Displaying items by tag: coronavirus

How to protect your family and community from Covid-19 over the holidays

The video above is a recording of the webinar hosted by the Foundation for Global Sustainability and co-produced with Hellbender Press and The Technical Society of Knoxville on December 21, 2021 on how to keep safe from Covid-19 and its emergent variant, Omicron, during the holidays.

James M. Reynolds, MD has an exceptional ability to bring together and explain in a straight forward and easy to understand way everything one needs to know to keep safe. After two years of uncertain news, speculation, contradictory discoveries, rampant misinformation, ever changing variants and recommendations, he straightens out the knots of uncertainty and insecurity left by this tumultuous period in most brains.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park Air Resource Specialist is seen at the Look Rock air quality research station.   Courtesy National Park Service

The lack of regional and local vehicle traffic during the pandemic greatly reduced measurable pollution in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

This is your Hellbender weekend read, and the first in an occasional Hellbender Press series about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the natural world

Great Smoky Mountains National Park shut down for six weeks in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recorded emissions reductions during that period in part illustrate the role motor vehicles play in the park's vexing air-quality issues. The full cascade of effects from the pollution reductions are still being studied.

Hellbender Press interviewed park air quality specialist Jim Renfro about the marked reduction of carbon dioxide and other pollutants documented during the park closure during the pandemic, and the special scientific opportunities it presents.  He responded to the following questions via email.

Hellbender Press: You cited “several hundred tons" in pollutant reductions during an interview with WBIR of Knoxville (in 2020). What types of air pollutants does this figure include?