I didn’t know that before.

If you mention to me ‘the Mediterranian’, I conjure up images of tourism, sun, olive trees and the Biblical lands. I would never have associated the Mediterranean with wetlands.

Mediterranian Wetlands

Lots of them, dotted around everywhere; Lakes, lagoons, dams and river deltas. 570,000,000 hectares – roughly 6% of the Earth’s land surface

You want to see the diversity, check TOUR DU VALAT

And, they’re in trouble…

Protection ‘vital for Mediterranean’s wetlands’

Thymio Pappayannis on how wetlands in the Mediterranean have changed

Urgent government action is the only thing that can stem the crisis facing the Mediterranean’s wetlands.

That was the message from a recent meeting convened to discuss how best to protect these increasingly vulnerable ecosystems.

Mangroves, reed beds, peat bogs, ponds, river banks, swamps, marshes all fall under the heading of wetlands.

Under the umbrella of the Mediterranean Wetlands Initiative (MedWet), more than 350 specialists from countries in the region came together in Agadir, Morocco, to discuss the challenges facing these unique ecosystems.

They were drawn from a daunting range of disciplines: there were bird watchers, eel specialists, forestry commissioners, marine biologists and environmentalists present at the symposium.

Their discussions centred on refining old strategies and developing new ways of conserving wetlands.

With more than 50% of the Mediterranean’s wetlands lost over the last century, Laurent Chazee, the co-ordinator of a report published during the symposium, say he wants governments to wake-up, stressing the need for urgent action.

“It is no longer enough to leave the fight to environmentalists,” he says.

“Governments must get involved and policies have to be more clearly thought through. If not, whole areas of countries to the south of the Mediterranean will be de-populated as people move away in search of water.”

In addition to increasing population, intensive agriculture, tourism pressures and climate change, new and as yet unquantified changes are having an impact on wetlands.

Source: BBC News Read more

An example:

Wadi Rum in Jordan.

Black Iris, Jordan's national flower

Wadi Rum is a protected environment. Rare species of animals, small plants, and herbs can be found by the inquisitive traveler. Red anemones, poppies and the striking black iris, Jordan’s national flower, all grow at will by the roadside and in more quiet reaches. Herbal medicinal cures used for centuries by the Bedouins are found in the mountainous regions.

Wadi Rum is also a bird-watchers’ haven with its 110 recorded species. Vultures, buzzards, eagles and sparrows are a few to be seen by those looking skyward. Other interesting creatures to be found include the camel-spider, feared by local Bedouins for its ability to harm camels, however this spider is not dangerous to man.

Seen gracefully in its natural habitat, the Ibex, mountain goat, is often spotted in the desert terrain. Another interesting animals are the Gray Wolf, Blandford’s Fox, and the Arabian Sand Cat which is similar in appearance to a domesticated cat and survives in its harsh desert surroundings.

Comment:

Who ever knew about this? I am amazed. Source: Atlas

Another:

The Ebro Delta

Natural water wells at the Ebro Delta - an interesting freshwater habitat typical of Spanish Mediterranean coastal plains close to karstic countryside where underground water overflows. (Photo: Anna Motis)

The Ebro Delta is one of the major river deltas of the Mediterranean Basin. It covers an area of 320km2 and consists of a typical delta platform extending 30km into the Mediterranean. The main surface of the delta is covered by agricultural land, and most natural areas are located along the edges, behind large natural beaches and sand dunes.

Because the Ebro Delta is heavily populated compared to other Mediterranean wetlands, the area is intensively utilized. There are very few areas where the natural resources are not exploited. In most of the delta, agriculture is the main activity and this includes intensive rice production covering 21,500ha and in some areas other crops such as lettuce, tomato, and melon. In a couple of relatively small areas, there is some extensive cattle ranching allowing the development of interesting habitats. Fishing is very important both in the lagoons, river and surrounding sea. Shellfish production is also remarkable in the enclosed bays of La Banya and El Fangar. Source: Ramsar

Species never imagined…

The wetland surrounding the Dead Sea supports endangered species such as ibex, hyrax and even a few Arabian leopards.

Source: WWF

Iberian lynx

Source: WWF

Blue Swamp Hen

Albufera Marshland, Mallorca

Other species include ospreys, turtledoves, night herons, scops owls, hoopoes, black-winged stilts, Kentish plovers, glossy ibis, spoonbills, bee-eaters, purple gallunule, great reed warblers, flamingos, and the purple swamp hen (pictured above). Not to mention species that are fairly rare elsewhere in Europe, such as the black vulture, Eleonora’s falcon, Audouin’s gull, the moustached warbler, and Marmora’s warbler.

Source: BlueBay

Treasured habitat ... a flock of flamingos feeding in the Carmargue, France. Photograph: Alamy

Source: The Guardian

Ox Eye, Wadi Rum, Jordan

Source: Atlas

Comment:

Plants, animals, reptiles, insects all inhabit the wetlands, the same as anywhere in the world. They are a part of our heritage and like everything else on the planet we are slowly but surely destroying them.

Many of the wetlands featured in this post are in European lands that are suffering from the global financial meltdown, or in lands where political strife is endemic. The governments are more interested in saving banks than flora and fauna.

The natural elements of this world, the beauty and majesty are not on the lists of priorities.

Are we doomed to totally destroy the beauty of our little blue ball in space?

When you consider the importance that this 3rd Rock from the Sun plays in the larger plan of the cosmos, it’s probably not too important, but for us, humanity, it is our home; it is all we have…

There is no Planet B.

The coffee helped, coffee always helps in a time of crisis.

We return you to our normal CTWW programme.

This week’s Change the World Wednesday:

Calculate your carbon footprint today at climatecare.org, carbonfund.org or www.nativeenergy.com and find out what you can do to minimize it, including purchasing carbon offsets.

“An alternative definition of the carbon footprint is the total amount of carbon dioxide attributable to the actions of an individual (mainly through their energy use) over a period of one year. The term owes its origins to the idea that a footprint is what has been left behind as a result of the individual’s activities.” – Surrey Health

Well, I went to one of the sites above and calculated. I use about 1,800kw/h of electricity and 56 kgs of bottled gas. Based on that my carbon emmisions = 1.2 tons of CO₂ requiring me buy £9 of off-sets.

Now I have two issues. One is that they make provision for a car, but there is no provision for a public transport use estimate; as I use public transport  daily, this figure is wrong.

Secondly, I grow a lot of plants, vege and fruit plants mainly, and there is now way of calculating the CO₂ that I reabsorb. So a further anomaly arises.

I consider that what I use and what I return are pretty much a balance, because my plants work 24/7, my other uses that produce a negative impact do not.

I just found a plant calculator on the second of SF’s links, I estimate that I am responsible for about 5 trees equivalent per year, which gives me a credit for $5.00. I found a public transport one, but the calculator appears and then disappears, so I haven’t yet been able to use it.

The plot thickens.

I have found a calculator that gives me Brazilian figures… after all, I am in Brazil. My carbon footprint has reduced to .26 tons of CO₂  and a further .16 tons on public transport. My secondary footprint (buying and lifestyle preferences etc) add 2.6 tons. I get a total result of: Total = 2.87 metric tons of CO2 and this comparison:

Your Footprint	Country Average	World Target

Looks like I have some work to do.

If you are interested in this country specific calculator, try Carbon Footprint Calculator.

Carnaval can be distracting

I remembered when I was washing the dishes. I have been disorientated since last Thursday because of carnaval here in Rio. Carnaval does that to some.

I opened Reduce Footprints… A regular Wednesday thing.

Whaaaaaaaaaaa! No CTWW!

*checks calendar*

*runs cursor over pc clock*

Both confirm that it is indeed Wednesday…

*reloads Reduce Footprints* Obviously there is something amiss…

Still no CTWW.

*Stares at screen blankly*

…………. *blinks*

I know, not enough coffee, I’ll go and make some and the world will have returned to normal.

You browse around here, while I make the coffee.

The above images are all taken in the new renovated Sambódromo this year.

Below is the other side of carnaval.

Disaster Area - all that remains after the blocos (street parades)

But the garis are quick on the job to clear hundreds of kilos of rubbish

Carnaval is a colourful time in Rio de Janeiro, but it does generated tons of rubbish. It doesn’t hang around long, the garis (council road sweepers) are quick on the job to return the route back to normal. This year, for the first time, efforts were made by cooperatives of catadores to separate the rubbish into recyclables.

The blocos are the street parades, to give you an idea of their size, Cordão de Bola Preta in Cinelândia and downtown Rio attracted a record crowd of 2,2 million followers. That’s one big party and a hell of a lot of rubbish.

“We’ll return you to the regular CTWW programme soon…”

Go figure…

I have an opinion about most things, but this has stumped me.

I found this on TreeHugger, go there to read the story.

Don’t just dismiss this as a rant and not worth reading. If you care about the environment, if you consider yourself ‘green’, then this is of vital interest to you.

Recently (past few years) there have been many snippets pointing to things like “Dumbing of America,” “corporations controlling the mainstream media,” “governments and agencies lying,” “the discrediting of science and scientists by agencies,” etc. The ‘etc’ means many many other aspects of keeping the people stupid. We have to face reality and the mainstream media won’t give us the information.

I have commented on them piecemeal in this blog and it’s predecessor, the original Eco-Crap and also on Shit Happens and its predecessor. Both of which were shut down without explanation from Google.

Heartland Institute propaganda, paid for with your money

But just in the last week some serious evidence and accusations have been made. Canada muzzling its scientists, Heartland Institute documents leaked, and just yesterday an article in The Guardian about outright attacks on the veracity of the scientific communities; Attacks paid for by big business are ‘driving science into a dark era’.

All this is something that I have gradually read and formed my opinions on what is happening on a worldwide scenario.

I am going to post some excerpts from The Guardian article, you can go and read the rest fully.

“Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.

She confessed that she was now “scared to death” by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.”

Affecting the whole world

Here you have the president of the AAAS raising the issue. A person of this stature does not make idle guesses.

“set against a background of an entire intellectual discipline that realises that it, and its practitioners, are now under sustained attack.”

The scientific community as a whole feel the threats, it is not just the opinion of one person.

“university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians. At the last Republican party debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted he should be the presidential nominee simply because he had cottoned on earlier than his rivals Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney to the “hoax” of global warming.”

Santorum's infallible reasoning

Right wing politicians obviously are the enemy, with Santorum boasting that he was the first, what an asshole. Santorum is believing the bullshit, and ignoring scientific evidence, which is absolutely typical of your Bible bashhers and the very reason why they should be kept as far from politics as possible.

We spent 500 years getting religion out of politics for a very good reason.

“These institutions [inc Heartland Institute], acting as covers for major energy corporations, are responsible for the onslaught that has deeply lowered the reputation of science in many people’s minds in America. This has come in the form of personal attacks on the reputations of scientists and television adverts that undermine environment laws.”

Paid and funded by those whose industries and interests will be hurt by the truth.

“the decision by the United States supreme court to overrule the law that allowed the federal government to place limits on independent spending for political purposes by business corporations.”

The greatest criminal decision made against the electoral system.

Mainstream Media

“methods used by corporate businesses to attack their targets: harassing individual scientists, ghost-writing scientific articles to raise doubts about government research, and undermining the use of science to form government policy.”

Blocking science from reporting to the people.

“should be based on the advice of experts who have carried out robust and rigorous analysis of the evidence, or if they should be guided by lobbyists who appear driven by narrow ideological dogma.”

Should we believe the truth, or the bullshit by the vested interests that appears in the mainstream media?

“massive organised attempts to undermine scientific data by people for whom that data represents a threat to their status quo.”

Science is being dominated by those whose only interest in money at whatever the cost to humanity and the planet.

The world and humanity are on a very dangerous course.

In-vitro Burgers

This is just plain disgusting!

First it was pseudo-chicken meat…

Now Test-tube Burgers.

Man is tampering again!

Man is tampering with things that he shouldn’t.

We have no idea of the long term risks, but I am sure that they are not good. So far, I have not seen anything that man has tampered with turn out good.

This PETA advert for laboratory meat:

Sure it looks lovely, but I suspect it’s a bit like McDonald’s ads for hamburgers; what you get is NOTHING LIKE the picture.

£200,000 test-tube burger marks milestone in future meat-eating

Project funded by anonymous individual aims to cut number of cattle farmed for food and reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Dutch scientist Mark Post holds samples of in-vitro meat grown in a laboratory. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the world’s first burger made from stem cells.

Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger – produced at a cost of more than £200,000 – this October.

Test-tube Burgers

Source: The Guardian Read more

Opinion:

Lately man has been playing too much God.

I am not a religious person having seen through the quackery of religion when I was much younger. But I do believe in ‘Mother Nature,’ not that she is some entity like we have made ‘God’ but she is the personification of the balance that ought to exist in nature.

Man insists on messing around with that balance and so far we have seen that it does no good.

I think I can safely say that not a single aspect of progress has been in line with Mother Nature, totally the reverse, everything we do grates against the very nerves that make this planet an operating concern.

We (that is, man) think we are oh so smart. We ignore the evidence around us; those of us who want to make money buy the governments and the media. You will not hear them say a word against this latest perversity, because they want you to believe it is good. You will never hear the truth.

Call me a cynic, because that’s exactly what I am; and you would well do to be a little cynical yourselves because your very survival may depend on it.

…and today? It’s a different story!

For those of you who are aware of the health dangers posed by artificial sweeteners and dutifully avoid them, the featured study findings may come as a shocking surprise.

Researchers have found that the artificial sweetener sucralose (Splenda) is a widespread contaminant in waste water, surface water, and ground water. In a recent test, water samples from 19 U.S. drinking water treatment plants serving more than 28 million people were analyzed for sucralose. The sweetener was found to be present in:

• The source water of 15 out of 19 of drinking water treatment plants tested
• The finished water of 13 out of 17 plants, and
• In 8 out of 12 water distribution systems

The average amounts of sucralose in source water and finished water was 440 ng/L and 350 ng/L respectively.

According to the study:

“Further, in the subset of [drinking water treatment plants] with distribution system water sampled, the compound was found to persist regardless of the presence of residual chlorine or chloramines … The results of this study confirm that sucralose [is] an indicator compound … for the presence of other recalcitrant compounds in finished drinking water”.

Recalcitrant compounds are organic or synthetic compounds that resist being broken down by chemical processes, such as those employed by water treatment facilities. This is troublesome, particularly as sucralose can be quite detrimental to human health, and the contamination appears to be very widespread in US water supplies.

Sucralose Destroys Healthy Bacteria

Three years ago, an animal study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health reported that sucralose:

• Reduced the amount of good bacteria in the animals’ intestines by 50 percent
• Increased the pH level in the intestines
• Contributed to increases in body weight, and
• Affected P-glycoprotein (P-gp) levels in such a way that crucial health-related drugs could be rejected. In terms of human health, this P-gp effect could result in medications used in chemotherapy, AIDS treatment and treatments for heart conditions being shunted back into your intestines, rather than being absorbed
• Is absorbed by fat cells (contrary to previous claims)

Champing at the bit

Normally I wake up on Wednesdays ready and raring to go; champing at the bit as it were. But this morning there were some issues in the news that took precedence. Having dealt with those and some other incidentals, I am running later than normal for CTWW.

My last week’s effort, I managed to put on the thinking cap and became creative.

My extra time at the botequim went well and I saved a whole week of two hours of TV and lights per day.

This week is similar.

The challenge is excellent, as usual, but the respect is just not here. Brazilians are not geared for this type of idea.

So here it is entirely impractical.

This week’s Change the World Wednesday Challenge:

If you’re already a recycling “guru”, please tell us about your toughest items to recycle and how you’ve managed it. And, of course, any tips and ideas you have for recycling would be wonderful!

Catadores take anything that is not nailed down if they think they can sell it

If I was to put a special recycling/disposal box out several things could happen. Firstly the local kids would take it, use it, abuse it. Then there is the rubbish truck itself, they would just dump it in with all the other rubbish. Then the locals would just use it for any rubbish, they have no idea, even if it were to be printed on the bin. Lastly, the catadores (street scavengers) would take it for its recycling value and dump any possible contents in with normal rubbish.

So I am looking at the second part of the challenge. I’m so glad Small Footprints always provides an alternative to the main challenge.

As with last week it involves the botequim (neighbourhood bar). You can see the botequim in the photo and the proximity to my light green wall and white gate to the right.

Now botequins are normally a type of pé sujo affair, which means ‘rough and ready’ although literally ‘dirty foot.’

More often than not, they are simply a ‘hole-in-the-wall’ affair, with or without tables on the footpath (sidewalk for our American cousins). Raimundo’s is not. Tiles on the floor and walls, clean toilets, etc.

Now he has two of these

It has taken me more than two years to convince him to put a container on the public side of the bar for general rubbish. In the past rubbish ended up on the floor or in the street which had to be swept up several times a day so as not to look unsightly.

Recently he installed a huge display fridge near the front of the bar for freguês (regulars) to serve themselves, with a bottle opener hung from the wall. He finally put a box under the bottle opener and it has become a rubbish container and most people use it. There are still some die-hards and kids, that insist on throwing stuff into the street; and I have shamed more that a few of them.

So a small difference has been made.

Just a quick moan this morning, but one nevertheless important.

Most internautas (a Brazilian invention) will have heard about things like PIPA and SOPA, fewer have heard about ACTA. The ramifications of the latter only really became apparent after the row about the former two and is now causing some governments to have the same thoughts and retreat like the cowards they are when their tenure in politics is threatened just as the American politicians did over SOPA and PIPA.

Europe has been the main theatre for protests against ACTA, although the British have remained as aplomb as ever.

You can read The internet is angry on BBC News for more details.

These laws are about anti-piracy. The fact that you don’t necessarily download and/or pirate stuff off the net doesn’t mean that you are immune from these government banalities. If you combine these laws with NDAA, which the stupid Americans have already let their politicians pass (December 2011), the threat for the green blogger is very, very real.

You see, as a green blogger you are classed as a ‘domestic terrorist.’ I would lay a pound to a pig’s ears that you , as a green blogger, are on someone’s list somewhere as a dissident or malcontent. And that should scare the living daylights out of you, particularly if you are an American. Even if you are not American, the law allows for you to be extradited from anywhere in the world; just look at what happened to those involved with MegaUploads.

What’s a ‘domestic terrorist’?

Anybody who disagrees with the government, their policies, or threatens the stability of the nation. Anybody who is a conspiracy theorist, who demands change, looks at alternative lifestyles, who is hoarding food and supplies, who buys their products from other than government corporate agencies, who buys from farmer’s markets, who complains about pollution and carbon footprinting. If you Tweet or FaceBook about anything contentious you are in danger. Anybody who reads this blog, anybody who reads your blog are all in the same boat. In fact the interpretation of a ‘domestic terrorist’ is open and flexible and the law allows the president to classify any group of people, or person, as such at anytime.

People who complain about Monsanto’s monopoly on seeds and GMOs, or who take a stand against Fracking and the grip of corporations generally; you are a threat to the government.

If you think I am making a mountain out of a molehill, all I can say to you is “Watch this space!”