Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

Scientists have estimated that bowhead whales — the longest-living whale species — can live more than 200 years.

It was once thought that the bowhead’s cousin, the right whale, had an average lifespan of about 70 to 80 years, but new research has revised that estimate to more than 130 years — nearly twice as long!

“From the standpoint of physiological scaling, these superannuated ages should not be unexpected. Whales are the largest living animals, and body size is highly correlated with longevity,” the authors of the study wrote.

The researchers worked with Indigenous subsistence hunters from Utqiaġvik, Alaska. They used chemical analysis of bowhead whales that had been killed to demonstrate that they are able to live more than two centuries, a press release from University of Alaska Fairbanks said.

The chemical evidence was corroborated by harpoon tips from the 19th century being recovered from bowheads killed during modern hunts.

Right whales are more closely related to bowheads than any other species and appear to have similar lifespans. Like their cousins, right whales filter their food through baleen plates and make seasonal migrations to birthing grounds.

The names given to right whales were sadly from whalers considering them to be the “right” whales for hunting because their thick blubber caused them to float after they had been killed.

“Industrial whaling, which for most species ended only 60 years ago, would have required any individuals now aged over 100 years to have survived at least 40 years of intense whaling, and any individual over 150 would have had to survive 90 years of that same intense hunt,” the authors wrote in the study. “Given that many whale species were reduced to less than 10% of their original population size, and the population minima for most species were reached in the mid-20th century, that degree of whaling would have rendered superannuated individuals extremely rare or completely absent from the age structures of most populations. Consequently, extremely old whales may not be part of the demographic makeup of current whale populations, even if they historically existed.”

The researchers looked at four decades of data that had been collected through photo identification programs tracking critically endangered North Atlantic right whales — who live along North America’s Atlantic coast — and Southern right whales, found south of the equator, the press release said.

The research team constructed survivorship curves — graphs showing how many of a population survives to each age — using the data, which are similar to those insurance companies use in the calculation of human life expectancies.

Their analysis showed that Southern right whales can live longer than 130 years — with some possibly living to 150 years — rather than the 70 to 80 years that had been previously thought.

*A Southern right whale in Península Valdés, Argentina. Francois Gohier / VW Pics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images*

In contrast, the team found that the average North Atlantic right whale lifespan is only 22 years, with few individuals living past 50.

Associate professor Greg Breed with University of Alaska Fairbanks explained that the stark contrast between the lifespans of bowhead and right whales is mostly due to human impacts.

“North Atlantic whales have unusually short lifespans compared to other whales, but this isn’t because of intrinsic differences in biology, and they should live much longer,” Breed, who is lead author of the study, said in the press release. “They’re frequently tangled in fishing gear or struck by ships, and they suffer from starvation, potentially linked to environmental changes we don’t fully understand.”

A North Atlantic right whale swims off with a small amount of fishing rope after a disentanglement effort. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, taken under NOAA research permit #15488

Breed has been studying marine mammals for years, including seals. Certain seal species have lifespans of up to 50 years. Narwhals can live a century or more.

Breed noted that there have been significant underestimations of whale lifespans in the past due to lack of whale aging data.

“We didn’t know how to age baleen whales until 1955, which was the very end of industrial whaling,” Breed explained. “By the time we figured it out, there weren’t many old whales left to study. So we just assumed they didn’t live that long.”

The new research could provide valuable information for future conservation efforts.

“To attain healthy populations that include old animals, recovery might take hundreds of years,” Breed said. “For animals that live to be 100 or 150 and only give birth to a surviving calf every 10 years or so, slow recovery is to be expected.”

The study highlights the essential nature of cultural knowledge in whale communities.

“There’s a growing recognition that recovery isn’t just about biomass or the number of individuals. It’s about the knowledge these animals pass along to the next generation,” Breed said. “That knowledge isn’t just genetic — it’s cultural and behavioral. Older individuals teach survival skills. Younger animals learn by observing and copying the strategies of the older ones.”

Breed and his colleagues plan to expand their research to additional whale populations and explore the possibility of other whale species currently believed to have lifespans of roughly 80 years living much longer. The researchers hope to discover more about whaling’s impact on the number of long-lived individuals in current populations and predict when they will recover to pre-whaling population numbers.

The study, “Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales,” was published in the journal Science Advances.

The post Right Whales Can Live 130 Years or Longer, Research Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

https://www.ecowatch.com/right-whales-lifespan-130-years.html

Green Living

Earth911 Inspiration: Be True to the Earth — Edward Abbey

Published

3 days ago

May 22, 2026

Alice Rush

This week’s quote is from American novelist and pioneering environmentalist Edward Abbey: “I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.”

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

This poster was originally published on January 31, 2020.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Be True to the Earth — Edward Abbey appeared first on Earth911.

https://earth911.com/inspire/earth911-inspiration-be-true-to-the-earth-edward-abbey/

Green Living

10 Books to Counter Consumerism

Published

5 days ago

May 20, 2026

Alice Rush

We are constantly bombarded by messages that tell us we need more stuff to be happy. The average American household contains around 300,000 items. The average home size has roughly tripled since the 1950s, and we still rent self-storage units by the millions to hold the overflow.

If you are rethinking your relationship to consumer culture – whether by choice or necessity – we’ve rounded up a list of books to make breaking up with consumerism and easier to understand which of our purchases are really necessary.

(Amazon links are provided for convenience. Your local library and independent bookstore are excellent first stops.)

Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

Trentmann’s sweeping 2016 history follows material culture from late Ming China and Renaissance Italy through to today’s global supply chains. He shows that consumerism is not a recent American export but a centuries-long international phenomenon, one that has reshaped households, cities, and the planet.

Empire of Things is dense but never preachy, and it gives readers the long view needed to understand what we are actually pushing back against.

No Logo – 10th Anniversary Edition

by Naomi Klein

No Logo was a movement manifesto when it appeared in 1999, and its dissection of branding, sweatshop labor, and corporate cultural takeover reads as prescient now that nearly every screen on earth is an ad surface. To take the next step, pair this read with Klein’s more recent argument about capitalism and ecological collapse, How To Change Everything.

The Conscious Closet

by Elizabeth L. Cline

Cline first exposed the human and environmental costs of fast fashion in Overdressed (2012). The Conscious Closet is the practical follow-up: how to clean out, repair, swap, and rebuild a wardrobe without funding the industry that produces an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste each year. It is the most actionable book on this list for anyone with a closet.

The Myths of Happiness

by Sonja Lyubomirsky

Psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky brings the receipts. In The Myths of Happiness, she walks through decades of research showing that material milestones — the raise, the upgrade, the bigger house — produce short bursts of satisfaction that fade quickly. What actually sustains wellbeing is rarely for sale. A clarifying read for anyone tempted to outshop their way to contentment.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Waste is coming for our minds, too. Odell argues that our scarcest resource is attention — and that the platforms we use have turned it into the raw material of a trillion-dollar industry. How to Do Nothing is not a digital-detox manual; it is a case for reclaiming attention as a political act, with consequences for everything from bird-watching to civic life. More relevant in 2026 than when it was published in 2019.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel makes the case that endless GDP growth is incompatible with a livable planet, and that “green growth” is mostly a marketing exercise. Less Is More (2020) traces 500 years of capitalism and lays out what a degrowth economy could actually look like — one organized around human and ecological flourishing rather than perpetual expansion. The book has helped move degrowth from the margins of academia into the mainstream of the climate debate.

The Day the World Stops Shopping

by J.B. MacKinnon

Journalist J.B. MacKinnon designed The Day the World Stops Shopping (2021) as a thought experiment — what would happen if global consumption dropped by 25%? — and then watched the pandemic run a version of the experiment in real time. He travels from Namibian hunter-gatherer communities to American big-box retail, talking to economists, ecologists, and CEOs. The result is one of the most readable accounts of why we shop, why we cannot easily stop, and what we would gain if we did.

Consumed: The Need for Collective Change

by Aja Barber

Writer and consultant Aja Barber connects fashion, colonialism, and climate in Consumed (2021), a debut that has become a touchstone for the ethical fashion conversation. Where Cline writes as a practitioner, Barber writes as a systems critic, tracing the textile trade’s roots in slavery and racial inequality and asking readers to confront why we fill emotional gaps with purchases. Pointed, generous, and built to be read in two sittings.

Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

If consumerism is the input, waste is the output we work hardest not to see. Award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis follows that output across continents in Wasteland (2023) — from New Delhi’s landfills and Ghana’s secondhand clothing markets to nuclear storage sites and the corporate origins of curbside recycling. Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Kirkus, it is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered where “away” actually goes.

Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet

by Sandra Goldmark

Sandra Goldmark runs a pop-up repair shop in New York and serves as director of sustainability at Barnard College. Fixation (2020) is her plainspoken case for getting things fixed instead of replaced, and for building a circular economy where good design, reuse, and repair are the default. Her five-rule formula — borrowed in spirit from Michael Pollan — is the most quotable advice on this list: “Have good stuff. Not too much. Mostly reclaimed. Care for it. Pass it on.”

What You Can Do

Reading is a start, not a finish. A few next steps:

Start at the library. Most of these titles are available through WorldCat or your local branch. Borrowing keeps a book in circulation and out of a landfill.
Audit one category of stuff before adding to it. Pick clothes, kitchenware, or electronics. Inventory what you already own before the next purchase. Most of us own more than we remember.
Find a repair option in your community. Take the time to locate repair, reuse, and donation outlets near you before tossing anything broken.
Support right-to-repair policy. Several U.S. states have passed right-to-repair laws since 2023; the rest are weighing them. Individual purchasing choices matter more when manufacturers are required to make repair possible.
Read one of these books and talk about it. Anti-consumption is harder alone. Book clubs, mutual-aid groups, and faith communities have all become surprising hubs for this work.

Editor’s Note: Originally authored by Gemma Alexander on June 18, 2020, this article was updated in May 2026.

The post 10 Books to Counter Consumerism appeared first on Earth911.

https://earth911.com/inspire/10-books-to-counter-consumerism/

Green Living

Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthX CEO Peter Simek on Cultivating Bipartisan Climate Strategies

Published

5 days ago

May 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.

For 15 years, the Dallas-based climate conference the EarthX conference has created space where fossil fuel executives and environmental activists, Republican appropriations chairs and Democratic climate hawks, find common ground. The organization targets three core stakeholders: the corporate world, policymakers, and investors seeking startups where environmental solutions are baked into the bottom line. Peter Simek, EarthX’s CEO, explains how reframing climate action around shared values—stewardship, economic opportunity, and love of the land—unlocks support that crisis messaging alone cannot reach.

The doom story doesn’t sell, Simek explained. “We’re not motivated as a species by doomsday language. It puts people in fight-or-flight mode.” He points out how climate became an identity issue, tangled up in culture-war debates over hamburgers and gas-powered trucks, when the real conversation should center on clean air, clean water, and protecting the places we love. “The EPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Act were passed during the Nixon administration,” he notes. “There are ways to message this that appeals across lines.”

Peter Simek, CEO of EarthX, is our guest on *Sustainability In Your Ear*.

Simek bets heavily on bottom-up action as EarthX works to build bridges. States, cities, and private capital often move faster than federal mandates, he argues, and they’re harder to reverse with a single executive order. Texas leads the nation in renewable energy deployment because wind and solar make bottom-line sense. “Even as there’s a policy turn against it, there’s still the driving reality that solar and wind are viable energy sources,” he says. A new event in 2026, the EarthX Institute, will focus on two policy priorities: nuclear energy, where bipartisan consensus is growing, and urban biodiversity.

Whether conversations at forums like EarthX translate into policy velocity that matches the pace of climate impacts remains to be seen. Simek says he stays focused on tracking downstream results, specifically the investments funded, the coalitions built, and the policies incubated from the local level up. “It’s about finding those ways in which there’s common sense, common ground, common values,” he says. “Elements to talking about nature and the environment that no one can really disagree with.”

Learn more about EarthX and its upcoming April 2026 conference at earthx.org.