AND A FEW GENERAL  COMMENTS FROM GOOGLE GEMINI The Guardian reports that climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities, exacerbating existing inequalities such as poverty, gender inequality, and lack of access to resources. The climate justice issue involves the global north and south, with richer countries historically responsible for emissions now experiencing lower risks, while poorer nations bear the heaviest burden. Furthermore, within countries, the richest individuals and communities often have the highest per capita emissions, while marginalized groups like low-income communities, people of color, and women face the most severe impacts.
Inequality within countries.....

How do you rebuild all this?’ Black River residents assess damage after Hurricane Melissa GuardianNatricia Duncan in St Elizabeth  Fri 31 Oct 2025 People of Jamaican coastal town described as storm’s ground zero are traumatised and desperate for help. It is a treacherous journey to Black River, a coastal town in Jamaica’s southwestern parish of St Elizabeth, which this week bore the brunt of Hurricane Melissa As you get closer to Black River, which has been described as ground zero for the category 5 hurricane’s impact, it becomes clear that almost every house and building has lost its roof. The town centre has been annihilated and now resembles a demolition site. Among the crumpled buildings and streets filled with zinc sheets from roofs and other dangerous debris are people traumatised, bewildered, grieving and desperate for help. Families with children who appear to be setting up residence in a bus shelter and others scouring the debris for food are indications of an unfolding humanitarian crisis. Some had come to Black River, the parish capital, from nearby devastated areas hoping to find aid, only to discover a scene of utter devastation.Uprooted trees and lamp-posts, rubble from landslides, huge potholes and miles of thick, slippery silt from severe flooding have turned the route into a dangerous obstacle course. But most daunting is the water that you encounter as you pass through communities that overnight have become rivers. The difficult conditions meant chaos on the roads to Black River on Thursday, with vehicles stalling in the water and police and army personnel trying to manage long lines of slow-moving traffic in both directions. And all along the way can be seen mind-boggling destruction to buildings and homes, some of which were gutted or packed with debris. As you get closer to Black River, which has been described as ground zero for the category 5 hurricane’s impact, it becomes clear that almost every house and building has lost its roof. 

Climate change is not just a problem of physics but a crisis of justice. Guardian  Friederike Otto 18 Apr 2025 My research as a climate scientist is in attribution science. Together with my team, I analyse extreme weather events and answer the questions of whether, and to what extent, human-induced climate change has altered their frequency, intensity and duration.

When I first began my research, most scientists claimed that these questions couldn’t be answered. There were technical reasons for this: for a long time, researchers had no weather models capable of mapping all climate-related processes in sufficient detail. But there were other reasons that had less to do with the research itself. Let’s imagine extreme flooding in Munich, Rome or London and heavy rainfall in the slums of Durban on the South African coast. How the people in these various places experience this extreme weather depends on the local economic and social conditions and, fundamentally, on their political situation. Researching weather – and thus, the role of climate change – in the way I do is always political, and this makes it an uncomfortable topic for many scientists. I believe it is important to show that both obstacles – the technical and the political – can be overcome; our climate models have become better and better, and we are coming to realise that research cannot take place at a remove from the real world. or example, to know exactly how big the risk of a drought is – where and for whom – we need a whole lot of information. Three main factors come into play: the natural hazard, our exposure to the hazard, and the vulnerability with which we approach it.

In west Africa in 2022, entire regions suffered from dramatic flooding during the rainy season. These floods were caused in part by above-average rainfall that, as my team and I discovered, was significantly more intense than it would have been without climate change. The rainfall was considered a “natural hazard,” but exacerbated so significantly by human-caused climate change that it was anything but natural. To a large extent, these floods – particularly in Nigeria – were caused by the release of a dam in neighbouring Cameroon, which flooded large parts of the densely populated Niger delta, home to more than 30 million people. The risk from rainfall is particularly high, both for the people and for local ecosystems and infrastructure such as buildings, bridges, roads and water supply lines. This region is uniquely exposed to weather and natural hazards. A dam was supposed to have been built in the Nigerian part of the delta to hold back the water, but it was never built. Given the poor infrastructure and high rates of poverty, people in this area are particularly vulnerable, affected much more adversely than those in other areas.So how does weather become a disaster?

We can’t say exactly how the effects of climate change vary by location and type of weather, but what is absolutely clear is that the more people are in harm’s way and the more vulnerable they are, the greater their risk. We’ve learned a lot more in recent years about all aspects of risk. For example, it’s now clear that climate change alters heatwaves far more than other weather phenomena. With every study that my team and I perform, we seek to answer the question of what these alterations actually mean for a small section of the global population. In these studies – known as “attribution studies” among experts – we analyse not just historical and current weather data but also information on population density, socioeconomic structures and basically everything we can find about the event itself to gain the most accurate picture of what happened and to whom.......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/18/climate-change-is-not-just-a-problem-of-physics-but-a-crisis-of-justice

• Literary and Activist Art:The book is seen as a powerful synthesis of literary craftsmanship and a rallying cry for environmental activism, intended to ignite debates and spark change. Critics consistently laud Macfarlane's writing style, describing it as "brilliant prose-poetry" and "masterful". 

• The book elicits strong emotions, with readers experiencing wonder, inspiration, and even tears as they connect with the stories of these rivers and their defenders. Is a River Alive? is considered a catalyst for change, urging readers to "re-imagine not only rivers but life itself" and to re-center rivers in our stories, laws, and politics. With Macfarlane's literary reputation, the book is expected to bring the vital "rights of nature" movement to a wider audienc
• Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review – streams of consciousness, Guardian Blake Morrison  Mon 28 Apr 2025  An impassioned plea to save our rivers combines poetry and adventure   racking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?” He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for the existence of all living beings”. T
• This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse. 

• Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, “a gradual, desperate calamity” has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps (recorded by a tracker called Top of the Poops) at despicable levels. “Generational amnesia” means that young people don’t know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: “I am the river; the river is me.” The river flows through him, a process mirrored in the prose, which rushes in long, ecstatic paragraphs that allow themselves commas but resist full stops

  Many Indigenous communities believe that rivers are conscious, with souls, intelligence, even memory. Macfarlane is less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer, the author of memorable books about mountains, landscape and underworlds, as well as a celebrant of words (acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, etc) he fears children no longer know. He’s also a dauntless traveller and in his new book records trips to India and Canada as well as Ecuador. To the question “Is a river alive?” he wants to answer as simply and resoundingly as his nine-year-old son did: yes! And he wills himself to believe it by granting rivers human pronouns: instead of which or that, “I prefer to speak of rivers who flow”. But it’s a long journey, with many challenges along the way. Macfarlane, at least, is among allies. He meets eco-centric lawyers as well as a shambling, bearded castaway, Josef DeCoux, who has fought to protect the river and cloud forest for decades. He’s awed by their tireless resistance to corporate profiteering and feels companioned by the forest: “Lushness beyond imagination. Greenness beyond measure.”

  His prose aspires to poetry throughout. Fireflies “score the dark like slow tracer bullets”. Flamingos “stand in their own reflections, doubled like playing-card queens, blushing the water pink”. Glow-worms “put tapers on their yellow lantern”. Shooting stars are “scratches on the world’s tin”. A half moon is a “clipped coin”. He so rarely falters in his “love-language” for the natural world that when he describes the sun, near Chennai, “rising red as a Coke can over the ocean” it feels bathetic. But bathos is the point: along with plastic bottles, turds and effluents, the Coke can is emblematic of a polluted coastline.......(ed) BEAUTIFUL!..... and buy the book!.......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/28/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane-review-streams-of-consciousness