Tag: Mexico

When climate change drove all the men away

National Observer discusses when climate change drove all the men away.

Kilometres short of the Mexico-U.S. border, rough hands yanked Javier Hernandez from the trunk. They beat him, fractured his skull and then buried him with straws poking from his nostrils for air.

Known as coyotes, Javier’s smugglers threatened to abandon his bloodied body in the desert unless his family paid a hefty ransom.

Javier had been on the road for three days. He’d left his rural farming village in central Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest states, to find work in “El Norte.” One by one, Javier’s siblings had quit the family’s rain-dependent corn patch to slip over the border as undocumented immigrants. His eldest brother had immigrated to California before Javier was born. The summer Javier turned 19, drought withered the corn on the stalk. With no employment possibilities, Javier hired a coyote. He was the seventh Hernandez child to bid his teary-eyed mother goodbye.

100-year old Record of Change in Mexico’s ecosystems

This bioGraphic video discusses meticulous records collected nearly a century ago, enabling scientists to reconstruct a picture of some of Mexico’s most important ecosystems before they were transformed. bioGraphic is powered by the California Academy of Sciences, a renowned scientific and educational institution dedicated to exploring, explaining, and sustaining life on Earth.

Changes in the biodiversity of various ecosystems around the world often happen slowly, imperceptibly, and it can be difficult to know what’s even been lost over years and decades—there’s simply no baseline to compare against. But tucked away in a small liberal arts college in Eagle Rock, California is a scientific collection that’s helping to make this type of assessment possible. The Moore Laboratory of Zoology houses the largest collection of Mexican birds in the world—more than 65,000 specimens, most of which were collected by one man, Chester Lamb, between 1920 and 1960. In essence, the collection provides a snapshot of Mexico’s bird biodiversity from a time prior to the country’s industrial revolution and the significant habitat loss and degradation that ensued during that period. Using this one-of-a-kind tool, Moore Lab curator, John McCormack, and colleagues are retracing Lamb’s footsteps and conducting their own surveys to learn how and why Mexico’s bird fauna has changed over time—as well as how some species might be adapting to ecosystem-scale transformations.

5 Reasons Many See Trump’s Free Trade Deal as a Triumph for Fossil Fuels

This Inside Climate News article discusses 5 Reasons Many See Trump’s Free Trade Deal as a Triumph for Fossil Fuels. The USMCA is a cornucopia of free-trade provisions for oil and gas companies. One environmentalist calls it “a climate failure any way you look at it.”

Woven into the new North American free trade agreement that awaits President Donald Trump’s signature is his ideal of an oil- and gas-driven energy future—untroubled by climate change, unbounded by borders, unfettered even by economic concerns like the price of metal or supply and demand.

Any number of realities may intrude upon that vision—including the imperative to cut fossil fuel emissions. But for now, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) helps three of the world’s biggest energy trading partners defer such considerations at a time when science and the Paris Agreement on climate change call for an all-out effort to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

“It will help corporations export pollution and jobs, weaken climate policies, and extract more fossil fuels,” said Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s Living Economy Program. “It’s a climate failure any way you look at it. How do you square that with the science telling us that we have 10 years to avoid a climate catastrophe?”