Listen to the Children

Too often we adults shun advice from children as too naïve and not worth our time to listen to.

Here is a twelve-year-old who has something meaningful and worthwhile to say and actually says it better than most adults. She addressed the United Nations meeting in Brazil with an elegance and style far beyond her years.

Please, take the time to listen, it is only a five minute segment of her speech but in that short time she paints reality far more succinctly than any adult I know ever has.

From her we have so much to learn and just maybe we can learn to share what we have with those who have nothing.

Bunge Foods Responds Harshly to Protestors

I found this request for help on Rainforest Action Network website and want to pass it along to as many people as possible. Please help if you can.

Last week, thousands of indigenous people and small farmers in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul peacefully blocked roads, railways and invaded dams to draw attention to the global food crisis and policies that favor agribusiness over small farms. Despite the non-violent nature of their actions, six of the participants protesting in front of a Bunge soy-crushing facility were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, suffering severe injuries.

Bunge claims to defend human rights, but the company's actions speak far louder and more violently than its words.

Rainforest Action Network is calling on us to take action and hold Bunge accountable for these actions.

Bunge has blocked all incoming e-mails from anybody using Get Active—one of the most common online organizing tools. They effectively blocked emails from RAN supporters. Hence the fax action.

You can click here for more information on how to take action, including joining the RAN action to fax Bunge CEO Alberto Weisser’s office, demanding that he take action to prevent attacks on peaceful demonstrators.

Hundreds of people protested at the Bunge soy-crushing facility, where they were hoping to reclaim bags of food staples produced by family farmers that were supposed to be distributed to the community.

Military police swarmed the peaceful gathering and attacked non-violent protestors. We must hold U.S. corporations accountable for the violence that occurs in and around their facilities.

Bunge allowed a peaceful protest for food to become a violent confrontation between a corporation that benefits from record grain prices and hungry people who are increasingly displaced from their land by soy plantations.

Bunge Foods is a Bunge North America Company whose parent company is Bunge Limited headquartered in White Plains, New York. Bunge is one of the largest grain traders, grain millers, oilseed crushers and shortening and oil refiners.

From their website: “Our integrated agribusiness, fertilizer and food products businesses position us to meet the world’s growing demand for affordable, high quality food and capitalize on global trends in demographics, agriculture and economics. Integration enables us to supply global needs efficiently and create value in a variety of market conditions.”

It seems their goal to ‘capitalize on global trends’ overrides people’s right to peacefully protest.

Thank-you

The Everglades Could Soon be Whole Again

Florida Governor Charlie Crist is expected to announce a $1.75 billion deal to essentially buy the U.S. Sugar Corporation, including 187,000 acres of farmland that once sat in the northern Everglades. The purchase, reported by Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald, would resurrect the almost decade-old restoration project to rebuild the Everglades.

It is hoped that the project will re-establish storage reservoirs, treatment marshes and a flowway that will reconnect Lake Okeechobee to the Glades. This could help recreate the original north-to-south movement of the "River of Grass", and eliminate damaging pulses of excess water into coastal estuaries. That would be good news for panthers and gators, dolphins and herons, ghost orchids and royal palms.

The Florida Everglades was once a vibrant, free-flowing river of grass that provided clean water from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Today, this extraordinary ecosystem is dying due in part to U.S. Sugar Corporation who has been responsible for years of sucking water out of the glades and pumping polluted runoff into the lake. Now that ex-governor Jeb Bush’s industry-friendly aides, who pumped up U.S. Sugar with obscene amounts of subsidies and have fought hard to eliminate funding for the restoration project, have been replaced with more eco-aware legislators, the project to restore and preserve this American treasure could now be back on track.

The plan was approved in the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2000 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in partnership with the South Florida Water Management District and numerous other federal, state, local and tribal partners, to enhance water supplies and maintain flood protection. It includes more than 60 elements, will take more than 30 years to construct and will cost an estimated $7.8 billion.

Once again, global warming is cited as a an important reason for why this project needs to be undertaken. According to a University of Miami expert in coastal marine environments, Dr. Harold Wanless, speaking at the Everglades Coalition’s annual conference in January 2008, recreating enough of the natural flow of water to the 2.4 million-acre marsh to rebuild its eroded peatlands could hold back salt water intrusion from rising sea levels and protect South Florida's drinking water supply. He pointed to conservative estimates that predict a two foot increase in sea levels by 2100, but cited other studies that indicate the rise could amount to 20 feet by 2200, which would submerge all of South Florida.

On a personal note, I visited the Everglades during summer vacations in the early 1960’s and again in 2005. The Everglades is not nearly as vibrant and teaming with life that I remember in earlier times. It feels good to finally report some good news for the planet.

Sources:

The end of U.S. Sugar

Journey to restore America’s Everglades

Everglades reading list

Everglades Restoration Gains Urgency as Climate Warms

Solar-Hydrogen House

This guy has the right idea on how to get off the grid, and is actually acting on it.

Mike Strizki, a civil engineer, living in East Amwell New Jersey, has discovered a method of making fuel out of sunlight and water. He generates enough electricity and hydrogen to heat and cool his home, and power his hydrogen-powered and electric-powered cars.

Imagine never having to stop at a gas station again, or paying a utility bill. Or being able to power your house from your car.

More details here.

He offers a great alternative to batteries for storing electricity by using hydrogen.

It might take a few years to make the cost of this system affordable, but it shows great promise for a new hydrogen-electric economy, one that eliminates or sharply reduces the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.

This is the type of ingenuity we need to get us away from fossil fuels and pollution.

You say you want a Revolution

Let’s clean up our land, Let’s clean up our air, Let’s clean up our water. Very lofty goals. Everyone should be involved. But what is it going to cost? Let’s face it, cost is the only factor that either prohibits us or causes us to do anything.

According to a report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency, the cost will be approximately $45 trillion over the next several decades.

This is the price tag placed on the necessary "energy revolution" that will be needed to greatly reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth. More from the report: the world needs to build 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power, in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050.

Now that we have a bottom line figure and a game plan we can get started, right?

Trying to get the world’s population to agree on what is necessary is not feasible. “We require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale," IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said.

A U.N.-network of scientists concluded last year that emissions have to be cut by at least half by 2050 to avoid an increase in world temperatures of between 3.6 and 4.2 degrees above pre-18th century levels. This is assuming that greenhouse gases (and therefore mankind) is the main causal factor of global warming. Other scientists say the increase in global temperature is a natural phenomena and cannot be avoided.

Even if the climate change is a natural occurrence, not induced by mankind, we will all benefit from participating in a revolution of such a grand scale.

We have the technology in place right now to lessen our dependence on fossil fuel. Solar technology, wind technology and even nuclear technology, all, if allowed to be put into place, will greatly help alleviate our dependence on fossil fuel which would result in drastic decreases in greenhouse gas emissions..

Why aren’t we using them? Why are we stubbornly holding on to old ways of heating and cooling our homes? Money.

It is expensive to convert our traditional methods of heating and air conditioning to less eco-damaging methods.

Even if every government on this planet would miraculously agree on a method of such a large transition, coming to a decision on who would bear the cost would require a revolution in thinking. This financial investment is more than three times the current size of the entire U.S. economy, 1.1% of the world’s gross domestic product.

"Carbon capture and storage" technology, allowing coal-powered power plants to catch emissions and inject them underground, is needed now. This would only be an initial first phase. This plan can easily be seen as necessary in order to prevent future contamination of our atmosphere while developing technology to prevent contamination in the first place. Sort of like stopping the leak in the bucket until we build a better bucket.

That better bucket will need to come in the form of solar, wind and nuclear power plants. The world would have to construct 32 new nuclear power plants each year, and wind-power turbines would have to be increased by 17,000 units annually. Nations would have to achieve an eight-fold reduction in carbon intensity — the amount of carbon needed to produce a unit of energy — in the transport sector.

This is a huge undertaking. We can’t get politicians to agree on how to best spend our tax dollars to benefit tax payers with what is left over after they distribute their windfall to special interest groups, how are we ever going to get them to think about cleaning up the environment? If we follow the established method of relying on politicians to pay for this revolution, this price tag is going to be much greater than $45 trillion.

I think we can all agree that we are on a dangerous course regardless of what is causing global warming. Our whole ideology on how we use energy to support our lifestyles needs to be re-examined. Kate of Hills and Plains Seedsavers directed my attention to a wonderful animation that so marvelously portrays mankind’s existence that I just have to share it here. It is entitled Carbon Weevils.

Our current lifestyles are not sustainable enough to promote the healthy life we all want. Greenhouse gases are a major contributing factor to rising hospital visits which in turn increases health costs and reduces quality of life. Rising demand for fossil fuel increases the price of that fossil fuel. The increasing number of food recalls is testament that mankind cannot maintain a safe food supply due to the sheer number of people to be fed. The number of starving people is rising due in part to converting food crops into fuel crops. Even though the world produces enough food to feed everyone, if it isn’t profitable to do so we won’t. Corporations will only participate if it is in their best financial interest.

We simply cannot continue on this path. Getting the world to act together in the best interest of each and every one of us will indeed require a revolution.