Our resilience depends community, love, and compassion. May we center these values in 2021.


** News of the world environment
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NEWSLETTER | JANUARY 1, 2021
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** Let's Dream Up a New World
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While driving up to our family cabin in the Sierras last week, we chanced upon a rare sight — a flock of hundreds, or maybe over a thousand, starlings wheeling, darting, swooping through the dusky sky in tight, fluid formations. We pulled over to the side of the highway and watched ([link removed]) the murmuration until the last of the birds settled into the trees below for the night, feeling blessed to have witnessed such wonder in the waning days of such an incredibly difficult year.

Later that night, we read about ([link removed]) [link removed] the starlings achieve such perfect synchrony in flight — by matching the direction and speed of the nearest seven or so neighbors and thus, optimizing “the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort."

There’s a lesson in there for us, I thought, about community and caring for each other and our own selves. The next morning, I found the perfect articulation of that lesson in the words of Barry Lopez — explorer and master storyteller who passed away on December 25 after a prolonged battle with cancer.

“If we can’t take care of each other, there’s really nothing to take care of,” he had said in a 2019 interview with the Journal ([link removed]) . “I mean yes, we want to control the amount of CO[2] in the air. Yes, we want to dismantle dams. Yes, we want to get plastic out of the ocean. Yes, we want recycling. But there’s no point in doing all that unless we take care of each other at the same time… We have to find a way to love each other and care for each other so that when any one of us goes down, we will either have the strength to get back up and shake it off, or others, who are our friends, will lift us back up.”

On this first day of 2021, my wish for all us is that we learn to be more loving and more compassionate towards each other and our living world. “All of this has to be dreamed again,” Lopez said, in reference to finding a way forward to a resilient world.

So be it. Let us dream up a new world together then.

Love,
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal

Photo by: Sue Cro ([link removed])
TOP STORIES ()
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** No Plan in Place ([link removed])
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The US Department of Energy manages 150 sites across the country for radioactive nuclear waste. But it appears the agency doesn’t have a plan in place to assess and mitigate the effects of climate change on these sites that need to be safeguarded for centuries, if not millennia to come.
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Earth Island Journal is a nonprofit publication. We don’t have a paywall because our mission is to inform and inspire action. Which is why we rely on readers like you for support. If you believe in the work we do, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to our Green Journalism Fund ([link removed]) .
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** Save and Develop? ([link removed])
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By putting the once little-known Great Himalayan National Park in Northern India on the global map, conservationists have catalyzed a massive wave of development along its border. Yet another example of American-style conservation impacting local communities.
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** Fantastic Fern ([link removed])
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The Azolla fern has been tangled with human history for thousands of years. Some see it as a pest, others are excited by its vast potential to clean up chemical runoff, act as a fertilizer, a high-protein food source, and a carbon sink.
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ICYMI ()
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** Science in Pictures ([link removed])
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Some cool, Some scary. But all definitely eye-catching: Check out Nature magazine's news and art team's selection of striking shots from a year in science.
Photo: Daniel Knop/Nikon Small World
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** Beauty. Love. Loss ([link removed])
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Rabbi, writer, mother and climate activist Shoshana Meira Friedman's ([link removed]) essay about showing her little son how to love our world that’s dying but at the same time is so “alive with belonging and beauty,” left us verklempt.
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