Climate Change & Public Health

Here are some well-respected sources of information on this topic: 

CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/effects/default.htm 

CH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/issues/climate-md/ 

Yale School of Public Health: https://ysph.yale.edu/research_practice/interdepartmental/climate/ 

American Public Health Association: https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues/climate-change 

EPA Human Health and Climate Change Research https://www.epa.gov/climate-research/human-health-and-climate-change-research

Rewilding: what is it, why does it merit our attention?

 

More about "rewilding", how we wuld do it, what it means: "Rewilding is comprehensive, often large-scale, conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species (keystone species). The shorthand definition of Rewilding is the "3 C's"--conservation of Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. The ultimate goal of rewilding efforts is to mitigate the species extinction crisis and restore healthy and sustainable ecosystem function in areas that require little or no human intervention or management." https://rewilding.org/what-is-rewilding/ Learn more: https://rewilding.org/ https://rewildingeurope.com/what-is-rewilding-2/

Conservation of Global Fisheries

Learn more about conservation of global fisheries:

 "HARVEST STRATEGY SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS"

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"The harvest strategy approach has been well studied by scientists from around the globe as they seek to understand how to best implement this type of management for various species, each with their own set of biological characteristics and environmental conditions. The process by which this policy is shaped at different organizations varies, and these studies look to those processes to help outline and recommend best practices for successful development of a harvest strategy."

 https://harveststrategies.org/

International Fisheries Conservation Program

 "The International Fisheries Conservation Project seeks to catalyze development of a system to ensure the long-term sustainable management of marine fisheries globally. Since 2013, TOF has promoted science-based management of tunas in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through its Global Tuna Conservation Project, and in 2019, launched the International Fisheries Conservation Project to build on our success over the last six years and to take a more holistic, global approach."

 https://oceanfdn.org/projects/international-fisheries-conservation-program/

A Healthy Ocean Depends on Sustainably Managed Fisheries

"The health of our ocean and inland waters and the livelihoods of millions of people all depend on well-managed fisheries. Fish and other seafood products provide vital nutrients for more than three billion people around the globe and supply an income for 10 to 12 percent of the world’s population. From small-scale mussel and sea urchin fisheries along the Humboldt Current in South America, to nearshore octopus fisheries in Kenya, to the freshwater fisheries of the U.S. Great Lakes and industrial tuna fisheries in the Western and Central Pacific—these diverse species are essential to healthy ecosystems and resilient communities."

https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/global-fisheries/ 

 Threats and Overfishing

"Fishing is one of the most significant drivers of declines in ocean wildlife populations. Catching fish is not inherently bad for the ocean, except for when vessels catch fish faster than stocks can replenish, something called overfishing.

The number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-third of the world's assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Overfishing is closely tied to bycatch—the capture of unwanted sea life while fishing for a different species. This, too, is a serious marine threat that causes the needless loss of billions of fish, along with hundreds of thousands of sea turtles and cetaceans."

  https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/overfishing

Henry Beston's classic: The Outermost House

I am re-reading a naturalist's classic description of a year upon the beach of Cape Cod: Henry Beston's "The Outermost House". I first read it 40-some years ago. Here's a quote that may pull you toward this book (Beston writing about the birds of the outer Cape): "We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees a feather magnifield and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, lliving by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

"Reinventing the Enemy's Language" : Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America

This is another part of the literature of native (First Nations) people that I'm working my way back through. I learned about this book because of my interest in the work of Joy Harjo, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, and the first native person to hold that title.

This volume was edited by Joy Harjo, and Gloria Bird, with Patricia Blanco, Beth Cuthand, and Valerie Martinez.

During this summer of 2020, when many of us are attempting to "become anti-racist", this is part of my learning process.

"This anthology celebrates the experience of Native American women and is at once an important contribution to our literature and an historical document. It is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind to collect poetry, fiction, prayer, and memoir from Native American women. Over eighty writers are represented from nearly fifty (native North American) nations." (Goodreads review)