Category Archives: wild animals

Conservation International – An organization with a history

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These type organizations when founded (1987) were founded for “the long haul”. The belief was then that Humans might damage the Earth but not destroy it. Well here we are,  when it looks like Humans may kill off themselves and maybe permanently in some respects changing the Earth, and these organizations sort of plod on. They need to pick up the pace. While I understand the desire to do good work in the 3rd world. They may want to change the minds help the 1st world countries first.

http://www.conservation.org/Pages/default.aspx

Two Conservation International Leaders Honored by World’s Top Conservationists

September 12, 2012
Conservation International Applauds its President Dr. Russell Mittermeier and Board Member President Ian Khama for receiving Honorary Membership of IUCN at World Conservation Congress

Jeju, South Korea – Conservation International’s long time President, Dr. Russell Mittermeier, a world-renowned  primatologist, herpetologist and conservationist, was granted Honorary Membership today by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the world’s largest international environmental organization. The award was presented at the World Conservation Congress taking place this week in South Korea, on the recommendation of the IUCN Council to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to conservation.

“Russ Mittermeier is an innovative, proactive and scientifically informed conservationist,” declared IUCN on its website.  “A renowned primatologist and herpetologist, he has undertaken extensive field work and made major contributions to the conservation of the fauna of Madagascar, the fauna of South America (especially in Brazil and the Guianas), primates in general, and freshwater turtles worldwide.”

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go there and read. More tomorrow.

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World Wide Fund – The save the animals people are the best

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People who work in poor countries to try save animals are some of the noblest people on the planet.

http://wwf.panda.org/

Elephants are the largest living land mammals on the planet.
Incredibly intelligent and social, they have no real predators in the wild. Except humans.

Due to their magnificent ivory tusks, which are carved and sold as luxury ornaments, elephants have been hunted for centuries. Now they are diminishing at such a rapid pace, that we risk losing them for good.

Join the million voices against illegal wildlife trade on our Facebook page and stay up to date with latest developments and campaign actions.

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Barack Obama’s Energy Policies – They are great but have left me a bit disappointed

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This election offers a clear choice if you are into the environment and advancing energy policies towards a clean energy future. Barack wants to go to clean energy and Mitt wants to go back to the past. I have been disappointed in some of Barack’s decisions or should I say his administration’s decisions. I was totally unhappy with his decision to back the two nuclear power plants in Georgia. I also thought that the Sylendra loan was totally political. Still his strong backing for Wind and Solar is deeply appreciated. More historic however, he has moved the military towards alternative energy. Like I tell people who are you gonna vote for? The other guy?

http://www.barackobama.com/record/environment?source=primary-nav

  • President Obama has made protecting the environment a priority, moving us toward energy independence, investing in clean energy jobs, and taking steps to improve the quality of our air and water. As of November 2010, the Obama administration’s policies have helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean energy industry.

  • President Obama enacted the largest expansion of land and water conservation and protected wilderness in a generation. He also created the America’s Great Outdoors initiative to develop a community-led conservation and recreation agenda for the 21st century.

  • President Obama is committed to putting in place an “all-of-the-above strategy” to develop every available source of American energy while making sure we never have to choose between protecting our environment and strengthening our economy.

In his most recent State of the Union address, President Obama reiterated his commitment to lessening America’s dependence on foreign oil and investing in clean energy to protect our environment and create jobs.

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Milwaukee Has A Pretty Phenomenal Transition Movement – Maybe this post will stay

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I tried to post about the Transition Movement in Milwaukee last year or the year before and got slammed for it by some editor/publisher woman there for using “too much” copyrighted text. She also dissed my unorthodox style. So I took the post down and replaced it with one about transition groups in Boston or Los Angeles. Maybe even the mothership in England. Let us see how this goes this time around.

http://onmilwaukee.com/living/articles/transitionmilwaukee.html?viewall=1

Transition Milwaukee: “we’re all in this together”

By Royal Brevväxling RSS Feed
Special to OnMilwaukee.com

E-mail author | Author bio
More articles by Royal Brevväxlin

Published May 30, 2012 at 5:31 a.m.

Transition Milwaukee (TM) is part of an international movement formed, in part, in response to the peak oil crisis and more generally around issues of climate change, economic security and permaculture principles.

Peak oil is a non-controversial acknowledgement from government, academic and industry experts that fossil fuels, a finite resource, reach a peak moment of production and necessarily begin to decline.

Any controversy that peak oil generates is from determining when this peak production will occur, from a few decades into the future to it already peaking in 2007. Bigger questions about what a society that can’t rely on fossil fuels looks like also stir up debate – and emotions.

Permaculture principles are those that inform design and systems theories about how to develop not only sustainable but self-maintained and regenerative ecological systems. Modern agriculture and societies based on oil consumption are not regarded as sustainable.

TM’s goals involve a “whole-systems” approach toward making our economies sustainable and regenerative for seven generations into the future.

“Right now, Transition Milwaukee acts as a network of concerned activists who are working toward reducing the radius in which we get our goods and services, food, water and shelter,” says Jessica Cohodes, TM steering committee leader, press contact and “big-picture synthesizer.”

Members of TM don’t really have official titles. Although it has a steering committee, TM is organized non-hierarchically.

“Transition Milwaukee has always been a group, grass-roots endeavor about the community, from the ground up. Part of its founding philosophy is that it isn’t someone else’s job to get us off oil, but our job,” says Erik Lindberg, a former TM steering committee member who regularly gives presentations on energy and the environment.

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The Big Fix Gets It Right – Thus gets no attention

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The American sheeple have grown tired of Reality TV that is not manufactured. If you show the American people the truth they stampede in the opposite direction because they have been taught that the truth entertains not that the truth shall set you free. First I give you the movie site and then the best review I could find. I know this has been out for awhile and I apologize for my tardiness. Part of the problem is I have spent a fair amount of time on the Gulf Coast, living in Tampa and New Orleans. As a result I have been frequent visitor to St. George Island. So I many times do not trust my emotional response to events there. Still this is important.

http://www.thebigfixmovie.com/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/big-fix-cannes-2011-review-189062

The Big Fix: Cannes 2011 Review

8:39 AM PDT 5/17/2011 by Kirk Honeycutt

The Bottom Line

A gloomy but perhaps realistic depiction of the forces of corruption and deceit that produce environmental catastrophes.

CANNES — The Big Fix from Josh Tickell (Fuel) and his wife and co-director Rebecca Tickell is the latest doom-and-gloom environmental documentary although this one takes alarming leaps from a single environmental catastrophe into fantastic realms of worldwide conspiracies, corporate malfeasance and political corruption. Which is not to say the filmmakers got anything wrong. Anyone with an open mind and some attention paid to events of the past few years will have little trouble seeing that the fix was in when the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico last year — and this fix will still be in when the next catastrophe happens.

The problems with The Big Fix though are threefold: One, judging by the poor attendance of journalists and film critics at the film’s Palais press screening, few people other than fellow activists are seeing to these doom-and-gloom movies anymore. Two, little here is really new as much of the Tickells’ findings have been reported elsewhere, even by some of those they interview, especially Jeff Goodell, who spent months in the Gulf for his well-researched Rolling Stone article.

Finally, the Tickells describe a “fix” is so vast and powerful, the film can only throws its hands up over any realistic solution other than to install solar panels to heat up your toxic household water.

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Fine Kettle Of Fish They Have Got Us IN – or actually out of I guess

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Whatever. It is real rare that I do a Purely environmental post. Yes it is true if there is no food to eat, then there is no private housing market, thus no residential energy market. But man that is a stretch. Still fishing vessels use huge amounts of energy, at least the large commercial ones do, so they pollute the water as well as strip it bare.

The end of fish, in one chart

Posted by at 08:00 AM ET, 05/20/2012

Want to see how severely we humans are scouring the oceans for fish? Check out this striking map from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2012 “Living Planet Report.” The red areas are the most intensively fished (and, in many cases, overfished) parts of the ocean — and they’ve expanded dramatically since 1950:

Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted.

Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent (see the chart to the right).

Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.

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Go there to see the graphs and maps and read. More tomorrow.

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Final Post On Lawn Care For This Year – Who knew that there was a whole organization

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I mean really, a whole organization dedicated to the safe cultivation of lawns? But it is true.

http://www.safelawns.org/blog/

PBS Program to Showcase Glenstone’s Organic Lawn

The natural lawn care movement in the United States will get a major boost in August when Growing A Greener World, hosted by Joe Lamp’l, showcases the organic lawn renovation at Glenstone, the modern art museum in Potomac, Md. The episode, estimated to be watched by nearly a million people nationwide in its first run, is scheduled to be aired in late August.

SafeLawns was on-hand, both to observe and to participate in the segment. We have been the lead consultants on the project since its inception in July of 2010 and the Growing a Greener World team is the first film crew to be allowed on the 160-acre Glenstone property, which has not had any synthetic chemicals used on its grounds since our arrival.

The two-day shooting session began in dreary, cold and wet conditions on Monday that ultimately led the crew indoors to the College Park laboratory of Dr. Mark Carroll and Dr. Thomas Turner, the two University of Maryland scientists who are working on an organic lawn research project with SafeLawns and Glenstone. The following day in Potomac, however, temperatures were in the 60s under brilliant blue skies.

“When you look at this place, the only thing you can say is ‘Wow,’” said Lamp’l, who is in his third season with this show.

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Good there and read. More tomorrow.

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Trying To Figure Out Lawn Mowing – Here at least is some help with the numbers

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I know lawn mowing seems trivial in some respects, but for this blog it is purposeful behavior. Behavior that can be modified. Mowers do not start themselves nor do they drive around by themselves. So for millions of us every time you start a mower think about it. Do you really need to do this and is this mower the right one for the job?

http://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm

Cleaner Air : Gas Mower Pollution Facts

Push Mower Comparison Chart

EPA Statistics: Gas Mowers represent 5% of U.S. Air Pollution

Each weekend, about 54 million Americans mow their lawns, using 800 million gallons of gas per year and producing tons of air pollutants. Garden equipment engines, which have had unregulated emissions until the late 1990’s, emit high levels of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, producing up to 5% of the nation’s air pollution and a good deal more in metropolitan areas.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a new gas powered lawn mower produces volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides emissions air pollution in in in one hour of operation as 11 new cars each being driven for one hour.

Gardeners Spill More than the Exxon Valdez

And speaking of gas, the EPA estimates that over 17 million gallons of fuel, mostly gasoline, are spilled each year while refueling lawn equipment. That’s more than all the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez, in the Gulf of Alaska. In addition to groundwater contamination, spilled fuel that evaporates into the air and volatile organic compounds spit out by small engines make smog-forming ozone when cooked by heat and sunlight.

Calculate Your Gas Mower’s Emissions

Until 1995, lawnmower emissions were unregulated. Older more powerful, less efficient two-cycle engines release 25-30% of their oil and gas unburned into the air. Gas mowers emit hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen (the principle ingredients of smog), particulate matter (damaging to the respiratory system), carbon monoxide (a poisonous gas) and carbon dioxide (contributing to global warming). The health toll includes cancer as well as damage to lungs, heart, and both the immune and detoxification systems. Plus smog inhibits plant growth. Lawnmowers are currently subject to EPA’s Phase 2 regulations. These requirements have reduced volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides emissions by over 70 percent from unregulated levels. EPA’s Phase 3 regulations take effect in 2012 for lawnmowers and will result in additional reductions in these pollutants.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Environmental Lawn Care – What a large and confusing subject

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We have over the past 3 or 4 years talked about getting animals to trim our grass. We live in the city, it is true but we have only talked about getting 2 animals. We think the village will be OK with it. So far we have talked about alpacas, goats and sheep. Now being small town kids, we assumed that they would roam the yard eating the grass and we would have a level and fertilized yard for free. But that is massively wrong. They require special feeds as supplements, they all require hoof care and must have a vet, and they can not tolerate the Illinois winters, so they have to be sheltered. The long and the short of it is that if you sell their hair to people who use it to make things (you do have to shear them for summer) then you can get close to break even but with only 2 animals it would be tough. So mow we shall for now.

Natural Lawn Care

Lawns do more than make your yard look good.

Lawns absorb water, which helps reduce storm runoff and improve water quality. Lawns also have a significant cooling effect, provide oxygen, trap dust and dirt, promote healthful micro-organisms, prevent erosion and filter rainwater contaminants.

Lawn care, however, has come at a high cost to the environment. According to the U.S. National Wildlife Federation:
  • 30% of water used on the East Coast goes to watering lawns; 60% on the West Coast.
  • 18% of municipal solid waste is composed of yard waste.
  • The average suburban lawn received 10 times as much chemical pesticide per acre as farmland.
  • Over 70 million tons of fertilizers and pesticides are applied to residential lawns and gardens annually. (Read Healthy lawns, healthy lungs)
  • Per hour of operation, a gas lawn mower emits 10-12 times as much hydrocarbon as a typical auto. A weedeater emits 21 times more and a leaf blower 34 times more.

Where pesticides are used, 60 – 90% of earthworms are killed. Earthworms are important for soil health.
Much of the environmental cost associated with lawn care can be avoided.
Healthy Lawn Basics   

The only way to reduce a dependence on chemical fertilizers is to develop a healthy lawn, which is naturally resistant to weeds, insects and diseases. If you need to fertilize your lawn more than once a year, consider these ways of improving the natural health of your lawn:

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Go there and read more then I frankly could. More tomorrow.

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Next Week Is Earth Week – Actually Sunday is the day

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Might as well end the week with a kick off for the next. Earth Day is Sunday, but Springfield can’t seem to get its act together on the actual day. But at least people celebrate it. Happy weekend everyone.

http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/10_things_we_ve_learned_about_the_earth_since_last_earth_day

April 19, 2012

10 Things We’ve Learned About the Earth Since Last Earth Day

Sunday is the 42nd celebration of Earth Day, which was started in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to help educate people about environmental issues and demonstrate public support for a conservationist agenda. With that in mind, we decided it was the right time to recap the most surprising, awe-inspiring and alarming things that we have learned about the Earth and the environment since last year’s holiday:

1. Undiscovered species are still out there: Countless discoveries over the past year reminded us that, despite centuries of research, the planet still has plenty of surprise species in store. Among the many finds include seven new forest mice species in the Philippines, a “psychedelic” gecko in Vietnam and a new type of dolphin in Australia. A new analysis released last August, billed as the most accurate ever, estimated that a total of 8.7 million different species of life exist on earth.

2. Global warming is already driving up food prices: While many fear that climate change will someday reduce crop yields and cause food prices to rise, a study published last May in Science indicates that this troubling trend has already gotten started. The models used suggest that reduced global yields of wheat and corn are related to global warming. Although the effects are relatively small so far, they may cause severe problems in the future, as climate patterns continue to change and food demand increases.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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