Red flag warning continues, though some rain is forecast for Thursday and Friday

14-week virtual program offers in-depth plant training for home gardeners and green industry professionals

Register by Dec. 1 to earn Home Horticulture Certificate

Register by Dec. 1 to earn a Home Horticulture Certificate at URI. The 14-week virtual program is open to anyone interested in learning more about plants and landscaping.

Starting to think about your spring garden? Working in a field related to gardening and want to learn more about the science behind it? Interested in expanding your gardening knowledge to apply it to your own projects? For individuals near or far hoping to accomplish these aims in an online-focused program — without a volunteer requirement or need to drive to the University of Rhode Island campus — URI’s Cooperative Extension is offering its convenient Home Horticulture Certificate course, starting in January 2025, with applications for the course due by Dec. 1. The course will be held on Thursday evenings.

This year’s online Home Horticulture Certificate course starts in January 2025, covering everything from basic botany and composting to soil science and vegetable gardening.

All lectures are held Thursdays from 6 to 8 p.m., Jan. 23 through May 1, 2025 on Zoom, covering everything from basic botany and composting to soil science and vegetable gardening.

Red flag warning continues...no rain in the forecast

 No outdoor fires and watch those cigarette butts

EDITOR'S NOTE: Donald Trump's Project 2025 plan calls for dismantling NOAA so you won't have to worry about these pesky notices for much longer.  - W. Collette

Taking a short break

Message from the Editor

By Will Collette

I'm taking a bit of a vacation from Progressive Charlestown. I'll still post important announcements, but I am taking a break from the pace of fully stocking the site with articles every day. I don't expect this to be a long break, but who knows?

An issue the election did nothing to resolve

How beef became a marker of American identity

A short history of how we got hooked on burgers and steaks

Hannah Cutting-Jones, University of Oregon

Beef is one of America’s most beloved foods. In fact, today’s average American eats three hamburgers per week.

American diets have long revolved around beef. On an 1861 trip to the United States, the English novelist Anthony Trollope marveled that Americans consumed twice as much beef as Englishmen. Through war, industry, development and settlement, America’s love of beef continued. 

In 2022, the U.S. as a whole consumed almost 30 billion pounds (13.6 billion kilograms) of it, or 21% of the world’s beef supply.

Beef has also reached iconic status in American culture. As “Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut once penned, “Being American is to eat a lot of beef, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American.”

In part, the dominance of beef in American cuisine can be traced to settler colonialism, a form of colonization in which settlers claim – and then transform – lands inhabited by Indigenous people. In America, this process centered on the systemic and often violent displacement of Native Americans. Settlers brought with them new cultural norms, including beef-heavy diets that required massive swaths of land for grazing cattle.

As a food historian, I am interested in how, in the 19th century, the beef industry both propelled and benefited from colonialism, and how these intertwined forces continue to affect our diets, culture and environment today.

New RSV Vaccine Shows 80% Effectiveness

Helps save older people's lives and hospital stays

By Regenstrief Institute

A multi-state study published on October 19 in The Lancet is one of the first real-world analyses of the RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine’s effectiveness. Researchers from the VISION Network found that the vaccine was highly effective in protecting older adults, including those with compromised immune systems, during the 2023-24 respiratory season. This was the first season after the RSV vaccine’s approval in the U.S.

The study showed that RSV vaccination provided about 80% protection against severe illness, hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to respiratory infections. It offered similar protection against less severe cases in adults aged 60 and older who visited the emergency room but didn’t require hospitalization. Of this population, those ages 75 and older, were at the highest risk of severe disease and were the most likely to be hospitalized.

The Christian Right’s New Rallying Cry

Don’t Feed the Children!

By Jim Hightower 

An iconic Texas band, the Austin Lounge Lizards, has a song that nails the absurd self-righteousness of Christian supremacists: “Jesus loves me… but he can’t stand you.”

I think of this refrain when I behold today’s right-ring proselytizers wailing that the blessed rich should not be taxed to assure that everyone has the most basic human needs. Seems very un-Jesusy to me.

One bizarre focus of their religious wrath is a wholly sensible and Biblically sound national policy: subsidizing school districts to assure that every child has healthy meals to fuel their daily learning.

Yes, in the Christian Nationalists’ book of public abominations, government feeding of children is a holy no-no. Project 2025, the Republican blueprint to impose theocratic rule over America, proclaims school meals a socialist/Marxist evil to be eradicated.

The extremists cry that if there is any free-lunch “giveaway,” it must be narrowly restricted to truly destitute students. But publicly singling out those children would stigmatize them. Plus, how odd to hear Republicans demanding an intrusive, absurdly expensive, bureaucratic process empowering the government to decide who’s eligible to eat!

URI Awarded $1.4 Million for Research into PFAS Contamination in Water

Finding the cause is an important first step

ecoRI News

The Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank has awarded a $1.4 million grant to the University of Rhode Island’s efforts to determine why groundwater and surface water are contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

URI’s Cooperative Extension is working with the Rhode Island Department of Health and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to identify possible reasons why the contamination with PFAS, also know as “forever chemicals,” is happening. Public water systems use groundwater and surface water to supply customers with drinking water.

Grant funding was made available via the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation emerging contaminants program and is in addition to $38 million over five years — $7.6 million a year until 2026 — for treatment of drinking water generally from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Report: When It Comes to Wind Energy Production Growth, Ocean State Ranks First

We're Number One!

By Bonnie Phillips / ecoRI News staff

Rhode Island ranks first in the nation for growth in percent increase in wind energy production since 2014, according to a report released Wednesday by the Environment America Research & Policy Center.

The state ranks second in percent increase in electric vehicle (EV) registration, and 17th in the nation for growth in percent increase in solar energy production, according to the online Renewables on the Rise 2024 dashboard, which charts the growth of six key energy technologies by state over the past decade: solar power, wind power, battery storage, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, and electric vehicle charging stations. 

Scientists Have Discovered Toxic “Forever Chemicals” in Bottled Water

Hmmm, they DO come in plastic bottles

By University of Birmingham 

A new study reveals that scientists have found toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water samples from across the globe.

Researchers discovered 10 ‘target’ PFAS (perfluoroalkyl substances)—chemicals resistant to environmental breakdown—in tap and bottled water available for consumption in major cities across the UK and China. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) were found in over 99% of bottled water samples collected from 15 countries worldwide.

They observed significant differences in PFAS concentrations between tap water samples from Birmingham, UK, and Shenzhen, China, with Chinese tap water found to have higher concentrations of PFAS compared to UK tap water.

However, the study demonstrates that measures such as boiling and/or activated carbon filtration – typically using a ‘jug’ water filter – can substantially reduce PFAS concentrations in drinking water, with removal rates ranging from 50% to 90% depending on the PFAS and treatment type.

Women are at a higher risk of dying from heart disease

Often doctors don’t take major sex and gender differences into account

Amy Huebschmann, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Judith Regensteiner, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Rates of heart disease and cardiac events in women are often
underestimated. eternalcreative/iStock via Getty Images

A simple difference in the genetic code – two X chromosomes versus one X chromosome and one Y chromosome – can lead to major differences in heart disease. 

It turns out that these genetic differences influence more than just sex organs and sex assigned at birth – they fundamentally alter the way cardiovascular disease develops and presents.

While sex influences the mechanisms behind how cardiovascular disease develops, gender plays a role in how health care providers recognize and manage it. Sex refers to biological characteristics such as genetics, hormones, anatomy and physiology, while gender refers to social, psychological and cultural constructs. 

Women are more likely to die after a first heart attack or stroke than men. Women are also more likely to have additional or different heart attack symptoms that go beyond chest pain, such as nausea, jaw pain, dizziness and fatigue. It is often difficult to fully disentangle the influences of sex on cardiovascular disease outcomes versus the influences of gender.

While women who haven’t entered menopause have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than men, their cardiovascular risk accelerates dramatically after menopause. In addition, if a woman has Type 2 diabetes, her risk of heart attack accelerates to be equivalent to that of men, even if the woman with diabetes has not yet gone through menopause. Further data is needed to better understand differences in cardiovascular disease risk among nonbinary and transgender patients.

Despite these differences, one key thing is the same: Heart attack, stroke and other forms of cardiovascular disease are the leading cause of death for all people, regardless of sex or gender.

We are researchers who study women’s health and the way cardiovascular disease develops and presents differently in women and men. Our work has identified a crucial need to update medical guidelines with more sex-specific approaches to diagnosis and treatment in order to improve health outcomes for all.

For the majority of the Supreme Court, a wetland where the water is out of sight is a wetland out of mind.

Wetland protections remain bogged down in mystery

Derrick Z. Jackson in EHN

Photo by Will Collette

It is mind-boggling, syllable pun intended, that scientists still do not know how many wetlands lost protection in last year’s crippling of the Clean Water Act by the Supreme Court.

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science said the range of possible protection loss is between a fifth of nontidal wetlands to nearly all of them.

Lead author Adam Gold, a watershed researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the wild uncertainty is because the court arbitrarily created a new standard for federal protection divorced from the science of how wetlands support larger streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean.

The Sackett case involved an Idaho couple who sued after the Environmental Protection Agency stopped their backfilling of a lot near a lake to build a home. The court was unanimous in saying that in the case of that couple, the EPA overstepped its authority. But a 5-4 conservative majority, led by Justice Samuel Alito, a long-time skeptic of both EPA authority, and what constitutes any kind of pollution, went a fateful extra step.

Alito famously said that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, a key contributor to global warming, is not a pollutant. That is despite studies tying carbon dioxide to skyrocketing rates of childhood asthma. A 2011 study in the journal Asthma and Allergy, said the parallel increase of global asthma and carbon dioxide emissions is “remarkable.” There is evidence linking elevated carbon dioxide to longer pollen seasons.

On wetlands, Alito’s razor-thin majority instituted an “eyeball” test. The court said a wetland merits federal protection only if it is “indistinguishable” from larger waters, evidenced by a “continuous surface connection” to them.

The mosquito-borne virus ‘triple E’ continues its spread, worrying RI health officials

Climate warming is extending the time for mosquito-borne infections

By Nada Hassanein, Rhode Island Current

Mosquito-borne illnesses are a growing concern in Northeastern states, with health officials monitoring cases and advising residents to avoid outdoor activities near standing water and other environments prone to mosquito spread.

Of particular concern is eastern equine encephalitis, a rare disease that can lead to serious and fatal illness, caused by mosquitoes carrying the virus.

Known as EEE or “triple E,” the virus can cause disease in humans and animals such as horses and birds. It doesn’t spread from human to human, but is transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito.

While most people don’t develop symptoms or serious illness, 1 in 3 people who become seriously ill from the virus die, and about half of those who recover from severe cases will still experience long-term physical and cognitive effects, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms can include fever, headache, vomiting and drowsiness. Encephalitis is a rare and serious complication in which the infection causes inflammation in the brain.

Eight states — Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin — have reported human cases of the virus this year, for a total of 16 cases, according to the latest CDC data. Other states have seen cases in animals only. In Maine this year, triple E was found in two emus and one wild bird.

EDITOR'S NOTE: in its final mosquito report of the season, DEM made these comments about the total number of serious cases of mosquito-borne illnesses:

This mosquito season, Rhode Island announced 20 EEE virus findings in mosquito samples, 16 WNV findings, one confirmed human case off EEE virus, and six confirmed human cases of WNV. The State of Connecticut announced 72 EEE virus findings, 309 WNV findings, two JCV findings, nine human cases of WNV, and two animal cases of EEE, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced 333 WNV findings, 97 EEE findings, four human cases of EEE virus, three animal cases of EEE virus, and 18 human cases of WNV. Weekly mosquito trap density and mosquito testing results are available on RIDOH’s arboviral surveillance data webpage.

Although extremely rare in humans, EEE virus is very serious and has a much higher human mortality rate than WNV. Approximately 30% of people with EEE virus die, and many survivors have ongoing neurological problems. Unlike WNV, which is prevalent in Rhode Island every year, EEE virus risk is variable, changing from year to year. For more information on EEE virus and ways to prevent it, please visit www.health.ri.gov/eee.

Common Chemicals Found in Shampoo and Plastic Could Be Quietly Disrupting Your Heart’s Rhythm

Do we really need toxins in our shampoo?

By University of Cincinnati

A study from the University of Cincinnati found that environmental phenols, commonly found in consumer products, can alter heart electrical activity, with specific effects differing between men and women. 

These moderate changes are unlikely to harm healthy individuals but may worsen existing heart conditions, particularly in vulnerable populations.

Environmental phenols are present in numerous everyday consumer products, serving as preservatives in packaged foods, parabens in shampoos, and bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic dishware. Consequently, people are consistently exposed to these chemicals on a daily basis.

Some of these environmental phenols are known to have cardiac toxicities. Now, an interdisciplinary study involving four University of Cincinnati College of Medicine professors is revealing their adverse impact on the heart’s electrical properties, and the research has been published in the journal Environmental Health.