“Bottled water has been described as “one of the greatest cons of the 20th century” and as “marketing’s answer to the emperor’s new clothes”(1)
Rather than typing some thoughts into this post, I invite you to watch the video clip above. CINE-ONU will be screening the full film “Tapped” for free to mark the World Water Day on March 22nd. If you are in Brussels and would like to see it, register with an email until March 21st 5:30 to cine-onu@unrig.org.
China is increasingly making data on air and water pollution public. Many pressure groups have been taking advantage of this data.
The Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) has taken this opportunity and compiled a map of companies in China that do not meet the pollution requirements set by Chinese law. International companies like Nike, Wal-Mart and Siemens are increasingly using this information to check whether there are any issues in their supplier base to avoid public scandals that may damage their reputation and brand value.
Plastic – this wonderful light material, that comes in so handy in our daily lives, does not just fill up billions of landfills worldwide, where it takes 200-400 years to decompose, but is also carried out to sea via rivers where it ends up floating in collections of ever smaller getting pieces in several places in the oceans.
The biggest of those garbage accumulations at sea with “… roughly the size of Texas [one could also say France], containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash…” (source: http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org) is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and with this it is the biggest rubbish dump on earth. No need to go and look for it on GoogleMaps (as I did), because of it being broken into small pieces it cannot be seen via satellite..
In some areas the density of plastic particles (and sometimes toxic ones) is 7 times higher than plankton. Fish consider it as a (quite possibly not so healthy) food source and also birds eat the small plastic pieces. Some die while others are eaten and so the plastic makes its way up the food chain..
Ideally of course the whole plastic should not ever make it into the oceans in the first place and maybe one day this will be made a priority (with lots of wishing and hoping..), but until then reducing the amount of plastic bags, water bottles and other throwaway plastic gadgets is the way to go.
Energy efficiency in china -interesting panel discussion
A panel from april at Yale university including panelists from HSBC India and several representatives with experience in China discuss challenges in implementing energy efficiency and renewable projects in china.
The different view points (corporate, policy making, investors and local networks) give interest insight in challenges and progress in the area of energy efficiency in both countries.
Lately I have heard the word Permaculture mentioned more often, but did you know that the first book on it was written before I was even born! More than 30 years ago the Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren were looking into ways of permanent agriculture (hence the name Permaculture), for the industrial agriculture was bad for soil fertility, but good for pests (which then were fought of with chemical warfare).
So what is all this about?
=> It’s about increasing biodiversity, which amongst other things stops pests (and us worrying about how to get rid of them), but provides us with a good variety of food throughout the year.
=> It’s about studying the land carefully and making adjustments that rainwater will be available to the plants for longer, thus making plants happy (and us too as we don’t have to water them ourselves).
=> It’s about letting newspaper and other mulches fight against weeds (rather than us doing so in back-breaking activities).
=> It’s about allowing certain weeds to grow for a while as they provide nutrition to the other plants.
=> It’s about even more than that, I think it’s certainly about time that I bought my mother (who loves her garden) a book on this (so she will not ask me to plug weed again next time I’m in town).
To sum it up, if permaculture has been set up carefully it will behave like a little paradise without depleting the nutrition, without letting wind and water take the soil away (which in turn could ruin water systems by changing their nutrient level) and all of that with hardly any human effort.
A small boy, age 9, wades through the stinking city dump outside Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh looking for trash to sell. If he does not bring home enough Riels (Cambodian currency), he risks that his parents, child soldiers under the Khmer Rouge, won’t have dinner for him when he returns home after a days work of collecting and selling garbage.
His life path seems set, but there is a chance it could all still turn different..
In 1995 Christian des Pallières, young retiree in humanitarian mission for reconstruction of a primary school system, had visited a Phnom Penh garbage dump and was appalled by seeing kids eating its filth. He and his spouse, Marie-France, had to act, first with bringing meals to the dump, then by establishing an association called “Pour un Sourire d’Enfant”(PSE, in English: “For a smile of a child”), which by now provides schooling and professional training to 6000 kids like the 9year old mentioned above! In addition children that have been beaten or worse are provided with a new home.
I learned about this organisation through Patricia, a colleague of mine,who had spend her summer vacation at PSE looking after groups of 40 kids aged 3 to 17 over the summer months as the real teachers were off. Breaking the regularity of the kids coming to school over the summer months would risk them not coming back in September.
Her enthusiasm really touched me and after talking to her, I saw the video of PSE and it touched me even more. (Let me know if you are interested in watching it also and I can lend it to you.) There is also alot more information on what PSE is and has achieved on their website, as well as information on how to get involved.
There was a meadow and then people from all over came and the meadow turned into a bustling village. A month later the tents were gone and if he would not have seen it with his own eyes, he would never have known they were there..
photo by Flickr user: fireflies604
A few days ago on my way back home from vacation I sat next to another home-coming guy, who had just left 30 degree warm Finland, where he had spent close to a month at a Rainbow Gathering. What’s that?
Wikipedia describes it as follows:
“Rainbow Gatherings are temporary intentional communities, typically held in outdoor settings, and espousing and practicing ideals of peace, love, harmony, freedom and community, as a consciously expressed alternative to mainstream popular culture, consumerism, capitalism and mass media.”
Jean-Louis, the man from the bus, goes there every year. It’s back to a simple way of life for him and the place is full with good musicians. He told me that everybody finds a place in the community, be it entertaining or cooking or chilling or helping with other chores. Imagine a bunch of people preparing yummy food, being surounded by musicians and then when the meal is served a hat is passed around and you put in there what you like. Some will put 10Euros each meal others not a penny in four weeks. And it’s all good.
I went to visit the Royal Botanical Garden the other day. The garden is only open to public for a short time every year. I am generally quite reserved when it comes to tourist attractions, but this garden is just amazing and you simply forget about hundreds of people that are amazed by the flower paradise around you.
If you get the chance go and visit the place. Not just a nice thing to light up your weekend – we cannot take enough opportunities to admire the beauty and variety of life nature has created around us. Let me know if you know of similar places that you can recommend .
Cloud-computing and ICT technology as such has changed our society. A development of our Web2.0 culture is just one small part of the impact. The way we communicate, the way we interact, the tools we use.
Even if we often are not aware of the environmental impacts of our actions – it is evident, that our changed behavior with the availability of computing tools and new ways to interact has an impact on the environment.
Nothing to be afraid of – there are positive and negative impacts: Did you know that a modern laptop consumes less energy than an old light bulb?
As Jorge Zapico who is currently researching the intersections of ICT and Sustainability at the Centre for Sustainable Communications in Stockholm points out correctly, that there are many ways in which we can enhance the positive impacts. For example an open source approach to sharing information, using the net to mobilize the environmental movement and taking advantage of technologies that make our life more (energy) efficient.
Which does not mean we should neglect the negative ones like the hidden hardware in many data centers that is running our beloved Internet cloud (slide 13). Enjoy Jorge’s presentation on this topic:
Whilst the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Island has impacted the lives of millions of travellers over the last days and cost airlines over 200 billion Euros per day. Non-volcanologists do not spend much time on considering environmental impacts of this event.
This might sound a bit philosophical: Since Vulcanos were there before us – shouldn’t they consider us as a threat rather than the other way around?
More seriously: As David Mc Candless points out in his blog Information is Beautiful, the amount of CO2 emissions that were prevented by the volcano eruption is significantly higher than the CO2 that the Volcano emitted.
We surely need to keep in mind that the root of climate change is not CO2 emissions but our demands (in this case for means of transport). This event hopefully makes some of us realize this connection > Let’s not forget that it is not a greener aviation industry and well treated passengers that will solve the climate change issue.
BBC News has developed a guide showing some of the world’s key volcanoes:
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