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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for March, 2014
What will become of those who cannot learn the terrible knowledge of cities?
Mar 26th
Taken from “Requiem for Sonora” by Richard Shelton
I guess you must have been there and learned to love the place for this poem to bring you undone.
If this poem is the only blessing I had ever received I would die happily.
Amazon Rainforest Breathes In More Than It Breathes Out
Mar 25th
Amazon Rainforest Breathes In More Than It Breathes Out
By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer | March 20, 2014
http://www.livescience.com/44235-amazon-rainforest-carbon-cycle-measured.html
“Pristine Amazon forests pull in more carbon dioxide than they put back into the atmosphere, according to a new study. The findings confirm that natural Amazon forests help reduce global warming by lowering the planet’s greenhouse gas levels, the researchers said.”
Let’s cease spending money on further research on a subject that has been fully covered and instead spend the money paying people to NOT cut the trees and plant more. In earlier interglacial cycles, it was the millions of trees and extensive savanna that gradually lowered CO2 enough to boost the downward cycle into the much longer glacial part of the cycle.
I hear many people asking themselves, “Why would we want to support long glacial periods?” Because that’s how Earth, a living being, has decided to counter the effects of the sun’s expanding heat. Let’s work with the planet, not just rape and pillage as if the Earth came into being for our benefit.
Use Trains and Ferries
Mar 10th
A lot of us despair realizing that one person can do so little about CO2 emissions. However, one thing we can do is switch to trains and ferries. Yes, they are more expensive, but with an increase in market share, costs will go down. There must be exceptions such as “love miles” when loved ones live overseas, but leisure travel could be by train and ferry. It costs more but what is the health of our Earth worth?
10 March 2014, 6.03am GMT
Morphing is one way to make aircrafts more efficient
“The transport sector as a whole is increasing CO2 emissions at such a rate that it has cancelled out two decades’ worth of green gains made across the manufacturing, power generation, district heating, residential, services and agriculture sectors combined. This devastating disparity is forecast to grow.”
“…the annual growth rate of the number of flights within Europe has remained consistent at 3.9%. The rise of Asia and cheap flight carriers, like Ryanair, making weekend trips away affordable to the masses have pushed the rate up. This is expected to level out at 5.3%.”
“The goal set by the EU to reduce aircraft CO2 emissions by 75% by 2050 is totally unrealistic. Even if Europe were to meet these goals, its aircraft industry will at the very least double its greenhouse emissions by 2050. The bleak reality is that we will probably see a quadrupling in the aircraft industry CO2 emissions by then – unless it totally reinvents the concept of the commercial aircraft.”
Eurostar on fast track to success after a slow start
By: Interview by Philip Waller Published: Sat, April 21, 2012
http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/315656/Eurostar-on-fast-track-to-success-after-a-slow-start
“Eurostar plans a £700million over- haul in 2014, including 10 new trains and a refurbished existing fleet.”
Without land, water, and culture, we are nothing
Mar 8th
Without land, water, and culture, we are nothing
“Deranger: The river systems are the life, and … grandmother moon, grandfather sun— everything is alive. When you’re raised with that relationship, that the foxes are your cousins and the eagles are your brothers, you start to have a totally different relationship and interaction with everything around you. And so much of humanity has lost that. But indigenous people have retained it somehow.
If you kill the land, the waterways, the air and culture of those people, you essentially kill those people. And that, in fact, is the definition of genocide.” Eriel Deranger of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation