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So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even? With respect to fossil fuels, water use, and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.
All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library. ♣
I may have applied to study “Environmental Studies” but I was never really bought over by the global warming/climate change scare. Even when I am a bit more concerned about natural resources depleting, I don’t think it’ll be within my lifetime – and even if I reduced my consumption to ZERO (i.e. kill myself), it’s nothing compared to the world’s resource depleting industries. Pollution would be the most that I actually cared about — only because I wouldn’t want to eat toxic sashimi or breathe in fucking HAZE.
My guess is that true blue environmentalists don’t actually want the environment to improve. Because any improvement will lead to complacency, or rather a decrease in alarmism, and in turn their support and funding.
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“You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.“
Singapore’s government, known to be meticulous planners, have responded to the index’s results, which they say are “biased against import-dependent, land-scarce, densely populated countries such as Singapore,” which by their nature and geographic location must rely heavily on imported resources like food and gas.
“As a city-state, it would have been more relevant if Singapore was benchmarked against other cities, which typically are also import-dependent for energy, food and water, rather than countries,” said a spokesperson from the country’s Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources.
our personal dedication to living in a planet-friendly way doesn’t even begin to register on a global scale, and it’s indeed depressing to consider that you could spend your life recycling, composting, eating organic food, taking public transportation, getting your power from solar, and biking, and essentially have no discernible impact on the planet. At all.
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it all needs to happen on such a massive scale that limiting our contributions proactive individual lifestyle choices simply isn’t going to cut it. For the kind of large-scale, planet-saving that’s required to address a problem like climate change, we’re going to need smart government policy. And, Wagner would argue—the right economic incentives.
three challenges faced by environmental philosophy which have emerged from recent debates. The first is the struggle to overcome an anthropocentric view of nature – the view which sees all of nature as serving human interests, and overlooks what has been called the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature. The second challenge is the question of how to define the place of humans in nature; are we to be regarded as equal to other natural beings, with no special privileges or rights, or do we have a higher role in shaping and managing nature? The final challenge is saying on what basis we should assign moral status, or what is sometimes called moral considerability, to animals and natural objects.
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One of the early contributors to this project was Aldo Leopold, who was not a philosopher but a professor of forestry and land management. His famous essay ‘The Land Ethic’, found in his 1949 book The Sand County Almanac, has stimulated a great deal of discussion about the kind of principles we need to guide us on environmental issues.
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Leopold carried forward a discussion by nineteenth century conservationists about whether nature should be preserved only because of its economic and practical benefits for humans or because it provides value beyond merely supplying natural resources. He mentioned the songs of birds and the beauty of flowers as being part of nature’s bounty. He also brought into focus the importance of the interconnection of things in nature, defending the kind of holistic perspective which has since played such a crucial role in scientific ecology. He insisted that environmental ethics should focus on systems and not just on individual things. Our human dependence on nature cannot be understood without a deep ecological study of the interconnectedness of life.
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if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.
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- at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
- more environmental damage, and
- a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.
Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:
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Agriculture to produce wheat, rice and pulses requires clear-felling native vegetation. That act alone results in the deaths of thousands of Australian animals and plants per hectare.
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humans have caused a net increase in plant species richness across two-thirds of the terrestrial biosphere, mostly by facilitating species invasions. In most regional landscapes, native species losses were significantly lower than exotic species gains, with agriculture species causing minor increases, but ornamental species sometimes play a large role that is still hard to assess. While assessing these global patterns required heavy use of models, the work builds on a great deal of existing work by others to come to this conclusion.
Anthropogenic global changes in biodiversity are generally portrayed in terms of massive native species losses or invasions caused by recent human disturbance. Yet these biodiversity changes and others caused directly by human populations and their use of land tend to co-occur as long-term biodiversity change processes in the Anthropocene. Here we explore contemporary anthropogenic global patterns in vascular plant species richness at regional landscape scales by combining spatially explicit models and estimates for native species loss together with gains in exotics caused by species invasions and the introduction of agricultural domesticates and ornamental exotic plants. The patterns thus derived confirm that while native losses are likely significant across at least half of Earth's ice-free land, model predictions indicate that plant species richness has increased overall in most regional landscapes, mostly because species invasions tend to exceed native losses. While global observing systems and models that integrate anthropogenic species loss, introduction and invasion at regional landscape scales remain at an early stage of development, integrating predictions from existing models within a single assessment confirms their vast global extent and significance while revealing novel patterns and their potential drivers. Effective global stewardship of plant biodiversity in the Anthropocene will require integrated frameworks for observing, modeling and forecasting the different forms of anthropogenic biodiversity change processes at regional landscape scales, towards conserving biodiversity within the novel plant communities created and sustained by human systems.
Though less than half of all believers and a bare majority of Evangelicals are familiar with the idea of a spiritual obligation to act as good stewards of the environment, when presented with this concept, three out of four believers embraced it. Most rejected the counter-argument that out of humility one should leave the environment in God’s hands …
It is clear that as believers worked through arguments about a spiritual obligation to be good stewards of the environment, they grew more inclined to endorse the idea of a spiritual obligation to act in this area. Of those who embraced the idea in this series, 62% had earlier said they did not feel that seeking to prevent the loss of species was a spiritual obligation; 74% had earlier said the same about seeking to reduce pollution; and 80% had said the same about seeking to prevent climate change. Thus a large majority of those who expressed comfort with the idea of environmental stewardship arrived at that view through deliberating and gaining greater familiarity with it.
National Geographic posed a question to its Facebook followers — or more precisely, a fill-in-the-blank. You can see in the world cloud above which words were repeated more than others in 1,000 out of the 2,500 responses Nat Geo received.
“Nature”, “children” and “beauty” are the biggest words. If you scan the cloud, you can find things like “pollution” and “warming” in much smaller sizes. It is the goal of all intelligent people out there to bring peace and joy to the planet — why else would we all be fighting so hard for it, in our own different ways? But perhaps we have been going about it slightly wrong; perhaps the way to bring out feelings of compassion and action from people — and in turn have these affect the state of our entire planet — is to spread good ideas, and good news. News of deforestation and climate change may make us feel pained and desire change, but they may also leave us hopeless in terms of our daily actions. If people are reminded of the top three — nature, children and simple beauty — perhaps then they will feel personally empowered in their lives, today. That way, with a feeling of internal joy, each individual can go forth doing their best with their mind in a good place. Very much akin to mindfullness and meditation — practices credited with supporting a positive, caring lifestyle.
For environmentalists trying to use entertainment to shape broad public attitudes and behaviors, nothing could be more important than understanding how to reach these hard-to-get people. Something that will speak to them, something that will change their minds, and most importantly, something that will incite them to action. A documentary might not be that something.
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Environmental films tend to “draw a pretty pre-disposed audience,” said Susi Moser, a fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and climate change communications specialist. A 2010 study on The Age of Stupid (a hybrid documentary, drama, and animation on climate change) found that most filmgoers were already quite concerned about climate change, and motivated to mitigate it, even before seeing the film. For audiences that are already devoted to an environmental cause, these films merely confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
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Documentary film director Louie Psihoyos anticipated this problem when he directed The Cove, a 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about mass dolphin hunting in Japan. His solution was to model the film after a popular Hollywood blockbuster.
“We wanted to do a ‘making-of’ style film that felt like Ocean’s Eleven,” he said. “That was a way in — to tell a dark story in a popular way.”
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This is an evolving list of artists, scientists, art/science collaborations, projects and organizations who are working on issues related to the intersection of art, science and the environment. If you have suggestions to add to the list, please send them to isast@leonardo.info.
The U.S. is in the midst of an energy revolution, and we don't mean solar panels or wind turbines. A new gusher of natural gas from shale has the potential to transform U.S. energy production—that is, unless politicians, greens and the industry mess it up.
Only a decade ago Texas oil engineers hit upon the idea of combining two established technologies to release natural gas trapped in shale formations. Horizontal drilling—in which wells turn sideways after a certain depth—opens up big new production areas. Producers then use a 60-year-old technique called hydraulic fracturing—in which water, sand and chemicals are injected into the well at high pressure—to loosen the shale and release gas (and increasingly, oil).
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• Fracking contaminates drinking water. One claim is that fracking creates cracks in rock formations that allow chemicals to leach into sources of fresh water. The problem with this argument is that the average shale formation is thousands of feet underground, while the average drinking well or aquifer is a few hundred feet deep. Separating the two is solid rock. This geological reality explains why EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, a determined enemy of fossil fuels, recently told Congress that there have been no "proven cases where the fracking process itself has affected water."
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A second charge, based on a Duke University study, claims that fracking has polluted drinking water with methane gas. Methane is naturally occurring and isn't by itself harmful in drinking water, though it can explode at high concentrations. Duke authors Rob Jackson and Avner Vengosh have written that their research shows "the average methane concentration to be 17 times higher in water wells located within a kilometer of active drilling sites."
They failed to note that researchers sampled a mere 68 wells across Pennsylvania and New York—where more than 20,000 water wells are drilled annually. They had no baseline data and thus no way of knowing if methane concentrations were high prior to drilling. They also acknowledged that methane was detected in 85% of the wells they tested, regardless of drilling operations, and that they'd found no trace of fracking fluids in any wells.
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In the beautiful kingdom of Bhutan, where I spent nine years, recent investigations by the only glaciologist in the country, Kharma Thoeb, have shown that a natural moraine dam that separates two glacial lakes in the Lunana area is today only 31 meters deep, in comparison to 74 meters in 2003. If this wall gives way, some 53 million cubic meters of water will rush down the valley of Punakha and Wangdi, causing immense damage and loss of life. Altogether there are 400 glacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan that may break their natural dams and flood populated areas lower in the valleys. If these floods occur, the glaciers will increasingly shrink. This will cause drought, since the streams and rivers will not be fed by melting snow.
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In the beautiful kingdom of Bhutan, where I spent nine years, recent investigations by the only glaciologist in the country, Kharma Thoeb, have shown that a natural moraine dam that separates two glacial lakes in the Lunana area is today only 31 meters deep, in comparison to 74 meters in 2003. If this wall gives way, some 53 million cubic meters of water will rush down the valley of Punakha and Wangdi, causing immense damage and loss of life. Altogether there are 400 glacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan that may break their natural dams and flood populated areas lower in the valleys. If these floods occur, the glaciers will increasingly shrink. This will cause drought, since the streams and rivers will not be fed by melting snow.
Chinese climatologists have called the Himalayan glaciers and other major mountains located in the Tibetan plateau the “third pole” of our ailing planet. There are 40,000 large and small glaciers on the Tibetan plateau and this area is melting at a rate three to four times faster than the North and South Poles. The melting is particularly accelerated in the Himalayas by the pollution that settles on the snow and darkens the glaciers, making them more absorbent to light.
According to international development agencies, about half of the populations of China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Pakistan depend on the watershed from the rivers of the Tibetan plateau for their agriculture, general water supply, and, therefore, survival. The consequences of the drying up of these great rivers will be catastrophic.
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Chinese climatologists have called the Himalayan glaciers and other major mountains located in the Tibetan plateau the “third pole” of our ailing planet. There are 40,000 large and small glaciers on the Tibetan plateau and this area is melting at a rate three to four times faster than the North and South Poles. The melting is particularly accelerated in the Himalayas by the pollution that settles on the snow and darkens the glaciers, making them more absorbent to light.
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While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
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Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.
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Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.
When you eat seafood, what impact are you having on the ocean and its interdependent and increasingly vulnerable marine population? Today’s health, safety, and sustainability considerations can make it complicated to determine the best seafood choices for you and your family. This interactive guide compiles all the information you need to continue to eat healthfully while lowering your seafood footprint. Use it to find out where your favorite fish ranks in sustainability, toxicity, and omega-3 content, as well its place in the food chain—and why it matters.
Fish, sharks, whales and other marine species are in imminent danger of an "unprecedented" and catastrophic extinction event at the hands of humankind, and are disappearing at a far faster rate than anyone had predicted, a study of the world's oceans has found.
Mass extinction of species will be "inevitable" if current trends continue, researchers said.
Overfishing, pollution, run-off of fertilisers from farming and the acidification of the seas caused by increasing carbon dioxide emissions are combining to put marine creatures in extreme danger, according to the report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (Ipso), prepared at the first international workshop to consider all of the cumulative stresses affecting the oceans at Oxford University.
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The flow of soil nutrients into the oceans is creating huge "dead zones", where anoxia - the absence of oxygen - and hypoxia - low oxygen levels - mean fish and other marine life are unable to survive there.
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Hypoxia and anoxia, warming and acidification are factors present in every mass extinction event in the oceans over the Earth's history, according to scientific research. About 55m years ago, as much as half of some species of deep-sea creatures were wiped out when atmospheric changes created similar conditions.
it's easier to pollute than protect public health, that regulatory agencies turn a blind eye, that elected officials are corrupted to go along, that big money nearly always gets its way, that organizations like NCI and ACS abound with conflicts of interest, and that many scientific community members willingly compromise their integrity in return for generous research grants and other benefits.
As a result, cancer is a growth industry, environmental harm and human health the price for big industry profits. The power of vested interests keeps them burgeoning. Public awareness can change things, not decades more worthless research in lieu of simple solutions, eliminating harmful substances that kill.
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everyone can vote with their pocketbook, boycotting harmful products, buying safer ones, and encouraging others to do the same thing. That's how important battles are won, by ordinary people at the grassroots - getting informed, doing the right thing, telling others, and proving where real power lies when it's used constructively.
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