The Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy at California State University, Sacramento issued a report this week entitled Consequences of Neglect: Performance Trends in California Higher Education which finds those trends to be in decline. Using national data, "[r]esearchers analyzed California’s postsecondary performance in the categories of preparation, participation, affordability, completion, benefits and finance, and found that the state’s performance is average, at best, and trending downward."
Among the findings:
- California ranks last in total funding per student
- Tuition and fee increases exceed the national average rate
- Each successively younger working-age generation is less highly educated that the one before.
- Black and Latino students continue to lag behind other racial/ethnic groups in levels of college preparation, participation, and completion
A new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility entitled Toxic Power: How Power Plants Contaminate Our Air and States rates the states with the most toxic air pollution from coal- and oil-fired power plants based on publicly-available data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory, a database of emmissions reported by industrial sources. Findings include that power plants are the single largest industrial source of toxic air pollution in 28 states and the District of Columbia. For the full methodology and to find out how your state ranks, see the analysis at: http://docs.nrdc.org/air/air_11072001.asp.
The Environmental Working Group released a study of the varying health, climate, and other environmental impacts of meat and dairy consumption: Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change and Health. which finds that "that if every person in the US refrained from eating meat or cheese one day a week every week for a year the reduction in emissions would be equivalent of taking 7.6 million cars off the road." Their interactive website includes a handy chart for comparing the consumption of different foods with miles driven. On methodology:
To assess climate impacts, EWG partnered with CleanMetrics, an environmental analysis and consulting firm, to do lifecycle assessments of 20 popular types of meat (including fish), dairy and vegetable proteins. Unlike most studies that focus just on production emissions, our assessment calculates the full “cradle-to-grave” carbon footprint of each food item based on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated before and after the food leaves the farm – from the pesticides and fertilizer used to grow animal feed all the way through the grazing, animal raising, processing, transportation, cooking and, finally, disposal of unused food. The analysis also includes the emissions from producing food that never gets eaten, either because it’s left on the plate or because of spoilage or fat and moisture loss during cooking. About 20 percent of edible meat just gets thrown out.
And a new study published in the July 15 issued of the journal Science from a group of twenty-four researchers - Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth - details how the decline of large apex predators, such as wolves, lions, and sharks, represents one of the most powerful impacts of humanity on the world's ecosystems, as their removal leads to a wider range of ecological disruptions through the processes known as trophic cascades. From the abstract:
Until recently, large apex consumers were ubiquitous across the globe and had been for millions of years. The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature. Although such losses are widely viewed as an ethical and aesthetic problem, recent research reveals extensive cascading effects of their disappearance in marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems worldwide. This empirical work supports long-standing theory about the role of top-down forcing in ecosystems but also highlights the unanticipated impacts of trophic cascades on processes as diverse as the dynamics of disease, wildfire, carbon sequestration, invasive species, and biogeochemical cycles. These findings emphasize the urgent need for interdisciplinary research to forecast the effects of trophic downgrading on process, function, and resilience in global ecosystems.
