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   ‘War Circus’   

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Carbon trading is perhaps the most singular evil the Illuminati and their political minions have yet come up with!
It will do nothing to help the world's populations handle climate change!
It will do everything to further enrich those who already control 98% of the world's resources!
Those who have brought the planet to these crises!
Those who need to be stripped of all their assets!
I don’t know of an issue of a greater magnitude than the energy issue that humanity’s facing right now.
Oh my God, we’re having wars in, you know, Asia, killing millions of people over the hydrocarbons.
The issue is so multi-faceted, it’s so immense, that... Oh yes, this is being very carefully managed.
'Researchers have found that when humans simply think about the possibility of extra senses, new dendrites grow between their brain cells.
In other words, the simple awareness of extra senses, or dimensions, may allow us to grow brain connections to actually accommodate such an awareness.'
You see when people, and increasingly more and more of you humans, tell you that the Illuminati try to keep you dumbed down, there's reasoning behind those words.
Kewe.
Typhoon Wipha
Keelung, Taiwan
KENYA — 22 February, 2005
Nearly five years ago, the government imposed a ban on logging in order to curb deforestation and to conserve the country's major water catchment areas.
Despite that the Kenyan government says it remains alarmed at the rate at which the country's forest cover is being depleted.
More than 90% of the original national forest cover has now been lost.
Environment Minister Kalonzo Musyoka bluntly warns: "Unless we rapidly improve our forest cover and our management we will face a national disaster."
      Philippine destruction by logging      
       — Personal tragedies, shattered dreams    
Kewe changes trains on the Underground, on the journey from west to north London.
Reflecting on what he's reading, he doesn't know if the stratosphere will continue to cool, or if ozone levels will return to levels of the past, or if the increasing stress of unstable monsoons and floods, of drought bowls, of vast wind forces, will continue in their exaggerated patterns.
Earth in its history has had many extended periods of all of these.
Life for humans in the brief time we have been on this planet has always been fragile.
Disaster is a reality we expect.
Killer Whale Pod Orcinus orca Prince William Sound between Green Island and Applegate Island Having scored a win in trying to get more protection for polar bears, a conservation group is turning up the heat on the federal government to keep the North Pacific right whale from going extinct. Photo: Hosking/Alaska Image Library
Killer Whale Pod
Orcinus orca
Prince William Sound between Green Island and Applegate Island
Photo: Hosking/Alaska Image Library
Empty water reservoir
Ladakh
Between Kun lun mountain range and the Great Himalayas
Tomsk State University — 11 August, 2005 — researcher Sergei Kirpotin
All happened in the last three or four years
The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago.
This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.

More than 90% of the original national forest cover has now been lost.
The situation is an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming," researcher Sergei Kirpotin, of Tomsk State University, Russia, told New Scientist magazine.
The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has started to thaw, he added, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".
       Siberia, Alaska      
       Dramatic permafrost melt — click here      
Humpback Whale Breaching in Southeast Alaska Marine Mammals U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Having scored a win in trying to get more protection for polar bears, a conservation group is turning up the heat on the federal government to keep the North Pacific right whale from going extinct. Photo: Alaska Image Library
Humpback Whale Breaching in Southeast Alaska
Photo: Alaska Image Library
Plant trees and protect Awhitu Regional Park
Press Release: Auckland Regional Council
Plant trees and protect Awhitu Regional Park

Aucklanders throughout the region are invited to help the Auckland Regional Council (ARC) protect and improve park life by planting native trees on the conservation area at Awhitu Regional Park on Wednesday 29 June and Sunday 3 July from 10am onwards.
Planting days are an excellent opportunity to make a positive difference to the environment. They're also a great way to experience the region's parks — this year the ARC is encouraging people to join planting days in parks that they haven't visited before, and make the most of a rewarding family day out.
Planting at Awhitu will give campers and picnickers shade and shelter. It will also stabilise the coastal edge and protect and enhance the coastal forest remnants.
New trees are planted to maintain and enhance biodiversity, and to protect park life including native plants, birds, fish and insects, and their support systems and food supplies.
Tree planting also goes a long way towards nursing our damaged ecosystems back to health. It speeds up natural regeneration, reduces flooding and erosion, and improves water quality in our rivers and beaches, making them safe for swimming.
For more information on this planting day contact the ARC on 09 366 2000 option 2 or visit www.arc.govt.nz.
What to bring:
Work boots or enclosed shoes (not sandals), a spade (if you have one), gloves, a jacket, snacks and a water bottle.
(it's thirsty work)
Dead Zones
Kewe reads that the Gulf of Mexico, the Caspian, Aral, and Dead Seas, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Asian and South Asian Seas, virtually all the seas of the world have significant problems of clean up.
Coastal water degradation is from rapid population growth, from chemicals used in agriculture, from raw and poorly treated sewage input, from heavy metals and oil product pollution.
POPs-persistent organic pollutants-chemical substances that persist in the environment, are increasingly being absorbed.
These chemicals that bioaccumulate through the food web, now show in the once pristine Arctic waters.
The disposal of plastic in the seas and oceans has become a serious problem for wildlife.
RED TIDE AREAS
'Black or Red Tide' areas — brown, orange, purple and yellow waters — is being seen is being seen in larger and larger areas around the coasts of the world.   A blooming of dinoflagellate phytoplankton is suffocating fish and feeding on fish tissue.   Animals such as mussels, clams and oysters ingest the toxins produced by these tides.
Eutrophication is extending due to years of fertilizer runoff, and discharge of human waste.   A thriving soup of algae and bacteria is being produced that uses up oxygen in the water.   Rivers, lakes and sea grass that once provided nesting harbors for many species are being overwhelmed.
The Gulf of Mexico, is one example of a now annually occurring 'Dead Zone'.   Near the mouth of the Mississippi, this new, oxygen free zone has resulted in a persistent range of dead water.   Excess nitrogen fertilizer flushed into the gulf, and a reduction of the Mississippi basin floodplains, has resulted in the Gulf of Mexico becoming one of the largest dead zones on the planet.
The wetlands once acted as a buffer to storms coming in from the sea but Louisiana has lost about a half million acres of coast to erosion since 1930.
The lost wetlands had been built by the Mississippi River, which is now corralled by levees and is bringing little replacement sediment to the Gulf mouth.
Even before Katrina the City of New Orleans and Louisiana needed billions of dollars to help restore coastal wetlands.
No longer having the sediment wetlands to act as a buffer, computer models have always shown that a hurricane of a strong Category 3 with wind speeds of 120 mph or more attacking New Orleans from the west would push storm surges from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain over the city's levees.
New Orleans dipping as much as 9 feet below sea level was most vulnerable to the surge of water that could be pushed by wind from the Gulf.
Funding had intended to be forthcoming from the US Federal Government taxpayer support
Unfortunately much of the money to be allocated was diverted to pay for the attack on Iraq.
For New Orleans such a surge could again push 20 feet of water, higher than the roofs of many homes, into the city, even if the levees are not breached as in Katrina.
HYPOXIC ZONE
A hypoxic zone deadly for fish grew within one year in the Mississippi Basin from eighteen thousand to twenty two thousand square kilometers.
To reduce the trigger that forms the zone, scientists are calling for restoration of two million hectares of wetlands, and the cutting of fertilizer runoff by 20 percent.
Dead zones are now forming annually around the coasts of Europe, the Middle East, around Asia, Central and South America, around areas of the East Coast of the United States.
In Europe at least one-third of the sewage flowing into the Black Sea, the Balkans, the Carpathian basin, remains unprocessed.
The Sea of Azov and the heavily polluted Bosporus no longer have fish.
Mackerel, pelamyd, greenfish, the most commonly caught fish that used to swim in these waters, have become non-existent.
Rejections of scientific advice, both in reducing pollution, and on reducing catches to safeguard fish stocks, has resulted in Europe's stocks of fish being depleted on a disastrous scale.
Orca in Prince William Sound Orcinus orca U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Having scored a win in trying to get more protection for polar bears, a conservation group is turning up the heat on the federal government to keep the North Pacific right whale from going extinct. Photo: Alaska Image Library
Orca in Prince William Sound
Photo: Alaska Image Library
 
Published on Thursday, October 19, 2006 by Reuters
U.N. Says Number of Ocean "Dead Zones" Rising Fast
by Daniel Wallis
The number of "dead zones" in the world's oceans may have increased by a third in just two years, threatening fish stocks and the people who depend on them, the U.N. Environment Program said on Thursday.
Fertilizers, sewage, fossil fuel burning and other pollutants have led to a doubling in the number of oxygen-deficient coastal areas every decade since the 1960's.
Now experts estimate there are 200 so-called ocean dead zones, compared with 150 two years ago.
Climate change, and the need to build resilience into habitats and ecosystems so they can cope with the anticipated increase in temperatures likely to come, now represents a further urgent reason to act
Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director
"Some successes are being scored but in other areas — like sewage, nutrients from fertilizer run off, animal wastes and atmospheric pollution; sediment mobilization and marine litter — the problems are intensifying," UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.
The first "dead zones" — where pollution-fed algae remove oxygen from the water — were found in northern latitudes like the Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast and the Scandinavian fjords.
Today, the best known is in the Gulf of Mexico, where fertilizers and other algae-multiplying nutrients are dumped by the Mississippi River.
Others have been appearing off South America, Ghana, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Britain.
The UNEP said in a statement that experts warn "these areas are fast becoming major threats to fish stocks and thus to the people who depend upon fisheries for food and livelihoods."
The full list is expected to be published early next year, but the preliminary findings were released on Thursday at an international marine pollution conference in Beijing, China, which gathered delegates from more than 100 nations.
The meeting also heard some good news from scientists studying the recovery rates of coral reefs damaged by bleaching in the late 1990's by high sea temperatures.
Coral reefs get bleached when warm water forces out tiny algae that live in the coral, providing nutrients and giving reefs their vivid colors. Without the algae, corals whiten and eventually die.
"The new studies indicate healthy ecosystems exposed to minimal contamination are likely to recover and survive better than those stressed by pollution, dredging and other human-made impacts," Steiner said.
UNEP said the overall findings were given even more urgency by new modeling that shows up to 90 percent of the world's tropical coasts may be developed by 2030.
"Climate change, and the need to build resilience into habitats and ecosystems so they can cope with the anticipated increase in temperatures likely to come, now represents a further urgent reason to act," Steiner added.
© Copyright 2006 Reuters Ltd
Common Dreams © 1997-2006
Sperm Whale Physeter catodon U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Having scored a win in trying to get more protection for polar bears, a conservation group is turning up the heat on the federal government to keep the North Pacific right whale from going extinct. Photo: Stephen Tuttle/Alaska Image Library
Sperm Whale
Physeter catodon
Photo: Stephen Tuttle/Alaska Image Library
20 YEARS OF CALAMITOUS EU FISHING POLICY
20 years of disastrous EU fishing policy, the inability to make difficult decisions on cutting fleet sizes, has led to mismanagement on a gigantic scale.
Excessive fishing has seen skate, monkfish and swordfish being reduced dramatically in recent years as suppliers have sought to meet increasing demand.   Monkfish grows slowly and matures late and fishing of immature females is potentially disastrous.   With skate having a low fecundity and a slow rate of maturation, overfishing of juveniles or immature females has lead to a stock collapse.
Breeding populations of Atlantic swordfish has been depleted by as much as 50% in just the last two decades; the average weight of fish now caught has fallen from 120kg to 30kg.   Tuna and cod are being fished to extinction in many places.
NINETY PERCENT OF LARGE FISH ARE GONE
A study, published in Nature magazine indicates that ninety percent of the large fish in the world's oceans are gone.
"Our analysis suggests that the global ocean has lost more than 90 per cent of large predatory fishes," say study authors Ransom Myers and Boris Worm of Dalhousie University.
"We have to understand how close to extinction some of these populations really are," Myers interview was reported from Ottawa by The Canadian Press.  
The researchers spent 10 years collecting data on large fish in four continental shelf and nine oceanic systems from the beginning of record keeping to the present.
They found that industrial fishing, using sensors and satellites, takes 15 years to reduce a new fish community to a tenth of its original size.

"The amazing thing is, all these data sources show almost identically the same pattern," Myers stated.   "Industrial fishing has cut populations of large fish in the oceans to a mere 10 per cent of 1950 levels."
"The world is in 'massive denial', spending its energy fighting over the few fish left instead of cutting harvests before it's too late."
Around the world ever bigger trawlers fish and freeze 24 hours a day.
Taking advantage of faraway fishing grounds, the ships dock, sell their catch at the nearest port for export to distant countries.
Exotic species are introduced to satisfy a demand no longer met from fished-out local seas.
Bottom trawling — now an extensive business — is scouring the continental shelf seabeds from the poles to the tropics profoundly altering the habitats of the world's benthic life.
Hydraulic dredging and beam trawling for fishmeal is taking place despite the knowledge there is a definitive change of the substrate.
Studies show that much of the Benthic fauna, the ocean bottom fauna, is destroyed when the boats dredge and trawl for fishmeal.
Fishmeal fishing kills uncountable life forms that our science has only begun to identify.
Creatures that will not be here for future generations.
Scientists are saying that for a few decades of intense fishing we will obliterate the life of the oceans.
Marine scientists around the globe have called for decisive action to end the blind destruction that is taking place in the world's oceans.
They are asking governments to end subsidies encouraging unsustainable fishing, and for worldwide legislation to stop bottom trawling.
The study by Ransom Myers and Boris Worm show that blue marlin caught today weigh one-fifth of what they once did.
Even in the open ocean, where untapped reservoirs of fish were presumed to exist, major depletions have occurred.   Longline fishing is one cause.
Fishermen from countries such as Japan are using lines with thousands of hooks.
Myers dismisses the arguments of Newfoundland Premier Roger Grimes of Canada.
The Premier has bitterly protested the federal closure of the Newfoundland cod fishery.  
"This is absurd." Myers says.   "They have these pictures and say, 'Look at all these fish that are there.'    They're baby fish!    They can't catch the quota that they have.  I view it as sheer idiocy."
He maintains that harvesting must be cut by at least 50 per cent, pointing to Alaska as a jurisdiction where sustainable fishing is practiced successfully.
"We can, as a society or societies, decide to fish the sea in a rational fashion and obtain more benefit certainly than we are obtaining at the moment.   It's not the technology; it's the lack of control over the technology.   There are factory ships in Alaska and yet they have a sustainable fishery."
Bald Eagles Fighting over Fish Haliaeetus leucocephalus U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Having scored a win in trying to get more protection for polar bears, a conservation group is turning up the heat on the federal government to keep the North Pacific right whale from going extinct. Photo: Alaska Image Library
Bald Eagles Fighting over Fish
Haliaeetus leucocephalus
Photo: Alaska Image Library
July 8 / 9, 2006
Blue Frontier in Peril
The Wail of the Oceans
By RALPH NADER
M illions of People will enjoy the ocean beaches this coming weekend.  Tens of millions of Americans live within a few miles of the Atlantic and the Pacific.  Yet if they could, these oceans would be crying out for help.
Just a few days ago, another foreboding peril was documented connecting global warming with the accelerating deterioration of coral reefs around the world ­ a critical sanctuary for marine life.
Torrents of chemical and other poisonous runoffs into the oceans have led to "dead zones" where only some of the smallest marine organisms can survive.
These areas are created in significant part by synthetic nitrogen fertilizers flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, for example, and nourishing massive algal blooms which then decay and cause oxygen-depleted "dead zones."
Corporate industrial agriculture is a major source of pollution of fisheries, such as mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Note the sequence:
Huge animal feed operations for cattle, poultry and hogs produce animal wastes laden with agrichemicals and agridrug residues.
They harm the ocean fisheries that then are consumed, at a diminishing rate, by men, women and children.
Pregnant women are warned about eating swordfish routinely, for instance, due to mercury contamination.
As wild fish are reduced in number by overfishing and contamination, corporations erect fish farms and fill them with all kinds of drugs and pesticides to keep the domestic fish alive long enough in this artificial environment to be harvested.
Salmon farms exemplify this problem.
Along comes David Helvarg, author of the engrossing Blue Frontier, with a beautiful paperback titled Fifty Ways to Save the Ocean that lays out your role in saving this great ecosystem of the Planet Earth.
These include, number 37, working to create wilderness parks under the sea (George W. Bush just decreed one off the Hawaiian Islands) that are off limits to exploitation, as well as supporting marine education in our schools, number 42.
Other "ways" are "what fish you should and shouldn't eat and which are endangered or could impact your health; how saving energy can help save the sea; proper diving, surfing, and tide pool etiquette," and joining in a "coastal cleanup."
Helvarg, founder of the citizen group, Blue Frontier took his "50 Ways" book on tour along one coastal community after another a few weeks ago.
He received a great reception by the growing number of "seaweed activists" who know Helvarg because he either dove into the oceans with them or compiled their groups in his groundbreaking /Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide 2005-2006/ (Island Press), the Blue Movement Directory.
Few people understand how intricately critical are the oceans to life on the earth part of the Planet.
Even fewer know how fragile a variety of conditions are in the Oceans which are daily being battered by man's effusions (e.g., plastic trash) and predations, (e.g., industrial overfishing).
One study concluded that the Big Fish in the oceans are down by 90%.
They have been hunted or destroyed one way or another.
The total ocean catch has been declining for several years.
Enjoy, enjoy the oceans, urges Helvarg.
But do so with ecological wisdom, if only for the sake of your descendants.
In his foreword to 50 Ways to Save the Ocean, Phillipe Cousteau writes:
"Each one of us has an earth echo, it defines our relationship with the planet and each other. . . .
Begin creating an earth echo that you can be proud of."
   The whale had been hit    
     It was mortally wounded    
     Japanese murder    
   Whale murdered by Japanese  
       Loss of marine life    
     Destruction by fishing fleets    
     Atlantic Cod Ninety Percent Declined    
     North Sea, Irish Sea, Western Scotland    
     Cod, Plaice, Whiting, Hake, fish stocks      
       Global weather, environment and climate change      
       Recent changes observed in Arctic Areas      
     Big melt warning for Arctic    
     Area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year    
High seas crash over harbour wall and lighthouse
Newhaven
Southern coast of England
Has the Age of Chaos Begun?
The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence.
But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing "storm of the decade" took place in March 2004.
Hurricane Catarina — so named because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina — was the first recorded south Atlantic hurricane in history.
Textbook orthodoxy had long excluded the possibility of such an event; sea temperatures, experts claimed, were too low and wind shear too powerful to allow tropical depressions to evolve into cyclones south of the Atlantic Equator.
Indeed, forecasters rubbed their eyes in disbelief as weather satellites down-linked the first images of a classical whirling disc with a well-formed eye in these forbidden latitudes.
 
Glaciers around the world shrinking
Mountains south of Lhasa
Tibet
Back at his bed and breakfast Kewe boots up his notebook computer, begins typing in his room.  
He flips a page of a magazine, sees people strolling the beaches in the UK.   Underneath he reads they are finding dead dolphins washing ashore.  
500 Dolphin carcasses are being recorded as being washed up on UK beaches annually.
He tries to finish the sentence he's typing, but the wealth of ill news overwhelms any positive point he thinks he might be achieving.   Who wants to read about the stuff we are not going to fix, he thinks?
Trying to personalize this more, he reaches for a better formula.   Corrections take money, he thinks, we all know that.   Yet it's a top priority of people's concern if the survey charts are to be believed.   Despite this, governments are not willing to spend money.
The economics of cleaning and restoring the environment could easily be explained.   Waste filtration, healthy recycling of water, planting of new forests, new healthy land growth, will bring many new jobs.  
Against the interest of all the worlds people
Environment cleanup is labor intensive.   But somehow this gets lost.  
Government leaders are much more interested in the military.   It's a symbiotic relationship.   The military gives the leaders power, and the cost of huge military industrial consortiums are born by the people paying taxes.
Any idea of spending such money on the welfare of the planet is not even considered.    In a world where we produce weapons, which are then sold and used against us, we are increasingly paying the heavy burden of a complex of military and industry against the interest of all the worlds people.
From the video 'Holes in Heaven' — Brooks Agnew, Earth Tornographer
In 1983 I did radio tornography with 30 watts looking for oil in the ground.
I found 26 oil wells over a nine state area.
100 hundred percent of the time was accurate, which is just 30 watts of power beaming straight into solid rock.
HAARP uses a billion watts beamed straight into the ionosphere for experiments.
Picture these strings on the piano as layers of the Earth, each one has its own frequency.
What we used to do is beam radio waves into the ground and it would vibrate any 'strings' that were present in the ground.
We might get a sound back like ___ and we would say, that's natural gas.
We might get a sound back like ____ and we'd say that's crude oil.
We were able to identify each frequency.
We accomplished this with just 30 watts of radio power.
If you do this with a billion watts the vibrations are so violent that the entire piano would shake.
In fact the whole house would shake.
In fact the vibrations could be so severe under ground they could even cause an earthquake.
Download or watch   HAARP Holes in Heaven
— Complete version available for mp4 download
Download or watch movie on HAARP — Advanced US Military research weapon on behaviour modification
weather change, ionesphere manipulation — click here
Download or watch audio of Dr. Nick Begich talking on HAARP
— The 2006 update to 'Angels Don't Play This HAARP'.
'Angels Still Don't Play This HAARP: Advances In Tesla Technology'.
Planet Earth Weapon by Rosalie Bertell
ozone, HAARP, chemtrails, space war — click here
HAARP/Chemtrails/Alien aircraft/Illuminati involvement
1 hour FreemanTV.com video — click here
(has 30 second lead in with blank screen and silence)
Angels Dont Play This HAARP weather manipulation
1 hour 36 minutes video — click here
(poor quality to watch but well worth listening)
Dr. Nick Begich, his book and his articles can be found here
       http://www.earthpulse.com/      
Article on Chemtrails — unusual cloud formations in the US.
     Thule Inuit battle to stop Star Wars and to close US air base    

CORAL REEFS DESTROYED
In the last super El Niño that occurred, many of the coral reefs of the world suffered massive mortalities.
Three quarters of the Maldive, brightly colored, living coral has turned into decaying rock.
Due to overfishing and pollution, 80 percent of the coral on Caribbean reefs has been destroyed.  
Rainforests of the sea
Coral reefs, have often called "the rainforests of the sea" because of their richness in wildlife.   The destruction in coral means also the elimination of the various life forms who used the coral as habitats.
Organisms reliant on coral are becoming rare many facing extinction.
More than 80 per cent of the reefs clustered around the Philippines are considered to be in jeopardy.
Coral off the East coast of Africa has been reduced in recent years to a tenth of its size.  
Cold-water reefs off the coast of Britain, reefs not yet accurately mapped, which are up to 8,500 years old, survive in the Atlantic at depths of 200 to 1,000 metres.
These reefs are under threat from the nets of trawlers that damage vast swathes of the reefs.
Scientists are issuing warnings that all these reefs will be destroyed.
Four-fifths of the coral on Caribbean reefs has disappeared
Peril facing world's coral reefs Photo: AP/Jack Plunkett
Paul Ellis, Texan, 61, says the purpose of a swim between Cozumel Island and Cancun, Mexico is to raise awareness of the peril facing the world's coral reefs.
After seeing some of his favorite dive spots in the Caribbean deteriorate, Ellis decided he needed to do something to bring attention to the problem.
"It broke my heart, and I realized I wanted my grandchildren to have a shot at seeing some of the wonders that I have seen," he said.
"I would like to think that in some small way (the swim) will put the word out about what it takes to have a sustainable biosphere."
Photo: AP/Jack Plunkett
Four-fifths of the coral on Caribbean reefs has disappeared in the past 25 years in a phenomenal saga of destruction.
There has been nothing like it in the past few thousand years according to a study published in the journal Science.    
One of the most serious consequences of the decline is that the reefs from Barbados, the Florida Keys, Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, Mexico, may now be unable to withstand the effects of global warming.  
"We report a massive region-wide decline of corals across the entire Caribbean basin," the five-strong team says in the introduction to the paper, in language remarkably strong for a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
"The ability of Caribbean coral reefs to cope with future local and global environmental change may be irretrievably compromised," the team reports.
The Great Barrier Reef coral will mostly be dead by 2050, says a study by Hans and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg — the head of Queensland University's marine studies centre.    The report is entitled: "Implications of Climate Change for Australia's Great Barrier Reef".
The brightly-coloured corals that make Australia's Great Barrier Reef one of the world's natural wonders is dying because of rising sea temperatures.
No prospect of avoiding "chilling long-term eventualities"
Their 350-page report found no prospect of avoiding the "chilling long-term eventualities" of coral bleaching because greenhouse gases were already warming the seas as part of a process it said would take decades to stop.
Coral has a narrow comfort zone and is highly stressed by a temperature rise of less than one degree Celsius.
Water temperature rises of less than one degree coincided with the world's worst recorded coral bleaching episode in 1988.
With bleaching, the warmer water forces out the algae that give coral its colour and, if all are lost, the coral dies and the reef will crumble.
Coral islands. Fiji Reef Conservation Project www.coralcay.org - Providing resources to help sustain livelihoods and alliviate poverty through the protection, restoration and management of coral reef and tropical forests. Photo: www.coralcay.org
Coral islands
Fiji Reef Conservation Project
www.coralcay.org
Ghostly coral bleachings haunt the world's reefs
By Michael Perry
Mon Mar 13, 2006
Fish swimming above bleached coral near Miall Island in the Keppel island group about 550 kilometres (340 miles) north of Brisbane February 22, 2006. Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahreheit), the upper limit for coral. Picture taken February 22, 2006. Australian Institute of Marine Science/Damian Thomson
Fish swimming above bleached coral near Miall Island in the Keppel island group about 550 kilometres (340 miles) north of Brisbane February 22, 2006.
Picture taken February 22, 2006.
Australian Institute of Marine Science/Damian Thomson
SYDNEY (Reuters) — When marine scientist Ray Berkelmans went diving at Australia's Great Barrier Reef earlier this year, what he discovered shocked him — a graveyard of coral stretching as far as he could see.
"It's a white desert out there," Berkelmans told Reuters in early March after returning from a dive to survey bleaching — signs of a mass death of corals caused by a sudden rise in ocean temperatures — around the Keppel Islands.
Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels.
Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit), the upper limit for coral.
High temperatures are also a condition for the formation of hurricanes, such as Katrina which hit New Orleans in 2005.
"My estimate is in the vicinity of 95 to 98 percent of the coral is bleached in the Keppels," said Berkelmans from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Marine scientists say another global bleaching episode cannot be ruled out, citing major bleaching in the Caribbean in the 2005 northern hemisphere summer, which coincided with one of the 20 warmest years on record in the United States.
"In 2002, it would appear the Great Barrier Reef went first and then the global bleaching followed six to 12 months later.   Is it the same this time around?   No," said Berkelmans.
"The Caribbean beat us to it.   We seem to be riding on the back of that event.
We don't know what is ahead in six months for the Indian Ocean reefs as they head into their summer."
"This might be part of a global pattern where the warm waters continue to get warmer."
Other threats to coral reefs — vast ecosystems often called the nurseries of the seas — include pollution, over-fishing, coastal development and diseases.
CAN CORAL RECOVER?
Corals are vital as spawning grounds for many species of fish, help prevent coastal erosion and also draw tourists.
Bleaching is due to higher than average water temperatures, triggered mainly by global warming, scientists say.
Higher temperatures force corals to expel algae living in coral polyps which provide food and color, leaving white calcium skeletons.
Coral dies in about a month if the waters do not cool.
Berkelmans said the Keppels had previously bounced back from bleaching once the waters had cooled.
But if temperatures remained abnormally high then that would be much more difficult.
Many scientists say global temperatures are rising because fossil fuel emissions from cars, industry and other sources are trapping the earth's heat.  
Experts worry some coral reefs could be wiped out by the end of the century.
Tropical algae thriving on fertilizers from hotel golf courses and badly treated sewage killing coastal reef
Costa Rica's Culebra Bay
Global warming could also damage corals by raising world sea levels by up to a meter by 2100.
That could result in less light reaching deeper corals, threatening the important algae.
The Great Barrier Reef — the world's largest living reef formation stretching 2,000 km (1,250 miles) north to south along Australia's northeast coast — was the first to experience what turned out to be global coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002.
The Keppels bleaching is as severe as those two events and scientists say the threat of widespread bleaching is moderate.
"Sea temperatures in all regions of the Great Barrier Reef are at levels capable of causing thermal stress to corals," said the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority's February report.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch said the 2005 Caribbean bleaching centered on the U.S. Virgin Islands, but stretched from the Florida Keys to Tobago and Barbados in the south and Panama and Costa Rica.
Reef Watch said sea temperature stress levels in the Caribbean in 2005 were more than treble the levels that normally cause bleaching and almost double the levels that kill coral.
"Time will tell whether there was large-scale mortality or not," said Professor Robert Van Woesik from the Florida Institute of Technology in a statement issued by Australia's Queensland University.
He said corals did have some ability to bounce back but that this was an unusually warm event.
DANGEROUS TERRITORY
Queensland University's Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, head of a group of 100 scientists monitoring bleaching, said scientists were concerned about how close in time the two severe bleaching episodes were.
"The 2006 Great Barrier Reef event comes soon after the worst incidence of coral bleaching in the Caribbean in October 2005," said Hoegh-Guldberg who also went diving on the Keppels where he said damage was extensive.
"The traces suggest we are tracking the temperature profile of 2001-2002, which led to the worst incidence of coral bleaching ... for the Great Barrier Reef," he said.
In 2002, between 60 and 95 percent of the reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef were bleached.
Most corals survived but in some locations up to 90 percent were killed.
Hoegh-Guldberg said projections from 40 climate models suggested that oceans would warm by as much as three to four degrees Celsius in the next 100 years.
"We're starting to get into very dangerous territory where what we see perhaps this year will become the norm and of course extreme events will become more likely," he said.
"The climate is changing so quickly that coral reefs don't keep up ... the loss of that ecosystem would be tremendous."
Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc.  All rights reserved.
 Young girl listens to elders
of increased loss of land
Acid Seas
Speaking at the American Geophysical Union's ocean sciences conference in Hawaii February 2006, Professor Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's global ecology department said:
"The current rate of carbon dioxide input is nearly 50 times higher than normal.
In less than 100 years, the pH (measure of alkalinity) of the oceans could drop by as much as half a unit from its natural 8.2 to about 7.7."
Another warning was issued the same week about the threat of acidity to sea life at the annual meeting in St Louis of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Katherine Richardson, professor of biological oceanography at Aarhus University in Denmark, said:
"These marine creatures do humanity a great service by absorbing half the carbon dioxide we create.
If we wipe them out, that process will stop.
We are altering the entire chemistry of the oceans without any idea of the consequences."
She was speaking about the extinction of crabs, oysters and mussels and their inability to continue to build coral due to the excessive absorption of carbonic acid into the oceans, a result of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels dissolving in the ocean.
Professor Ken Caldeira stated in Hawaii:
"Increased carbon dioxide emissions are making the world's oceans more acidic and could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to the one that occurred on land when the dinosaurs disappeared."
In 1998, 16 percent of the world's coral died, with 46 percent of the Indian Ocean coral destroyed.
A temperatures increase of as little as one degree centigrade, well below the two to six degrees water temperatures expected around the reef over the next century will kill the coral.
"There is no evidence that corals can adapt fast enough to match even the lower projected temperature rise," the study by Hans and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg found.
Consisting of 2,900 interlinked reefs, 900 islands and 1,500 fish species, scientists consider the Great Barrier Reef the world's largest living organism.
The report said that over-fishing and pollution from coastal farms were also contributing to the destruction of coral on the Great Barrier Reef.
The Australian government announced plans in December to reduce farm run off and ban fishing in about a third of the reef in a bid to protect Australia's number one tourist drawcard.
But the report's authors said the government needed to do more, recommending Canberra ratify the Kyoto protocol on reducing greenhouse gases and take the lead in emission reduction.
The WWF (World Wildlife Fund) said urgent measures must be put in place to minimise reef damage and reduce greenhouse gases.
"The argument for instant action is undeniable," WWF said in a statement.
"Major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions must occur now, not in five or ten years time.
This is likely to deliver major benefits to our societies both in the near-term and at times beyond 2050."
Fishing with cyanide and dynamite, though often prohibited, continues to destroy whole groupings of the remaining world's coral.
     80% of coral reefs destroyed in Caribbean    
     Carbon dioxide creating acid seas    
       Rising sea temperature killing Great Barrier Reef      
 
POLLUTION OUT OF CONTROL
Europe's waste problem will be unmanageable? Photo courtesy BBC

Europe's waste problem will be unmanageable?
 
Pollution of the world's coastal waters is pandemic.
Forests and wetlands that have always played a central role in the protection of water tables, and in the support of wildlife are being reduced to an alarming extent.
Trees are increasingly cut down.
Wetlands continue to be converted to other uses.
Waste discharge, continues to contaminate rivers, seas and oceans.
Chemicals and petroleum is in all areas where oil is shipped.
Pollution, now chronic, occurs from spills by ship and pipeline accidents, and the disposal at sea of oil-contaminated ballast water and dirty bilge, sludge, and slop oil.
Radioactive particles from bomb-grade plutonium are included in the contamination.
Off the Russian shores, large quantities of toxic and radioactive substances are being kept at river and sea edges, often with weak protection.
Leakage and a migration of pollutants from these storage places are common occurrences.
Radiation pollution, from atomic plants from such countries as the United Kingdom, is being detected as far north as the Arctic Ocean.
As water shortages in many countries becoming increasingly severe, states all across the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the surrounding gulfs and seas, utilize desalinization plants to supplement aquifers.
Little is being done to prevent the chemical pollution being issued as discharge from these plants.
   The supply of fresh water is a serious threat both to the health, and to the political stability of these areas, and to many other peoples of the world.
It is estimated that within the next decade many areas of the world will have major problems with supplying even minimum levels of clean water.
 
       Pollution linked to rainfall and drought      
       Europe's energy use still rising      
Smog episodes have become common in Beijing, as in many cities around the world.
Suspended particulates, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, have increased dramatically in the air above cities.
China's cities have both severe river pollution, and a lack of fresh water for their populations.
In Beijing, the demand for water has increased almost 100 times in the past few decades.
The demand for water, due to industrialization and population needs, has seen a proliferation of dams and reservoirs being built.
Between 1950 and 1986, the number of reservoir dams in China has increased from one and a half thousand to more than twenty two thousand.
The building of the Three-Gorges Dam worries environmentalists.   They say that the weight of millions of tons of water behind the dam will increase the chance of a powerful earthquake.   While studies show that micro hydro plants are more efficient, the work proceeds.
China admits to the possibility of a large, destructive quake but says the dam when fully operational will generate one ninth the demand of China's present electrical needs.
The dam will provide power equal to burning 40 million tons of coal, thereby reducing present greenhouse gas emissions such as sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide.
An announcement by state media follows reports that the dam could cause landslides, soil erosion and pollution, states that at least four million people are to be moved from the area around China's Three Gorges Dam amid warnings of an environmental catastrophe.
The dam's head of construction, Wang Xiaofeng, said the ecological effects of the dam could not be ignored.
Landslides crashing into the reservoir have then produced huge waves that have damaged the shoreline.
The $25bn (£12.5bn) project, across the country's biggest river, the Yangtze, is due to be completed by the end of 2008. China with its more than fifty nationalities, including the Austronesian, and highland peoples, is a nation of 1,200 million people.
China's lands range from the sub-arctic in the far north, to tropics in the south.
Human history is first detailed in Yunnan Province with Kunming Man and Lijiang Man.
Glass Palaces
A country that builds glass palaces in Shanghai, has allowed 180 million hectares of land to be degraded.
With the over-exploitation of grasses and vegetation, unsustainable agricultural methods and inadequate soil conservation, whole regions have been, and are being turned into desert.
   Managed by a superimposition of a new version of the Communist Party, China has engaged both in extensive deforestation and has planted more than thirty billion trees over the past two decades.
In recent years China has seen acute flooding on rivers such as the Yangtze due to huge areas of land being deforested.
Heavy rainfall now results in run-off water filling the rivers, which are then unable to cope when there is heavy rainfall.
Knowing that the clearing of forests for farmland has created extreme soil erosion, that the sediment is washed into rivers resulting in severe flooding, the leadership is attempting to stop desiccation throughout the northern regions of the country....
Kewe as he stops typing seeks to rest his eyes.
He turns to the internet for some comic relief, but a program he clicks on begins to give highlights of past news.
One is a report from Longbaoshan, North China:
Beijing, has this year experienced a series of exceptionally heavy sandstorms.   The Chinese government blames them on a process of desertification that is taking place across north China.   Chinese leaders are calling for measures to stop the spread of China's deserts.   A Beijing sandstorm feels like a biblical curse.   An eerie yellow color stains the sky.
...A fine, strangely pungent grit burns the eyes and skin.   It coats absolutely everything.   This year the sandstorms have been the worst in living memory....   This is the human cost of deforestation and overgrazing.   When the grasslands and forests disappear, the desert begins to move, carried on the wind.   An anxious Chinese government is demanding tree planting campaigns....
Condensed from a report taken from correspondent Adam Brookes, June 2000. BBC NEWS
 
"The world is turning to dust, with land the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries," the United Nations says.
"One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened."
China has lost 92,100 square kilometers (36,000 square miles), an area the size of Portugal, to desert, since the 1950s.
      
      
China plants trees in bid to save forest
Monday 27 February 2006
 
China planting trees. The trees are to restore the rapid loss of China's forests
The trees are to restore the rapid loss of China's forests
China has planted 12 billion trees over the past five years in an effort to restore its scarce forest cover and combat flooding and the loss of farmland blamed on excessive tree-cutting.
The new trees, many planted by volunteers, covered 80 million acres, Jia Zhibang, director of the State Forestry Administration said at a news conference in Beijing on Monday.
China has been trying for more than a decade to reverse the rapid loss of what little remains of its forests.
Experts blame heavy tree-cutting, spurred by rapid economic growth, for the loss of farmland to deserts and devastating summer flooding in areas where denuded hillsides fail to trap rainfall.
Tree-planting in northern China has helped to reduce the severity of the spring dust storms in Beijing and other northern cities.
Hopes
The trees planted in 2001-2005 raised the portion of China covered by forests from 16.5% to 18.2%, and the government hopes to raise that to 20% by 2010, Jia said.
The amount of China covered by what outsiders would consider forest is usually smaller than reported because the government figures often include fruit orchards and other territory with trees.
The government also hopes to increase the amount of vegetation in China's densely crowded cities, Jia said.
       AP
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Cali climate change meeting
Global youth climate movement
Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil
Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation
Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
Ice-capped roof of world turns to desert
Scientists warn of ecological catastrophe across Asia as glaciers melt and continent's great rivers dry up
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Published: 07 May 2006
Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences — the country's top scientific body — has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade.
Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River.
They added that the vast environmental changes brought about by the process will increase droughts and sandstorms over the rest of the country, and devastate many of the world's greatest rivers, in what experts warn will be an "ecological catastrophe".
The plateau, says the academy, has a staggering 46,298 glaciers, covering almost 60,000 square miles.
At an average height of 13,000 feet above sea level, they make up the largest area of ice outside the polar regions, nearly a sixth of the world's total.
The glaciers have been receding over the past four decades, as the world has gradually warmed up, but the process has now accelerated alarmingly.
Average temperatures in Tibet have risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 20 years, causing the glaciers to shrink by 7 per cent a year, which means that they will halve every 10 years.
Prof Dong Guangrong, speaking for the academy — after a study analyzing data from 680 weather stations scattered across the country — said that the rising temperatures would thaw out the tundra of the plateau, turning it into desert.
He added: "The melting glaciers will ultimately trigger more droughts, expand desertification and increase sand storms."
The water running off the plateau is increasing soil erosion and so allowing the deserts to spread.
Sandstorms, blowing in from the degraded land, are already plaguing the country.
So far this year, 13 of them have hit northern China, including Beijing.
Three weeks ago one storm swept across an eighth of the vast country and even reached Korea and Japan.
On the way, it dumped a mind-boggling 336,000 tons of dust on the capital, causing dangerous air pollution.
The rising temperatures are also endangering the newly built world's highest railway, which is due to go into operation this summer.
They threaten to melt the permafrost under the tracks of the £1.7bn Tibetan railway, constructed to link the area with China's northwestern Qinghai province.
Perhaps worst of all, the melting threatens to disrupt water supplies over much of Asia.
Many of the continent's greatest rivers — including the Yangtze, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yellow River — rise on the plateau.
In China alone, 300 million people depend on water from the glaciers for their survival.
Yet the plateau is drying up, threatening to escalate an already dire situation across the country.
Already 400 cities are short of water; in 100 of them — including Beijing — the shortages are becoming critical.
Even hopes that the melting glaciers might provide a temporary respite, by increasing the amount of water flowing off the plateau — have been dashed.
For most of the water is evaporating before it reaches the people that need it — again because of the rising temperatures brought by global warning.
Yao Tandong, head of the academy's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Research Institute, summed it up.
"The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe," he said.
©2006 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.  All rights reserved
 
Kewe cannot sleep.
He turns off the computer.
We don't see the remedies are not enough, he keeps telling himself.
One country in the world making a serious effort at afforestation — is it enough?
The rest of us, we don't see the total picture.
We are all looking at the deterioration of our local environment and not realizing that this is taking place all around the planet.
Perhaps the hardest thing is to acknowledge that any corrective actions we think our government is taking is hopelessly inadequate.
 
       United Nations report says large areas of planet drying up      
       Mekong river China dams      
  
India in Gandhi's time was a nation of 700,000 villages.   For many it still is.
Its people speak Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Sanskrit, Hindustani, English, and almost uncountable other local village languages.
India's people — many of whom never eat fish or meat — have a wildlife that thrives among them.
A land that extends from the glorious deep gorges of the Himalayas, to green valleys filled with meadow flowers, to golden beaches of white sands, to vast tropical regions, the land is threatened today by an alteration in both winter and summer monsoons.
A country of the power of more than 1,000 million people, one of India's directors for science has remarked on India's nuclear policy that India could emerge a super power in solar energy.
All the country needs to do is invest its vital, human-intelligent resources in that sector, instead of choosing new super nuclear weapons.
Still world's largest producer of ozone-depleting chemicals
India is still the world's largest producer of ozone-depleting chemical substances, despite the now positive results Scientists are observing by the reduction of use of such chemicals.   The environment ministry has introduced rules to regulate the phasing of production — over the next decade or so.
The three countries of Pakistan, India, and China have half of the world's irrigated land damaged by recent agricultural methods.   A heavy reliance upon multi-national companies selling their wares has resulted in excessive fertilizer being used.   Now there is a vast expanse of salinized and waterlogged soils in these regions.  
Seventy five percent of all human-induced salinization, over-salting of the soil, in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, is now in the Asia-Pacific region.
Again the reliance on oversees, non-native common sense:  
By the year 2005, a zealous multi-national food and agricultural industry has a plan that India will produce three quarters of its rice from just ten varieties; this, as compared with the 30,000 varieties cultivated in previous times.
    Coca-Cola and Plachimada, India    
    Deregulation, Accumulation of wealth    
    — India resistance and corporations    
    — India photos      
     India — Class war      
     Globalization      
    
Tuesday, 14 September, 2004
Worst floods in decades hit Dhaka
Flooding in Dhaka
The new floods have already cost hundreds of millions of dollars
Bangladeshi authorities have closed all government offices in the capital, Dhaka, as the worst flooding in decades hit the city.
Nearly all main roads in the city are under water.   Officials say such severe flooding is "unprecedented".
The Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, has called an emergency meeting of utility services in response to the crisis.
She has called for immediate measures to restore gas, electricity water and telephone services in worst hit areas.
Most vehicles are off the roads, train services have stopped running and food markets and businesses are shut.
In July, the rest of the nation experienced its worst floods in six years which left 600 people dead.
Open sewage
Meteorological officials believe recent rainfall is the worst for many years, overshadowing July's floods in which most of Dhaka's roads were knee deep in water.
The BBC's Waliur Rahman in Dhaka says there are concerns about sewage contaminating the city's clean water supplies and the effect of flooding on poorer people.
Flooding in Dhaka
Most traffic has been kept off roads
Our correspondent says that people in low lying areas are now buying emergency supplies and that many face grave conditions.
Businesses and markets were shut on Tuesday, increasing a floods bill that is already estimated to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Dhaka Stock Exchange has been suspended for a second day.
Flood waters can be seen outside centres of government, including the office of the prime minister, parliament and the secretariat.
Prime Minister Khaleda Zia urged the authorities to take immediate steps to remove flood water from the most severely hit parts of the city.
In some areas, rainwater has entered ground floor houses and submerged shops.
The deputy director of the Dhaka Meteorological Department, Arjumand Habib, told the AFP news agency that 341mm of rain had fallen in Dhaka on Monday, the highest recorded level in 50 years.
Parts of Dhaka's drainage system have collapsed after heavy rainfall left large areas of the city waterlogged.
At least seven people have been killed in incidents connected with the floods, including some who were electrocuted.
An official of the Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority said that almost all the city was under water and its drainage system was unable to pump out such a huge amount in so short a period of time.
The worst affected part of the city — home to more than 10m people — is the business district of Motijheel, where all roads are waist deep in water.
Dhaka mayor Sadek Hossain Khoka said the flood waters would take at least 24 hours to recede.   Weather forecasters say the rain will continue until Wednesday.
Submerged manholes
Three people were killed in the city when they came into contact with live electricity wires submerged in the water and four died in central Shariatpur district when their boat capsized in a river in a storm.
Power in many parts of the city has now been suspended to prevent further accidents.
City dwellers can't operate normally — they are in great misery
Sadek Hossain Khoka,
Dhaka mayor
Submerged manholes and potholes in roads have become dangerous hidden traps for rickshaws, the only vehicles to be seen on the streets.
The authorities at Dhaka's Zia International Airport say flights have been delayed as passengers and crew struggle to get to the airport.
More than 100,000 people were affected by water-borne diseases in the aftermath of July's floods.
The government estimated they caused around $7bn of damage.
Mining destruction Ancient forest destruction Global youth climate movement. Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil. Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation, sustainable transportation systems, environmental justice. Big Trees as Natural Monuments Big Trees as Curiosities Big Trees as Recreation Big Trees as Cathedrals of Nature Endangered Big Trees From Sacred Symbol to Industrial Stumpage Photo: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/
Mining destruction
Global youth climate movement
Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil
Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation
Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
GLOBAL GARDEN GROWS GREENER
A NASA-Department of Energy jointly funded study has concluded that Earth has been greening over the past 20 years.   Climate changes have provided extra doses of water, heat and sunlight in areas where one or more of those ingredients have been lacking.  
Plants finding conditions easier are flourishing in places where climatic conditions previously limited growth.
"Our study proposes climatic changes as the leading cause for the increases in plant growth over the last two decades, with lesser contribution from carbon dioxide fertilization and forest regrowth," said Ramakrishna Nemani, the study's lead author from the University of Montana, Missoula, Montana.
Nemani and colleagues constructed a global map of the Net Primary Production (NPP) of plants from climate and satellite data of vegetation greenness and solar radiation absorption.   NPP is the difference between the CO2 absorbed by plants during photosynthesis, and CO2 lost by plants during respiration.
NPP is the foundation for food, fiber and fuel derived from plants, without which life on Earth could not exist.  Humans appropriate approximately 50 percent of global NPP.  
NPP increased significantly over 25% of the global vegetated area, but decreased over 7% of the area; illustrating how plants tend to respond in various ways, depending on regional climatic conditions.  
Co-author, Charles Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, cautions no one knows whether these positive impacts are due to short-term climate cycles, or longer-term global climate changes.
Climatic changes, over approximately the past 20 years, trended to easing climatic limits to plant growth.   In general, in areas where temperatures restricted plant growth, it became warmer; where sunlight was needed, clouds dissipated; and where it was too dry, it rained more.
In the Amazon, plant growth was limited by sun blocking cloud cover, but the skies have become less cloudy.
Also is mentioned is that a 36 percent increase in global population, from 4.45 billion in 1980 to 6.08 billion in 2000, overshadows the increases in plant growth.
       How ozone is made      
            Global warming makes Earth greener      
BIOMASS BURNING
For millennia, the early people of the continent now called Australia burnt their land as a purifying method to open the underbrush.
The elders understanding when it is a time to burn still torch in their retained parks.
Today data from the forests of the United States, from the Scandinavian countries, from Canada, Russia, China, South East Asia, show a dramatic increase in biomass burning.
Burning of any plant material is biomass burning.
Lightning and human torching causes fire in forests, in grasslands, on savannas and on agricultural lands.  
Studies by scientists indicate the doubling of the moisture content in the stratosphere over the last 50 years has been caused, at least in part, by the increase in biomass burning.
Water vapor shifts from the troposphere into the stratosphere, and the higher humidity helps in the destruction of the ozone layer.   Catalysis takes place.  
Water vapor seepage, and the continual build up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pockets, may in the future have a much greater role in ozone destruction than CFC usage.
Accompanying water vapor seepage, the clearing of forests and grassland for agricultural purposes and the burning of land before the growing season, have significantly increased the levels of methane oxidation, a greenhouse creating gas, entering the atmosphere.
       For information on biomass burning: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards      
       http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov:81/Library/BiomassBurning      
       Pollution linked to rainfall and drought      
MILLIONS OF HECTARES DESTROYED
Carbon dioxide emissions of fires, including decayed plant matter and accumulated peat, pours multi-millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
With climate change making the forests drier, the cutting of forests, combined with lightning, is allowing huge areas to become ignited.
With the opening of forests, for every acre of forest destroyed, at least one more acre burns in ground fire.
Over the last few decades, millions of hectares of trees have been lost by lightning causes, extreme weather conditions, and by human torching.
Countries such as Portugal, France, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the United States, and Mongolia all have had substantial loss of forest due to fire.
All regions of the world have shrunk in forests, often to non-existence, in the past hundred years.
Of the forests that remain, cutting, both for timber and as clearing for agriculture, continues almost unabated.
Between 1850 and today, a quarter of all forests have been removed throughout Asia and Southeast Asia.
95% of the United States forests have disappeared over the past two hundred years.
NASA's Landsat satellite photographs show that between 1980 and 1995 more than 200,000 square miles, an area the size of France, has been cleared and burned in Brazil alone.
Usage of wood is growing faster in developing world
The people of the United States, Canada, and most European countries, consume ten times more paper products than developing nations, but usage of wood and paper, from trees, is growing faster in the developing world.
Managed restoration of forested areas to take care of the demand is far from adequate.
Major players in the global development race have used public money to harvest forests, especially the tropical forests that remain, and have done so with minimal or no environmental, freedom-of-information or human rights policies.
Little has been done to restore the forests.
The Amazon is a good example of how trees and water connect.
About half of the rain that falls on the forest is produced by the forest itself — the forest breathes out water through its multi-billions of capillaries.
When forests are cut, there are fewer plants to hold the rain and recycle it back.
More water runs over topsoil, carrying that away, leaving less moisture to make rain, and barren lifeless soil for hectares around.
Commercial logging bans in Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Thailand, and Viet Nam have slowed, but not halted the cutting of trees in these lands.
For example, before the logging ban in 1988 in Thailand, forest depletion averaged more than 480,000 hectares per year.
In the last decade it was down to 100,000 hectares lost per year.
With mass flooding, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Thailand, Philippines, and Viet Nam have all have begun to established forest plantations.
But due to increasing demand, cutting continues.
       CO2 record high levels in the atmosphere      

    Highest for 650,000 years    

       — Climate fear as carbon levels soar      
            Nine of ten warmest years      
            Clock ticking for forests      
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Ancient forest destruction
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Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
 THE CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA
Half of Australian forests have been cut.
Of the original forest estates that do remain, less than a quarter are unaffected by clearing or harvesting.
Logging of trees in Tasmania is taking out whole segments of that, once considered endless stronghold.
The cutting of the precious few trees that help keep the climate cooler on the mainland, including the tropical forests of Queensland, continues.
The National director of the Australian Wilderness Society Alec Marr said: "The time for clearing in Queensland is over.   It's long past time this stopped."
Despite the protests, land is identified as being needed for other purposes, the trees considered merely a valuable money asset.
Endemic replanting is taking place in Australia, but new growth is far from adequate to recreate former areas that thrived as forestland.
Australians are the fourth biggest users of water among 30 industrialised nations, despite living on the driest inhabited continent on earth.
Eastern Australia has already experienced five consecutive years of below-normal rainfall, while August 2006 was the driest August on record.
Some 92 percent of New South Wales, the most populous state, is considered officially in drought.
Soaring temperatures, bone-dry soil and an extreme lack of rain have primed Australia for a potentially harrowing summer of mega-fires.
Bushfire season in Australia usually begins at the turn of the year, but as firefighters fought more than 50 blazes that erupted around Sydney this past weekend, government officials warned of the potential for a mega-bushfire season.
According to authorities from nearly every Australian state, severe drought and hotter-than-normal temperatures have turned massive areas of land into virtual tinderboxes that are only a spark away from devastation.
August 2006 was not only the hottest on record for Australia, it was also the driest.
       Tree top protest over Tasmania      
       Wetlands cleared and ploughed      
       Australia poisoning land      
Monday, 6 November 2006
Living with Australia's drought
By Matthew Davis
BBC News, New Orleans
Residents in Goulburn are living with strict water rations due to the continuing drought
Residents in Goulburn, Australia are living with strict water rations
Goulburn in New South Wales is Australia's oldest inland city.
But when it comes to dealing with chronic water shortages it offers an alarming glimpse of the future.
A town of some 22,000 people, situated about two-and-half hours south of Sydney, it has been coping with severe water restrictions for the past five years.
With the town in the grip of Australia's worst drought in a century — there has been no significant rainfall in Goulburn since January and not a single drop in October — residents are confronted with all manner of water-related prohibitions.
All use of town water outside is banned, which includes hosing the garden, washing the car, and filling or topping up swimming pools or spas.
Households are only allowed to consume 150 litres per person per day.
If they exceed that target, they are faced with hefty fines. Bills are already soaring. Wardens patrol the streets on the look-out for "water louts" (residents who illegally use their hoses).
The town's streets, avenues and cul-de-sacs have become a sun-dried suburbia, a scorched landscape of parched lawns and dying plants and flowers.
Joanne Godbar stands with a stopwatch. Living with drought in in Goulburn, Australia.
Obviously with the showering, we have to time the shower
Joanne Godbar stands with a stopwatch
Dusty cars sit unwashed on the driveways.
Rugby teams have to cut back on their training because the ground is so hard.
There are even fears that the cricket season will have to be cancelled by the New Year unless there is a break in the drought.
So no wonder Joanne Godbar is standing in her bathroom posed with a stopwatch, looking like the starter in an Olympics 100 metres final rather than a mother-of-two.
Her daughter is just about to take a shower, and Joanne is making sure that she does not spend more than five minutes under the water.
"Obviously with the showering, we have to time the shower," says Joanne.
"You have to be really careful with the washing machine.   Clothes that aren't too dirty just go back in the drawer.   And then there's a garden.   Well, we haven't got a garden any more.   We've just accepted the fact that we will never again have a nice green lush lawn."
The scale of the problem facing Goulburn is clear at Pejar Dam, one of the town's main reservoirs.
It is an empty bowl, with just 2% of its capacity.
Even the small amount of water that is resting on the bottom is impractical to use.
You would lose too much through evaporation by transporting it into town.
A sign by the side of the reservoir says that boating is banned — a glaring statement of the obvious.
"We'd be a good 10 metres under water where we standing now," explained Greg Finlayson, Manager of Water Services at the local council.
Every four days a farmer in Australia is committing suicide.
I haven't contemplated that myself, but it destroys my soul
Farmer Charlie Prell
"For the past two years we've been under the most severe water restrictions in Australia, and possibly the western world."
"During the winter, the water consumption has been cut in half.
During the summer, the residents and business are using just a quarter of what they used to consume."
Falling income
Travel further down the road, and you come to Gundowringa farm.
The Prell family has been farming this land for four generations, but fears it might have to leave if the rain does not come soon.
At this time of the year, the farm should be a dreamy picture of lush rolling hills.
But it has been starved of water, and the bleached landscape is dying.
The family has kept an accurate measure of monthly rainfall since 1895.
In October, for the first time ever, there was not a single drop of rain.
Charlie Prell took me for a tour of the farm, driving through dried-out river beds and showing me his bedraggled sheep and cattle.
Pejar Dam One of Goulburn's main reservoirs is dry Residents in Goulburn Australia are living with strict water rations due to the continuing drought
One of Goulburn's main reservoirs is dry
The farm's income stream has dropped by 50%, and the family has had to sell-off a third of its land to make ends meet.
Last year, sheep commanded a price of A$40-50 a head.
Now it has plummeted to A$10-15 a head.
The price has fallen because of a glut in the market.
Farmers are selling off their sheep at bargain basement prices because they cannot afford to feed them through the summer.
"Every four days a farmer in Australia is committing suicide," he says.
"I haven't contemplated that myself, but it destroys my soul."
Contingency plans
Many businesses have been forced to totally reinvent the way they operate to deal with the water shortage.
Dad's Car Wash is a case in point.
With cars lined up bumper to bumper, it is doing a roaring trade — which comes as no surprise, since it is the only place in Goulburn right now where you can get your car washed.
Goulburn Australia. One of Goulburn's main reservoirs is dry. Residents in Goulburn, Australia are living with strict water rations due to the continuing drought.
One of Goulburn's main reservoirs is dry
Had it not invested A$100,000 in a recycling plant which allows it to re-use grey water, the business would have faced ruin.
"The place would probably have lasted six months," according to owner Jeff Hayward.
"So it really was a case of do or die.   A$100,000 is a lot of money, but we employ 10 people so it was not just me that was going to be affected but the staff as well.   So we really thought we must do it."
Painful though the process has been, Goulburn is learning to cope with its severe water restrictions, and people seem to deal with them with a combination of resilience and resignation.
The local council claims the town may be in better shape than other Australian cities, for the simple reason that over the course of five rain-starved years it has become adept at tackling the problem.
Still, if the drought continues, the water crunch will only get worse.
A contingency plan is already in place to transport water into the town by the truckload — a task that would require 40 trucks a day, at a cost of A$1m a week.
The worrying question for Goulburn — and indeed, communities all over the world: Is this the new normal?
 
Lake Chad provides water to more than 20 million people living in the four countries which surround it — Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, in Africa. Lake Chad, a remnant of a former inland sea has grown and shrunk with changes in climate over the past 13,000 years. Lake Chad was at its largest, around 4000 BC. when it is estimated to have covered an area of 400,000 km². Lake sediments appear to indicate dry periods, when the lake nearly dried up, around 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC, and 100 BC. It was one of the largest lakes in the world when first surveyed by Europeans in 1823. Images: NASA
Lake Chad provides water to more than 20 million people living in the four countries which surround it — Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, in Africa.
Lake Chad, a remnant of a former inland sea has grown and shrunk with changes in climate over the past 13,000 years.
Lake Chad was at its largest, around 4000 BC. when it is estimated to have covered an area of 400,000 km².
Lake sediments appear to indicate dry periods, when the lake nearly dried up, around 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC, and 100 BC.
It was one of the largest lakes in the world when first surveyed by Europeans in 1823.
Images: NASA
AFRICA
In middle Africa, the mighty Congo River making its way to the coast passes through a forest-savanna mosaic.
Framing the river are wide, flat expanses of tableland, separated by canyons that plunge to enormous depths.
Here is some of Earth's most beautiful work, and here the forests of Africa, as the rest of the world's large forests, are diminishing rapidly.
Humankind, for the first time since they began to climb out of the trees, now has the ability to cut down all the world's centers of trees.
The forests in Africa are threatened by agricultural expansion, by drought, by bush fires, by human need, and civil war that wrecks constant havoc.
Large-scale oil exploration and mining is a major cause of deforestation.
Purchases of timber from East Asia, Europe, and North America fuel the widespread destruction and devastation.
In Uganda, forests and woodlands have shrunk from 45% of total land area in 1900, to an estimated 8% and even that 8% is being attached for use.
The relic blocks of forests left at Gola in Sierra Leone, at Sapo in Liberia, at Tai in Côte d'Ivoire, are now of global importance because of their rarity.
These forest fragments are the last remains of a once complex and species-rich expanse that flourished in the upper Guinea area.
Fouta Djallon, Mount Nimba, and Loma, in essence all the watersheds in Western Africa, are increasingly at risk.   Lands that are areas of exceptional biodiversity.'
One fifth of all remaining African trees are now in a single country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.   The forests of this central, bio-diverse nation are slowly being cut, and shifted away.
The flora and fauna of these diminishing worlds — plus the extremely high level of endemism of Madagascar — has placed the countries on a long, always getting longer, list of desperate, environmental priority.
       Global warming choking life out of Lake Tanganyika      
            Kalahari sands stirred by greenhouse gases and heatwaves      
 
Wangari Maathai — Tree Planter
Forests cleared
As I was growing up, I witnessed forests being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations, which destroyed local biodiversity and the capacity of the forests to conserve water.
In 1977, when we started the Green Belt Movement, I was partly responding to needs identified by rural women, namely lack of firewood, clean drinking water, balanced diets, shelter and income.
Throughout Africa, women are the primary caretakers, holding significant responsibility for tilling the land and feeding their families.
As a result, they are often the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce and incapable of sustaining their families.
The women we worked with recounted that unlike in the past, they were unable to meet their basic needs.
This was due to the degradation of their immediate environment as well as the introduction of commercial farming, which replaced the growing of household food crops.
But international trade controlled the price of the exports from these small-scale farmers and a reasonable and just income could not be guaranteed.
Undermines future generations
I came to understand that when the environment is destroyed, plundered or mismanaged, we undermine our quality of life and that of future generations.
Tree planting became a natural choice to address some of the initial basic needs identified by women.
Also, tree planting is simple, attainable and guarantees quick, successful results within a reasonable amount time.
This sustains interest and commitment.
So, together, we have planted over 30 million trees that provide fuel, food, shelter, and income to support their children's education and household needs.
The activity also creates employment and improves soils and watersheds.
Through their involvement, women gain some degree of power over their lives, especially their social and economic position and relevance in the family.
This work continues.
       Nobel Peace Prize Lecture — Wangari Maathai      
       Africa rain forests cut and destroyed       
       Earth's most beautiful work, the forests of Africa      
Clean energy Global youth climate movement. Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil. Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation, sustainable transportation systems, environmental justice. Big Trees as Natural Monuments Big Trees as Curiosities Big Trees as Recreation Big Trees as Cathedrals of Nature Endangered Big Trees From Sacred Symbol to Industrial Stumpage Photo: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/
Clean energy
Global youth climate movement
Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil
Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation
Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
Tuesday, 3 October 2006
Maathai writes of prison ordeal
Wangari Maathai plants a tree in celebration Wangari Maathai won the Nobel peace prize in 2004
Wangari Maathai won the Nobel peace prize in 2004
The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai, has told the BBC she wrote her autobiography to give hope to others.  
She said she was always asked about her upbringing and what inspired her campaign for the environment, so she decided to share her experiences.
She writes of how her activism led from dark days in prison to world acclaim.
"Even young people, who come from very humble backgrounds like me, can feel they too can do something," she said.
"You have to use whatever opportunities come your way."
Mrs Maathai said her divorce from her husband was the most painful and deeply personal experience of her life, but being thrown into prison during President Daniel arap Moi's government was also very difficult.
"I had small children and I didn't know how they were reacting.   They were old enough to understand that mummy was in jail but were not old enough to understand why," she told the BBC's Network Africa programme.
Her autobiography Unbowed, published by Knopf, is being launched in Nairobi.
"There I was, dressed to kill with my beads in a cell that was cold, dank, filthy, smelly and crowded, with no room to sit down, water was all over," she writes.
"Later I was put into a concrete, maximum-security cell with four other women and given a uniform, a pan to use as a toilet, and a blanket.   the women warders also cut off my braids."
'Bogus'
Unbowed — the book
Life is a journey — sometimes it is pleasant and sometimes it is painful
Wangari Maathai
MP and Nobel Peace Laureate

"To the cheers of a packed house, one MP said that because I had supposedly repudiated my husband in public, I could not be taken seriously and that my behaviour had damaged his respect for all women."
During the debate, her Green Belt Movement, mostly of women who planted trees to combat the devastating effects of deforestation and desertification, was described as a "bogus organisation" in which she spent all her time travelling abroad, by another MP.
She said that pain and suffering is not invited but comes because of the path you have chosen to walk.
"Life is a journey — sometimes it is pleasant and sometimes it is painful — but the important thing is to make the best of it and that is what I tried to do."
The Nobel Peace Prize awarding committee described Mrs Maathai as "a source of inspiration for everyone in Africa fighting for sustainable development, democracy and peace".
She became an environmental campaigner after planting some trees in her back garden.
This inspired her to set up the Green Belt Movement in 1977.
Her campaign to mobilise poor women to plant some 30 million trees has been copied by other countries.
She was elected to parliament in 2001, and became deputy environment minister in 2003.
Wind power Global youth climate movement. Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil and environmental justice. Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation, and sustainable transportation systems. Big Trees as Natural Monuments Big Trees as Curiosities Big Trees as Recreation Big Trees as Cathedrals of Nature Endangered Big Trees From Sacred Symbol to Industrial Stumpage Photo: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/
Wind power
Global youth climate movement
Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil
Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation
Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
In 2001, for example, IBAMA (the Brazilian Environmental Agency) issued authorisation documents for deforestation of 5,342 hectares, but the total deforestation showed by satellite images from INPE (the Brazilian Institute of Space Research) reveals that 523,700 hectares were deforested.
In other words, in 2001 just 1% of the total deforestation area was authorized.
Previous years' data is similar.
THE AMERICAS
Around the world, the process of deforestation is eradicating much of the planet's remaining wild animal species.
More than two-thirds of the world's wildlife habitats have been destroyed, or reduced to a fraction of areas that formerly existed.   This over the last few decades!
The last few of these species (except for those animals and birds who learn to urbanize) live within the remaining areas now being deforested.
Caribbean, Bahamian, forest clearing had until recently been for sugar and banana plantations.
Forestland converted for tourists who flock to these islands is the new cause of clearing.

Fragmentation (unsustainable habitats for wildlife) continues as the natural forests in the offshore islands dwindle.
In South America, vast expanses of natural wild areas have been razed in recent years.  
Countries are still granting concessions to overseas forestry companies.   Guyana, Surinam, Bolivia, Venezuela, all are opening, or are considering opening, large areas of primary forests to be harvested.
Logging increases flammability of surrounding forest.
Logging once begun increases the flammability of the surrounding forest.
Opening up the leaf canopy allows for sunlight to penetrate the fuel layer of dead leaves and branches on the ground.
As surface fires erupt, the surrounding areas also dry out.
Surface fires create more forest fires.
This drying, caused by logging opening up the canopy, is not included state deforestation monitoring programs.
This feedback, circles of drying fires creating more surrounding drying, represents a new qualitative change in many areas.
Fire — helped by human destructive activity, under conditions of climate change, and the opening of forests — is now threatening much greater areas.  
Fires caused by logging are releasing significant amounts of carbonic gases into the atmosphere.
The Amazon basin and region accounts for ten percent of primary living processes necessary for the maintenance of life of the planet, giving a rich supply of oxygen.
Tree cutting for logging, for farming, and in the last decade for coca farming (cocaine), and the accompanying soil-erosion, is creating vast no-growth land areas.
The change — where the land taken is suitable for two years of farming, then becomes barren, with the cutting of always newer trees deeper into the forest — is depriving the whole of the planet of its former strength, for both human and animal habitation.
     Amazon destruction speeds up    
     Worsening drought in the Amazon basin      
      Deforestation underestimated by at least 60%    
       Man made grotesque calamity      
       Increased biomass helps clean carbon dioxide from the air.      
       Camisea Natural Gas Project      
       Araucaria Forest      
       Hundreds of slaves freed in Brazil      
       Sustainable Amazon      
This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history.
If you look at NRDC's website you'll see over 400 major environmental roll backs that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It's a stealth attack.
The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian rhetoric.
When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act.
When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill.
But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.
    Robert F. Kennedy, Jr    
    Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005    
As an example of a country that has listened, Aotearoa environmentalists, turning their attention to logging in privately owned indigenous forests, have amended their Forests Act.
Today, less than 3% of New Zealand's indigenous forests are logged.
Trees not endemic are not being allowed to be planted at the expense of local regenerating indigenous vegetation.
These new laws have significantly modified the behavior of the larger logging companies.
       Greenpeace appalled at giant coal mine approval      
Solid Energy's haste risks giant land snail's extinction
Thursday, 29 September 2005
Press Release: Royal Forest And Bird Protection Society
Solid Energy risks causing the extinction of the endangered giant land snail, Powelliphanta "Augustus", in its haste to mine the only known habitat of this ancient species, the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society says.
All Powelliphanta snails are absolutely protected species under the Wildlife Act. Solid Energy has applied to the Department of Conservation for permission to move up to 100 snails from a 5 hectare (ha.) area to another part of the Stockton mine site. It then intends to dig up the species' source habitat.
"Solid Energy's proposals would effectively kill off all but the 100 snails it wants to move. It is uncertain that these would survive translocation. This could pose a real risk of extinction when the total population is thought to be no more than 800-1000 snails and possibly less," Forest and Bird field officer, Eugenie Sage said.
"Solid Energy's claim that its Stockton mine plan "requires" it to mine all 5 ha. of an endangered species' only known habitat in the next few months represents a failure to take environmentally responsible management seriously."
"The coal is not going anywhere. Solid Energy's mining licence covers 2,310 ha. If it wanted to be environmentally responsible, the company could delay mining 5 ha. to examine properly the options for protecting Powelliphanta "Augustus".
These options include not mining the site, using underground techniques, mining only part of the site, and/or thoroughly researching, planning and trialing translocation techniques."
Information obtained from the Department of Conservation under the Official Information Act shows serious flaws and risks in Solid Energy's proposal.
A departmental report says that to eliminate risk, the time frame required is years with a trial first to determine whether the transferred snails survive and breed.
"This is very different from Solid Energy's one-off proposal with no trial and a timeframe of weeks or months," said Ms Sage.
"Conservation Minister Chris Carter is being poorly advised if he believes, as he told Forest and Bird recently, "Solid Energy's decisions on its Stockton mine are operational and it is not appropriate for the Minister of State Owned Enterprises, or me, to intervene in this matter."
"The possible extinction of Powelliphanta "Augustus" is not an operational matter to be left to the Board of Solid Energy.
"It is an issue which the Minister of Conservation and Solid Energy's shareholding ministers of SOEs and Finance must take action over in line with the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy ," Ms Sage said.
"Labour took decisive action to protect West Coast forests against the SOE Timberlands' high impact logging in 1999. Protecting this endangered species of giant land snail is even more urgent," she said.
 
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
Scanning the details he is copying, Kewe looks at the laws New Zealand, one of our very small nations, certainly far from the richest, is enacting.
He thinks of the United States where only 5% of the country's original forests remain.
Replanting is mostly to benefit the forest industry.
It is to their specific needs.
The tallest, oldest trees are cut. Little serious replanting is being done to try to restore any semblance of former ancient forests.
The few natural forests that do remain are diminishing by fire, and by disease.
The US Forest Service allows for 136,000 square miles to be logged each year.
80% of public forestlands are not permanently protected.
Clearing continues.
Few indigenous trees are replanted in an attempt to restore the forest to how they were.
Chainsaws and bulldozers are cutting down trees when we could be using farming methods such as hemp for growing paper.   Hemp growing is severely restricted.
There are segments of people who are seeking to place Earth's stability first, and are attempting to halt forests from being felled for paper.
Unfortunately they are not succeeding.
 
       Siberia, Alaska      
       Dramatic permafrost melt      
EXTINCTION AND MANIPULATION OF GENETIC MATERIAL
 
Norway to House Seeds in Doomsday Vault
A doomsday vault has been carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island ready to serve as a Noah's Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe.
Near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway's remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole, the purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out.
The seeds, packaged in foil, are to be be collected and stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust trust, founded in 2004, has helped with the project and will help run the vault that starts accepting seeds from around the world September 2007.
The Svalbard Archipelago, 300 miles north of the mainland, was selected because it is located far from many threats and has a consistently cold climate.
Norway is paying for the storarage, amounting to about $4.8 million for infrastructure costs.
Seed vault in a cavern under a remote Norwegian Arctic mountain
The entrance to the Arctic Seed Vault. In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster. Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom. The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978. Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane. The 16 September 2007 Arctic minimum ice extent falls below the minimum set on 20-21 September 2005 by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, NSIDC, judges the ice extent on a five-day mean. Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record in 2007, US scientists have confirmed. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September, 2007. The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005. Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open. Image: Global Crop Diversity Trust/Mari Tefre

The entrance to the Arctic Seed Vault.
In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster.
Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.
Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The 16 September 2007 Arctic minimum ice extent falls below the minimum set on 20-21 September 2005 by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center, NSIDC, judges the ice extent on a five-day mean.
Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record in 2007, US scientists have confirmed.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September, 2007.
The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open.
Photo: Global Crop Diversity Trust/Mari Tefre
Image inserted by TheWE.cc
Already, some 1,400 seed banks around the world, most of them national, hold samples of their host country's crops.
But these banks are vulnerable to shutdowns, natural disasters, war and lack of funds, said Riis-Johansen.
Storing duplicate seeds in the Svalbard vault is meant to offer a fail-safe system for the planet.
In the United States, the government is storing wild seeds.
Mass removal of plants are taking place around the planet, including the fields streams and byways of the United States, and botanists are storing seeds hoping they can retain a little of the vast genetic coding for the use of future generations.
Terminator seeds
The US is co-owner of a genetically engineered seed that cannot be regerminated.
The aim is to force farmers to purchase all their annual seed needs from corporations, to prevent them from using seed produced in their own fields.  
University research, with private industry grants, moves ahead despite protests.
   Opponents point out that terminator seed will develop problems at some future time, and with no local farm backup, bulk seed will not be obtainable.
   New 'Terminator' patents are being applied for.
MON 863 — Rats fed Monsanto GM corn due for sale in Britain developed abnormalities in blood and kidneys
Kite flown to protest cultivation of GM maize.
A kite is flown to protest against the cultivation of GM genetically modified maize. France is Europe's top agricultural producer. In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster. Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom. The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978. Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane. The 16 September 2007 Arctic minimum ice extent falls below the minimum set on 20-21 September 2005 by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, NSIDC, judges the ice extent on a five-day mean. Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record in 2007, US scientists have confirmed. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September, 2007. The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005. Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open. Image: DDP/Michael Kappeler

A kite is flown to protest against the cultivation of GM genetically modified maize.
France is Europe's top agricultural producer.
In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster.
Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.
Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The 16 September 2007 Arctic minimum ice extent falls below the minimum set on 20-21 September 2005 by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center, NSIDC, judges the ice extent on a five-day mean.
Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record in 2007, US scientists have confirmed.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September, 2007.
The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open.
Photo: DDP/Michael Kappeler
Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.
The Independent on Sunday can today reveal details of secret research carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant, which shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of their blood.
According to the confidential 1,139-page report, these health problems were absent from another batch of rodents fed non-GM food as part of the research project.
The disclosures come as European countries, including Britain, prepare to vote on whether the GM-modified corn should go on sale to the public.
A vote last week by the European Union failed to secure agreement over whether the product should be sold here, after Britain and nine other countries voted in favor.
Forced into retirement
...That research, which was roundly denounced by ministers and the British scientific establishment, was halted and Dr Arpad Pusztai, the scientist behind the controversial findings, was forced into retirement amid a huge row over the claim.
Dr Pusztai reported a "huge list of significant differences" between rats fed GM and conventional corn, saying the results strongly indicate that eating significant amounts of it can damage health.
Freeze on commercial genetically modified crops not allowed under EU rules
French anti-globalization icon Jose Bove takes part in a demonstration against the Genetically modified crops in 2006. A total freeze on commercial genetically modified crops is not allowed under EU rules, the European Commission said Friday, September 21, 2007. France is Europe's top agricultural producer. In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster. Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom. The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978. Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane. The 16 September 2007 Arctic minimum ice extent falls below the minimum set on 20-21 September 2005 by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, NSIDC, judges the ice extent on a five-day mean. Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record in 2007, US scientists have confirmed. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September, 2007. The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005. Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open. Image: AFP/Olivier Laban-Mattei

French anti-globalization icon Jose Bove takes part in a demonstration against the Genetically modified crops in 2006.
A total freeze on commercial genetically modified crops is not allowed under EU rules, the European Commission said Friday, September 21, 2007.
France is Europe's top agricultural producer.
In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster.
Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.
Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The 16 September 2007 Arctic minimum ice extent falls below the minimum set on 20-21 September 2005 by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center, NSIDC, judges the ice extent on a five-day mean.
Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record in 2007, US scientists have confirmed.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September, 2007.
The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Northwest Passage was open.
Photo: AFP/Olivier Laban-Mattei
The new study is into a corn, codenamed MON 863, which has been modified by Monsanto to protect itself against corn rootworm, which the company describes as "one of the most pernicious pests affecting maize crops around the world".
  A HANDFULL OF COMPANIES 
 
With astonishing rapidity, extremely large multi-national companies are being allowed to govern global production, global processing and global marketing of food.
Conglomerate corporations, operating in many diversified fields, today own the world's food and agricultural companies.   These companies continue with research into producing power foods, with minimal regard to genetic future problems such as inbreeding depression.
A limited gene pool is retained in laboratories to answer to the world's populations.		 
       Destruction of the World's Seeds      
         — Dr. Vandana Shiva      
       — Globalization      
      
Study: GM crops bad news for nature
Tuesday 22 March 2005
 
A study shows wildlife are attracted more to natural farms
A study on the impact of genetically modified (GMO) crops on wildlife has found birds and bees are more likely to thrive in fields of natural rapeseed than GMO seed.
But scientists behind the British study also stressed that the differences between the two arose not because the crop was genetically engineered but because of the way pesticides were applied.
"The study demonstrates the importance of the effects of herbicide management on wildlife in fields and adjacent areas," researcher David Bohan said.
Green groups, however, were aghast. "These results are yet another major blow to the biotech industry. Growing GM winter oilseed rape would have a negative impact on farmland wildlife," Friends of the Earth campaigner Clare Oxborrow said.
Study
The study was the last in a four-part $9.5 million test of controversial technology — the largest experiment of its kind in the world.
Scientists said that when compared with conventional winter-sown rapeseed, GMO herbicide-resistant plants kept the same number of weeds overall, having more grass weeds but fewer broad-leaved weeds.

"The study demonstrates the importance of the effects of herbicide management on wildlife in fields and adjacent areas"
David Bohan
Researcher
Flowers of broad-leaved weeds provide food for insects, while their seeds are an important food source for other wildlife.
Researchers said that while fields planted with the biotech version were found to have fewer butterflies and bees, differences arose not because the crop was genetically-changed but because of the way they were sprayed.
In October 2003, the same government trials found that GMO sugar beet spraying was significantly more damaging to the environment than the management of conventional varieties.
They also concluded that gene-spliced spring-sown rapeseed may also have a negative impact on wildlife, while GMO feed maize did not.
The biotech lobby insists the crops are safe.
"GM crops offer a better, more flexible weed management option for farmers and, as the results today indicate, the difference between the impact of growing GM and non-GM crops on biodiversity is minimal," Tony Combes, deputy chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, which represents biotech firms like Monsanto and Syngenta, said.
       Agencies
  

Consumers of first world nations are directly linked to the devastation of the planet's resources.
Every purchase of timber without regard to reforestation, use of materials mined without regard to how the mined surface areas, and peoples, are wasted, disregard for usage of oil for fuel and transportation, these make us all directly involved.
Each piece of mahogany furniture, every strip of Indonesian plywood, each piece of virgin paper and cardboard used from unreforested trees is destruction.
Each domestic automobile that uses power consuming energy far beyond what normal travel warrants, is wanton irresponsibility.
With the knowledge we have — knowledge is available — we can do something.
What can we do?
Trees are a start:
Wind power Global youth climate movement. Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil. Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation, sustainable transportation systems, environmental justice. Big Trees as Natural Monuments Big Trees as Curiosities Big Trees as Recreation Big Trees as Cathedrals of Nature Endangered Big Trees From Sacred Symbol to Industrial Stumpage Photo: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/
Wind power
Global youth climate movement
Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil
Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation
Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
 1. Deforestation creates streams that become clouded with sedimentation, smothering spawning beds.
Water temperatures rise with no shade.
 
 2.Old growth and new growth endemic forests provide life-nurturing areas for those who are not of the human species.
Yet habitats for these others are also important for human well-being.
 
 3.Carbon sequestration is vital to a world pouring ever more pollutants into the atmosphere.
Trees and surrounding plants act as carbon sinks.
They take greenhouse gasses and replenish oxygen into the atmosphere.		 
Afforestation program
China, which by 1980 had only eight percent of its land under forest cover, has adopted both a reforestation and afforestation program.
The mass agenda of the government has problems.
Trees planted in areas lacking rainfall are suspected of depleting precious groundwater reserves.
But under China's Agenda 21, forest cover should be increased to 17% of the total land area by 2010.
China hopes by a ban on logging to save the remnants of forest cover on the upper headwaters of its rivers.
It also hopes to prevent once formally 'El Niño' situations, now annually occurring disastrous flooding.
Flooding that is wreaking havoc yearly along heavily populated rivers.
Regardless of China's policy, the millions of hectares of forests that remain in surrounding Asia are still under attack.
Yet homeland trees cannot satisfy the needs of many of Asia's burgeoning populations.
In many places, timber for home consumption is now having to be imported.
Where is it coming from?
The dwindling forests of Africa, South, and Central America, and Canada are providing this material.
Trees felled for paper and to provide wood products for an increasing need means the former forests that have provided carbon sinks for the world are no longer there.
The once massive forests of Brazil and Africa and South East Asia and now even Canada, year by year are being eaten away.  
Afforestation too expensive?
Afforestation in any language is a word not in the dictionary for most governments.
Neither is the idea considered, that trees purchased today, without the requirement and payment for reforestation, is a momentary thoughtless economic parsimony.
That each unreplaced tree adds to the loss to the planet's strength.
The United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, the United Kingdom, most of the world's nations, give limited resources to retain the integrity of their forests, and to the ecosystems inside forest.
Slovenia, one of a few countries actively seeking protection and renewal of forests, has introduced a unique habitat of "eco-cells."
Eco-cells is a system set to protect species, one of the progressive systems that could be introduced and adopted around the planet.
In other related environmental areas of concern, these below are among the many:
    PHOTOCHEMICAL SMOG
Scientists are saying a growing cocktail of soot, particles, aerosols, and other airborne pollutants are flowing around the planet.
Besides having an effect on human health, satellite readings are showing global implications with regard to weather.
A pollution parcel will travel halfway around the globe in a week.
These parcels, concentrating in the lower troposphere, are intensifying as emissions from developing nations escalate.
           Pollution linked to rainfall and drought      
Frogs, newts and amphibians in general are rapidly becoming threatened worldwide, a new study shows.
Frogs, newts and amphibians in general are rapidly becoming threatened worldwide, a new study shows.
"Amphibians have a moist, wet, rather delicate skin. They absorb things. They're good red flags for us to watch."
Geoffrey Hammerson, research zoologist.
OZONE DEPLETION
2006 saw the largest loss of Ozone in the Southern Hemisphere ever.
Densely populated areas are under direct risk from substantial ozone decline in the Northern Hemisphere.
North America and Europe, recognized as a root cause for the destabilization of the ecosphere in all parts of the world, with per capita production and consumption rates highest in the world, have minimal budgets to seek redress for this issue.
CFC's have been identified to be the sole cause.   Global warming and the restricting of heat reaching the stratosphere is now considered equal if not more significant to stratospheric ozone loss.  
The attitude remains in developed countries that ozone loss, and environment problems in general are not something they alone should pay to solve, that costs should be shared by all.
The developed countries, and the United States as the biggest contributor, are responsible for global warming.
       How ozone is made      
       One-third of amphibian species threatened      
VEGETATION COVER AND TUNDRA ACTIVITY
With an increase in total vegetation cover, especially in the tundra, it is not known how this will effect global warming.   Changes caused by the warming of the tundra may in itself amplify the effects.
A large scale conversion will likely create new dynamics to the whole climate system of the planet.
An increase in emissions of methane from tundra will add to gases already being released into the atmosphere by human activity.
Scientist Sergei Zimov takes a sample of ground taken from a layer of melting permafrost on the Duvanny Yar cliff, some 75 miles from the town of Chersky, in northeast Siberia, August 28, 2007. Back in November 1982, the young scientist was roaming around local shops and warehouses looking for the nails he needed to finish building a scientific research station high above the Arctic Circle that he had founded two years earlier. Photo: Dmitry Solovyov/Reuters
Scientist Sergei Zimov takes a sample of ground taken from a layer of melting permafrost on the Duvanny Yar cliff, some 75 miles from the town of Chersky, in northeast Siberia, August 28, 2007.
Greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost once begun may continue for decades unless checked by CO2 sinks.  
The balance may require great effort and expense to become stabilized, if stability can be achieved.
Greenhouse gas concentrations aided by tundra release of methane may cause irreversible impacts on ice sheets, global ocean circulation and sea-level rise.
Scientists do not yet understand many elements of weather control.
As the thinning of polar ice continues, the coming decade will show more clearly how the Arctic thaw, and tundra plant growth, will have consequences to the climate.
The increase in temperature that is leading to increased plant growth around the planet, most notably the northern land areas and topical regions, may result in carbon retention if assisted by human intervention.
Without such intervention, and with human activity both continuing to despoil the land, and to pump increasing volumes of emissions into the atmosphere, nature acting to compensate is compensating, albeit the counterbalancing being considered extreme by its human sojourners.
     Siberia, Alaska    
     Dramatic permafrost melt — click here    
     Global warming makes Earth greener    
OCEAN TEMPERATURES RISING
5.1 million temperature profiles have been taken of the oceans.
Records from countries around the world, all show that the oceans have begun to warm.
Data from research ships, naval ships, merchant ships and buoys repeatedly provide evidence that the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans began warming in the 1950's.   The Indian Ocean began warming in the 1960's.
In the garden, Kewe thinks, human has changed its climate.
Populations already vulnerable, the impoverished nations, are most as risk, at this time.   It is the poor in all nations who suffer most severely when resources are degraded, when environmental catastrophe strikes.
       Eighty percent of coral Caribbean reefs destroyed.      
       Rising sea temperature killing Great Barrier Reef      
WHAT IS LIKELY?
Two scenarios Kewe offers, two among the many that may take place:
We will have green cities.
A major part of the effort will be redesigning environmentally.
Transportation...real waste management...real river, lake, marshland, water preservation.
There will be interdisciplinary ideas.   The engineering of work towards cleaner production will be at the forefront.   Ecosystem performance will be the optimum target.   With the idea of environmental stewardship.
Humankind will proceed with what it knows it has to do, with a cleaning of the garden.
Allowing the time, and the determination to go forward.
With a will to protect and restore the land and waters.
Then we will be at a new beginning for our species.
It will be our natural science advancements that will allow us to take ourselves further; that will allow us to grow in our spirit.   When we spend money on actualizing a livable biosphere we will be enhancing in all ways the pleasure of life.
Nations given the choice of life or non-life, will cease to act selfishly and complacently.
Citizens empowered with both a local and global cleanup of the garden, will with this empowerment make decisions about the wise use of their money.  
There will be no more black budgets engaged primarily in war weapon research and building.   The drain on valuable resources that could be used for the restoration of the planet will cease.
Embarking on a program of cultivating new endemic forests, and expanding and maintaining the forests that presently remain, will be but one of the many healthy programs observed.
With trees allowed to grow, with trees that are acknowledged as a life-giving part of the system.
This will be the process that will help stabilize the global atmospheric temperature.
This will be the process that will allow the human spirit to grow.
NO REMEDIAL ACTION?
If there is no remedial action, nature's plan is to balance and adjust.
What is likely in the accompaniment is drought and flooding and fierce storms that will wreak their vengeance.
Our planet has a lot of power.   It will rid itself of us.
These past years the 'El Niño' influence has become more severe.
The Gulf Stream that moderates Europe, the Monsoons of Asia, all will proceed with their irregularity.
GALES WREAKING HAVOC!
Cities will record higher temperatures and as the Shires of the world have their new weather patterns, gales wreaking havoc will sweep across; then we will wake from our dream.
Then it will be too late.
Then the time for growing will have passed.
Then the power of the gales will have increased and the saplings no longer will stay in the soil.
Like Easter Island where its residents chopped down all its trees, the people will mostly have disappeared.   Only stupendous monuments will dot the landscape.
Concrete piles, concrete edifices to glorify “The We” peoples —
WE as we live now.
       Nobel Peace Prize Lecture — Wangari Maathai      
       Global weather, environment and climate change      
       Abrupt Climate Change — includes all aspects of abrupt climate change, including Pentagon study, the Pentagon's weather nightmare      
       The Dark Side Initiates — Click here      
       Dark path initiates depend on the denial      
       The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path      
Mining Global youth climate movement. Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil. Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation, sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice. Big Trees as Natural Monuments Big Trees as Curiosities Big Trees as Recreation Big Trees as Cathedrals of Nature Endangered Big Trees From Sacred Symbol to Industrial Stumpage Photo: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/
Mining
Global youth climate movement
Tackling the climate crisis, our addiction to oil
Energy conservation, cleaner electricity purchasing, more renewable energy generation
Sustainable transportation systems and environmental justice
Monday, 13 December, 2004
Pollution: A life and death issue
Alex Kirby
By Alex Kirby
BBC News website environment correspondent
As part of Planet Under Pressure, a BBC News website series looking at some of the biggest environmental issues facing humanity, Alex Kirby considers the Earth's growing pollution problem.
cyclist in the smog, AP
WHO says 3m people a year are killed by outdoor air pollution
One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another.
Pollution is an obvious example — we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.
Cutting waste and clearing up pollution costs money.   Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place.
Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening.
  • Air: The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
  • Water: Diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal diseases associated with poor water.
  • Soil: Contaminated land is a problem in industrialised countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil.   It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilisers and slurry from livestock.   And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
    Chronic problem
    Chemicals are a frequent pollutant.   When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind.
    But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces.
    • Cost of air pollution around the world
    Cost of air pollution around the world
    The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children's health".
    Some man-made chemicals, endocrine disruptors like phthalates and nonylphenol — a breakdown product of spermicides, cosmetics and detergents — are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals.
    A worker carries dead fish in a basket at Kankaria Lake in Ahmadabad. Chemical pollution was blamed for killing fish in Kankaria Lake in Ahmadabad, India, AP
    Chemical pollution was blamed for killing fish in Kankaria Lake in Ahmadabad, India
    Affected species include polar bears — so not even the Arctic is immune.   And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals — and to us.
    About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually.   At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.
    Trade-off
    But the snag is that modern society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival.
    So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognise there will be trade-offs to be made.
    The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria.   Where does the priority lie?
    The industrialised world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused.   It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.
    Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers.   There is a UN convention on transboundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbours, or between states which do not share a border.
    Perhaps the best example is climate change — the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
    For one and all
    One of the principles that is supposed to apply here is simple — the polluter pays.
    Plastic bottles, A recent study detailed the plastic litter that pollutes the marine environment, copyright Science
    A recent study detailed the plastic litter that pollutes the marine environment
    Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price.   But it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
    One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
    Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
    We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there's no such place as 'away' — and there's no such person as the 'other'".
    Ask not for whom the bell tolls — it tolls for thee, and for me
    Planet Under Pressure

    A six-part series looking at the biggest problems facing the Earth

    Introducing Planet Under Pressure

    PART 6: FIGHTING POLLUTION

    Pollution: A life and death issue
    Child on nebuliser in south DurbanFight for clean air
    Durban poor take the pollution issue into their own hands
    Photojournal: Living with pollution
    Map: Pollution hotspots
    Quiz: Are you pollution-savvy?

    COMPETITION
    Green and pleasant
    Enter our contest — design an eco-friendly garden

    PREVIOUS SECTIONS
    Part 1: Species under threat
    Part 2: World water crisis
    Part 3: Soaring energy demand
    Part 4: Can the planet feed us?
    Part 5: Tackling climate change


    RELATED BBC LINKS:
    Global warming?
    2015 — Where will we be?

    RELATED INTERNET LINKS:
    UNEP — chemicals programme
    World Health Organisation
    European Chemical Industry Council
    WWF — Toxic chemicals
    Environmental Protection Agency
    I don’t know of an issue of a greater magnitude than the energy issue that humanity’s facing right now.
    Oh my God, we’re having wars in, you know, Asia, killing millions of people over the hydrocarbons.
    The issue is so multi-faceted, it’s so immense, that... Oh yes, this is being very carefully managed.
    Carbon trading is perhaps the most singular evil the Illuminati and their political minions have yet come up with!
    It will do nothing to help the world's populations handle climate change!
    It will do everything to further enrich those who already control 98% of the world's resources!
    Those who have brought the planet to these crises!
    Those who need to be stripped of all their assets!
    Part I
           Record loss of sea ice in the Arctic summer       
           Why did you cut the trees grandma     
           The Dark Side Initiates — Click here      
           Dark path initiates depend on the denial      
           The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path      
        CO2 record high levels in the atmosphere      
           Increases in carbon dioxide never exceeding 30 ppm in 1,000 years      
        — Now 30 ppm in last 17 years.      
        Highest ever — 800,000 years checked — Climate fear as carbon levels soar      
           Global warming has reached point of no return?      
           Arctic warming at twice global rate      
           Destruction of the World's Seeds — Dr. Vandana Shiva — Globalization      
           Pentagon report only      
           Recent changes observed in Arctic Areas      
           Nine of ten warmest years      
           Oil chief: my fears for planet      
           Frequently asked questions about global warming.      
           The WE — Life — New fish found, albatros pact, monkey sterilisation      
     
         To view more on the garden, click here for 'State of the Planet'    
    		 
      TheWE.cc