EcoWorldly

Renowned primatologist, environmentalist, and humanitarian, Dr. Jane Goodall, has called for the entire world to join in a celebration of peace.

Nearly half a century after her landmark work with chimpanzees in Tanzania, “Dr. Jane” as she’s more often known, is traveling the world with a message that “peace is possible.”

This message is inspiring many to join Roots & Shoots, the Jane Goodall Organization’s international youth activism program. Roots & Shoots supports grassroots activities and projects that benefit the environment, animals, and communities.

On September 21st, Roots & Shoots groups and other individuals around the world will symbolically join Dr. Jane in a call for peace from communities the world over. Groups from Tanzania to Tennessee will make and fly Giant Peace Doves, like the one pictured here.

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This week, Ecoworldly celebrates the Water Week, and between September 8 - 14, readers of the blog will be reflecting on a lot of water issues here. But isn’t it exciting that this is also the week that word finally leaked out that Google was patenting a retrofitted floating water and wind energy data center.

What does that mean? According to documents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office August 28, the Google water-powered data center will be - a system that includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

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Christopher and Kerri are a couple and social justice teachers out on a mission. Since the beginning of September 2008, they have been on a unique 30-day experiment on food choices, consumerism, waste, poverty and social psychology - trying to live on a one dollar a day diet.

But this insightful challenge - in their own words - to help us better understand and teach about a variety of concerns, could have been more interesting if it was broader in perspective.

Instead of trying to spend just a dollar on food daily from their comfort in Encinitas, California, where a tub of toothpaste costs $4.99, they should have enlisted a family in, say, Chittagong, Bangladesh or Turkana, Kenya, and asked them to survive on a dollar a day.

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Biofuels war has broken out in Africa. Newspaper headlines have not proclaimed it but the gist of it is already out. Big money profiteers from Europe and United States are rushing to Africa in a new scramble for the continent, transforming large swathes of arable land into massive biofuels plantations.

Local but poor populations in many parts of Africa are increasingly being driven deeper into economic obscurity yet 60% of them still depend on agriculture for survival. Another 60% of that eke out a living by subsistence farming and animal husbandry.

The World Bank has been sitting on a secret report since April that says biofuels are responsible for the global food crisis; food prices have risen 75% because of the impact of the search for alternative fuels through the use of food products.

African civil society is calling for a moratorium on new biofuels investments in Africa amid concern that that the biofuels revolution will bring more food insecurity, higher food prices and hunger to the continent.

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Americans are Reportedly Inhaling 10 billion Pounds of Chinese Toxic Fumes Annually

It was reported a few days ago that some 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach within the borders of the US annually, quoting numerous scientific estimates.

But the pollution figures that scientists studying the impact of Asian, and mostly Chinese, environmental waste in the atmosphere have suggested are more than alarming.

The real impact of the Asian Tigers, helped by their giant brother, China, which is now thought to have overtaken the US in emissions of greenhouse gases, may amount to a kind of colonization of the United States, and by extension, North America, potentially destabilizing weather patterns across the North Pacific and masking the effects of global warming.

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Dogs have long been accepted as man’s best friend. But nosy ones have provided inspiration to a laser research team working on early cancer detection methods to devise a breathalyzer-type tool that could significantly improve survival rates for suffering millions.

Researchers at University of Oklahoma are reportedly working to create a sensor to detect bio-marker gases exhaled in the breath of a person with cancer, picking up on earlier studies showing that dogs can detect cancer by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.

In a study published two years ago, it was found that dogs identified breast and lung cancer patients with accuracies of 88% and 97%, respectively by smelling breath samples.

It has been proven elsewhere that gas-phase molecules are uniquely associated with cancer but the team will use nanotechnology to improve laser performance and shrink laser systems, which would allow battery-powered operation of a hand held sensor device.

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The two tribes lived there in a plum lakeside community when the Sahara Desert, as we know it, was a lush, green country, but were separated by effects of climate change over a time line of 1,000 years.

The mystery of the lost tribes of the green Sahara has been unraveled by a joint team of archaeologists and palaeontologists who were out on a dinosaur-hunting expedition in the Ténéré Desert in present-day Niger but instead stumbled on a large, Stone Age graveyard.

Now whatever little may be known about the Kiffian and Tenerian tribes, thought to have lived in the Sahara between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago are bone harpoons, earthen pots, among other artifacts.

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The most recent scientific research suggests that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth. Realizing the urgency to spread this message and to take the word across to each continent and to each country, 350.org took shape as a movement that is now working to spread this most important number on the planet by building a global grassroots climate movement united by a common call to action.

350 is the most important number on the Planet. This number is a safe line for our global climate and a start line for a global movement is how 350.org begins to explain the importance of 350.

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100 Million Trees Are Cut Each Year to Generate Junk Mail
A report by ForestEthics, the nonprofit environmental organization whose mission is to protect endangered forests, has made a very startling revelation: that there are 100 million green reasons why junk mail are an annoying intrusion.

Not that the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year are irksome enough or that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars or 51 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The group estimates that every year, more than 100 million trees are cut down to make junk mail - the equivalent of clear-cutting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months!

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The New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman sent a postcard from Copanhagen recently.

In an Aug. 9 op-ed column titled “Flush with Energy,” Friedman drew a stark contrast between America’s energy policy and that of Denmark.

That the United States – the all-powerful, lone (for now) superpower –  can so easily be trumped by little Denmark is shameful.

It only adds salt to the wound that so many foolish, ignorant and willfully oblivious Americans still insist that they live in the “Greatest Nation on Earth” despite so many shortcomings, such as displayed by this stay-the-course mentality that leaves us in the energy policy dust of forward-thinking nation’s like Denmark. Read the rest of this entry »