Maybe not in our hearts, but certainly in our brains. Plus, they can make you love the indoors far too much—which is why there’s now a full-fledged, woodsy rehab center for joystick addicts who need a soothing pathway back to a normal life. (Outside Online)
Dr. Gagliano’s scientific research, which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior and signaling. Currently at the University of Sydney in Australia, she has published a number of studies that support the view that plants are, to some extent, intelligent. Her experiments suggest that they can learn behaviors and remember them. Her work also suggests that plants can “hear” running water and even produce clicking noises, perhaps to communicate. New York Times
Almost all “wild rice” is cultivated, but the real thing grows freely on the lakes of northern Minnesota
— Read on www.saveur.com/true-story-wild-rice-north-americas-most-misunderstood-grain/
The House passage of the bill, on a vote of 363-62, sends the measure, which was passed by the Senate this month, to the desk of President Trump. The vote Tuesday offered a rare moment of bipartisanship in a divided chamber and a rare victory for environmentalists at a time when the Trump administration is working aggressively to strip away protections on public lands and open them to mining and drilling.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump was expected to sign the bill into law. But the one million acres of wilderness that would be protected by the bill stand in contrast to the administration’s plans to open up for drilling nine million acres of protected habitat for the sage grouse, two million acres of protected land in Utah, parts of the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and most United States coastal waters.
New York Times
The bold print speaks for itself.
The bill, which the Congressional Budget Office projects would save taxpayers $9 million, enjoys broad support in the House. The lower chamber is poised to take it up after the mid-February recess, and White House officials have indicated privately that the president will sign it.
The measure protects 1.3 million acres as wilderness, the nation’s most stringent protection, which prohibits even roads and motorized vehicles. It permanently withdraws more than 370,000 acres of land from mining around two national parks, including Yellowstone, and permanently authorizes a program to spend offshore-drilling revenue on conservation efforts.
This is even more amazing then Mitch McConnell’s efforts to legalize hemp.
It’s no coincidence that the popularity of zero-waste lifestyles happens to coincide with mounting evidence that climate change will be the defining event of this century. We’ve also only just begun to seriously research the effect of the staggering amount of plastic in our oceans — the first comprehensive count of it by Science just three years ago reported anywhere between 4.7 and 12.8 million metric tons of ocean plastic. Plastic, in modern life, is nearly inescapable — simply washing our clothing, about 60 percent of which is now made of synthetic plastic fibers — releases hundreds of thousands of fibers into the water supply. Waste on dry land isn’t any better: The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 23 percent of landfill waste comes from packaging and containers.
Vox
First, they came for the styrofoam, and I did not speak out—because man oh man I hate styrofoam.
Dean’s List 