John Bacher tells us about the Skownan First Nation’s herd of herbivores that live together in a Manitoba park: elk, moose, woodland caribou, white-tailed deer and wood bison. Whether they know it or not, the Skownan are replicating conditions that two scientists in Siberia have created in their experiment: to show that herds of large herbivores keep permafrost from melting by trampling the snow all winter.
Bernard Lown and Evgueni Chazov were both eminent cardiologists—in Boston and Moscow—while their countries were preparing for nuclear war. A young medical student, who knew them both, brought them together. Together they founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which by 1985 had over 135,000 members in 40 countries. Canadian physician Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford, who was co-president of IPPNW and knew them, recalls the two old friends, who died recently only a few months apart.
Viren Bhuyion worries about the loss of democracy in his home country, India, under the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He details some of the ways that Modi’s Hindu extremist party BJP has been repressing other religious communities, communists, and journalists and attempting to diminish Jawaharlal Nehru’s status in India’s history.
“Green New Deals” are being advanced in many different countries open under the label “just transition”—and John Feffer is comparing their progress at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is identifying ways in which several governments are working together on projects.
For the first fifteen years, writes Jez Littlewood, the Chemical Weapons Convention was highly successful, for numerous states were complying and verifiably destroying their stockpiles of weapons. After 2012, the situation in Syria ruined this success, for there have been over 300 alleged uses of chemicals in that war.
TheIPCC has stated that it is not enough to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to “net zero,” for the planet will remain unbearably hot long after that—unless we also subtract from the atmosphere the excess carbon that is already there. That will require use of “negative emission” technologies. Metta Spencer lists a dozen of the promising ones, and argues for adopting some of them soon.
