Change the World Wednesday – 31st Dec

Last CTWW of the year.

Yes, there is a challenge, two actually.

First is have a Happy New Year!

Second, don’t use/accept a drink in a plastic glass.

Not even to toast in the New year.

Besides, plastic glasses are just so tacky.

Good wine doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.

Even beer is cheapened by plastic.

Once you have got over New Year, continue the challenge for the rest of the year. Make it a whole year of refusing plastiuc glasses.

See you in January.

Simple Green Ideas

Yes, Christmas is over for another year.

One thing for sure, you’ll have plenty of this stuff left over from the frenzy of Christmas morning.

Your Christmas may not have been so green this year, but you can make next year an environmentally friendly Christmas. Save your wrapping paper. It only takes a few minutes to flatten it out and fold it and store it in a box.

Just think, if every family did this, how many trees would have been saved.

Happy New Year!

Monday Moaning

What is it with man?

Must we destroy everything?

It seems that we must. Man is hell bent on destroying everything in nature.

We are literally shitting in our own nest!

Here’s just one more pathetic example.

A nightingale sings – but not for much longer if housebuilding drive wipes out its haven

Campaigners fear disaster for the endangered songbirds if a plan to build 5,000 homes on a breeding site in Kent is given green light

The nightingale has suffered a 90% reduction in numbers. Photograph: Alamy

It is revered for the beauty of its song and is a beloved adornment to the British countryside. But the nightingale – hailed by Keats as a “light-winged Dryad of the trees” – is now in trouble, having suffered a catastrophic drop in numbers in recent years.

Even worse, say ornithologists, the best site in Britain for protecting the songbird – at Lodge Hill in Medway, Kent – is under threat of destruction. Its loss, they say, could deal an irreparable blow to the nightingale in this country. It could also open the floodgates to commercial exploitation of hundreds of other protected environmental sites across the country.

“Lodge Hill is the only Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in the UK that is specifically set up to protect nightingales,” said Sarah Lee, of the RSPB. “It is the most important site for the birds in the UK. Yet the local council want to build 5,000 homes there. It would absolutely destroy the site and the birds’ homes – and send a very worrying signal about the prospects of protecting other critically important sites in the UK.”

According to ornithologists, the nightingale has suffered a 90% reduction in numbers over the past 40 years. Factors involved in this population crash include the intensification of UK farming that has destroyed swaths of sandy scrubland on which nightingales like to breed, while the spread of human populations in West Africa, where the nightingale spends the winter, has also affected numbers. In 2012, a survey revealed there were only 3,300 breeding pairs left in the UK. The bird is now on the amber list of species of “conservation concern”.

In an attempt to protect the nightingale, the Lodge Hill site – a piece of land once owned by the Ministry of Defence – was named as an SSSI, a place where local species are given special protection against human interference.

However, three years ago, Medway council prepared plans to build 5,000 homes at Lodge Hill, a proposal that was approved by its planning committee in September.

Source: TheGuardian Read more

Opinion:

We are at fault; yes, you and me because we vote for these stupid people. We often vote without thinking, we don’t know enough about the candidates, we believe all the pre-election bullshit that pours from their filthy mouths.

Voting should be taken more seriously. We should investigate the candidates thoroughly.

Councils and other governemtn bodies are too keen to rubber stamp projects without considering the ramifications.

Nature Ramble

From Scotland

Source: RachelSquirrel

Satireday on Eco-Crap

How to get your Kids to Eat Veges at Christmas

Green Christmas… Ho ho ho!

Nature Ramble

Saving the Beeliar wetlands is vital: we can’t have a highway destroy it

The western Australian wetlands are home to threatened species – but the government’s plan for a highway would damage the ecosystem irreparably. There are better alternatives

Beeliar lake.

Today we can visit Beeliar wetlands and experience a taste of the stunning Western Australian wetlands that once extended along the Swan coastal plain. A rich tapestry of flora and fauna have made these wetlands their home but now face an uncertain future: successive governments have catastrophically failed to protect the native habitat which have earned Perth’s status as a biodiversity hotspot.

Less than 20% of these wetlands remain today. If we do not act now to conserve and protect these precious places, there will be nothing left for future generations.

A long standing threat to these wetlands is dangerously close to becoming a reality. A four lane, estimated 5km highway extension – proposed on and off for decades – has received financial backing by Tony Abbott’s federal government to the tune of more than half a billion dollars. This fragment of highway remains from a city plan drafted in 1955, back when land clearing and filling in wetlands were the norm. Significant features of our city’s transport plan have evolved in the decades since.

Despite insisting we face a budget crisis, prime minister Abbott has thrown an unprecedented small fortune at the Roe 8 extension and wrapped it up as part of a never-before-heard-of “Perth freight link.” The project, from Muchea to Fremantle Port, was revealed only recently.

‘A long standing threat to these wetlands is dangerously close to becoming a reality’.

Source: TheGuardian Read more

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

Volume of world’s oldest water estimated

The researchers dated some of the deep water to between one and 2.5bn years old

The world’s oldest water, which is locked deep within the Earth’s crust, is present at a far greater volume than was thought, scientists report.

The liquid, some of which is billions of years old, is found many kilometres beneath the ground.

Researchers estimate there is about 11m cubic kilometres (2.5m cu miles) of it – more water than all the world’s rivers, swamps and lakes put together.

The study was presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

It has also been published in the journal Nature.

The team found that the water was reacting with the rock to release hydrogen: a potential food source.

It means that great swathes of the deep crust could be harbouring life.

‘Sleeping giant’

Prof Barbara Sherwood Lollar, from the University of Toronto, in Canada, said: “This is a vast quantity of rock that we’ve sometimes overlooked both in terms of its ability to tell us about past processes – the rocks are so ancient they contain records of fluid and the atmosphere from the earliest parts of Earth’s history.

“But simultaneously, they also provide us with information about the chemistry that can support life.

“And that’s why we refer to it as ‘the sleeping giant’ that has been rumbling away but hasn’t really been characterised until this point.”

The crust that forms the continents contains some of the oldest rocks on our planet.

But as scientists probe ever deeper – through boreholes and mines – they’re discovering water that is almost as ancient.

The oldest water, discovered 2.4km down in a deep mine in Canada, has been dated to between one billion and 2.5bn years old.

Source: BBCNews Read more

Comment:

Now all we have to do is find a way to pollute it…