Watch to find out the story behind the newly discovered G. leonardodicaprioi, found in the Maliau Basin of Malaysian Borneo.
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By Basten Gokkon
An oil spill in Borneo that began over the past weekend has now spread across an area greater than the city of Paris and is heading out to the open ocean, the Indonesian government said.
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Looking for ways to cut down on single-use plastic while grocery shopping? You may already have eco-friendly shopping bags, but bringing your own reusable produce bags is another easy swap.
According to the UN Environment Program, up to 5 trillion single-use plastic bags are used globally each year, and because of the material they're made from, most municipal recycling centers don't accept them (more on this below).
The most sustainable option is to skip the bag altogether. You can also make your own reusable produce bags out of old T-shirts. But if you'd rather purchase them new, here are our recommendations for the best reusable produce bags on the market today.
Best Reusable Produce Bag Set: Eco Joy Cotton Reusable Produce Bags
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxOTAxNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzODE2MDIyNH0.qyiKrnX8T4CRp8Y5Kn_cW1oaSF7vDci2gmKEXxJfQmE/img.jpg?width=980" id="8db60" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d39a705e9f90fc1369a1806bc6d4e016" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="400" data-height="400" />Eco Joy
<p>If you're making the switch to more sustainable shopping bags and want a variety of products to use, the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reusable-Sandwich-Biodegradable-Eco-Drawstring/dp/B003PK4W3I/ref=sr_1_36?crid=3TDUCB8ZOM7WI&dchild=1&keywords=produce+bags+grocery+reusable&qid=1613484643&sprefix=produce+bags%2Caps%2C189&sr=8-36" target="_blank">Eco Joy Cotton Reusable Produce Bags</a> set is a great place to start. The set comes with three mesh drawstring bags, three muslin drawstring bags, a large mesh tote and a zippered sandwich-size pouch.</p><p>Each product is made with organic, non-GMO cotton that's ethically sourced in accordance with Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) standards. The cotton comes from India and Turkey, and the bags are hand-assembled in Canada by the owner of Eco Joy, so you can feel good about supporting a small business while reducing your environmental impact.</p><p><strong>Customer rating:</strong> 4.7 out of 5 stars with over 300 Amazon reviews</p><p><strong>Why buy: </strong>Zero-waste; Handmade in Canada; WRAP compliant; Machine washable</p>Best Mesh Bags: Organic Cotton Mart Reusable Cotton Mesh Produce Bags
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxOTE0OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MTQyNDQ5MX0.E6MFCOXZ-3EvKDK0MIv34EJO3oE6WMWxiFZBR5aNU_w/img.jpg?width=980" id="ba5c7" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="91a9dd3d18f7b4a41fae606ff4d1204b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="400" data-height="400" />Organic Cotton Mart
<p>Some shoppers prefer to use mesh bags when shopping for fruits and veggies. We recommend checking out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Best-Reusable-Produce-Organic-Cotton/dp/B07CK2TJKL/ref=sr_1_16?crid=10A7NM0LQ0B7E&dchild=1&keywords=mesh+produce+bags&qid=1613483897&s=home-garden&sprefix=mesh+pro%2Cgarden%2C162&sr=1-16" target="_blank">Organic Cotton Mart's Reusable Cotton Mesh Produce Bags</a> if you're in this camp, as they're made with Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified cotton.</p> <p>Mesh reusable produce bags can make the checkout process easier than muslin bags since you can see what's inside them without having to open them up. Plus, the tare weight (i.e., the weight of the empty bag that should be subtracted from the total weight of your produce to make sure you don't pay extra for using your bag) is printed right on the label of Organic Cotton Mart's bags, making everything that much more convenient.</p> <p><strong>Customer rating:</strong> 4.6 out of 5 stars with nearly 1,000 Amazon reviews</p><strong>Why buy:</strong> GOTS certified; Machine washable; BiodegradableBest Muslin Bags: Simple Ecology Reusable Produce Bags
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxOTE1OS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNjY3NDE3N30.f2sAcYTGhqq4ytlNGSyzZexPwqH2SpqpTwsX2fvph10/img.jpg?width=980" id="f90b3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e95c082f9b831bf11004e12b73ae8263" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="400" data-height="400" />Simple Ecology
<p>On the other hand, if you just want to purchase muslin bags, we like <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Ecology-Reusable-Organic-Shopping/dp/B004UJ0U0C" target="_blank">Simple Ecology's Reusable Produce Bags</a>, which are also made with GOTS-certified organic cotton. Simple Ecology also has a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6AUMBG/ref=sspa_dk_detail_2?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B01N6AUMBG&pd_rd_w=MA3ZS&pf_rd_p=cbc856ed-1371-4f23-b89d-d3fb30edf66d&pd_rd_wg=hVunQ&pf_rd_r=G6RTQ1Z5DKEY325MAJZ9&pd_rd_r=5d298b3a-1be7-4ebd-a9e1-d5d672a40497&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExMzc4RVAxWjNLOTdCJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwNTc0NTAwMzBDMjFYOVJPTUpWSCZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwNjYyOTM4M0s4Vk81SVBPS1NFSyZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2RldGFpbF90aGVtYXRpYyZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=" target="_blank">starter kit</a> that comes with several reusable grocery bags if you're looking for more variety.</p> <p>The benefit of using muslin reusable produce bags is that, unlike mesh, there are no holes for small items to slip through. This means that in addition to larger produce, you can use them to purchase bulk foods like lentils, beans and rice — or even powders like flour or spices — without worrying about anything leaking. They're also best for keeping leafy greens fresh.</p> <p><strong>Customer rating:</strong> 4.7 out of 5 stars with nearly 1,500 Amazon reviews</p><strong>Why buy:</strong> GOTS certified; Machine washable; Biodegradable; Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certified packaging when purchased from manufacturerBest String Bags: ECOBAGS Market Collection Reusable Bag Set
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxOTE2Ny9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NTkzMDc5Mn0.v_aTdf8TPuA39wgpmS2Dgb_88t2jfcbXDJkC9wf5CrE/img.png?width=980" id="c42d2" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ada50990c5c2520886afd23fcca522a4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="752" data-height="628" />ECOBAGS
<p>Whether you're buying bread, fresh flowers, produce or all of the above, the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/ECOBAGS-Market-Collection-Reusable-Natural/dp/B08KFGPGN5" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ECOBAGS Market Collection Reusable Bag Set</a> is ideal for <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/farmers-markets-coronavirus-safety-2645581711.html" target="_self">farmers market</a> shopping or large grocery hauls. The netted bags are durable, flexible, and pack down small so they're easy to keep in your car or purse.</p> <p>ECOBAGS is a woman-owned certified B Corp, which means it uses sound social and environmental practices. These bags come in packs of three or five and have a few different handle lengths and color options, but they're all made with GOTS-certified organic cotton.</p> <p><strong>Customer rating: </strong>Not applicable</p><p><strong>Why buy:</strong> GOTS certified; Machine washable; Biodegradable; Certified B Corp; SA8000 certified for the protection of basic human rights of workers</p>Ravaged by Deforestation, Borneo Loses Nearly 150,000 Orangutans in 16 Years
By Basten Gokkon
The world lost nearly 150,000 orangutans from the island of Borneo in the past 16 years due to habitat loss and killing, and is on track to lose another 45,000 by 2050, according to a new paper in the journal Current Biology.
The study, published Feb. 15, observed 36,555 orangutan nests across Borneo, an island that is shared between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, between 1999 and 2015. During that period, the researchers reported a steep decline in the number of nests they encountered over a given distance: the encounter rate more than halved from 22.5 nests per kilometer (about 36 per mile) to 10.1 nests per kilometer. That decline, they calculate, represents an estimated loss of 148,500 individual Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus).
Trending
Like many places in the tropics, Borneo is burning—and the consequences are widespread.
Every year more than 2 million acres [almost 810,000 hectares] of Indonesian rainforest are destroyed. Between 2000 and 2010, nearly a quarter of Borneo’s diverse peat forests and their rich soils were drained, burned and cleared.
Before this trip, I’d known of the plight of orangutans, thousands of which have died as their forest habitat disappears. I also knew about the outsized role that clearing of these forests plays in driving climate change. I was less prepared for the impact that damage to these ecosystems has on human health.
For me, the burning forests were a nuisance to my visit. For the locals, they were a matter of life and death.
Though it’s hard to track the number of deaths from these fires and their long-term impacts, airborne particulates from previous fires here were associated with a 5- to 25-fold increase in cases of pneumonia alone, a disease consistently one of the biggest causes of death of both the elderly and young children in the region.
Burning forests are not the only health threats to the island’s people. Borneo’s rivers are plied by barges scouring river sediments for gold. The process they use releases tons of mercury into the rivers where families catch fish and practice aquaculture. Mercury contamination damages riparian ecosystems and results in smaller, more toxic catches for thousands who depend on rivers for their food security and livelihoods. Parts of the Kahayan River harbor more than twice the legally allowable level of mercury.
I left Borneo with a heavy feeling in my gut. In other places there’s warfare, or HIV or other headline-grabbing atrocities that capture our attention. Yet the sad truth is that a shocking amount of human suffering comes from far less sensational things, such as the silent scourge of environmental degradation and ecosystem loss, which destroy opportunities for healthy and productive lives.
In Borneo, it is the slow burn of peat forests and steady contamination of mercury that quietly, but gravely, threaten the communities living there.
The idea that the natural environment is important to human health isn’t new. It was foremost in Hippocrates’ mind (yes, that Hippocrates) more than 2,000 years ago. But compared to our reactions to other important factors for human health—consider the many public health practices we’ve implemented over the centuries as we’ve learned how disease spread—societies have done very little in the way of sensibly managing ecosystems to protect our health.
One reason we may have neglected our natural lifelines for so long is that we didn’t know just how closely human health is connected to our environment. But that’s rapidly changing thanks to recent scientific advances.
I recently worked with a team of scientists and public health researchers on a study of the links between ecosystems and human health. The evidence we know of, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, connects ecological health to a surprising range of human health dimensions:
- Nutrition. Nutritional deficiencies account for many of the leading causes of death and disability globally, especially for children. With insects, birds and bats pollinating about 1 in 3 food crops worldwide, nature’s role in pollination alone is essential for a big portion of nutrients and calories in the human diet. Meanwhile, fisheries and wild animal populations are key sources of nutrients for billions of people. Without wild game, children in Madagascar would experience a minimum 30 percent higher risk of anemia—increasing their risk for sickness and death in many ways. The global decline of wildlife poses a nutritional crisis for many, with the worst impacts felt by those unable to replace wild food sources with domesticated species or fortified foods.
- Disasters. Healthy mangroves and other coastal barriers defend communities against coastal storms. Researchers estimated one cyclone in Orissa, India would have killed three times as many residents had mangroves not buffered their villages. Global loss of mangroves, reefs, wetlands and dunes places in harm’s way millions who live near the world’s coasts.
- Infectious disease. From hunting to the destruction of habitats, people’s actions alter communities of wild species in many ways, often with unforeseen and significant consequences. Healthy wildlife populations can influence the continued function of ecosystems and check the spread of disease. For example, in both Panama and the Brazilian Amazon, reduction in the diversity of mammal species has been linked to increased risk of human exposure to Chagas disease.
- Climate change. Already the impacts of global forest loss—the combined result of a million matches, bulldozers and machetes—account for more carbon dioxide emissions than all passenger cars combined. As these and other human-caused sources of greenhouse gas emissions continue, the resulting climate shifts contribute to a range of human health impacts, including heat stress, air pollution, spread of infectious disease, respiratory allergens, natural hazards, food insecurity and water scarcity.
- Indirect impacts. Many consequences of ecosystem loss take less direct pathways. In Belize, it took detailed study to discover that fertilizers applied to croplands caused changes in wetland vegetation far downstream. Unfortunately for coastal residents, these changes favor a variety of mosquito much more effective at transmitting malaria. Farming practices in one place have unwittingly resulted in greater exposure to malaria many miles away.
Evidence is mounting that the ecosystems we’re destroying are important for a range of vital human health needs. But countries, communities and families don’t have equal ability to deal with these impacts.
In a wealthy country, low fish catch might result in an altered menu or a shopping inconvenience. In another country it could be a matter of life and death. Indeed it is often the world’s poor—those with few alternative food sources, with less public infrastructure, with limited health care and insurance—who feel the most immediate brunt of environmental losses.
But is money a panacea? In 2013, Singapore, a nation with one of the world’s most productive economies and most admired healthcare systems, found itself choked by smoke from burning forests in neighboring Indonesia. The nation’s otherwise moderate air quality reached “hazardous” levels for the first time ever, and residents flocked to hospitals with cardiopulmonary illnesses.
In the U.S., the potentially debilitating Lyme disease afflicts thousands annually, while West Nile virus killed nearly 300 Americans in 2012. For both diseases, researchers have found higher risk of infection in places where diversity of native animal species has been reduced. Mounting evidence supports the theory that a higher number of species can “dilute” the harmful impact of those few species most effective at transmitting disease.
I write these words from a hospital in Austin, TX. My father experienced a life-threatening infection earlier in the week, by a form of bacteria resistant to nearly all forms of treatment. Thankfully his condition is now improving. As I watch him getting back to cracking jokes and talking about his grandchildren, I notice the antibiotic in Dad’s IV: vancomycin. I remember that it is one of the world’s precious few “antibiotics of last resort.” And I think of its humble origins: a handful of rich soil from the remote forests of Borneo.
Earth’s biodiversity is, in fact, a remarkable storehouse of compounds and innovations that has provided more than half of all commercial medicines, and may harbor undiscovered cures for cancer, malaria or the next emerging infectious disease.
As we destroy Earth’s forests, reefs, wetlands and other ecosystems, we light a fire to our storm barriers, our air filters, our water towers and our medicine cabinets, all at the same time. But we can turn this around: Stewarding nature would unleash a powerful, vital force in sustaining human life.
The notion that death and suffering can be prevented has been a driving force in medicine and has completely transformed human existence. We’re rapidly learning about the health consequences of ecosystem loss, and the countless life-saving benefits that natural ecosystems give us. How much longer should we wait to use that knowledge to save and improve human lives?
This post was originally published on Conservation International's blog, Human Nature. Will Turner is chief scientist at CI. Follow him on Twitter at @WillRTurner.
Marine biologists’ worst fears seem to be confirmed: coral colonies take a long time to recover from catastrophic climate events.
British and Brazilian biologists report in the Public Library of Science One (PLoS One) that the richest habitats of the sea could also be among the most vulnerable to climate change.
For more than 17 years, conservationists from Plymouth University in the UK worked with researchers from the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil to analyze the diversity and density of coral reefs and colonies off the coast of South America. Quite early in that 17 year span, there was an El Niño event.
El Niño is a periodic eruption of unprecedented ocean temperatures: it is a natural phenomenon and seems to have happened periodically through recorded human history, distinguished by droughts and wildfires in those places that normally expect high rainfall and floods on otherwise normally arid coasts.
Rising Temperatures
The 1997-98 event lasted for 18 months and was considered one of the most devastating of all, with sea temperatures reaching a global record. Tropical coral reefs were affected almost everywhere; there were also devastating storms and floods in California and forest fires in Borneo.
Corals are peculiarly sensitive to sea temperatures—they tend to bleach if seas get hotter—and many corals live and flourish near the limits of their tolerance. Coral reefs are also home to an estimated 25 percent of all marine species, so the loss of a reef has a serious effect on marine biodiversity, as well as on the incomes of local fishermen—and local tourist operators.
The British and Brazilian scientists monitored eight species of Scleractinian, or stony corals, and worked with the Brazilian Meteorological Office to build up a complete picture of the environmental conditions and the way in which they affected species behavior.
Slow Recovery
During 1998, all the monitored corals showed increased mortality and one species disappeared completely from the reefs for at least seven years. Then, as temperatures dropped, the corals started to grow again.
Recent measurements show that the coral colonies have fully recovered, and are now back to the levels recorded before 1998. That’s the good news. The bad news is that recovery took so long.
“El Niño events give us an indication of how changing climate affects ecosystems as major changes within the Pacific impact the whole world,” said one of the authors, Martin Attrill of Plymouth’s Marine Institute.
“If the reefs can recover quickly, it is probable they can adapt and survive the likely changes in water temperatures ahead of us. However, we found it took 13 years for the coral reef system of Brazil to recover, suggesting they may be very vulnerable to climate-related impacts,” concluded Attrill.
Visit EcoWatch’s WATER and BIODIVERSITY pages for more related news on this topic.