Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Employers hiring migrant workers through a federal program must provide food or cooking facilities. But those picking our fresh food have no access to adequate meals On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. Continue reading...

The Idaho camp where Nora Zavala Gallion harvested sugar beets in 1968 felt like a prison because it had been one – for Japanese Americans in the second world war My mother, Nora Zavala Gallion, was 11 years old when she first set foot inside the farm labor camp in Caldwell, Idaho. It was 1968, and her family had traveled over 2,000 miles (3,218km) by car from Texas’s Rio Grande valley to harvest sugar beets as migrant laborers. While my family had worked numerous crops across the country for decades, the girl who would become my mother sensed something very different about this location. The camp’s small, dilapidated wooden living quarters were called “barracks” and featured open, latrine-style bathrooms and showers. Somehow, my mother knew this place had a troubling past. Continue reading...

The Austrian capital has been spared the worst of recent flooding. Its experience could be a lesson in how to tackle the climate crisis Floods are seemingly unavoidable these days. Florida, North Carolina, Nigeria, Tunisia, Mexico, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Poland and Austria are among the places that have experienced flooding in the last month. Those floods should no longer come as much of a surprise. Climate change leads to more frequent and intense rain almost everywhere on the planet, and most infrastructure, from roads and bridges to canals and hydroelectric dams, is simply not built to withstand such extremes. That’s where Vienna stands out. The floods that have deluged central Europe over the past two weeks caused plenty of disruptions in Lower Austria, including to a newly built train station meant to connect the burgeoning suburbs to the city. But aside from some disruption to Vienna’s otherwise well-functioning subway system, Viennese homes were largely spared. Why? It’s not because Vienna sits on higher ground than the surrounding areas (by and large it does not). The reason the city escaped the worst of the floods is because of human engineering and political foresight dating back to the 1960s, which emerged in response to earlier floods that devastated parts of the city. Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Wiener Klimarat, Vienna’s climate council Continue reading...

npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 02 October 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00082-6 Strong versus weak sustainable development in the blue economy: a study of 15 EU coastal countries