Environmental related posts.
I don’t need to say much as the pictures in this story tell the tale. And this story is sad enough, but the truth is this is a very short list of the places we have managed to ruin to the point where they become uninhabitable; there are many others. There are thousands of “SuperFund” […]
A very interesting way to explain our dependence on fossil fuels, and how this dependence developed. Give it a quick watch.
An interesting article in the New York Times written by ELISABETH ROSENTHAL … IN 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” […]
The title says it all, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Plastic, unfortunately is our toxic legacy. And believe me, global warming, nitrous/phosphorus pollution and habitat destruction are also our legacy, but we can’t discount the negative effects plastic is having and is going to continue to have in our ecosystem and our lives. I […]
On Friday, June 24, the Conservative government once again embarrassed our country on the international stage. We alone prevented the United Nations from adding chrysotile asbestos to the global list of hazardous substances. We won’t allow asbestos in our homes and offices. We are spending millions to remove it from our Parliament buildings. Here in […]
Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed in The Washington Post last month about the connection between climate change and recent extreme weather events. Now Stephen Thomson has combined McKibben’s words with striking footage of the events he writes about. The result is a chilling must-see video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhCY-3XnqS0
It’s time to start connecting the dots. I am glad Bill McKibben wrote the article he did, and I am thankful Stephen Thomson converted it to an easy to absorb video, as I was planning on writing something along the same lines. Far too often I hear people saying “there have been large storms before”, “there have been severe floods before”, “there have been giant hurricanes before”, “their have been severe droughts before” … but what they aren’t taking into consideration is the fact that these types of typically isolated weather events are happening in much greater frequency, but more importantly, they are happening all over the planet, NOW. Not one, isolated, bigger than normal natural disaster, but a series of bigger than normal natural disasters happening, well, everywhere. Every country on every continent (and yes even in Antarctica) is experiencing abnormal and catastrophic weather. So it isn’t simply a case of a single isolated severe weather event happening, but it is a case that severe weather is quickly becoming the norm for our once ‘stable’ climate. And again, not just for us in North America, severe weather is affecting the entire planet. In fact The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in a recent study discovered that natural disasters have more than doubled in the last two decades. Elisabeth Rasmusson, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council:
The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is increasing, and this trend is only set to continue. With all probability, the number of those affected and displaced will rise as human-induced climate change comes into full force.
Speaking at the Oslo conference, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres called the issue of climate-related displacement “the defining challenge of our times” and criticized the international community for lacking the political will to reduce to pace of climate change.
There is increasing evidence to suggest that natural disasters are growing in frequency and intensity and that this is linked to the longer-term process of climate change.
As they said in the video, I think we have a lot more to be concerned about than $4 a gallon gasoline.
Not sure if you have read one of my earlier posts, It’s Almost ‘The End of The Line’ For Seafood, where I point out how we are overfishing our oceans and are quite literally running out of fish. Well this is kind of a continuation on that note. At a Japanese fish auction house, which […]
It’s sad really, so many people vying for the the latest and greatest iPhone and iPad, all the while completely unaware Apple is not living up to it’s responsibilities to manufacture their goods in an environmentally sustainable way. And yes I know Apple isn’t the only company who simply doesn’t care about the welfare of […]
A very interesting video on an important subject.
About Johan Rockstrom:
Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems — and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash. Climate change is certainly in the mix — but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.
“From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.”
I have posted the Story of Electronics and the Story of Cosmetics, well here is the original of the series which focuses more on a general nature of the overwhelming amount of stuff we use in our everyday lives.