CASSOU, Burkina Faso — With her daba in hand, her back bent from decades in the fields, Maan — meaning “grandmother” in the local Nuni language of Burkina Faso’s Centre-Ouest region — isn’t ready to put down her hoe just yet. On this July afternoon, as the sun blazes overhead, the septuagenarian works cheerfully alongside her 8-year-old grandson, weeding her plot near Cassou, a rural commune of some 54,000 inhabitants where she was born. The 2-hectare (5-acre) plot, which Maan Alima Tagnan inherited from her late husband, sustains her small family. For years, she has cultivated a mix of crops here. What draws the eye, however, is the unusual layout: carefully spaced rows of young trees alternating with mature ones, thriving among cowpeas, millet and other crops now nearing harvest. Maan Alima Tagnan under one of the trees she has planted in her field. Image by Yvette Zongo for Mongabay. This is agroforestry polyculture using “fertilizer trees,” an ancestral technique that the Association for the Promotion of Fertilizer Trees, Agroforestry and Forestry (APAF) has revived and modernized by introducing new varieties of nitrogen-fixing trees. “We haven’t invented anything — it’s nothing new to plant trees in fields to enrich the soil,” Firmin Hien, deputy executive director of APAF-Burkina Faso, tells Mongabay. “Our parents used to do it too, but people abandoned the practice with the arrival of chemical fertilizers.” His remarks are echoed by Cheick Zouré, a specialist in the rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems at Joseph Ki-Zerbo University in Burkina…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Cases granting nature and ecosystems legal rights are increasing worldwide, but perceptions of the rights of nature movement as a revolutionary ecocentric movement are too simplistic, according to the authors of a recent study published in Environmental Research Communications. The study conducted an in-depth analysis of 78 peer-reviewed articles that focused on rights of nature case studies in Ecuador, India, New Zealand and the U.S. between 2012 and 2022. It identified nine patterns, among which were that environmental concerns were not the common driving force behind rights of nature (RoN) and that Indigenous peoples and local communities are not universally advocates of the legal rights framework — contrary to conventional perceptions. However, the interests of Indigenous and local communities are undoubtedly most affected by RoN, say the authors, and the rules surrounding the concept have created a space to question the way nature is used for short-term human gain when it lacks a platform to defend its own rights to exist. “Not all or almost any of the rights of nature can solely be linked to protecting the environment,” says Ilkhom Soliev, co-author of the study and head of the Department of Environmental Sociology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. “It’s more of a social, power-related process that questions the rights and ownership to land, forest, water or fishing and who should be owning these rights.” The study’s findings supports those of other researchers, like one by Eden Kinkaid, from the geography department at the University of Arizona, U.S.,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The writer John McPhee once described Alaska’s Salmon River as having “the clearest, purest water” he’d ever seen. Today, that same river runs orange with toxic metals unleashed by thawing permafrost. “During the summer of 2019, the clear waters of the Salmon turned distinctly orange and have remained discolored and turbid since,” according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Salmon River’s transformation represents a much larger crisis. In Alaska’s Brooks Range,75 streams have “recently turned orange and turbid,” the study found. “This is what acid mine drainage looks like,” said Tim Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside, and co-author of the study. “But here, there’s no mine. The permafrost is thawing and changing the chemistry of the landscape.” The cause lies underground in permanently frozen soil, known as permafrost. As global temperatures rise, this ancient layer is thawing. When water and oxygen reach the newly exposed soil, they trigger chemical reactions that break down sulfide-rich rocks, creating sulfuric acid that leaches naturally occurring metals like iron, cadmium and aluminum from rocks into the river, the research shows. Researchers tested 10 major tributaries of the Salmon River and found that nine had toxic concentrations of at least one metal on at least one of three sampling dates. The study shows that levels of metals in the river’s waters exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) toxicity thresholds for aquatic life. Metal levels in the Salmon River mainstem were dangerously high…This article was originally published on Mongabay