In coal mining country, companies are encroaching more and more into old graveyards for the coal underneath. Unfortunately, they’re not the best at keeping track of the bodies they remove from the ground.
Walter Young, a 63-year-old man from Pigeon Creek, West Virginia, told the Associated Press that he went to check on the site of his great-grandmother’s grave one day only to find that the entire cemetery was gone. And upon questioning the coal mining company, no one had any clue where his relative’s grave had been moved.
The Humane Society of the United States, with the declared support of two congressmen, is pushing a new bill that would outlaw the trade of primates across state lines. The action comes a day after a chimpanzee owner stabbed her pet as it attacked a woman in Connecticut.
Representatives Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) urged the passage of the Captive Primate Safety Act (H.R. 80). Twenty states already prohibit keeping primates as pets altogether.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, confirms that polarized light pollution can cause confusion in creatures that rely on light ‘cues’ to navigate through their environment, with many animals also thrown off course by light reflecting from buildings.
I don’t hate Sam Walton, I don’t hate jobbers or discounts or international trade. I don’t even hate many lawyers. I hate when corporations jump through hoops to set up faux social media (social media includes listening) in order to reach out to everywoman and then they trample us.
Literally.
There is only one thing for Walmart to do at this point in time.
Apologize.
There’s a dead man and his father had to bury him. Yes, a father buried a son so that someone could get a flat screen TV, cheap. Rather than apologize Walmart has just today taken this off their website.
Just to be sure that search engines pick this up properly, let me give you the text.
Bring a buddy!!! If you guys think you can do this alone, think again people! These shoppers are die hard and they’ll run you over like there’s no tomorrow! The more you have, the better!
This comes from Kim at Hormone Colored Days. Naturally the mom who had originally posted it come through with a thoughtful comment.
Zhang determined that the animals died of kidney failure after performing a necropsy — an animal autopsy — on about a dozen dogs. He declined to say when the deaths occurred but a report Monday in the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper said they had occurred over the past two months.
“First, we found melamine in the dogs’ feed, and second, I found that 25 percent of the stones in the dogs’ kidneys were made up of melamine,” Zhang told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. (from CNN)
We have a problem. We have 1,500 dead dogs but let’s take a look at what these dogs are. These dogs are bred for their raccoon like coat which is used for trim on coats. Are we as a global economy okay with the slaughter of dogs, man’s best friend, for ornamental fabric? Is it acceptable that Melamine is added to the food supply of both humans and animals?
From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.
Whether it is a pet or a family member, one of the toughest things to deal with as a parent is death. We’ve lost two dogs and a dear friend, who was the father of my daughter’s good friend, and last weekend, my grandmother died. Although my children had only met her a handful of times, my grief and loss was shared with my children. I can’t hide in the closet and cry.
I have always been honest with my children, and I want them to view death as naturally as they consider birth. It is a celebration of life. At times, it is relief to have young children around to hold and hug. At other times, children complicate the picture with their needs which forces a parent to push their grief aside. One of the most healing activities in our family is to share memories of the loved one who has gone on to the next life.
Sustainability, it seems, can be practiced in all aspects of one’s life–including DEATH!
As I discovered recently, traditional methods of handling dead humans are surprisingly serious sources of pollution and resource consumption. For example, burials require a dangerous toxin, formaldehyde, to embalm the body, and those pollutants remain in the corpse as it decays and then goes back into the Earth. Caskets, too, can be problematic in terms of using wood (usually not sustainably harvested), and then the graveyards where they all end up take up lots of land. What about cremation? Well, stoking those fires requires tremendous amounts of power–i.e., electricity, which of course usually comes from coal-fired power plants.
According to the statistics from Wikipedia, each year in America the following environmental nasties get sent below ground with our dearly departed:
30 million board feet (70,000 m³) of hardwoods (caskets);
90,272 tons of steel (caskets);
14,000 tons of steel (vaults);
2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets);
1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults);
827,060 US gallons (3,130 m³) of embalming fluid, which most commonly includes formaldehyde.1
Knowing all this, Death becomes even scarier than usual for any eco-conscious person. But rather than face the great unknown with a heavy heart, rather than lie in the Earth without the ability to rest in peace, you can help preserve the planet even after you are gone. Yes, you can get a green burial.
It’s not only the Gulf of Mexico that’s suffering from “dead zones” caused by excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus used as fertilizers.
Marine dead zones are spreading in the Baltic sea, and that could cause the entire ecosystem to collapse for lack of oxygen. Dire warnings from Lasse Gustavsson, Swedish head of the World Wildlife Funds branch in Sweden.
It’s not even summer on the calendar yet, and the temperature has already topped 100 degrees on several occasions in New York City. According to the Centers for Disease Control, global warming leads to more heat emergency days. In addition to the discomfort, increased need for air conditioning that strains the electrical grid in any region (remember the blackout of 2003?) and generalized lassitude that a lot of really hot days strung together brings, why are excess heat emergency days a big deal? For one simple public health reason: more people die.
