ELISABETH KOSTERS: Nova Scotia mining lobby propaganda undermines broader environmental debate

Contributed | Posted: a day ago 

Bruce MacKinnon's cartoon for Sept. 3, 2021.

ELISABETH KOSTERS • Guest Opinion

Recently, I attended the virtual “Nova Scotia Precious and Critical Mineral Show” put on by the Mining Association of Nova Scotia (MANS).

I’m a retired geologist. I’m fully aware that the energy transition requires a massive shift in material needs at a scale that almost nobody can imagine. This challenge is an opportunity, but also a risk.

Society has left resource extraction exclusively to the private sector, with the result that our planet is in a terrifying climate and biodiversity crisis. Resource extraction typically makes a few people extraordinarily rich, but its societal impact costs all of us dearly in environmental cleanup for decades or centuries after the extractive industry has upped and left.

There’s hardly a good news story to tell. In recent years, (inter)national agencies have formulated which minerals will play an essential role in our future. These are called critical minerals.

So I was interested in this symposium. Here’s what struck me:

1. There wasn’t a single representative from any of the First Nations and not one speaker had the good manners to articulate a land acknowledgement.

2. The 12 technical presenters were all white men, a lot of them older than 60.

3. Four presentations pertained to mineral claims located in southern Nova Scotia, in the highly fragmented habitat of the critically endangered mainland moose which has been much in the news because of clearcutting and protests against it. That area also happens to be a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. None of the presenters mentioned this.

4. Five presentations pertained to gold prospects. Gold isn’t a critical mineral. Almost all of it is mined for jewelry and since it’s completely inert, the bit that we do need for medical and technical applications can easily be obtained from recycling. But MANS and its members push gold relentlessly despite these blatant facts. One of the presenters, frustrated by the stalling of the exploration of a gold claim in Cape Breton as a result of opposition by First Nations, admitted that gold isn’t a critical mineral but that “we need to mine gold to pay for developing other minerals.”

Excuse me? What if we as a society create a model for producing the materials that society needs rather than just the stuff it wants?

5. One presenter who reported on yet another future gold mine in eastern Nova Scotia shrugged off a question about environmental impact with “there’s just some stunted trees and bogs there.” Reminder: this is exactly what the developer of Owls Head thought he was buying. Maybe the mining sector should begin to read about the importance of all wetlands as critically important carbon sinks.

6. Only one presentation impressed me. It was by Don Bubar, the president and CEO of Toronto-based Avalon Advanced Materials. He talked about the possibilities for extracting tin and indium (both critical minerals) from mine waste at the historic East Kemptville mine in southern Nova Scotia. Mr. Bubar talked about the need for a circular economy and about the innovations that we need to extract critical minerals from mine waste. This talk made my day.

MANS is useless. It actively undermines a balanced discussion about our role as humans on a planet ever more under threat. Its only objective is to reduce government interference in its ambition to disembowel our province as much as possible.

MANS officials pay lip service to the environment, but they mostly waffle about how reclamation makes old quarry pits and open-cast mines “beautiful,” thus completely ignoring the fact that wilderness is incomparable with reclaimed land.

They refer to “critical minerals” only as a justification towards their goal of private profit without providing any deeper insight into the future, nor do they make any contribution to a balanced debate that we so badly need. Anyone who raises the slightest objection to their bullish talking points is called an obstructing environmentalist and is blocked from their social media platforms.

The earth resources sector in Nova Scotia has the government in its pocket, just like the forestry sector does. Unless citizens force deep and profound changes in the manner in which we treat the natural wealth that we’re responsible for, catastrophic climate change and biodiversity collapse will continue unabated.

We still have a chance, in Nova Scotia, but as long as organizations such as MANS continue with their opportunistic and bullish propaganda, brainwashing those who haven’t had the opportunity to delve deeper into the subject, I’m not optimistic.


Elisabeth Kosters lives in Wolfville

The Biodiversity Crisis Needs Its Net Zero Moment

Climate change isn’t the only major crisis facing the world. We’re in the middle of a mass extinction, and we’re missing all of our biodiversity targets.

ILLUSTRATION: JENNY SHARAF; RICHARD HANSEN/SCIENCE SOURCE

OCTOBER 2021 WAS an important month for crisis meetings. There was the big one, COP26, where decisionmakers descended on Glasgow to spend two frenetic weeks figuring out how to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Climate Agreement and keep global heating under 1.5 degrees Celsius. But earlier that month, a different crisis meeting took place that almost completely slipped below the radar—a meeting that will have huge implications for the future of every living thing on our planet.

The world is in the middle of a biodiversity crisis. Birds, mammals, and amphibians are going extinct at least 100 to 1,000 times faster than they did in the millions of years before humans began to dominate the planet. In the last 500 years alone, human activity has forced 869 species into extinction, according to data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). If things continue at their current rate, we’re on track for a sixth mass extinction—the first since that infamous dino-ending catastrophe 65 million years ago, which sparked an extinction event that eventually knocked off 76 percent of all species.

This time around, there’s no giant asteroid to pin the blame on. Humans have transformed the planet, turning half of all habitable land into agriculture and replacing wild animals with livestock. In the oceans, we are continuing the trend our ancestors began on land tens of thousands of years ago—hunting large species to the point of collapse and leaving mostly smaller species behind. In other words, biodiversity is in desperately bad shape.

“There is a gradual realization that there are two big crises going on, and we should better act on both of them,” says Almut Arneth, a biologist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. On October 11, the delegates at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference had gathered virtually to do just that. They were trying to agree on a new set of global targets that can arrest the dramatic drop in global biodiversity—a Paris Agreement-style plan to reset our relationship with nature. These targets will be debated and finalized at a second meeting due to take place in Kunming, China, in April 2022.

The last time the parties of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity got together to set a global biodiversity agenda was in Japan in 2010, where they came up with the Aichi targets, a set of 20 goals aimed at reducing a range of environmental harms including habitat loss, overfishing, and pollution over the subsequent decade. But those goals were difficult to measure, and countries weren’t required to report their progress in any definite way. In September 2020, a UN report revealed that none of the Aichi targets were fully achieved, and only six of them were partially achieved.

The Kunming meeting is an attempt to get the world’s biodiversity targets back on track. “It’s a decisive moment,” says Henrique Miguel Pereira, head of the Biodiversity Conservation research group at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. The first draft of what is called the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework was released in July and sets out four major goals to be achieved by 2050, along with 21 more specific targets that will be assessed in 2030. While the Aichi targets tended to be a little vague, these post-2020 targets add some numerical pizzazz.

The first goal—which has several different elements—includes commitments to cut extinctions by a factor of 10 by 2050, and to halt or reverse the current increase in the extinction rate by 2030. Other targets include reducing the introduction of invasive species by 50 percent and halving fertilizer runoff from farms by 2030. “Now we have these targets that will dominate the agendas of the countries and the international agenda for the next 10 to 15 years,” says Pereira.

But a big headline target like reducing extinctions to 10 percent of their current levels raises some tricky questions. For a start, we’re not even completely sure how many species are going extinct at the moment. Extinction rates vary widely between different groups of species. Amphibians, for example, are disappearing at a higher rate than mammals, which are disappearing at a higher rate than birds. The IUCN has evaluated the extinction status of 138,374 species, but that’s only a fraction of the more than 2.1 million animal, plant, fungus, and protist species that have been described by scientists. There are millions more undescribed organisms out there, so species could be going extinct before we’re even aware they exist. And if you take into account species that may vanish in the near future, the trajectory of the extinction rate may be even higher than current estimates suggest.

“People want to have a simple metric, and it’s incredibly difficult with biodiversity,” says Pereira. In 2020 the ecologist Georgina Mace—who helped design the criteria behind the IUCN’s Red List of threatened species—suggested that the target should be to keep extinctions of described species to below 20 per year over the next 100 years. But since we don’t know how many undescribed ones are going extinct, this could end up overlooking species that we don’t yet know about.

Another option is to look at a different indicator of biodiversity, such as the Living Planet Index. Developed by the World Wildlife Fund in 1998, the LPI reports average changes across a number of vertebrate populations, but they don’t tell us anything about how many species are going extinct. The LPI was used to measure progress towards the Aichi targets, but it has been criticized for its relatively narrow focus on a small number of species. According to Basile van Havre, who cochairs the working group behind the post-2020 framework, the precise metric behind the 10-fold reduction target will be discussed ahead of the Kunming conference, at a meeting in January.

Of course, if climate change has taught us anything, it’s that having a target to hit is only the start of the battle. Global greenhouse gas emissions still haven’t peaked, and even taking into account current net zero targets, the world is facing about 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100 compared to preindustrial levels. This is above the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit temperature increases to no more than 1.5 degrees, and it will lead to a world where sea levels are 20 inches higher than in 1995 and extreme heat events that used to happen once every 50 years will happen more than once every 10 years. “You can set as many targets as you want. And you can sell them with nice headline statements,” Arneth says. “The important thing is, are you actually doing something to achieve them?”

One proposed target in the framework that has already gained some momentum is “30 by 30”—ensuring at least 30 percent of land and sea areas are under conservation by 2030. A group of 71 countries has already banded together to make sure that the new framework includes a target to turn at least 30 percent of the ocean into protected areas in the next nine years. But this won’t be easy. The majority of protected ocean areas are close to shorelines, within the jurisdiction of the closest country. But nearly two-thirds of the ocean is beyond these areas of national jurisdiction, and so far only a little over 1 percent of that area is protected. Deciding who is responsible for protecting these remote and poorly understood areas will be another challenge that delegates at Kunming will have to reckon with.

Although there are many thorny problems still on the table, there are signs that we can turn the biodiversity crisis around. Many of the world’s biodiversity hot spots are also potent carbon sinks, which will mean that efforts to keep carbon locked up will also preserve crucial habitats. There has also been considerable success bringing back wild animals that had been driven away from particular countries, or even to the brink of extinction, thanks to human activities. The European bison was extinct in the wild until the 1950s, when projects to restore the huge mammal to its natural habitat got underway. Now there are wild populations in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus.

A 2011 study commissioned by the Zoological Society of London found that European brown bears, lynx, wolverines, grey wolves, and golden jackals were all expanding their range across the continent, thanks to rewilding efforts. Although northern and western Europe don’t usually feature highly on lists of the world’s most biodiverse spots, the region is an important test of whether ambitious conservation aims can coexist with dense human populations. Europe has some of the most intensively used lands anywhere on the planet—around 80 percent of the continent’s surface is used for settlements, farming, and infrastructure.

This can lead to problems. In 2006 a wild bear wandered onto German soil for the first time in 170 years. The bear—christened Bruno by the press—was part of a conservation program to reintroduce the animals into the Alps in northern Italy. But German authorities turned against Bruno after he started killing sheep and rabbits, and he was eventually shot by a team of Finnish hunters on the orders of the Bavarian Environment Minister. (“It's not that we don't welcome bears in Bavaria. It's just that this one wasn't behaving properly,” said an official at the time of the killing.) Bruno’s body later became the subject of a diplomatic row after Italian authorities demanded it be returned to Italy, claiming that it belonged to the state. The Bavarian government disagreed and opted to stuff Bruno’s body and put it on display in Munich’s Museum of Man and Nature, where it remains to this day.

How Europe handles rewilding will provide an important example to the rest of the world, says Pereira. “If we cannot handle wildlife and wilderness in Europe, you cannot really say other countries have to protect their wildlife,” he says. There are parallels to the climate crisis here too. Greenhouse gas emissions from the European Union peaked in 1990, but unless leaders there can support other countries in cutting their own emissions, the world will have no chance of hitting net zero by 2050. For international targets to succeed, countries with the resources to deliver conservation goals will have to start by showing they can take them seriously within their own borders.

Pereira is hopeful that the tentative signs of success from Europe’s rewilding schemes show that it is possible to turn the biodiversity narrative around. “My kids already have much more wildlife in their lives,” he says. “And my grandkids probably will have even more biodiversity if we continue to manage it well.”

Juno flyby reveals stunning new images of Jupiter, sounds of its moon Ganymede

Ashley Strickland
CNNDigital
Saturday, December 18, 2021 

This image taken by the Juno mission shows two of Jupiter's large rotating storms, captured November 29. (Kevin M. Gill CC BY/MSSS/SwR/JPL-Caltech/NASA/CNN)

The largest planet in our solar system appears to look more and more like a work of art. It's full of surprises -- and so are its moons.

The NASA Juno mission, which began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, just recently made its 38th close flyby of the gas giant. The mission was extended earlier this year, adding on a flyby of Jupiter's moon Ganymede in June.

The data and images from these flybys is rewriting everything we know about Jupiter, said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, during a briefing at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Friday.

There, Bolton revealed 50 seconds of sound created when Juno flew by Ganymede over the summer.The clip of the moon's audio was created by electric and magnetic radio waves produced by the planet's magnetic field and picked up by the spacecraft's Waves instrument, designed to detect these waves. The sounds are like a trippy space age soundtrack.

"This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades," Bolton said. "If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede's magnetosphere."

The Juno team continues to analyze the data from the Ganymede flyby. At the time, Juno was about 645 miles (1,038 kilometres) from the moon's surface and zipping by at 41,600 mph (67,000 kilometres per hour).

"It is possible the change in the frequency shortly after closest approach is due to passing from the nightside to the dayside of Ganymede," said William Kurth, lead co-investigator of the Waves instrument, who is based at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, in a statement.

The team also shared stunning new images that resemble artistic views of Jupiter's swirling atmosphere.

"You can see how incredibly beautiful Jupiter is," Bolton said. "It's really an artist's palette. This is almost like a Van Gogh painting. You see these incredible vortices and swirling clouds of different colors."

These visually stunning images serve to help scientists better understand Jupiter and its many mysteries. Images of cyclones at Jupiter's poles intrigued Lia Siegelman, a scientist working with the Juno team who typically studies Earth's oceans. She saw similarities between Jupiter's atmospheric dynamics and vortices in Earth's oceans.

"When I saw the richness of the turbulence around the Jovian cyclones, with all the filaments and smaller eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around eddies," said Siegelman, a physical oceanographer and postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in a statement.

"These are especially evident in high-resolution satellite images of vortices in Earth's oceans that are revealed by plankton blooms that act as tracers of the flow."

MAPPING JUPITER'S MAGNETIC FIELD

Data from Juno is also helping scientists to map Jupiter's magnetic field, including the Great Blue Spot. This region is a magnetic anomaly located at Jupiter's equator -- not to be confused with the Great Red Spot, a centuries-long atmospheric storm south of the equator.

Since Juno's arrival at Jupiter, the team has witnessed a change in Jupiter's magnetic field. The Great Blue Spot is moving eastward about 2 inches (5.1 centimetres) per second and will complete a lap around the planet in 350 years.

Meanwhile, the Great Red Spot is moving westward and will cross that finish line much quicker, in about 4.5 years.

But the Great Blue Spot is being pulled apart by Jupiter's jet streams, which give it a striped appearance. This visual pattern tells scientists that these winds extend down much deeper into the planet's gaseous interior.

The map of Jupiter's magnetic field, generated by Juno data, also revealed that the planet's dynamo action, which creates the magnetic field from Jupiter's interior, originates from metallic hydrogen beneath a layer of "helium rain."

Juno was also able to take a look at the very faint ring of dust around Jupiter from inside the ring. This dust is actually created by two of the planet's small moons, named Metis and Adrastea. The observations allowed the researchers to see part of the Perseus constellation from a different planetary perspective.

"It is breathtaking that we can gaze at these familiar constellations from a spacecraft a half-billion miles away," said Heidi Becker, lead co-investigator of Juno's Stellar Reference Unit instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement.

"But everything looks pretty much the same as when we appreciate them from our backyards here on Earth. It's an awe-inspiring reminder of how small we are and how much there is left to explore."

In the fall of 2022, Jupiter will fly by Jupiter's moon Europa, which will be visited by its own mission, the Europa Clipper, set to launch in 2024.

Europa intrigues scientists because a global ocean is located beneath its ice shell. Occasionally, plumes eject from holes in the ice out into space.

Europa Clipper could investigate this ocean by "tasting" and flying through the plumes -- and learn if life is possible on this ocean world.

Oceanographers are using their expertise of ocean eddies to study the turbulence at Jupiter's poles and the physical forces that drive its large cyclones. Compare this image of a phytoplankton bloom in the Norwegian Sea (left) with turbulent clouds in Jupiter's atmosphere (right). 

(Gerald Eichstadt CC BY/MODIS Image/Aqua/GSFC/NASA OBPG OB.DAAC/CNN)

Juno spacecraft 'hears' Jupiter's moon

by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

This JunoCam image shows two of Jupiter's large rotating storms, captured on Juno’s 38th

 perijove pass, on Nov. 29, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing

: Kevin M. Gill CC BY

Sounds from a Ganymede flyby, magnetic fields, and remarkable comparisons between Jupiter and Earth's oceans and atmospheres were discussed during a briefing today on NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans.

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio has debuted a 50-second audio track generated from data collected during the mission's close flyby of the Jovian moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021. Juno's Waves instrument, which tunes in to electric and magnetic radio waves produced in Jupiter's magnetosphere, collected the data on those emissions. Their frequency was then shifted into the audio range to make the audio track.

"This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades," said Bolton. "If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede's magnetosphere."

Detailed analysis and modeling of the Waves data are ongoing. "It is possible the change in the frequency shortly after closest approach is due to passing from the nightside to the dayside of Ganymede," said William Kurth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, lead co-investigator for the Waves investigation.

At the time of Juno's closest approach to Ganymede—during the mission's 34th trip around Jupiter—the spacecraft was within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of the moon's surface and traveling at a relative velocity of 41,600 mph (67,000 kph).

Radio emissions collected during Juno’s June 7, 2021, flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede are presented here, both visually and in sound. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Univ of Iowa

Magnetic Jupiter

Jack Connerney from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead investigator with Juno's magnetometer and is the mission's deputy principal investigator. His team has produced the most detailed map ever obtained of Jupiter's magnetic field.

Compiled from data collected from 32 orbits during Juno's prime mission, the map provides new insights into the gas giant's mysterious Great Blue Spot, a magnetic anomaly at the planet's equator. Juno data indicates that a change in the gas giant's magnetic field has occurred during the spacecraft's five years in orbit, and that the Great Blue Spot is drifting eastward at a speed of about 2 inches (4 centimeters) per second relative to the rest of Jupiter's interior, lapping the planet in about 350 years.

In contrast, the Great Red Spot—the long-lived atmospheric anticyclone just south of Jupiter's equator—is drifting westward at a relatively rapid clip, circling the planet in about four-and-a-half years.

In addition, the new map shows that Jupiter's zonal winds (jet streams that run east to west and west to east, giving Jupiter's its distinctive banded appearance) are pulling the Great Blue Spot apart. This means that the zonal winds measured on the surface of the planet reach deep into the planet's interior.

The new magnetic field map also allows Juno scientists to make comparisons with Earth's magnetic field. The data suggests to the team that dynamo action—the mechanism by which a celestial body generates a magnetic field—in Jupiter's interior occurs in metallic hydrogen, beneath a layer expressing "helium rain."

Data Juno collects during its extended mission may further unravel the mysteries of the dynamo effect not only at Jupiter but those of other planets, including Earth.

Left to right: A phytoplankton bloom in the Norwegian Sea, and turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s

 atmosphere. Jupiter images provided by NASA’s Juno spacecraft have given 

oceanographers the raw materials to study the rich turbulence at the gas giant’s poles and 

the physical forces that drive large cyclones on Jupiter. 

Credit: NASA OBPG OB.DAAC/GSFC/Aqua/MODIS. Image processing: Gerald Eichstadt 

CC BY

Earth's Oceans, Jupiter's Atmosphere

Lia Siegelman, a physical oceanographer and postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, decided to study the dynamics of Jupiter's atmosphere after noticing that the cyclones at Jupiter's pole appear to share similarities with ocean vortices she studied during her time as a doctoral student.

"When I saw the richness of the turbulence around the Jovian cyclones, with all the filaments and smaller eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around eddies," said Siegelman. "These are especially evident in high-resolution satellite images of vortices in Earth's oceans that are revealed by plankton blooms that act as tracers of the flow."

The simplified model of Jupiter's pole shows that geometric patterns of vortices, like those observed on Jupiter, spontaneously emerge, and survive forever. This means that the basic geometrical configuration of the planet allows these intriguing structures to form.

Although Jupiter's energy system is on a scale much larger than Earth's, understanding the dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere could help us understand the physical mechanisms at play on our own planet.

Arming Perseus

The Juno team has also released its latest image of Jupiter's faint dust ring, taken from inside the ring looking out by the spacecraft's Stellar Reference Unit navigation camera. The brightest of the thin bands and neighboring dark regions scene in the image are linked to dust generated by two of Jupiter's small moons, Metis and Adrastea. The image also captures the arm of the constellation Perseus.

"It is breathtaking that we can gaze at these familiar constellations from a spacecraft a half-billion miles away," said Heidi Becker, lead co-investigator of Juno's Stellar Reference Unit instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "But everything looks pretty much the same as when we appreciate them from our backyards here on Earth. It's an awe-inspiring reminder of how small we are and how much there is left to explore."

Spacecraft buzzes Jupiter's mega moon, 1st close-up in years

Provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE
Former Puerto Rico Education Secretary Is Sentenced to Prison

Julia Keleher, who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud, said she was “inept” in how she handled some big policy changes in a troubled system.

Puerto Rico’s former education secretary, Julia Keleher, arriving at federal court in 2019. She was sentenced to six months in prison on Friday.

Credit...GDA, via Associated Press


By Patricia Mazzei
Dec. 17, 2021

Two years ago, federal agents arrested Puerto Rico’s former education secretary, Julia Keleher, as part of a sprawling corruption investigation whose accusations helped uncork public dissatisfaction with the island’s leaders and contributed to the furious ouster of a young and ambitious governor.

The accusations against Ms. Keleher and another top official set off the very first protests in the summer of 2019 against former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló, prompting him to rush home from a family vacation in France to what would turn out to be his final frenzied weeks in office.

On Friday, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced Ms. Keleher to serve six months in prison and 12 months of house arrest and pay a $21,000 fine. She had pleaded guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud.

Ms. Keleher’s sentencing came amid a new spate of corruption arrests — three mayors in three weeks — that has dominated headlines in Puerto Rico. One former mayor, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and receive kickbacks, was accused this month of awarding contracts worth nearly $10 million to an asphalt company that paid him off with cash and luxury wristwatches.

Ms. Keleher, who resigned in April 2019, pleaded guilty to a charge that she knew that a politically connected consultant would be paid to do work as part of a federal contract that did not allow for subcontractors.

She also pleaded guilty to signing a letter endorsing a road-widening project that removed an obstacle to development of land adjacent to a public school. The project required giving up a strip of land — 1,034 square feet — from a school in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, the capital. (The road widening project had been approved by the government in 2003.)

In return for the letter, the developer rented her an apartment in an adjacent building named Ciudadela from May to July of 2018 for $1. She was later given a $12,000 incentive bonus, funded by the developer, that helped her buy the two-bedroom unit for $297,500.

“To the people of Puerto Rico, I would like to apologize for the pain and heartache any of the actions that I took while serving as secretary have caused,” Ms. Keleher, 47, said during a video hearing before Judge Pedro A. Delgado Hernández of the United States District Court in Puerto Rico. It was her first time speaking about the case because the court had previously placed her and others involved under a gag order.

A school bus leaving John F. Kennedy Middle School in Caguas, P.R., in May 2018. The school was one of hundreds on the island shuttered because of reported drops in the student population.Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

Ms. Keleher’s plea agreement significantly narrowed the allegations against her, which at one point had included charges of identity theft and bribery. Initial charges that she steered a $13 million federal contract to a politically connected consultant were dropped.

In a subsequent phone interview, Ms. Keleher acknowledged making “mistakes” — some that led to criminal charges and others that made many Puerto Ricans despise her — but stressed that she had not stolen money or steered it away from students or teachers.

Instead, she insisted that the many changes she tried to make in the island’s education system during her short tenure threatened powerful political interests.

“I wasn’t communicating well, and I, culturally, was inept,” she said. “I didn’t appreciate the culture or the context or what I represented.” Her “let’s charge ahead” approach, she said, struck Puerto Ricans as an outsider who had come to tell them what to do and rob them of their own agency.

In the more than two years since her arrest, Ms. Keleher has become an emblem of the corruption, both real and perceived, that has plagued the territory for decades. A former education secretary, Víctor Fajardo, served a decade in federal prison after siphoning more than $4 million in federal funds to himself and his political party.

Her case offered a glimpse into the inner workings of a government that has struggled through financial bankruptcy and hurricane recovery. Consultants have played an outsize role because Puerto Rico lacks a civil service with the capacity to handle administrative matters in-house — in part because such a large proportion of public employees are political appointees rather than career workers with institutional expertise.

Federal data suggest that corruption is not more common in Puerto Rico than it is elsewhere. An analysis by the United States Sentencing Commission found that, in 2020, about 0.2 percent of federal offenders in Puerto Rico were involved in bribery and corruption crimes, compared with 0.4 percent at the national level.

But many Puerto Ricans distrust the government that sank them in debt and failed to adequately respond after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Even before her arrest, Ms. Keleher, who is from Philadelphia, was deeply unpopular for closing hundreds of public schools because of low enrollment. She upset teachers’ unions for championing an education reform bill that authorized charter schools and stoked fears about the privatization of public education. She pushed to decentralize the Education Department, Puerto Rico’s largest government agency, to create regions that operated more like local school districts, eroding the power of some of the department’s administrators.



Parents, teachers and students protested school closures outside Luis Santaella School in Aguas Buenas, P.R., in 2017.

Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

The school closures came after the fiscal board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances required major cutbacks, but critics said Ms. Keleher ignored pleas from students and parents in remote towns to keep schools open rather than force them to make long commutes without any public transit available.

“The massive school closures that she led are something for which she will never serve one day in jail,” Mercedes Martínez Padilla, the head of a teachers’ union, said on Friday. “That was a crime against the children of our country.”

Most shuttered schools, she noted, have become public nuisances attracting drug users, wild horses and homeless people.

In the interview, Ms. Keleher said she felt the radiating anger against her when she made her first public appearance in federal court in San Juan after her arrest. A crowd of protesters swarmed the courthouse.

Their ire, she said, seemed motivated both by the corruption charges and by the anger over the school closures. Making matters worse was her status as a non-Puerto Rican who appeared to be dismissing local communities and their history in a territory where many people have long felt oppressed by colonialism.

But she maintained that, while many Puerto Ricans may dislike her, the big changes she tried to undertake were necessary and remain unfinished.

The school system has aging infrastructure, and many poor and special education students are at risk of dropping out. Early in the coronavirus pandemic, many students did not have adequate internet or computer access for remote schooling. Before that, a flurry of earthquakes in the southwestern part of the island exposed serious construction flaws that forced some school buildings to close.

Ms. Keleher and former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló discussed uses for 60 shuttered schools in San Juan, P.R., in 2018

.Credit...GDA, via Associated Press


Ms. Keleher said that schools had old textbooks. The distribution of resources was uneven. Teachers lacked professional training. Without a centralized payroll and attendance system, it was impossible to hold people accountable for showing up to work — a problem exacerbated by the many political appointees rotating in and out of the department after every election.

“Every four years you have an almost entirely new agency,” said Laura Jimenez, an education policy expert at the Center for American Progress, who overlapped with Ms. Keleher at the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration. Ms. Jimenez later worked as a consultant for the Puerto Rico Education Department. “That’s no way to run any organization, let alone a government organization.”

Last year, an assistant to Ms. Keleher and the assistant’s sister pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud. They have yet to be sentenced, suggesting possible cooperation with prosecutors. A consultant involved in the transaction with the school land and apartment has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for trial in February.

Four other people accused of taking part in a fraud scheme involving $15.5 million in federal funding — including Ángela Ávila Marrero, the former executive director of the Puerto Rico Health Insurance Administration — have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

The case forced Ms. Keleher to sell her Washington home and move in with her parents outside Philadelphia, where she logged into her sentencing hearing. She has been making a living by teaching English online — including, she said, to resettled Afghan refugees.

She chose not to return to San Juan to be sentenced in person.

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.


Patricia Mazzei is the Miami bureau chief, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. Before joining The Times, she was the political writer for The Miami Herald. She was born and raised in Venezuela, and is bilingual in Spanish. @PatriciaMazzei • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 18, 2021, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Former Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico Is Given Six Months in Prison. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

He was the Canadian head of the world’s largest pot company. His next big bet? A rare fungus worth $10,000 a kilogram – Toronto Star

 December 18, 2021 

It’s worth tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, grows out of the corpse of a caterpillar, and for centuries has only been found in the heights of the Himalayas.

Now Bruce Linton, the former CEO of cannabis giant Canopy Growth, has his eye on this fungus, and it may play a key role in his next massive money-maker.

Linton is a founding investor in Mood Science, a young company that’s researching the properties of cordyceps sinensis and other fungi with potential health benefits, dubbed “functional mushrooms.”

Mood Science is launching a line of drops, gummies and more using cordyceps, which the company claims can help with stress, energy and focus. And in the background, Mood Science will also conduct research into psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms,” which some believe are the future of mental health treatment.

Sitting at a table in Strange Love, a white-marbled financial-district cafe run by Mood Science’s sister company that boasts functional-mushroom-boosted coffee, Linton said he was struck not only by the monetary value of cordyceps sinensis, but also by its purported health benefits.

Functional mushrooms are not psychoactive like their magical cousins. Though they have been used in traditional medicine for centuries, research is still thin on their purported health benefits. But many companies in the psychedelics industry are getting into functional mushrooms.

Linton has had his eye on psychedelics for a while. After his departure from Canopy Growth, he told The Canadian Press he saw “untapped value” in the psychedelics industry.

Psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound produced by more than 200 species of fungi, is a long game, Linton told the Star, whereas functional mushrooms can go to market right now because they aren’t psychoactive.

“(Psilocybin will) become increasingly more legal in more places,” he predicts. “So what you want to be able to do is start here in the functional, build your science, your brand, your competencies, and then when you can, you smash them all together.”

Linton built Canopy Growth into the world’s largest cannabis company. But can he do the same with mushrooms? There are a lot more unknowns in the mushroom world, from tight regulations on psychoactive mushrooms, to a lack of scientific research on the growing market of functional mushrooms and fungi including cordyceps sinensis.

The functional and the fun

Functional mushrooms and fungi are finding their way into everything these days, including coffee, skin care, supplements and gummies. These mushrooms are often marketed in North America with a variety of health claims; cordyceps, for example, is often advertised as an energy booster or “Himalayan Viagra.”

Vague promises made about functional mushrooms include improving mental performance, boosting immunity and improving quality of sleep. Comedian turned podcaster Joe Rogan recommends coffee mixed with lion’s mane and chaga. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian has reportedly used skin care made with reishi.

Many of these functional fungi have been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years in countries including China, Russia and Japan to treat a variety of ailments.

Psychoactive mushrooms, on the other hand, have been illegal in Canada since 1974, but there’s a growing body of research into their potential use in psychotherapy, including in end-of-life care.

But while functional mushrooms and their magic cousins have very different effects, it’s not uncommon for a psychedelics company to get into the functional — a.k.a. legal — mushroom business, said Simeon Schnapper, general partner at JLS Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in psychedelics and technology.

For example, Silo Wellness, a Canadian-based company that offers psychedelic mushroom retreats (in Jamaica, where it’s legal), recently partnered with the late Bob Marley’s family to release a line of functional mushroom products.

The idea is to establish a brand and a revenue stream for the company, with an eye to a more colourful future, said Schnapper.

Linton was drawn in by the sleek branding of Strange Love, whose financial district location has all the trappings of a trendy cafe: tall windows, white marble, pink and green branding, a neon sign reading “All you need is love.”

He likened the Strange Love cafes to Tokyo Smoke, acquired by Canopy Growth in 2018. Tokyo Smoke started out as a cannabis lifestyle brand, said Linton, gaining market awareness before it was licensed to actually sell cannabis.

Around the same time, Canopy Growth bought ebbu, a Colorado-based hemp research company, adding to the firm’s scientific strength, said Linton. He sees the relationship between Strange Love and Mood Science in the same way, which influenced his decision to invest.

Mood Science founder David Tran was a founding investor in Strange Love, which was started by Chris Nguyen in 2016 and now has three locations in Toronto.

Both Nguyen and Tran come from a sales and marketing background, with Tran most recently in the fashion industry. Neither has a background in science. Strange Love also has a naturopathic doctor on its team.

Tran founded Mood Science during the COVID-19 pandemic after integrating functional mushrooms into his health regimen. He wants Mood Science to be “the Tesla of adaptogens,” and is betting on huge growth in the use of functional fungi in the wellness community.

“I think what we’re doing is really a reaction to the growing trend in the market,” he said. “Consumers want to go more natural, holistic, with their wellness, and they want to get away from pharmaceuticals.”

This isn’t Linton’s first foray into fungi; he is on the advisory board for psychedelics company Red Light Holland, and was on the board for psychedelics company Mind Medicine.

But now he’s interested in bringing the science of mushrooms into people’s everyday lives.

Mood Science is actively looking for acquisitions that can help bolster the science side of the company, said Linton, who is serving as an executive advisor for the company.

“The reason a winner occurs is because they make a number of rapid decisions that get their momentum and rate of acceleration going better than anyone else’s. And I think we’re in that spot,” he said.

‘People want to buy outcomes’

Cordyceps sinensis or Ophiocordyceps sinensis, also known as the caterpillar mushroom, is particularly difficult to cultivate. It grows in the wild, at high-altitude locations in the Himalayas where the parasitic fungus takes over the body of a ghost moth caterpillar, eventually killing it.

Cordyceps sinensis is used in traditional Chinese medicine to boost energy, endurance and libido, among other bodily functions.

The caterpillar mushroom has become increasingly rare due to overharvesting and the changing climate. Decades of attempts to artificially cultivate the growth from the host larvae, called a “fruit body,” were not successful. In recent years, however, researchers in China have succeeded in cultivating it in a lab.

But Mood Science is taking the insect out of the equation, cultivating the mycelia of cordyceps sinensis — like the roots of a plant without the plant itself — in liquid, in a lab in Colorado, Ohio. The result is Cordycell, Mood Science’s proprietary cordyceps sinensis compound. Tran calls it a “molecular mushroom.”

Mood Science is not the first to do this. There are a number of cordyceps sinensis products on the market today that use the mycelia, the vegetative part of a fungus, instead of the fruit body, which is easier to cultivate, said Nicholas Money, a mycologist at Miami University in Ohio.

So what makes Cordycell different from other products?

For one, Mood Science claims it has exclusive access to a strain of cordyceps sinensis belonging to Penn State University, a claim the Star was unable to verify via Penn State.

Tran said Cordycell has up to 15 times more sought-after derivatives of the fungi — such as cordycepin — than other products on the market today, and said Mood Science is able to “formulate clinically dosed products that help consumers with focus, energy, better sleep, and supporting stress.”

Money said while it’s certainly possible that Cordycell has significantly more cordycepin, further research is needed to determine cordycepin’s properties.

In fact, while Mood Science and many other natural wellness companies say mushrooms and fungi have medicinal properties, there is currently no widely accepted research to support these claims.

Mood Science bases its claims on the traditional uses of functional mushrooms, as well as some scientific studies done on their effects.

There’s more research on some mushrooms than others, but overall, the scientific community is still in the early days of exploring functional mushrooms, said Money; good research on the real effects of cordyceps sinensis and other functional fungi is “almost nonexistent” at this point, he said.

“I’m not saying that it doesn’t have these properties,” Money said. “But at the moment, this is faith-based medicine rather than medicine for which there’s a strong scientific rationale.”

Mood Science has partnered with an Ontario lab that specializes in testing cannabis and is currently developing protocols for testing Cordycell and other fungi to learn more about their properties.

Cordycell will officially launch in 2022, said Tran, in an array of products such as gummies and drops.

Mood Science is focusing on selling and researching functional mushrooms for now, but it also has two Health Canada licenses to conduct research into psilocybin.

“Not only are we gonna have the baseline infrastructure and all the fancy equipment to analyze the functional mushrooms, but we can analyze … psychedelic mushrooms,” said Tran. “We don’t know where the industry will go. But we think that knowledge will be valuable.”

One major claim made by the Mood Science team has yet to be proven, and that’s cordyceps sinensis’ potential use in treating mild depression, which as of yet has very little research to back it up.

Tran hinted that research into cordyceps sinensis’ potential mental health effects could begin in 2022.

Much like with cannabis, “people want to buy outcomes,” said Linton.

“I just think science is going to be a bigger part of this than people expect.”

This isn’t ‘Cannabis 3.0’

Science aside, Linton is betting money on the future success of the mushroom business, from the functional to the magical. But experts in emerging industries say it may be a long road ahead.

Michael Armstrong, an associate professor in the Goodman School of Business at Brock University, said while some parallels can be drawn between the cannabis industry and the psychoactive mushroom industry, there are also some key differences.

Far fewer Canadians use mushrooms recreationally, he said. So while he thinks it’s possible that psilocybin will become more widely available for medical purposes, Armstrong isn’t putting money on them being legalized recreationally.

“It’s not going to be cannabis 3.0,” he said.

But it’s not a bad idea for psychedelics companies to get into functional mushrooms, Armstrong said, so they can still get to know what customers are looking for, and build brand recognition.

It helps on the revenue side, too — Mood Science isn’t profitable right now, but Strange Love is, according to Tran.

Armstrong said the legalization of cannabis in Canada has made people more open-minded about other natural products, including previously banned substances.

“We legalized it and the world didn’t fall apart,” he said. “What else have we banned and have not studied?”

Schnapper agrees that magic mushrooms are on their way to being used in medical settings, but he also thinks that the growing popularity of microdosing magic mushrooms could signal a potential recreational market for psilocybin.

As for functional mushrooms, the more companies that get into this market, the more consumers will demand research to back up claims, said Schnapper.

The functional mushroom play has a lot of upfront costs and it’s a crowded market, but if it’s done well, it is a good revenue opportunity to help fund the science side of a business, he said.

Linton said Mood Science is moving fast, despite difficulty raising money in such an evolving market.

Nevertheless, the company has managed to attract investment, said Linton, including from Canadian fashion designer and entrepreneur Joe Mimran.

Linton said the legalization of cannabis has paved the way for psilocybin, which he predicts could be approved for medical use in five years or less, even if recreational psilocybin is a long way off.

Now, about a year into his investment, Linton is feeling good about his decision.

If he wasn’t, “I wouldn’t have done this interview,” said Linton.