda. “There seems to be an overall decline in body size due to things like climate change, and other types of human influences,” she says.

Hunting and harvesting are the biggest drivers of this trend: if humans pluck the fattest fish from the ocean each time they cast their nets, it follows that only the smaller ones will survive to pass on their genes. But climate could also play a role because of a basic rule of biology: larger creatures have a bigger surface area-to-volume ratio and therefore find it easier to retain heat. “The theory is that you don’t need to maintain that larger body size as the temperatures are warming, and so you can be smaller,” Gotanda says.Page: 1 2 Ne

Human Evolution in the Modern Age

Humans are still evolving, and modern technology

 and culture both play a role.

By Avery HurtFeb 4, 2022 

(Credit: laikavoyaj/Shutterstock) 

In 2000, famed evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould said, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” Now, 22 years later, most evolutionary biologists beg to differ. Natural selection is still operating on humans, they say — and they have evidence to back up the claim.  

Take, for example, lactose tolerance. Most people lose the ability to digest lactose after they’re weaned. However, roughly 35 percent of adults worldwide have one specific genetic variant that allows them to digest lactose throughout life. Recent genetic research has found that this variant became common only after humans domesticated animals and started drinking their milk. Even today, the trait is more common in populations with a history of dairy farming than in populations whose ancestors did not raise animals for milk.  

Sarah Tishkoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studies genomic changes and disease risk in human populations. She cites an example of natural selection still going on today: the development of resistance to infectious disease. Malaria, for example, infects over two hundred million people every year, and kills almost half a million of those, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. However, some people have a genetic variant that protects them from malaria. These people will be more likely to live and pass on that variant to their children. This is “a really clear-cut case of ongoing evolution,” says Tishkoff.  

Tishkoff and her team have also found that some people living in the Andes and in Tibet have developed an adaptation to life at high altitudes. Other research has found that indigenous people in the Andes may have developed resistance to arsenic poisoning. And those are just a few of the ways that humans are continuing to evolve today.

Technology and Evolution

Scientists have been able to discover many of these examples of ongoing natural selection thanks to a technology much enhanced since Gould made his pronouncement: the ability to sequence the human genome quickly and inexpensively. Using huge genetic data sets to track changes, scientists can pinpoint genetic changes in populations and catch evolution in action.   

But not all the tools that uncover such evidence are so high tech. Church records that list births, marriages, and deaths offer a unique window into evolution on a population-wide level, as do large, ongoing epidemiological studies. Researchers who mined data from the Framingham Heart Study — a multigenerational study of cardiovascular disease among residents of Framingham, Massachusetts — were able to untangle the effects of natural selection in action, predicting that the community's next generation of women will have lower cholesterol.

Scott Solomon, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University, dug into this type of data for his book Future Humans: Inside the Science of our Continuing Evolution. That kind of population data is useful, he explains, because it provides information about fertility, such as trends in the age of women when they had their first child, and how many children they had. Multiple studies like this, he says, have found that natural selection favors an earlier start to reproduction and a later age for the onset of menopause — in other words, more time to have children. And, of course, the more children, the more chances for mutations and more opportunities for evolution.  

Improved health care means that, on average around the world, most people live to adulthood. That would seem to neutralize the effect of natural selection — or as it is sometimes called, survival of the fittest. But Solomon points out that it’s not always about survival; these days it’s more often about reproduction. That’s why changes in the timing and number of births are still so important.  

Improved health care and new technologies do play a role, though. But there’s another important actor in this evolutionary play: culture.  

Enter Culture 

According to Solomon, another big factor in modern evolution is gene flow, the movement of genes between different populations. When people move from one population to another, they take their genes with them, and that changes the prevalence of certain traits in both the populations they leave and the ones they join. “That is actually one of the most important mechanisms for modern human evolution,” he says. “In the last couple of hundred years, and certainly in the last century, human populations have been mixing like never before.”  

Other cultural changes are likely affecting modern human evolution in ways we don’t yet understand. For example, research has shown that women rely on scent when choosing mates. But these days, we use all sorts of products to mask our scents. In addition, hormonal birth control can change the way women react to the scent of potential mates. One study found that hormonal birth control caused women to be more attracted to men who were genetically similar to them, while women not on hormonal birth control were more likely to be attracted to men who were genetically different.  

Future Humans 

There is no way of knowing the long-term effects of modern cultural practices and technologies on human evolution. But scientists can make some educated guesses. For example, it’s possible, says Solomon, that the increasing use of in vitro fertilization could lead to more infertility. When infertility has a genetic cause, in vitro fertilization preserves in the population a gene that without the technology would have been weeded out by natural selection.  

Modern technology may also be helping us evolve different bodies. Caesarian sections make the healthy birth of babies too large to make it through the birth canal possible. Increased use of these procedures could possibly lead to an increase in the average size of humans. A 2016 study models how that might already be happening in some populations.  

The workings of evolution are complex, involving myriad small adaptations that — over time — may result in significant changes. While scientists can’t predict what that will mean for future humans, there’s one thing most of them agree on: We’re still evolving, bit by bit.