Even more golf courses than McDonald’s locations
Plus: The end of university herbaria? Cop City protesters, or domestic terrorists?
Before my alarm went off this morning (yesterday, by the time you’re reading this), I woke with a jolt of panic, thinking it was already Saturday and I’d forgotten to draft and schedule the newsletter. Deep sigh. It’s just been one of those weeks! So I’m going to keep this nice and short and get right to the link roundup…
What I’ve been reading.
The criminalization of protest: 42 people who participated in protests against Cop City, the police training center that the city of Atlanta is razing an urban forest to build, have been charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism law, and face up to 35 years in prison. Critics say it is alarming to see activism conflated with terrorism. [Sean Keenan and Rick Rojas for The New York Times]
Must-read: Ryan Lenz, a freelance investigative journalist who worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center for almost a decade, compared the harsh crackdown on Cop City protesters with the relatively light touch authorities have taken in the past with far-right groups protesting on public land. [New Lines Magazine]
Priorities! In February, Duke University (endowment $11.6 billion), announced that it would be closing its herbarium, a collection over 800,000 specimens of plants, fungi, and algae. It’s not the first university to do so; in 2017, the University of Louisiana Monroe ditched half a million specimens to clear up space for new sports facilities.[Carl Zimmer for The New York Times]
“Herbarium specimens would seem to belong to the time of corseted ladies and tweed-clad gentlemen with butterfly nets in hand,” evolutionary biologist Erin Zimmerman wrote in her newsletter, A Feast for the Curious. “But in a time of increasing habitat devastation brought on by the activities of humans, natural history specimens such as those in herbaria are more important than ever.”
She continues:
Each herbarium specimen represents a data point… a snapshot in time. It says, this plant grew in this place, at this time. Old specimens are priceless, because we can never go back and take that same snapshot again. Taken together, these many data points can be used to test a wide variety of hypotheses about the causes of and solutions to environmental change. By comparing shifts in ranges and population sizes over long periods of time, botanists can understand the effects of climate change on a given region, identify species that are threatened, predict the effects of human activity, and follow the spread of invasive species. These studies are fundamental to understanding our world and addressing its growing environmental crises.
Herbaria are also repositories of yet-undescribed species. According to a 2023 report from Kew Gardens, an estimated 15% of the world’s flora is still unknown to science. As many as half of these are predicted to already be in the backlogs of chronically understaffed herbaria, waiting to be discovered. Because these unknown plant species tend to have restricted ranges and small populations, an unknown species has a 77% chance of being threatened with extinction at the time of its “discovery” by scientists (quotation marks here because these plants are usually well known to indigenous people living in their vicinity).
The end of winter, continued: “U.S. ski areas lost $5 billion from 2000 to 2019 as a result of human-caused climate change.” [Brittany Peterson for the Associated Press]
Glimmers of hope: Finally, I’m positively obsessed with this story about rewilding golf courses.
Some quick facts:
“America’s roughly 16,000 golf courses use 1.5 billion gallons of water a day, according to the United States Golf Association…
“…and are collectively treated with 100,000 tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium a year.
“The United States has more golf courses than McDonald’s locations…
“and also has more than any other country, accounting for about 42 percent of all courses worldwide
“28 former courses were transformed into public green spaces between 2010 and October 2022”
More of this please! [Cara Buckley for The New York Times]