Connecticut Green Living

A strange phenomenon has crept into our daily lives here in Connecticut - the resurgence of the plastic bag. I understand that we are in a health crisis. I understand that there is concern about cashiers touching reusable bags. But why the rush to revert to plastic bags? What happened to paper? Another scourge: the plastic glove. I went to People's bank here in Branford and tucked into the envelope cubby were two gloves - one blue, one yellow, wadded like chewing gum. Guess what: someone has to remove those. And then these plastic gloves end up in the same waterways as our plastic bags. Remember the campaign against plastic? Remember climate change? Let me connect the dots. Climate change was already threatening our lives when Covid-19 hit. However, because it's a slower killer there was no 'shelter-in-place' command for climate change . If we had a president who believed in science, perhaps there would have been. Now climate change is rearing its pissed off head in...

A study published today, April 6, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment examines a novel twist on an old idea: that beauty is more than skin deep. The authors have shown how one should take charisma into account when studying and managing invasive species. Such interlopers are the second largest cause of biodiversity loss. Transferred to new environments by human activity, they become competitors or predators of local species, which are often unable to withstand the incursion. An international research team, involving two French laboratories, have evidenced an aspect of these invasions: species charisma. The popularity of a species and its perception by society and the media, they concur, determines how it is introduced and what impact it has on its new surroundings. In Italy, for example, the arrival of the popular North American grey squirrel threatens the existence of the native red squirrel. "Charisma is used in the literature to refer to the “attractive...