June 2021: 3 Significant environmental news I want to share

In writing, I am a semi-democratic. Last month, in my realm, eight environmental articles hooked me. I picked 3-news among them that my friends liked most. Before going to the stories, I articulate the essence- 

1. Our mother earth and life are more than mystic; kilometers below Earth’s surface, where sunlight for photosynthesis cannot reach such depths, and the meager amount of organic carbon food that does is often exhausted; life was everywhere.
2. The law of nature doesn't care about our absurd thought of nature’s wellbeing; although wolves are predators, a 24 percent decrease in deer-vehicle strikes is linked to their arrival. 
3. And our next generation is more caring to the earth than we do; Eight teenagers, along with an 86-year-old nun, launched a case to prevent the approval of a massive coal mine. The federal court of Australia has found the environment minister has a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis.

On May 24, The Quanta Magazine published, Scientists, poke and prod at the fringes of habitability in pursuit of life’s limits. To that end, they have tunneled kilometers below Earth’s surface, drilling outward from the bottoms of mine shafts and sinking boreholes deep into ocean sediments. To their surprise, life was everywhere that we looked. And it was present in staggering quantities: By various estimates, the inhabited subsurface realm has twice the volume of the oceans, making it one of the biggest on the planet, as well as one of the oldest and most diverse.

Researchers are still trying to understand how most of the life down there survives. Sunlight for photosynthesis cannot reach such depths, and the meager amount of organic carbon food that does is often exhausted. Scientists find evidence that, much as the sun’s nuclear fusion reactions provide energy to the surface world, a different kind of nuclear process- radioactive decay- can sustain life deep below the surface.

Although these radiolytic reactions yield energy far more slowly than the sun and underground thermal processes, they are fast enough to be drivers of microbial activity in a broad range of settings- and that they are responsible for a diverse pool of organic molecules. It opened up whole new vistas into what life could look like, how it might have emerged on an early Earth, and where else in the universe it might one day be found.

On May 26, The Anthropocene printed, the various species in an ecosystem are in a delicate balance with one another. If one is removed or overabundant, the results can ripple through the entire community. Changes to an ecosystem also often affect humans, both our conservation and economic interests. Such is the case with wolves, which have proponents both for their protection and their removal.

To better understand one aspect of the economic impact of wolf recolonization, researchers in Wisconsin have compared the costs incurred by wolf-caused livestock losses to the money saved from a reduction in deer-vehicle collisions, likely due to the presence of the predators.

Due to wolves’ tendency to use roads as corridors, the researchers hypothesized that they would steer deer away from roadways, thus lowering the number of wildlife collisions. They found that- on an average wolf, arrival linked to a 24 percent decrease in deer-vehicle strikes. Besides, wolf presence could potentially limit crop damage by shifting deer away from road-adjacent agricultural fields.

And, on May 27, The Guardian wrote, the Australian court finds government must protect young people from the climate crisis. Eight teenagers, along with an 86-year-old nun, launched a case to prevent the approval of a massive coal mine. The federal court of Australia has found the environment minister has a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis in a judgment hailed by lawyers and teenagers who brought the case as a world first. It was a historic and spectacular decision with potentially significant consequences. It is the first time in the world that such a duty of care has been recognized, especially in a common-law country.