Published on July 4th, 2008
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For those who fervently follow global warming to the secret labyrinths of the White House, we all know what the professional spinners did with that email attachment from the Environmental Protection Agency about how greenhouse gasses were polluting the environment and should be checked.
Instead of acting upon it or even printing copies to president George Bush and his handlers, they tossed it in a cyber trash bin called Spam folder as if that was the only green thing to do.
Many months after Scott McClellan quit spinning for Dubya, climate watchers are crying foul that he never ever touched the seemingly hot subject in his recently released book, What Happened. But in his famous spins, he had blamed human activity - you and me - as responsible for global warming on more than one occasion.
Spin can be clever tomfoolery sometimes but the White House stance on global warming is well known and George W. Bush has never disappointed with his public statements that smack verily of official ignorance or pretense on the subject as an inconvenient truth.
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Published on July 3rd, 2008
Look for your swimsuit!
Sunday 6th of July Italy will participate for the third time to the “Big Jump“, a campaign by European Rivers Network (ERN) to inspire a reconciliation of people with their rivers.
The Italian NGO “Legambiente” has organized many events to celebrate this national meeting on the Po River, the country’s longest river (405 miles long). The Po’s waters flow through the Val Padana, the plain that stretches across northern Italy from the French border on the west to the Adriatic Sea on the east. Many Italians live in this fertile expanse, some of the most heavily cultivated land in Europe: here is located the city of Turin, headquarters of Fiat, the automotive conglomerate, and some of the country’s most beautiful and historic towns.
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Published on July 2nd, 2008
The phone went the other day. Nice chap at the other end – a press contact. And he thanked me for the coverage I’d given this story in the past. Very rare in this game.
It turns out that Lyme Bay – just an hour’s drive from here has had the victory we’d all hoped for.
One of the UK’s finest marine wildlife sites is set to be protected from damaging scallop-dredging, thanks to the introduction of a 60sq mile exclusion zone.
Paul Gompertz, Devon Wildlife Trust’s director, said: “This is one small step for marine but one giant leap for marine-kind. It finally acknowledges that our seas need vital life-support systems like Lyme Bay reefs.
“It’s taken 18 years, hundreds of thousands of fundraised pounds, the energy and dedication of many people - and a host of setbacks and heartache along the way. But it has all been worth it - to see a new day dawn for the future of marine conservation in this country. The Government is to be congratulated on a bold step. Now we need to see the exclusions enforced.”
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Published on July 1st, 2008
I know, in order to improve the quality of our lives the first step to do is to respect our cities, our neighbourhood and people around us. While we run up and down to full every empty space of our days, the Italian cultural heritage takes a rest to tell us about ancient families and artists, old palaces and frescos. Rome, Florence, Venice and other historical cities that today have to face many social challenges: urban blight, social degradation and abandoning of public spaces. Italy spends hundreds of thousands of Euros every year cleaning up historical monuments that have been defaced by writing or graffiti art.
To face urban blight and raise a common sense of respect Florence launches today a new idea: ten black angels passing through the city centre in order to guarantee decorum and educate people. Starting tomorrow, the group will go around the city talking with citizens and tourists, seeing that they respect the cultural heritage and don’t leave their garbage everywhere. The ten angels are citizens from Senegal living in Florence for a long time; they have been chosen and trained for this project by the consulate of Senegal and the council administration of Florence.
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Published on June 26th, 2008
The FAO’ Food Security Summit, recently held in Rome, gathered together the international community to discuss about the state of poverty around the world. In 1996 the Millennium Goal aimed to cut by half the number of hungry people by 2015, then estimated at 800 million; today the goal is not only far from the original prediction but other 50 million are suffering. We need more food, we have to increase the production and Europe is starting to look at GMO cultivations to face this global crisis.
A worrying alarm arrives now from the Italian Farmers Association (CIA): mass amounts of food is sitting and rotting in their fields because sale prices don’t cover all of the costs of production. The result is a 1.5 million of tons wasted every year and 4 billion of Euro frittered away. All this with rising costs for Italian consumers and farmers.
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Published on June 24th, 2008
With escalating oil and gas costs and growing French electricity imports, Italy is changing is stance on nuclear power. The re-elected Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promised on his campaign to recommit the country to nuclear power and an heated debate is now popping up from north to south.
The general impression is there is still strong local opposition for three main reasons: high construction costs, projected build times of one to two decades and no identifiable Italian community willing to see a nuclear reactor built in their neighborhood. Italy has also failed to resolve the issue of what to do with nuclear waste. A proposed dump in Basilicata region was shelved in 2003 after thousands of demonstrators staged road blocks, marches and hunger strikes.
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Published on June 20th, 2008
They go by the boisterous acronym MEND, or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and they are lethal. As political students of Niccolò Machiavelli, they have crafted Machiavellian tactics to a fault, and boast about shutting oil pipelines in their motherland to get the ears of their sullen government and the rest of the capitalist world which is driven by its lust for oil.
But they don’t just boast, they actually engage in hostage taking and abduction of foreign oil workers working in Nigeria’s oil rich but socio-economically poor Delta region for ransom (they call it pollution reparation); sometimes killing them and even bombing oil pipelines for effect.
MEND said in an email circulated to news media in January 2006: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it…. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”
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Published on June 19th, 2008
Italy’s failure to apply EU directives is not only related to the garbage emergency in Naples. A recent article by Fulcro Pratesi, President of the environmental group Wwf Italy, makes a plea to save one of the most enchanting Italian cities from degradation. Summer is coming and big cruise liners are devastating the Venice lagoon creating a health hazard for residents.
Tourism has been part of the life of Venice for centuries; however, in the last years, the city has faced grave problems due to the tremendous volume of tourists each year. Residents say that whereas the centre of Venice was once full of shops selling ‘real things’ but now most shops sell souvenirs such as Merano glass and carnival masks.
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Published on June 18th, 2008
Expo 2008, the international exposition on water and sustainable development, opened its doors to the world on Saturday in the Spanish city of Zaragoza.
Situated along Spain’s largest River, the Ebro, the 62-acre expo aims to inform people on global water issues and serve as a discussion forum for advocates and international policy makers. A goal of the expo is to produce a “Zaragoza Charter” which will detail recommendations to address such issues as access to clean water, water scarcity, water wars, and water conservation.
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Published on June 18th, 2008
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) published a report in 2006 that documented the plunder of natural resources by human activity and warned that the globe itself could be outstripped in its capacity to support life, rendering the earth extinct in under 50 years.
Based on scientific data collected from across the globe, it revealed that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by human activity in just over the past three decades, because of, among others, increased emissions of green house gases into the ecosystem.
Unless consumption of natural resources was cut and the destruction of vital ecosystems was stopped, human life and that of thousands of other animals and plants would not be sustainable hence the suggestion that the earth itself could be extinct by 2050. In short, the demise of biodiversity will be the death of life on earth, as we know it.
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