California tribes will manage, protect state coastal areas – AP News

Ocean with flowers - Salt Point State Park, CA (by Alyosha Efros CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr).

Five California tribes will reclaim their right to manage coastal land significant to their history under a first-in-the-nation program backed with $3.6 million in state money. Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band … said climate change has forced governments with a history of exploiting Indigenous lands to acknowledge tribes’ deep-rooted knowledge of protecting ecosystems.“We’re in the crisis mode,” he said.

How Belize Cut Its Debt by Fighting Global Warming – the New York Times

Aerial view of the Caribbean Sea and the Split in Caye Caulker, Belize (by Falco Ermert CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

Belize faced an economic meltdown. The pandemic had sent it into its worst ever recession, putting the government on the brink of bankruptcy.
A solution came from unexpected quarters. A local marine biologist offered Prime Minister Johnny Briceño a novel proposal: Her nonprofit would lend the country money to pay its creditors if his government agreed to spend part of the savings this deal would generate to preserve its marine resources.

The Reality of Recycling Plastic

Plastic (by Mike Carney CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr)

Industry makes 380 million tons of plastic every year and none of it is truly recyclable.
Greenpeace has just released a report in October calling out the plastic industry for greenwashing the status of plastic recycling by continuing to employ the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on their products, when the truth is that recycling plastic has been a near-complete failure…