Image from Manataka™
American Indian Council - manataka.org
It was well
publicised in the media last week that we have reached the feared 400 ppm
carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration level in the Earth’s atmosphere. The World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported in a press
release last week that the 400 ppm threshold was recorded at several stations of the World
Meteorological Organization’s Global Atmosphere Watch network, and the threshold was reached earlier than the predicted
2015-16. The press release shows some dramatic graphic representations of the
changes in CO2 concentrations from ice core determinations, for the
last 800,000 years and 300 years, and from instrument measurements at Mauna Loa for data since 1957.
Today is Earth Day, which this year is on the theme 'The Face of climate change'. The Earth Day Network is the organization that coordinates
Earth Day around the world each year and their website www.earthday.org is encouraging people from
around the world to share their stories on the impact of climate change.
Recently, I attended a conference on the theme of environmental conservation and sustainability, and during the questions
and discussion at the end of the presentations someone stated that ‘soil is the most
important thing!’ I thought: no, water has got to be the most important thing,
since without water there’s no life – look at the planet Mars, lots of soil, but no water
and no life!
Water is essential for life and it is an important resource to
virtually all economic activities, including food production, energy and
industrial outputs. Clean water is an indispensable natural resource for a
healthy life for humans and for freshwater ecosystems and, therefore, demands
careful management. A growing world population and climate
change are adding pressure to already scarce water resources.
Rachel Carson has sparked the modern day environmental
movement with her book Silent Spring
published 50 years ago and Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines, also written 50 years ago, alerted
the public to the undeniable suffering of calves living in veal crates and
birds in battery cages. The second and final day of the conference revisiting
these two books was about the current challenges of conservation and animal
welfare and what the future holds. The two sessions comprised five
presentations:
I’m attending the ‘Rachel Carson & Ruth Harrison 50
years on conference’, which is taking place on 12-13 March 2013, at the Oxford
University Biodiversity Institute. These two women whose books changed science
certainly deserve the recognition. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was a wake-up call for the environment and
helped to turn conservation into the mainstream scientific and public concern
it is today. In Silent Spring, she described
how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in animals and human tissues, causing
cancer and genetic damage. Ruth Harrison’s Animal
Machines (1964) was also a wake-up call for the conditions of farm animals and
helped to turn animal welfare into the mainstream scientific and the public
concern it is today.
National Parks all around the world attract many millions of visitors, help to protect habitats and wildlife, and provide areas where urban dwellers can go for a break from their normal lives. The world's first national park is generally held to be Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872 in the USA. But while parks and other protected areas are still being established, many existing ones are under pressure from growing populations, recreational pressure, and not least from tightening public purses. So it's probably not entirely coincidental that a report on the economic value of national parks in the USA, where the concept was first put into practice, was released on 1 March, the same day that 'sequestration' - the automatic implementation of budget cuts implemented when legislators failed to come up with a new budget deal - came into force, with national parks hit along with all other areas of government spending.
This
week is Climate Week (CW), a campaign which started in Great Britain, in March 2011, when the first CW resulted in 3000 events, which were
attended by half a million people, making it probably Britain’s biggest
ever environmental occasion. This year, 3226 events were registered in
the Climate Week web page, ranging from events run by schools, businesses, charities, councils and many others.
As I discussed in a previous blog posted here, ‘Going Veggie to save the planet – does what you eat really matter?’ perhaps we should be eating less meat or even become vegetarians because meat production put considerable pressure on the world’s resources, such as land and water, and also to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. A meat-based diet consumes 2.9 times more water, 2.5 times more primary energy, 13 times more fertilizer and 1.4 times more pesticides than does a vegetarian diet.
Compelling evidence of cheese-making has been uncovered in prehistoric pottery sieves found in the Kuyavia region in Poland by researchers from Great Britain, Poland and the United States. The study has just been published online in Nature journal on 12 December 2012.
An abundance of milk fats was detected in these specialized pottery vessels, comparable in form to modern cheese strainers, suggesting that humans have been making cheese in Europe for at least 7,500 years. There is a possibility that cheese was made even at earlier times using other materials such as cloth or wooden cheese strainers, but these materials are more perishable and difficult to detect as archeological material.
As it has become a tradition with the UN climate talks each year, a
decision or final agreement wasn’t reached until after the official end.
The meeting was meant to close on Friday, 7th December 2012, but final agreements were only reached and made public on Saturday 8th.
