Are you ready to never read "blood meal" the same way again?

There is now scientific confirmation of the tick-borne meat allergies we first told you about in August. From ABC News:

A bite from the lone star tick, so-called for the white spot on its back, looks innocent enough. But researchers say saliva that sneaks into the wound might trigger a reaction to meat agonizing enough to convert lifelong carnivores into wary vegetarians.

"People will eat beef and then anywhere from three to six hours later start having a reaction; anything from hives to full-blown anaphylactic shock," said Dr. Scott Commins, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

It's been nearly two weeks since Hurricane Sandy decimated large parts of the Eastern seaboard. The subway may be back, but more than a half million people are still without power and thousands are still without water. The conversation continues about how best to adapt to a new world of monster weather.

Scientific American has an interview today with climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, who has been studying the impact of climate change on New York since the '90s, and first analyzed risks to the city infrastructure from rising waters in 2001. Rosenzweig says a new way forward for coastal communities will require "an integrated approach that covers three areas: engineering, ecologically based adaptation and policies."

Overarching all of this is design, urban planning. What we really need to do is recover, rebuild and create a vibrant and sustainable coastal city region. Let's do this in creative ways. For example, the Dutch are not just looking to engineering solutions, they are looking at a mix of solutions. So there are the iconic floating houses but they are also doing a lot with raising apartment buildings and allowing water to slosh in and out when floods come. We have to accept that we are a coastal region. There are going to be coastal floods. How do we live with it?

How do we live with it? The Census has this great and kind of shocking visualization of how Americans are drawn to coastlines like moths to flame. That "we" is huge, and climate change will touch all of us.

We haven't been able to look to the government for leadership on climate change, so why would we look to it for leadership on cleaning up the mess that climate change creates? In an interview at Salon, disaster historian and New York resident Jacob Remes discusses what "living with it" would look like from the ground up.

Every day, the generation that drove America's love affair with the automobile draws closer to death retirement. And who better to help us figure out what that means than the AARP?

A new report out from its Public Policy Institute considers whether America’s baby boomers may be moving toward lives that rely less on cars. From the Associated Press:

How long those 74 million people born between 1946 and 1964 continue to work, whether they choose to live in their suburban houses after their children leave home or whether they flock to city neighborhoods where they are less likely to need a car will have important ramifications for all Americans.

On the one hand:

Most boomers live in the suburbs and are expected to remain in the homes where they raised their children even after they become empty nesters. The housing bust has also trapped many older boomers in large homes whose values have fallen, sometimes below the balance of their mortgages.

On the other hand:

Demographers have noted an uptick in retirees moving to central cities where they're less dependent on being able to drive. Because there are so many boomers, if a significant number move to central cities, it could drive up housing costs and force cities to make greater accommodations for the elderly, such as more benches at bus stops or a slowing of the timing of pedestrian crossing lights.

In light of the enduring tree-sit blockade in East Texas that's holding off the Keystone XL pipeline construction there, this op-ed from Waging Nonviolence.

A tree-sit was organized to challenge strip mining in 2011 and in 2012. This year the tactic was used to resist fracking and to protest a new biolab in Florida. Other “climbers” have included members of the Ruckus Society, students at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of California Berkeley. But the most enduring example was Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year tree-sit in the late 1990s.

It's almost the 15-year anniversary of Hill's Northern California campaign against redwood clear-cutting, and the tree-sit tactic has never been so popular. It's practically become de rigueur for the environmental movement.

Our tiny fish are in trouble. Sardines may be considered "sustainable," but we're not managing them well.

A new study from researchers in the U.S. and Venezuela on sardine collapse in the Caribbean has found "climate change, plankton decline, and overfishing" are to blame for an extreme decline that "may have dire socioeconomic consequences" for countries in the region. From SciDev:

Adorable pet-snatching coyotes are flocking to North American cities, and new research shows that they're pretty well-adapated to urban life.

Biologist Stan Gehrt has been studying Chicago's near-secret coyote population for 12 years. About 2,000 coyotes live in the city, and "the majority of people have no idea," says Gehrt.

From The Ottawa Citizen:

He thought at first there wouldn’t be enough to study, but when he trapped them and attached radio collars it became clear the animals were common, and multiplying.

Gehrt and others have found the coyotes are not just moving to the city from the wilds -- they're making their homes in the city and raising urban pups, establishing coyote communities that sometimes stay within only a couple of city blocks. In Massachusetts alone, the population has grown from zero to about 10,000 in 60 years, with many animals making their homes in "very urban" sections of cities.

From On Earth:

Yesterday, we ran through some of the consequences of newly legal weed in Colorado and Washington for local ecosystems and power grids. But those new marijuana laws also specifically allow for the cultivation and processing of super eco-friendly hemp, which could -- at least in theory -- be an environmental game changer.

Hemp completely dominated the U.S. textile market before the invention of the cotton gin. Some believe cannabis was originally made illegal by William Randolph Hearst and Dupont looking to knock hemp out of the market to protect their investments in timberlands and petrochemicals.

Hemp and marijuana are genetically distinct but are both regulated as Schedule I narcotics, even though if you smoked a bowl of hemp you'd end up with lungs full of smoke and no THC high. Textiles, biofuels, foods -- that's where hemp really shines. (Vanilla Tempt hemp milk is kind of amazing, you guys, I swear.)

Here Slate's eco-advice columnist half-heartedly makes a case for polyester as the best textile (um, ew), but ultimately admits: "Overall, hemp appears to be slightly easier on the environment than cotton, superior on water and land requirements, and only slightly worse for energy use."

We kind of already knew this, but it's always nice to have your presumptions shored up with maths.

It's not red states and blue states, folks -- it's red suburbs and blue cities. See The Washington Post’s map of county returns, which shows that Obama carried urban areas all around the country:

The Atlantic Cities offers this:

It's boom times for American weed. Yesterday, both Washington and Colorado voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Both ballot measures passed by comfortable margins.

From Time:

The initiatives represent an increased public push for legalization; a 2011 Gallup poll found that 50% of Americans are in favor of marijuana legalization, up from just 12% in 1969.

This likely means increased production to meet newly legal needs, which likely means more impact on the environment.

Marijuana advocates point to the fact that it's "just a plant." They're not wrong! But it’s a plant that’s often shipped hundreds of miles from production to consumer, and either grown indoors at tremendous energy costs, or cultivated outdoors to the detriment of the local landscape.

As we'd come to expect, California's Proposition 37, which would have provided for mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods, failed yesterday 45 to 55 percent. The county map is pretty telling: The state's progressive cities all voted for the measure, while the Central Valley and its strong farming industry voted against.

The slaughter could have been worse -- the latest polling leading in to the election showed only 39 percent support. But as Grist's Twilight Greenaway points out, this doesn't mean an end to the food-labeling movement -- on the contrary, things are just getting started.

Where electoral politics and California's crazy proposition system have failed, direct citizen action is picking up the campaign. For some months, "Label It Yourself" has promoted self-regulation at your local grocery store. A "decentralized, autonomous grassroots campaign born out of our broken food system," its efforts have intensified after Prop 37's defeat.