Critical Environmental Areas

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Critical Environmental Areas (CEAs) are areas in the state which have been designated by a local or state agency to recognize a specific geographical area with one or more of the following characteristics:

    A feature that is a benefit or threat to human health;
    An exceptional or unique natural setting;
    An exceptional or unique social, historic, archaeological, recreational, or educational value; or
    An inherent ecological, geological, or hydrological sensitivity to change that maybe adversely affected by any physical disturbance.

A CEA designation serves to alert project sponsors to the agency's concern for the resources or dangers contained within the CEA. Once a CEA has been designated, potential impacts on the characteristics of that CEA become relevant areas of concern that warrant specific, articulated consideration in determining the significance of any Type I or Unlisted actions that may affect the CEA. https://www.dec.ny.gov/permits/6184.html

For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment | AIER

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For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment | AIER

For recycling to be a socially commendable activity, it has to pass one of two tests: the profit test, or the net environmental-savings test. If something passes the profit test, it’s likely already being done. People are already recycling gold or other commodities from the waste stream, if the costs of doing so are less than the amount for which the resource can be sold.?

Voluntary “recycling” like scrap iron or aluminum businesses will take care of that on their own. The real question arises with mandatory recycling programs — people recycle because they will be fined if they don’t, not because they expect to make money—or “voluntary” recycling programs such as those at universities or other communities where failure to recycle earns you public shaming.

When Life Gave Pennsylvania Spotted Lanternflies, Its Bees Made Spotted Lanternfly Honey – Gastro Obscura

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When Life Gave Pennsylvania Spotted Lanternflies, Its Bees Made Spotted Lanternfly Honey – Gastro Obscura

Don Shump, owner of Philadelphia Bee Co., has tended hives around the city for more than a decade, harvesting and selling neighborhood-specific varieties, donning bee beards at educational workshops, and extracting colonies of honeybees, wasps, and hornets from places they don’t belong. One day in fall 2019—right around the time the first adult spotted lanternfly populations exploded in Philadelphia—he entered the honey house, where a coworker was processing the harvest, and was hit with an unfamiliar aroma.

“It smelled like maple bacon,” Shump says. “I didn't know what these girls had gotten into, but it was something different.”

The harvest looked different, too: thick in texture with a deep reddish-brown color. Late summer and fall, when asters, goldenrod, and Japanese knotweed are in bloom, is the season for dark honey. But Shump had never seen anything like this, and beekeepers around Southeast Pennsylvania were seeing the same thing—an unusually dark harvest with a surprisingly smoky, robust flavor.

This is wild. Spotted lanternflies are giving honey a delicious smoked taste in Southeast Pennsylvania.