
By Ryan Schleeter
The first 100 days in office are usually the height of a president's political power. It's the window in which they have the most credibility and clout to push their agenda forward.
But so far, President Donald Trump's agenda has met incredible resistance at every step. Thanks to you, his cabinet nominations were the most contested in history, his Muslim ban has been stopped in the courts at every attempt and the number of people showing up at marches and protests have dwarfed the crowds at his rallies.
For the sake of our climate and communities, we need to keep that momentum going.
To change everything, it's going to take all of us—especially when the stakes are high and President Trump's attacks on climate progress are never-ending. That's why I hope you'll join us on April 29 in Washington, DC (or a city near you) for the People's Climate March.
This is the time when we need to raise our voices and let President Trump and his administration of climate deniers and fossil fuel shills know that our people-powered resistance isn't going anywhere.
From the Women's March in January to the Native Nations March earlier this month, we have already seen how mass mobilization can change the conversation and reassert the power of people in our democracy. That's why on April 29, day 100 of the Trump administration, we're marching for:
• Jobs. A fossil fuel-based economy doesn't just pollute our environment and wreak havoc on the climate. It also hurts American workers. We're marching for a clean energy economy that expands access to jobs and opportunity—especially for the communities of color, Indigenous peoples and balue collar workers hit hardest by our reliance on fossil fuels.
• Justice. As we shift away from fossil fuels, we need to take care not to leave anyone behind. We're marching for a just transition, one that protects working people and their livelihoods as we move away from the dirty energy sources of the past to the clean power of the future. That also means uplifting the stories of those on the frontlines of climate change and environmental hazards.
• Our climate. This one might seem obvious, but right now there is more at stake than ever in the fight against climate change. We're marching for a future that invests in clean energy, climate resilient cities and equitable development. We're marching to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which science tells us is the only way to ensure a livable planet. We're marching for a chance to avoid a climate catastrophe that future generations will have to pay for.
The first People's Climate March in 2014—when 400,000 people took to the streets of New York City—was larger than anything the climate movement had ever seen. But today, we're bigger, stronger and more motivated than ever before.
Let's show President Donald Trump the movement that he's up against. Join us this April as we resist attacks on our climate, jobs and justice.
A tornado tore through a city north of Birmingham, Alabama, Monday night, killing one person and injuring at least 30.
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EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
By David Konisky
On his first day in office President Joe Biden started signing executive orders to reverse Trump administration policies. One sweeping directive calls for stronger action to protect public health and the environment and hold polluters accountable, including those who "disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities."
Michael S. Regan, President Biden's nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, grew up near a coal-burning power plant in North Carolina and has pledged to "enact an environmental justice framework that empowers people in all communities." NCDEQ
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.