November 29, 2022 Schwartzreport (info@schwartzreport.net)
Humans v. Nature: Our Long and Destructive Journey to the Age of Extinction
on Nov 29, 2022 02:33 am
Phoebe Weston, – Reader Supported News / The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is an excellent essay giving the timeline showing how we got to where we are today. well worth your time to click through and read all of it. The only way we are going to end this trend is by changing our cultural worldview, and making fostering wellbeing at every level the first priority. and we have every little time to make this change.
An abandoned farm in the dust bowl near Dalhart, Texas, June 1938.
Credit: Dorothea Lange / FSA / OWI Collection / Courtesy of Library of Congress
The story of the biodiversity crisis starts with a cold-case murder mystery that is tens of thousands of years old. When humans started spreading across the globe they discovered a world full of huge, mythical-sounding mammals called “megafauna”, but by the end of the Pleistocene, one by one, these large animals had disappeared. There is no smoking gun and evidence from ancient crime scenes is – unsurprisingly – patchy. But what investigators have learned suggests a prime suspect: humans.
Take the case of Genyornis, one of the world’s heaviest birds, which was more than 2 metres tall and weighed in excess of 200kg. It lived in Australia until, along with many other megafauna, it went extinct 50,000 years ago. In North America, giant beavers weighing the same as a fridge and an armadillo-like creature …
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Inequality is literally killing us: The most unequal societies suffer most in public health metrics
on Nov 29, 2022 02:32 am
Stephen Bezruchka, M.D., M.P.H., Associate Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Health Systems & Population Health and of Global Health at the School of Public Health, University of Washington. – Salon
Stephan: Here is evidence validating my assertion that wealth inequality is destructive of social wellbeing. This isn’t going to change until Citizens United is either reversed or Congress passes an act to publicly fund elections and make it a felony for an individual or any corporate form to transfer money to an individual in public office. That should be followed by an act changing the tax code to what it was back in the 1950s when the middle class was being created.
Patients rest in a hallway in the overloaded Emergency Room area at Providence St. Mary Medical Center on January 27, 2021 in Apple Valley, California. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty
In 1992, a publication appeared in the British Medical Journal written by Richard Wilkinson, featuring a simple graph of life expectancy in 1981 among nine rich nations, along with the percentage of income received by the poorest 70% of families for each country. It showed how greater inequality in a country was associated with lower life expectancy, with only a weak link between national incomes and mortality rates. Richer countries were not necessarily healthier than less rich ones, at least among developed nations. Increases in income inequality over time were linked to higher death rates. But were the results valid?
Depending on a single study as definitive evidence is a shaky way to stake a claim. Knowledge progresses by conjectures, critical commentary, discussions, and either general acceptance or rejection. Yet five previous studies, beginning in 1979, demonstrate similar findings. …