Eco-Friendly Cities in the USA (Best and Worst)

WalletHub is a personal finance website based in Washington D.C. They specialize in helping individuals decide how to finance large purchases, choose credit cards, and about various types of bank accounts. One of the things that WalletHub produced a few months ago is a ranking of the greenest cities in the USA. While the report, called Greenest Cities in America, was written in October 2018, it is still getting a lot of attention now.

This report ranked the 100 most populous cities in the USA according to how they scored across four dimensions 1) Environment, 2) Transportation, 3) Energy Sources, and 4) Lifestyle and Policy. Each of these dimensions have many criteria that contribute to them, and the total scores of all four are combined to form a cities score.

The top ten greenest cities are:

1. San Diego, CA
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Irvine, CA
5. San Jose, CA
6. Honolulu, HI
7. Fremont, CA
8. Seattle, WA
9. Sacramento, CA
10. Portland, OR

The bottom ten greenest cities are:

90. Jacksonvile, FL, 91. Gilbert, AZ, 92. Cleveland, OH, 93. Mesa AZ, 94. Lexington-Fayette, KY, 95. Detroit, MI, 96. Memphis, TN, 97. Toledo, OH, 98. St. Louis, MO, 99. Corpus Cristi, TX, 100. Baton Rouge, LA.

Some of the note worthy findings are that of the top ten greenest cities in this analysis, 6 are in California and 8 are on the west coast, but only one is on the east of the Mississippi. Also of note is that no west coast states appear in the bottom ten cities, and the only eastern seaboard state in the bottom ten is in Florida.

Other than the strait ranking, the report also highlights some other interesting facets. One such facet is the percentage of each cities that is devoted to green space. This criteria had a three-way tie between Honolulu, HI, Anchorage, AK, and Fremont, CA. The cities with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, per capita, were Virginia Beach, VA, Reno, NV, Hialeah, FL, San Bernardino, CA, and Honolulu, HI which is a pretty wide geographical spread of cities. A criteria that I was a bit surprised to see included was the number of farmers markets, per captia, in a city. This criterion jumped out at me because it does not seem like a particularly important aspect of the greenness of a city, but I suppose this may stand as measure of how environmentally conscious the population of a city might be.

All in all, it is an interesting report and generally fun to look over and think about. Enjoy!

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Climate Change is a Security Risk

From the Office of the Director of of National Intelligence of the United States of America comes a new Worldwide Threat Assessment by the US intelligence community.

Worldwide Threat Assessments represent the collective insights of the bulk of the US intelligence community on matters that threaten USA lives and interests around the world.

This most recent Worldwide Threat Assessment points out in several places that climate change is a growing national security threat. One way that global climate change poses a threat to US national security is because of how it influences and encourages infectious diseases. The reports finds that the US and world will likely remain vulnerable to outbreaks of infectious diseases such as the flu and other pandemics. Such outbreaks will cause increases in “death and disability, severely impact the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.” It also finds that the work that has been done to control infectious diseases has very much improved the situation, but that these improvements may still be inadequate for addressing more frequent outbreaks of diseases due to rapid and unplanned urbanization, prolonged humanitarian crises, human intrusion into unsettled lands, expansion of international trade and travel, and climate change.

A second way that global climate change poses a threat to US national security is because of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, etc. One particular area highlighted in the report is the worsening effects of sea level rise on urban areas of Southeast Asia. These effects take the form of damage to infrastructure that is likely to impact military bases, inflict economic costs, and lead to human displacement and loss of life. Another area highlighted in the report are the increasing food insecurities around the world, social injustice, human migration, and interstate tensions in countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Jordan that all result from increasing droughts, heat waves, and floods caused by climate change.

 

Climate change is real. It is having effects on the entire world now. Many of those effects are dramatically impacting the way humans around the world live, and those impacts are being felt by US citizens now and will only get more drastic as time goes on.

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ABirdingNaturalist Turns 7!

ABirdingNaturalist has now existed for seven years! Thank you to all of you from the 151 countries around the world who have visited my blog! A special thanks to the 77 of you who have become followers of my blog! Over the past seven years I have written 235 posts which have been viewed over 42,000 times!

I hope you keep visiting and that you get something useful from the posts that I write. If there is any topic you would like me to cover, let me know and I will see what I can do! Now on to see what the next years brings!

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Future 50 Foods

A partnership between the World Wildlife Fund and Knorr Foods has just released a list of 50 foods that we can all utilize to diversify our diets and reduce our impacts on the planet.

The report, called Future 50 Foods, is a compilation of foods of many different types (grains, root vegetables, fruit, etc.). These foods were selected because each one strikes a healthy balance of being high in nutrition, have a low environmental impact, good availability and price, and tasty!

At present, a huge portion of the human population of the world (including developed and undeveloped countries) gets about 60% of all our calories from just 3 plant species (rice, corn, wheat). That means that a huge amount of effort goes into growing all that rice, corn, and wheat. That effort often results in monocultures where a single crop is grown and covers an enormous track of land.

Instead of continuing to grow just these small numbers of species, and to start relying on a broader suite of food sources, we all can start eating more diversely. And that is where this list of foods to eat to improve the future of the planet comes in. It is a guide to the foods that we can all branch out to start eating.

Personally, I am pretty curious about the foods on this list. Some of them I have never heard of before such as Marama Beans from the Kalahari Desert or Moringa from Asia. Many others I have eaten and enjoyed such as Wakame Seaweed and Black Salsify but they certainly do not make up any significant part of my diet.

It is worth noting that there are no animals on the list of 50 foods. Eating animals is very costly, in terms of environmental impact, and so none make the list of high priority food that humans around the world should start eating more of.

So, go out and diversify your palette, explore some new foods, and help to change our food industry for a healthier planet!

Let me know if you try any of the foods on this list in the comments below. What did you try? How did you prepare it? where did you buy it? What did you think?

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