Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories
Amid steep global bird declines, farmers create refuges; regulators fail to fully account for vulnerable communities' drinking water concerns; the saga of Syngenta, a scientist, and a subpoena.
Amid steep global bird declines, farmers create refuges
New research finds that certain farming practices are benefiting some types of birds, underscoring the influence agriculture can have on important species at a time when bird populations around the world are in decline.
Farms that make use of smaller plots, varied crops, and tracts of forest, are helping boost bird populations in Costa Rica, scientists wrote in a paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings add to previous evidence that diversified farming is an important conservation tool, said co-author and Stanford University researcher Nicholas Hendershot.
“There is a really huge benefit for biodiversity from these diversified farming practices,” he said.
Hendershot and his colleagues determined that over 18 years, bird species living on diversified Costa Rica farms were more likely than those in forests to have increasing, rather than decreasing populations. The varied crops and natural features on diversified farms provide a home for the birds and for insects and other animals that birds eat, said Hendershot. (Read the rest of the story.)
US failing to account for full extent of drinking water concerns in vulnerable communities
US environmental regulators are failing to adequately account for how extensively vulnerable communities are exposed to contaminated drinking water, a new study has determined.
From 2018-2020, one in ten people in the United States were exposed to water quality violations that could impact their health, the study found. And roughly 70% of those affected are considered “socially vulnerable” under a range of factors that include race, language, disability, and housing vacancy rates.
The exposure risk was particularly noteworthy for Hispanic populations throughout the southwest and southcentral US. And when looking at people living on tribal lands, the numbers were more alarming: three in ten people were exposed to health-based water quality violations, the researchers found.
Overall, the number of people exposed to drinking water violations is more than three times greater than the number of people identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to the analysis. The authors note that current federal environmental justice tools leave out other factors important for identifying inequities in water quality. (Read to the rest of the story.)
Letter from the editor: The saga of Syngenta, a scientist, and a subpoena
(Carey Gillam is the managing editor of The New Lede.)
Six months ago neurologist Dr. E. Ray Dorsey and a colleague authored an article titled “Paraquat, Parkinson’s Disease and Agnotology,” which spotlighted secrets unearthed from within the corporate files of paraquat maker Syngenta AG. The article was published March 6, 2023, in Movement Disorders, the official journal of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.
In the article, Dorsey and co-author neurologist Dr. Amit Ray pointed to stories I wrote for The New Lede and The Guardian that were based upon thousands of pages of the company’s internal documents dating back to the 1950s. Those files revealed many corporate secrets related to paraquat safety and the weed killer’s potential connection to the dreaded, incurable brain disease known as Parkinson’s.
The statements published in the article did not sit well with Syngenta, to put it mildly.
Syngenta has spent the last few months engaging in what Dorsey’s defenders say is the latest effort in a history of chemical industry actions to harass, or otherwise smear, scientists whose work threatens corporate interests. (Read the rest of the Letter from the Editor.)