Hard to imagine that at exactly this time last year, I drove off with the family to the neighbouring county for an Easter break and coincided our holiday with an absolute blinder of a heatwave.
The normally pallid writer who blinks mole-like in the daylight returned a week later a bronzed sex god.
In case you missed them the first time around, here are the top 10 international environmental headlines that made news in the blogosphere for the week of March 31 - April 6.
1. Asia — United Nations Climate Change Talks: “Kyoto II” climate talks open in Bangkok
“The first formal talks in the long process of drawing up a replacement for the Kyoto climate change pact opened in Thailand on Monday with appeals to a common human purpose to defeat global warming.
‘The world is waiting for a solution that is long-term and economically viable,’ U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said in a video address to the 1,000 delegates from 190 nations gathered in Bangkok.
Public transportation in Africa can be fun and comical; even depressing or horrible, depending on how you look at it. Consider this: you are a backpacker traveling deep somewhere in the Kenyan rift valley in a 1975 Leyland bus or British Bulldog as they are known here. It is your first time in Africa and everything seems a memorable adventure to take back home. As the bus throttles uphill, belching black smoke in its wake, it gives loud engine rants that sound like Armageddon has arrived, at the top speed of 25 miles an hour.
They disregard sitting capacity here and the bus is never full until the last passenger tilts with it while hanging precariously on the door rails. And there will still be enough room for another one! The foul-mouthed crew had packed passengers at the previous stop like sardines on a hot afternoon with temperatures running to nearly 40° C (104° F) and one must endure the sticky sweat of the person sitting next to you.
That person most probably will be a rotund lady with a basket-full of damp clothes and groceries as well as sun-dried fish and a live chicken for soup on one hand. On the other will be a six-month old baby with his mouth holding on to his mother’s teat, and a two year old wailing profusely and tagging along.
The bus window next to your seat won’t open and your legs won’t fit the spacing forcing you to put your leg astride to expose your feet on the aisle, also packed with all sorts of goods, from a sack of charcoal to sticks of sugarcane. You feel like a caged animal. Sounds familiar?
Remember CFCs? They had the power to flavour teenage armpits and work wonders on refrigeration.
There’s two things I remember from when I was growing up. Well, not two things literally. That would suggest a woebegone adolescence. No, two things of environmental importance.
At 15, Chernobyl. A complete nuclear meltdown causing Europeans to duck for cover to avoid the prevailing winds.
Yeah, so plants are safer now, aren’t they? Well, look, personally, when you play with atoms, I still think of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, once smiling communities now nothing but cancerous shells of their former selves. Higher safety standards lead to greater complacency. No-one reading this can guarantee that another nuclear disaster won’t happen, so please, let’s leave that one alone. I’ve heard it all before.
(I don’t like things that glow in the dark really. I have innate misgivings.)
And as well as Chernobyl, we had an enormous hole in the ozone layer recognised for the first time.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so goes the old adage. But in Africa, green innovations by very creative and eco-imaginative minds seem to be turning this adage around, and perhaps we will soon hear of: “All work and play combined sustains a green Africa”.
It all started with the PlayPump, the water system that is a children’s merry-go-round attached to a water pump and storage tank that featured on Ecoworldly a while ago.
A see-saw that generates electricity when played on by children? Now there is this simple looking see-saw which when played on by children in Africa, generates electricity to help power up their school. It has no name yet but if this trend continues, it looks like Africa will be one very big playground for green play, literally.
You wanna play, somebody?
In an endeavour hopefully better fated than that of the “unsinkable ship”, the Harland & Wolff shipyard of Belfast are now building the world’s biggest tidal electricity generation system.
Named SeaGen, the 1.2 megawatt installation will generate power for over 1,000 homes using energy harvested from tides in Strangford Lough, east of Belfast.
Dear Readers,
Last week, we asked what issues matter most to you. With the initial results rolling in, we’ll concentrate first on public transportation, which currently leads as the number one issue on everyone’s minds.
Recently, Pem brought us a chilling account of England’s bus system, which has much room to improve. We’ll follow this article with a focus on [...]
Earth Hour begins at 8 PM on March 29. For Kamchatka and the Kiribati Islands, that’s in just under 14 hours from now.
As the clock strikes eight in the evening, people across your time zone will be turning off their lights. It’s activism en mass. The purpose: to inspire people to take action on climate change and to demonstrate that massive and immediate action is possible.
So this Saturday night, do something that you will remember the next morning. Join the global movement, Earth Hour, and for just 60 minutes starting at 8 PM keep your lights and electricity turned off.
Dear Readers,
Every two weeks, EcoWorldly writers put their heads together to report on a single issue as it’s happening all around the planet. We have writers on six continents, so these group topics are always a great way to learn more about environmental issues from many perspectives.
Now we want to give you a chance to choose topics that matter to you. What environmental issues would you like to know more about in countries all over the world? We want to bring you news and views about the issues that matter most to you.
Take our Interactive Poll of environmental issues.
Greenpeace recently released their quarterly guide entitled The Guide to Greener Electronics.
What’s the guide all about? In Greenpeace’s words:
“The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child labourers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society’s gizmo-loving ways.”
Nintendo came bottom of the league with no public policy on toxics elimination or recycling. And although the guide describes the behaviour of electronics giants regarding toxic waste, energy usage is not taken into account – something I want to discuss here.
In a press conference on Thursday, Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, shared his concern that greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere will lead to grain and water shortages in India and China as well as rising grain prices in the United States.
“The world has never faced such a massively predictable potential reduction in grain harvest as we are now looking at with the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau,” said Mr. Brown. “Keep in mind, this is not based off of a climate model with somewhat theoretical projections. This analysis is based on what is already happening–on a trend that’s very well established in both India and in China.”
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