Human beings are deeply dependent on motorized machines to move themselves around. Trillions of these things now choke a vast and growing network of so-called “roads,” getting into deadly accidents and polluting the planet’s atmosphere.
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One of Earth’s tens of millions of species has been mining colossal volumes of organic matter buried for ages — energy-rich liquids and gases that would have been buried for aeons still — and burning the stuff for fuel! Their garbage dumps have been seeping vast volumes of earth-warming methane. Bottom line: the creatures have managed to raise the surface temperature of their planet to a level higher than any time in the past hundred thousand years! Whether human beings can pull out of their nose dive is anyone’s guess.
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Here are sounds from a voyage undertaken with Marshall Islander Ben Chutaro and his friend Doug, way back in August 2007. The idea had been to go to Mili — I had been pressing Ben to take me there for ages, to see the marine/nature conservancy he was setting up — but weather ended up [...]
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Agriculture is the backbone of Tanzania’s life and economy. Three quarters of her people are small-scale, peasant farmers. Earning a living is tough. Soils are exhausted; water is scarce. Improved seed is an inaccessible luxury. Concrete policies that empower small-scale, rural farmers–particularly women, who produce most of Tanzania’s food–need to be boldly implemented. GPM contributor Josephat Mwanzi reports from Dar es Salaam, in the wake of a forum on African agriculture.
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By its very nature, water can only be successfully managed by consensus. It flows from one place to the next, often in a meandering way, blind to human demands and arbitrary boundaries. Conflicts often arise, smart solutions typically the exception, rather than the rule. Nowhere are water issues more a propos than in the landlocked South American nation of Bolivia.
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Think about resources crucial to human survival. What comes to mind? Fresh, clean water for sure. Food tops the list. Earth’s primary living products – plants that grow from seeds – are the foundation of humanity’s food supply. Wheat, barley, oats, corn, potatoes and a dizzying variety of beans and legumes … Conserving these seeds of survival – as a common resource – is one of humanity’s greatest challenges … Never more so than in the age of global climate change and plant disease pandemics.
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Stuart Franklin is turning air miles into trees. Franklin — the founder of a grassroots carbon offsetting project in Ecuador — calculates how many seedlings he has to put in the ground in order to generate a carbon bank big enough to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by tourists jetting to the popular Galapagos Islands each year.
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The city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, is famous among urban planners for its innovation and rational development, with a reputation for being highly livable and very sustainable. It was one of the first cities to market itself as “green” in a 1980s advertising campaign. And it is.
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Once upon a time, the US was the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide, the major man-made, heat-trapping gas. The average American still emits more than the rest of us, but – sometime last year – fueled by a rising demand for coal and cement – China’s annual emissions surpassed the US’s, at about six billion tonnes. As the Chinese choke on fume-filled air, their leaders are turning to the wind.
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An Interview with 1989 Right Livelihood Award winner Melaku Worede.
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