
Shale Gas Outrage
On Thursday, Sept. 20, while Philadelphia's Convention Center buzzes indoors with Marcellus Shale lobbyists, politicians and policymakers, a coalition of citizens' groups alarmed by the acute and cumulative impacts of shale gas drilling will make their core message, "Stop Fracking Now," clearly heard outside the convention hall at a rally.
Led by the Philadelphia-based nonprofit group Protecting Our Waters, Shale Gas Outrage organizers bring together sobering concerns about drilling's negative impacts on local communities and economies: air, soil and water pollution, public safety, climate change and political corruption.
The rally speakers will include: Bill McKibben, author, president and co-founder of 350.org; Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., ecologist, author and winner of the Heinz Award; Josh Fox, director of Gasland and The Sky is Pink; Stephen Cleghorn, Ph.D., organic farmer, researcher and advocate; Stewart Acuff, lifelong labor organizer in the utility workers' sector; Maya Van Rossum, Delaware Riverkeeper; Doug Shields, former Pittsburgh City Councilman; and Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.
A press conference will be held at Arch Street Methodist Church, 55 North Broad St., at 10 a.m., followed by the rally on Arch Street between Broad and 13th Streets at Noon, with the march beginning at 2 p.m. at the Convention Center making stops at President Obama’s campaign office, PNC Bank, Chamber of Commerce and Governor Corbett’s Philadelphia office.
The Shale Gas Outrage Steering Committee states, "Shale gas development contaminates our communities, harming human health and living ecosystems. It distracts us from taking the immediate steps essential to curb climate change. Building a thriving economy requires us to create green jobs, develop sustainable energy and ensure a healthy environment. Therefore, we are committed to stopping fracking now, including maintaining and expanding each moratorium and ban already established. We are also committed to fighting for justice in place of the unacceptable and unequal burdens imposed by the shale gas industry upon vulnerable populations and future generations."
An Interfaith Blessing of the Waters will take place at 5 p.m. at the Arch Street Methodist Church.
On Friday, Sept. 21, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia will share information at the Potential Health Effects of Hydraulic Fracturing Symposium from 9 a.m. - Noon at 19 S. 22nd St.
Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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