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Eminent scientists gathered at The Third International Conference on Science and God (ICSG 3) and The Twenty-Eighth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS 28) (convened online, back-to-back, from April 10-13, 2022) to present and discuss solutions to the most pressing environmental issues from the perspectives of post-materialist “New Paradigm” science and empirical science, respectively. The scientists presented the culmination of their works in research and industry, while engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue to reach a deeper and broader understanding regarding potential solutions to environmental issues. For your insight and inspiration, The Earth & I offers four articles based on these scientists’ exceptional work. Lisa Miller, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, spoke at ICSG 3 and emphasized the need for a post-materialist approach to environmental problems, acknowledging human beings’ innate spiritual awareness of the natural world. See: Spiritual Awareness: A Roadmap for Science. David Blekhman, PhD, Professor of Technology at California State University Los Angeles, spoke at ICUS 28 and explained the tremendous potential of a new hydrogen economy. See: “Net Zero” Strategy: Tapping Hydrogen for Sustainable Electric Power and Transportation. Bruce Johnson, PhD, Professor of Environmental Learning at the University of Arizona, spoke at ICUS 28 and outlined the need for a new, systemic, and consistent approach to environmental education. See: Higher Still, an Environmental Awakening at the Grassroots Level. Michael Shaver, PhD, Professor of Polymer Science at The University of Manchester, UK, spoke at ICUS 28 and introduced a project to bring stakeholders of the plastics supply chain (including waste management) together to formulate ideas for a sustainable system with plastics. See: “One Bin”: Incentivizing Sustainable Plastic Systems. The complete text of these scientists’ presentations will be published in the conferences’ proceedings in the future.

On September 16, 2021, an academic conference was convened in Seoul, Korea, under the title, “The Possibility of New Paradigm Science to Overcome COVID-19.” Hosted by the Hyo Jeong International Foundation for the Unity of the Sciences – Korea (HJIFUS) and chaired by Dr. Jin Choon Kim, Professor Emeritus of SunHak Universal Peace Graduate University, the conference brought together about twenty scholars and scientists to consider and discuss a presentation by the conference’s main speaker, Dr. Won H. Kim, Professor of Biochemistry at Yonsei University’s Wonju College of Medicine. Dr. Kim’s presentation, titled “Pandigm (Pan-paradigm) Science and COVID-19,” was followed by commentaries from distinguished scholars and a roundtable discussion with all participants. Kim’s presentation opened with a challenge to conventional scientific exploration. “The purpose of science is to pursue truth,” Kim stated. He suggested, however, that today’s scientific quest for truth is largely confined within the framework of a materialist paradigm. Kim’s research explores what he coins “Pandigm” (Pan-Paradigm) science, or science that goes beyond materialism. There are many phenomena, he declared, that cannot be explained by a materialist paradigm. Kim proposed that a new scientific paradigm is needed to explain, for instance, the phenomenon of “water memory”—the concept that a substance can be dissolved and diluted by physical stimulation into water, which then acquires properties of the original substance. The practice of homeopathy, which utilizes water memory (through dilution of a substance until none of its molecules remain), has a long history of practitioners but cannot be explained by the current materialist scientific paradigm. According to Kim’s hypothesis, matter consists of a physical aspect and an “imaginary” aspect. Further, all substances emit three-dimensional (3D) waves: a 3D field in physical space which comes from a non-physical superluminal (faster than the speed of light) wave, or information, in “imaginary space.” The 3D wave of the substance can be separated from the original substance by physical stimulation, such as violent shaking or strong pounding in the case of homeopathy, or by electrical stimulation via Schumann waves (the resonant frequency of the Earth). Separated 3D waves, which can be expressed as water memory, still function like the original substance even after separation. According to physicist Paul Dirac, space is full of particles with negative energy and negative mass, which Kim identifies as imaginary space. The imaginary aspect of matter, or 3D wave, that Kim discusses is similar to the concept of Chi found in Asian traditions, which posits that every piece of matter has its own intangible Chi. Kim's theory suggests that interactions between different 3D waves form the basis of every biological reaction. Kim asserts that water memory can also be digitized. The late Dr. Jacques Benveniste claimed that passing white noise through water was one method for digitization. Kim digitized water memory using visual imaging. A visual image is captured by a light sensor as laser light is passed through water containing the 3D waves of a substance. The captured image can be copied and changed into a visual shape in a graphic program. Kim conducted experiments which indicated that digitized 3D waves can be stored in a computer and expressed in a variety of tangible ways. Such digitized 3D waves also function like the original substance. Kim claims that 2D images of digitized 3D waves expressed on a flat surface—such as on a card, in clothes, or even in wallpaper—form a 3D field around the object. These fields, in theory, can produce healing environments with specific properties, depending on the wave being expressed. Kim has already developed what he calls a “UN” card ("yu" from the Korean word "to heal" and "en" from “energy”). A specific healing environment can be provided by harnessing different 3D waves. For example, a UN card that expresses P53, a tumor suppressor protein, functions as a tumor suppressor. Kim goes on to explain that a digitized 3D wave can also be modulated to electricity using an electrical plug called a UL (“healing electricity”) plug. By plugging the UL plug into an electrical outlet, one can, in theory, eliminate the effects of harmful radiation from the Earth and “purify” electricity by making it free of harmful electromagnetic waves. Kim further states that specific digital 3D waves of “medically effective substances” can also be put into the UL so that the space where electricity flows can protect people against specific diseases. Kim claims the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can be suppressed by a specific anti-COVID-19 UN card and an anti-COVID-19 UL plug. They contain specific digital frequencies which are calculated from the amino acid sequence of the proteins of the coronavirus. They also contain digital 3D waves of known remedies for COVID-19 such as remdesivir as well as 3D waves for ivermectin, niclosamide, hydroxychloroquine, and nafamostat. The mechanism of the remedy for COVID-19 is to prevent viral invasion of the cell and replication. Thus, a digital 3D wave of the remedy should, according to Kim, be effective both for preventive and therapeutic purposes. So far, Kim has distributed almost a million anti-COVID UN cards in Korea and is observing the results. Kim’s presentation was followed by a rigorous discussion among the participants. One commentator, Dr. Gun Woong Bahng, Leading Professor of State University of New York – Korea, said that Kim’s viewpoint, with further testing and experimentation, could lead to a new understanding of the fundamental nature of matter. “Existing science based on a materialistic worldview does not have a deep understanding of the information (internal nature) of matter.” Concerning COVID-19, Dr. Wangjae Lee, Professor Emeritus at the Medical College of Seoul National University, pointed out that the function of innate immunity in a person's upper airways could be enhanced by taking high-potency doses of Vitamin C. Dr. Douglas Joo, chairman of HJIFUS, closed the meeting by describing the purpose of the conference and HJIFUS’s vision for future environmental efforts. “Solving today’s myriad of environmental problems requires harnessing the best research and technology of conventional scientific fields and opening the door to the possibility of solutions from new paradigm sciences.” He continued, “In addition to scientific solutions, a global cultural shift towards genuine concern for nature is also critical for overcoming the environmental crisis. If we as the human race can improve our relationship with the natural world through character education, ending the misuse and overuse of natural resources caused by selfishness and greed, and, ultimately, work in alignment with the principles of interdependence, mutual prosperity, and universally shared values to preserve the natural environment, we can build a truly sustainable future for the benefit of the entire planet."

In the following article, The Earth & I covers Professor Michael Shaver's presentation given at the 28th International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS) entitled, “Sustainability, Plastics, Systems—One Bin to Rule Them All.” Prof. Shaver is the Director of Sustainable Futures at The University of Manchester, UK. An official, edited version of Prof. Shaver’s presentation will be published in the ICUS XXVIII Proceedings in the future. Plastics can be seen as the bane of any environmentalist’s existence due to their reputation as the primary source of single-use waste, such as from plastic bottles, cups, and straws. However, plastics (or polymers) are an indispensable part of modern society. They are the building blocks found in appliances, clothing, and electronics, as well as being prevalent in applications such as packaging and sanitation. It may be counterintuitive, but alternatives to plastics often end up producing more waste and carbon dioxide. An example is the use of Styrofoam cups versus ceramic cups. Single-use plastics (including Styrofoam) are notorious for their contribution to waste and water pollution in particular. However, from a resource consumption perspective, over 500 Styrofoam cups could be made, transported, and used before they reach the energy costs of one ceramic cup. In addition, in general, it is estimated that using plastics over alternatives saves 582.6 million gigajoules (GJ) of energy per year, corresponding to 100 million barrels of oil. However, given how long it takes Styrofoam and other plastics to break down once in the environment, their environmental impact could be lowered by them being properly recycled and reused instead. “So, the consequences for a plastics-free world are really significant. And so the argument is that we have to have a waste management system that recovers value from all plastics. Which means we’re not seeking something like a sustainable plastic. We’re seeking a sustainable system in which that plastic exists,” Professor Michael Shaver told the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS XXVIII). One Bin to Rule Them All Prof. Shaver is a lead researcher of a project at The University of Manchester (UK) called “One bin to rule them all.” The project started in November 2020 and is scheduled to end in October 2023. It is organized by a consortium led by The University of Manchester with cooperation from seventeen companies and UK authorities. The purpose of the project is to “improve compliance with recycling [in the UK] by developing ‘One bin’ to hold all plastic-like items and improving recycling infrastructure to create more usable recycled plastics that can be fed back into a circular economy.” As the project name suggests, consumers would discard all their unwanted plastics into a single bin. Recyclers would sort the plastics later. The automatic sorting process would happen more swiftly if all plastics were created with hidden barcodes, marker molecules, embossed codes or flexible semiconductors that sorting machines could easily identify. This would require cooperation from everyone in the plastic supply chain, including manufacturers, brand owners, and local waste management, in an integrated business model to ensure that plastics are reused, recycled, and disposed of properly in a circular economy. It also requires shared industry standards for tagging plastics. As Prof. Shaver explained: “[A]ll that we’re doing is really identifying decisions that can be made and recognizing the increase in both material value and economic value that is enabled through that. … It requires us to have open data standards on waste management across the system. And it requires us to have shared business models instead of isolated business models. “One Bin” envisions a circular economy in which plastics are reused, recycled, and disposed of properly through cooperation between all relevant stakeholders, including manufacturers, brand owners, and local waste management under a shared business model. “What’s really important is that this exists across the supply chain,” he added. “So, this is not just isolated into a particular silo, but in fact really integrated across that whole system to ensure it works for all actors and all stakeholders who are involved.” As part of the ‘One bin to rule them all’ project, Prof. Shaver and his team focused on developing “an agenda for future research” through twenty-five interviews with senior industrial and commercial management leaders and a cross-sector workshop, with the study published as an open access article. Four Areas of Agreement By the second stage of the study, twenty interviews were completed, and thirteen partners attended a full-day workshop. The workshop participants were able to formulate open-ended questions regarding an ideal circular plastics economy following discussion around 1) standardization of materials, 2) sorting and technology, 3) value creation, and 4) pilot trials. They reached four broad areas of agreement—on standardization, infrastructure investment, collaborative business models, and value creation—although these will require certain systemic changes to be made. Standardization refers not only to a universal manufacturing criterion of the plastics themselves (PET, HDPE, PP, and the like), but other elements pertaining to contamination and disposal. These include the use of adhesives, color pigments, labels, lacquers, and laminates used with plastics, as well as descriptors such as “biodegradable” and “compostable.” Infrastructure investment refers to setting up systems that incentivize recycling and reusing plastics and make them economically feasible. Current deterrents cited in the UK include the lower cost of virgin plastics versus recyclates and increased profitability of Plastic Export Recovery Notes (or exporting plastics for burning) over Plastic Recovery Notes (or plastic recycling after contaminants have been removed). Collaborative business models would include not only the tagging techniques outlined above, but they would also include reporting the volumes of individual plastic products sorted for recycling. This information will reduce disposal burdens based on current legislation (Extended Producer Responsibility) in the UK. Value creation refers to improving the desirability of discarded plastic materials through advanced sorting and higher purity recyclates. Producing cleaner recyclates will encourage the creation of a circular economy in addition to increasing recycling and reuse. Sorting plastic requires numerous factors to be considered, including the following: Multi-materials versus mono-materials Food versus non-food Bottles versus trays Colored versus natural Additives Melt flow indices Mechanical versus chemical recycling Systemic changes (with cooperation from local governments), including standardization, infrastructure investment, collaborative business models, and value creation, need to be implemented to create a circular economy for plastics. In his presentation, Prof. Shaver stressed how the development of tagging will encourage recycling activities as well as help persuade governments to get involved. “What’s important to recognize is that all these tags will enable a decision,” said Prof. Shaver. “[A]s soon as an infrastructure investment is made, you enable another decision. And you can then work with governments to say, ‘Oh, OK, if you invest in this infrastructure, you can now unlock this potential fate,’ because the sorting mechanism is already there. “That doesn’t mean there aren't any risks associated with it, so if something like switching that final pathway from chemical recycling to biodegradation, there’s a lot of other things you need to think about in that system. But it gives you the potential to potentially work,” he said. Recycled, Biodegraded, Composted, and Reused Plastics are an essential part of society, and replacements often require more energy and resources to produce. Instead of focusing on the elimination of plastics as the goal, we can focus on creating a sustainable system in which those plastics exist. This will require cooperation from supply chain businesses, local governments, and the active participation of consumers to ensure that the plastics are recycled in the first place. The ‘One bin to rule them all’ project is an example of a starting point of bringing relevant stakeholders together to discuss how a sustainable system, or circular economy, for plastics can be implemented. Once sustainability is coupled with economic growth, this will provide an incentive for decisions toward a sustainable system. During the session discussion following Prof. Shaver’s presentation, he responded to a question regarding the challenge of plastics in India. “[I]f you show that environmental sustainability is enabled alongside economic growth, because you’re de-risking things, because compliance costs are less, because systems are more efficient—that unlocks change. And tying those two narratives together has been really useful in our work with [the] UK Government, and with some international plastics trade bodies.” As the general populace becomes more educated, more actions can be taken to enable an economy in which the plastics people use are also regularly recycled, biodegraded, composted, and reused. Just thinking of things as recyclable, biodegradable, compostable, or reusable does not matter. Instead, Prof. Shaver said, “The only thing that matters is that things are recycled, biodegraded, [and] reused. We have to focus on enabling an actual fate—not an imagined fate.”

The Earth & I Interviews Karl Willey of the Maryland Oyster Restoration Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Oysters have become recognized for their ability to clean water and their role in water ecosystems. Organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) in Maryland have been utilizing oysters for water restoration efforts, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, America’s largest estuary. Below are edited highlights from Gregg Jones’s interview with Karl Willey, center manager of the Maryland Oyster Restoration Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, in which he discusses the role of oysters and that of his organization in restoring the Chesapeake Bay. What is your role with the CBF (Chesapeake Bay Foundation)? I am the Maryland Oyster Restoration Center Manager. With our oyster restoration coordinator, oyster gardening coordinator, four 3,300-gallon oyster growing tanks, and a sixty-foot oyster seeding boat, we engage hundreds of volunteers to help Save the Bay through oyster restoration activities. At our oyster center, we can grow around twenty million to thirty million [oyster larvae] on shell per year and seed them out onto sanctuary reefs in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. These oyster reefs are protected underwater and will never be harvested legally. We also create Reef Balls with spat [juvenile] oysters on them and start a reef that didn’t exist. I call them “small condos,” with a spat-set of around 1,700 spats per Reef Ball. What is a Reef Ball? A reef ball’s a concrete sphere shaped like an igloo with holes in it. The holes allow fish to swim in and out of it, and it becomes an instant reef once you put spat on it. The third activity is oyster gardening. This involves growing several hundred spat-on-shell in cages the size of a mailbox and placing them off privately owned docks throughout Maryland and Virginia. Volunteers and our other partners will tend to the cages, cleaning them about once a month, and in the process see fish and critters on their own mini reef. The fourth activity is shell recycling by collecting oyster shells from restaurants and people that shuck at their homes. We provide locations for them to donate their shells, pick them up, stockpile them, and we set spat on them in our setting tanks by the next summer. How big of a role does oyster gardening take in terms of the work that you do for reef restoration? It’s a big and important role. It gets the word out to the public that oyster restoration is needed in the Chesapeake Bay. Growing oysters says “I care about the Bay and its critters” to our neighbors, lobbyists, and legislators. People are voting more for restoration work in the Bay and generally want to do more for Saving the Bay. Getting people involved throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in restoration work, whether it’s planting a tree or growing oysters, is a vital part of restoration. It helps us do our job in large-scale restoration efforts. Our volunteers educate our legislators that make political decisions allowing us to build more reefs in our public waters. How long has CBF been involved with oyster restoration in relation to the Chesapeake Bay? We started in 1996 with oyster gardening in Virginia and Maryland. It attracted donors as people saw how effective and exciting oysters are. Donors said they wanted to invest more money into restoration, so we slowly grew larger. CBF invested into a sixty-foot oyster seeding boat that we run named Patricia Campbell, named after donor Keith Campbell’s wife. Historically, what would a natural, pristine oyster reef or tributary look like? What did they look like back in the 1600s before they were damaged by humans? There are very few scriptures, writings, or logs from captains back then describing exactly what they looked like. They could describe them partially by saying that oysters were jetting out from the water at low tide, a ship could run aground on it, and you could eat your fill, and even after your fill, still see billions of oysters out there—a carpet of oysters. Building up to that would be almost impossible today, but what we can do is start it by putting oysters on the bottom of the Bay, based on oyster reef charts done by the state of Maryland in 1905. That’s where the partnership starts between nonprofits like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and local, state, and federal agencies. The University of Maryland (UMD) and Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) scientists survey the bottom to find out where we could rebuild reefs. Then the Army Corps of Engineers and Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will place the substrate, whether it be shell, rock, or crushed concrete, on the bottom. After putting the substrate down, other partners like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Oyster Recovery Partnership will seed the reefs with millions of spat-on-shell. Scientists later monitor the bottom and find out how it did. More than fifty adult oysters per square meter is considered a healthy oyster reef. It may take a decade to get reef like hills underwater. What you really need in a reef is a three-dimensional structure that would filter the Bay, provide habitat, and help break up the stratification in the water, allowing more oxygen to be pulled down from the top to the bottom, minimizing the dead zones in Chesapeake Bay that kill fish during the summertime. I think that is vitally important. What you really need in a reef is a three-dimensional structure that would filter the Bay, provide habitat, and help break up the stratification in the water. The second bonus you get out of the 3D structure of an oyster reef is that it breaks up big waves during storm events. Right now, we have a lot of shoreline erosion and land loss along waterfronts. Big catastrophic events like hurricanes can cause significantly more damage without the oyster reefs there to dampen down the larger waves. Reefs play an important role in protecting fish and other critters, water quality, and shorelines. Yes, there also isn’t much vegetation, right? Right. If you have a hard shoreline, it makes it worse. A marsh or beach would look more natural and inviting in front of a home. Oysters are analogous to the coral reefs in the Caribbean, the beautiful reefs you see when you go snorkeling in the blue water. All the fish live around it, but, once you swim away from it, you see very few fish by the sandy bottom. Life is similar in the Chesapeake Bay. Oysters are the Bay’s reefs. If you take all the oysters out of the Bay, then you just have sand and mud. There really isn’t much left in the Bay, thus making the oyster a keystone species. Without the oyster reef, many fish species would not exist in the Chesapeake Bay. A rockfish, for example, loves rock. If you remove an oyster reef, which is oyster rock to some fish, a rockfish would be less likely to live there. They travel there to spawn but wouldn’t if it weren’t for the oysters. Other critters that live in the oyster reef are important, such as the oyster toad fish that lives on the bottom in an oyster reef with the goby, blenny, and skilletfish. There’s a long list of such species. And on the bottom under a reef there’s the benthic of organisms that benefit from the waste from oysters. Exactly how do oysters benefit the Bay? When an oyster eats, it filters everything out of the water. It grabs all of it and filters it into its system. And it identifies what it doesn’t like and packages it up into a pseudo-feces and distributes it on the bottom where other organisms will consume it. For algae and things it likes, the oyster will send them through its gut and digest them, which then becomes feces on the bottom that other organisms will consume. So, oysters clean the water column, whether it be dirt, suspended solids, or algae. One large adult oyster over three inches can filter up to fifty gallons of water per day. You could deploy ten billion oysters in the Bay for restoration activities. With that amount of energy in the water, oysters can filter out a lot of suspended solids and clean the Bay. When did scientists first see the decline of the oysters and have concern? There’s actually an interesting book called The Oyster: A Popular Summary Of A Scientific Study (1891). It was written back in 1891 by William Keith Brooks, one of the oyster commissioners for the state of Maryland who was in charge of watching over the oyster population. It was a huge industry; people made millions of dollars off the oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. The commissioner saw the oyster depletion and wrote the book. Ken Paynter, a scientist through the University of Maryland, wrote the foreword on a reprint, which came out about a hundred years later. Brooks reflected that oysters are having problems and we could fix it now if we take certain steps, but it did not happen. One of the ideas is relevant today in Virginia: using rotational reefs. If a healthy reef gets down to around ten oysters per square meter, they’ll close that reef from harvest and let it grow back. And maybe in three years they will open it back up again after a survey. That is what Brooks recommended. Back then in the 1800s, they had a lot more oyster larvae floating in the water column that could rehabilitate and reseed itself. If the watermen replaced the shells back in the water and the spat settled on it, harvest could happen in two years. You could then continue harvesting as long as you don’t overharvest. He saw the writing on the wall. He wrote that book while he still was a commissioner and got fired. To answer your question of when scientists first recognized the issue, I don’t even know. Somewhere in the 1800s, Connecticut area oystermen overharvested the oysters and basically didn’t have anything else to harvest. The tool they had up in Connecticut was the dredge. They brought down the dredge to the Chesapeake Bay, and very quickly Maryland saw it was an efficient tool and made a law that prohibited dredging in the Chesapeake Bay unless you were a Maryland resident. So, Connecticut oystermen became Maryland residents. Overharvesting oysters and oyster diseases in the 1950s changed some harvesting rules. Today, most large dredges are only used on skipjacks to harvest on public oyster bars. What are some of the hurdles that have been encountered and overcome to restore oyster populations? Challenges in oyster restoration include climate change, sea level rise, water quality, and oyster diseases. There’s still poaching going on in certain areas of the Bay, which is a challenge for our DNR police. Other challenges include the cost of doing restoration correctly and the limitation on shell. Shell—that used to be free—is valuable now. People would give you bushels of shell when I first started restoration, but now it costs over $7 a bushel. Many watermen want to get involved in oyster aquaculture, but there is a cost to set spat-on-shell and put it in the water. That's another hurdle, the sheer cost and volume of work, but I see it getting easier in Maryland. The state has set aside an oyster aquaculture division within the Department of Natural Resources that helps the watermen/farmers. DNR can make it quicker and less expensive to get involved in oyster aquaculture. The state needs to invite more watermen and other people switching over from wild oyster harvesting to oyster aquaculture, which is more sustainable. We have very few wild oysters left in the Chesapeake Bay. Like old growth forests, some are in our oyster sanctuaries. These old reefs have tolerated diseases, water quality changes, and climate changes, and our new reefs can benefit from their offspring, creating more resilient reefs in the Bay. It seems it’s quite a collaborative effort between the state, DNR, universities, and nonprofits. Absolutely. We also have the public volunteering and voting, legislators creating new laws, and the watermen with extended knowledge. Watermen help in the restoration work. They’ll hire their boats out to pull up oysters and do monitoring plus seeding oysters back into the Bay. There are multiple sectors in the oyster industry that are helpful. And they know they need to do the right thing to keep oysters in the Bay for generations to come. Where does Maryland stand in relation to other oyster restoration efforts in the US and globally? I’m pretty sure that the Chesapeake Bay is the leader of oyster restoration in the world. Other countries have been doing oyster aquaculture for hundreds of years, some being in Europe and Asia. Many efforts in oyster farming have been made, but restoration is a growing trend. Being one of the largest restoration efforts in the world, it’s not done perfectly. It’s done the best we can and we learn, but, quite honestly, it has ended up going very well. Especially the first oyster sanctuary we finished at Harris Creek that met the fifty oysters per square meter mark. It is doing quite well and will be studied for years to come. What are some of the target goals of the efforts here in Maryland and Virginia? I know you have ten tributaries, right? Yes, that goal is ten tributaries, five in Maryland and five in Virginia by the year 2025, and we’re almost there. If you go out [in Virginia] and monitor their reefs over a season, more than likely they will get a natural spat set in those reefs. Just about every year or every other year, they’ll get one with a nice spat set, but it’s a little harder in Maryland. We’ve got to have the right salinity, so the upper reaches of the lower salinity areas may not a get a natural strike every year or a heavy set. It’s a little heavier lift up here to get a reef to sustain itself without the help of re-seeding it every couple years. But at some point, the “tipping point” will be reached. Finally, can an individual get involved in oyster gardening to help the restoration work? Yes. If somebody wants to do it on a larger scale, we’ll work with them and give them the equipment they need. You can send an email to marylandoystergardening@cbf.org. *Gregg Jones is the outreach director of the Hyo Jeong International Foundation for the Unity of the Sciences (HJIFUS), the publisher of The Earth & I.

According to NASA, June 2022 was tied with 2020 as the hottest global June since record-keeping began in 1880. Was it really? Depends on who you ask, says Yale Climate Connections (YCC). Was June 2022 Really the Hottest? NASA reported in July that June 2022 was 1.18℃ above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1880-1920. NOAA disagreed, ranking June 2022 as the sixth warmest June on record. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) declared June 2022 as the third-warmest June on record. The Japan Meteorological Agency agreed with the CCCS’s ranking. The differences between the various agency rankings weren’t very big, says YCC. They were “separated by only 0.08 degree Celsius (0.14°F) in the NOAA database,” says YCC contributor, Jeff Masters. What accounts for the differences? It depends on how the agencies “treat data-sparse regions such as the Arctic,” says Masters. Source: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/07/nasa-june-2022-tied-as-earths-warmest-june-on-record/

Life expectancy has dropped for all racial groups, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics said in an August 2022 report. Overall at-birth life expectancy in the US fell by nine months from 2020 to 2021. The decline of 77.0 years to 76.1 years brought US life expectancy to its lowest level since 1996. The 2021 drop, combined with a 1.8 year drop in 2020, is “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy” since the early 1920s. American Indian-Alaskan Native people (AIAN) saw the biggest drop in life expectancy—nearly two years—to 65.2 years in 2021. This was equal to the life expectancy of the total U.S. population in 1944. Non-Hispanic Whites had the second-largest decline, from 77.4 years in 2020 to 76.4 years in 2021. Non-Hispanic Blacks saw a seven-month drop from 71.5 years in 2020 to 70.8 in 2021. Following a four-year drop in life expectancy from 2019 to 2020, Hispanics saw a slight two-month decline in 2021, to 77.7 years. Life expectancy for Asians saw a one-month drop, to 83.5 years. The life expectancy gap for men and women grew slightly, from 5.7 years in 2020 to 5.9 years in 2021. COVID-19 deaths contributed to 74% of the decline from 2019 to 2020. Sources: Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates for 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220831.htm

Typhoon Merbok struck the western shore of Alaska on Sept. 17, 2022. Due to unusually warm ocean temperatures, Merbok was born near Japan, where typhoons that strike Alaska rarely begin, and propelled eastward to become one of the worst storms on record to hit the state. As Merbok moved eastward toward Alaska, its waves surpassed 50 feet in the nearby Bering Sea. Water levels near Nome, Alaska, were 10.52 feet above the low tide line. That height was only surpassed once before, by the worst storm on record in November 1974. However, Merbok was by far the strongest to strike in early autumn. The storm impacted hundreds of miles of coastline from north of Bristol Bay to just beyond the Bering Strait. CBS News reported that the storm was vast enough to cover the US mainland from the Pacific Ocean to Nebraska and from Canada to Texas, with effects felt as far away as California. Alaska’s subsistence economy was especially impacted as evidenced by a lost protective berm in the village of Shaktoolik. Rebuilding from storms is especially challenging for remote regions of Alaska. Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alaska-flooding-typhoon-merbok-today-2022-09-18/

Global data from WHO and UNICEF finds household access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene remains a challenge in parts of the world. In 2020, 90% of the world’s population had access to at least “basic” drinking water services, such as pipes and wells. This was up from 88% in 2015. However, 2 billion people lack access to “safely managed” domestic drinking water, or water that is clean, uncontaminated, and accessible at home. About 80% of people who lack drinking water services live in rural areas. Some 2.3 billion people lack soap and water at home, including 670 million people with no handwashing facilities. Some 3.6 billion people, or almost half the world population, lack safe sanitation at home. Almost 500 million people still practice open defecation. Millions suffer worldwide from neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), many of which are water-related or hygiene-related. One such disease is Trachoma, the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness. Forty-one million people are estimated to suffer from active trachoma, with about 10 million visually impaired or irreversibly blind as a result. Global access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene could reduce the burden of global disease by 10%. Improved sanitation between 2000 and 2016 contributed to a 10% decrease in diarrheal deaths globally, and a 15% decrease in diarrheal deaths in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html

Nigeria has endured prolonged flooding since September 2022, described by The New York Times as its worst in a decade. UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund) has provided updated reports on the impacts of the flooding, especially on Nigeria’s children. In a November 2022 update, UNICEF reported that the flooding had impacted 3.2 million people. Of those, 1.9 million were children. Children make up 60% of Nigeria’s population. Some 1.4 million people had been displaced by the flooding. More than 600 people died due to the flooding. The heavy rainfall and flooded rivers have damaged water systems, and sanitation facilities, raising the risks for disease transmission. Thirty-four of Nigeria’s 36 states were affected. According to the report, “UNICEF, in coordination with the Government, NGOs and other UN agencies, is scaling up an integrated emergency response.” It is to be implemented from October 2022 to March 2023. Source: https://reliefweb.int/report/nigeria/unicef-nigeria-flash-update-flood-september-november-2022

New research finds that moving food from farms to consumers generates higher-than-expected CO2 carbon emissions. Nature reported in July 2022 that about one-fifth of all carbon emissions linked to the food system came from transportation—“a much bigger slice of the emissions pie than previously thought.” The study from the University of Sydney in Australia collected data from 74 countries and regions. It found that food transportation in 2017 added equivalent CO2 emissions of about 3.0 gigatons. That is 7.5 times previous estimates. Developed nations, which have about 12% of the global population, generated nearly half of international food-transport emissions. Low-income countries, which have about half of the global population, generated about 20% of international food-transport emissions. Transporting fruit and vegetables generated double the amount of CO2 produced by growing them. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00531-w

New Study Shows Doctors Less Likely to Follow Guidelines When Taking Medication It might be reasonable to expect medical doctors and their family members to follow established guidelines when taking prescription drugs. However, according to a December 2022 report in Science Daily, a new study using Swedish data has challenged that assumption. According to study co-author and MIT economist, Dr. Amy Finkelstein, “You should see the most adherence when you look at patients who are physicians or their close relatives. We were struck to find that the opposite holds, that physicians and their close relatives are less likely to adhere to their own medication guidelines." Despite doctors having advanced knowledge and easy access to other medical providers, the study shows that the general Swedish population stuck to medication guidelines 54.4% of the time, while doctors and their families did so 50.6% of the time. The paper, "A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise," was published in the American Economic Review: Insights. Finkelstein’s co-authors included Petra Persson, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University; Maria Polyakova, PhD, an assistant professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine; and Jesse M. Shapiro, the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University. The team examined Swedish data from 2005 through 2016 with research involving 5,887,471 people. Of those, 149,399 were doctors or their close family members. Armed with their surprising research results, the team tried to identify the cause of the lapse in doctor adherence. Their conclusion was that doctors possess "superior information about guidelines" for prescription drugs and consequently apply that information to themselves. The largest adherence gap in the study involved antibiotics: According to Science Daily, “doctors and their families are 5.2 percentage points less in compliance [in the case of antibiotics] than everyone else.” Sources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221216142638.htm https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20210591

Breakthrough Study Examines Ice Cores to Determine Frequent Weather Patterns University of Colorado Boulder researchers and a team of international scientists have collaborated to reveal 11,000 years of Earth’s climatic history by studying Antarctic ice cores, according to a January 2023 report in Science Daily. Published on January 11, 2023, in Nature, the study is the first of its kind to determine seasonal temperature records dating to the onset of the period known as the Holocene. Though scientists have long studied polar ice cores for atmospheric data over extended periods of time, this was the first study to determine annual summer and winter temperatures—a frequency never before achieved. How did they do it? The team relied on recent technological developments and a few innovations of their own. Tyler Jones, lead author on the study, and assistant research professor and fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), said that the research team’s goal was to “push the boundaries of what is possible with past climate interpretations.” “For us,” he said, "that meant trying to understand climate at the shortest timescales—in this case seasonally, from summer to winter, year-by-year, for many thousands of years." According to Science Daily, the study also validates one aspect of a long-standing theory that has not been previously proven: how seasonal temperatures in polar regions respond to what are known as Milankovitch cycles, hypothetical “collective effects of changes in Earth's position relative to the sun due to slow variations of its orbit and axis.” "I am particularly excited that our result confirms a fundamental prediction of the theory used to explain Earth's ice-age climate cycles: that the intensity of sunlight controls summertime temperatures in the polar regions, and thus melt of ice, too," said Kurt Cuffey, a co-author on the study and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This new access to more highly detailed data on past climate patterns should also help researchers study the impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on Earth’s present and future climate. By understanding naturally occurring planetary cycles, scientists can do a better job of identifying human influences on climate and temperatures. "This research is something that humans can really relate to because we partly experience the world through the changing seasons—documenting how summer and winter temperature varied through time translates to how we understand climate," said Jones. Study co-authors Bruce Vaughn, a chief scientist on the project and manager of the Stable Isotope Lab, and Bradley Markle, assistant professor at INSTAAR and the Department of Geology, collected the West Antarctica ice that was shipped for analysis. Next on the team's agenda is an attempt to analyze ice cores from similar locales, such as the South Pole and northeast Greenland, where ice cores have previously been drilled. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230111131458.htm