Green Options

Isn’t it uncanny that on the eve of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the appearance of ‘On the Origin of Species’ - the Bible of much vilified evolution theorists - Christendom might just be unveiling the latest saint?

This week, the doubtful naysayers may have been proven wrong: the Vatican has lifted a centuries-old veil of official hostility towards and denial of the Theory of Evolution to admit it was actually compatible with the Bible.

The Church of England, as the Anglican Church is officially known in the UK, wasn’t going to be left behind and issued their own confirmation that Darwin’s theory never conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation.

Sweden’s Umeå University in April announced the discovery of ‘the world’s oldest living tree’, a 9,550 year old spruce in the mountains of Dalarna province of the Nordic country.

Scientists discovered the 13 foot tall (4 meter tall) spruce growing at an altitude of 2,985 feet (910 meters) on Fulu Mountain but it is thought its roots actually sprouted just after the end of the last ice age, nearly 10,000 years ago, and the lone survivor has been cloning itself ever since.

The discovery effectively turned the tables on Methuselah, a bristlecone pine located in California’s White Mountains, which at 4,768 years old, was believed to be the oldest living tree around. Its species are known to live long - there are 4,000-year-old pine trees in North America.

German biologists have discovered an hitherto unknown ant species, believed to be the oldest on the planet, deep in the Amazon rain forest.

Field researchers from Karlsruhe’s Natural History Museum who made the discovery near Manaus, Brazil, say the species, which resembles miniature wasps and looks like no other, may date back around 120 million years, according to Reuters.

Martialis heureka, nicknamed the “Ant from Mars” due to its unusual features and heureka from its surprising discovery, the ants themselves are eyeless, pale in color, subterranean, and predatory, according to Wikipedia.

Over one billion people - 18% of the world’s population - lack access to safe drinking water worldwide. Only 56% of Africa’s 800 million population have access to clean water. About 700 million people in 43 countries are affected by water scarcity, according to the UN.

In another few years - in 2025 to be precise - the number could swell to 3 billion driving back gains in the fight against poverty and under-development, otherwise known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

For many people around the world, safe drinking water is a scarce resource and out of necessity, they resort to what’s available - polluted water.

But contaminated water isn’t just dirty—it’s deadly. Some 1.8 million people die every year of diseases like cholera, caused by poor sanitation. Tens of millions of others are seriously sickened by a host of water-related ailments—many of which are easily preventable.

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.

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.

Just over a month since the Smithsonian Institution announced the discovery of new bird species in Africa, little is still known about the olive-backed forest robin named for its distinctive olive back and rump.

Scientists are trying to unravel the little bird’s specific diet, mating and nesting habits, and the species’ complete habitat range, but the dense undergrowth of tropical forest where it was sighted may still offer further surprises.

Adult members of the robins - both male and female - measure just about 4.5 inches in length and average 18 grams in weight.

Males exhibit a fiery orange throat and breast, yellow belly, olive back and black feathers on the head. Females are similar, but less vibrant. Both sexes have a distinctive white dot on their face in front of each eye.

Conservationists were thrilled last month that thousands of African Western Lowland gorillas - 125,000 by head count estimates - may have found a safe haven in a mud swamp and probably escaped predators.

This could have doubled the number of the endangered primates thought to survive worldwide.

But it never dimmed the fact that the great apes are still heading toward extinction if the activities of mad rebel groups operating with abandon in the forests and mountainous regions of Africa continue unchecked.

Mountain gorillas (Gorilla gorilla beringei) are the worst hit among the three subspecies according to their habitant in different parts of Africa. Others are the Western Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and the Eastern Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla grauere).

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.

Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak’s brief stopover for lunch in July in Kampala may have been less poignant had it not put everything to do with River Nile into perspective, for it triggered a bitter diplomatic row between east Africa neighbors, Tanzania and Uganda, over exploitation of its precious waters.

The East African newspaper reported this week that the spat was simmered by three previous unannounced visits to Cairo by a Ugandan water ministry official to negotiate a ’secret deal’ for Egypt to draw more of the Nile waters in contravention of existing multilateral agreements.

Dar es Salaam then demanded to see a copy of the political arrangement between Uganda, which shares Lake Victoria - which feeds the Nile - with Kenya and Tanzania, and Egypt whose economy is largely dependent on waters of the River Nile that drains into the Mediterranean.