News
Weekly Linkfest – Edition 004
Welcome to round four of our Weekly Linkfest, where we share the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain interesting from what we’ve seen this week.
I would greatly appreciate readers getting involved in this weekly linkfest. Please email editor (at) permaculturenews.org with links (and ideally a summary sentence outlining the key point of each link) to noteworthy articles and news reports on the internet.
Off we go:
Good News (coz we all need it):
- Global deforestation slows as China replants. Of course, we need to turn it into active reforestation – where the net result is rapid increase – rather than just ‘slowing deforestation’, but we take our good news where we can get it.
- The Zero Net Deforestation Act soon to come into force in British Columbia will see every tree cut down getting replaced.
- One Irishman embraces renewable energy.
- Tokyo’s United Nations University gets a farmers’ market.
- Publisher Experiments With ‘Free’ And Sees Book Sales Increase 20x
- Maybe your teenager isn’t a lazy good-for-nothing after all. Maybe he/she is just plain tired?
- Localised currencies in the spotlight again.
- This YOU ARE NORMAL campaign that flies in the face of our you-won’t-be-happy-without-your-next-purchase mentality is pretty cool.
Bad News (coz we need to understand the challenges if we’re to design our way out of them):
- The mainstream media has virtually forgotten about Colony Collapse Disorder, but the bees haven’t. Some background here.
- China’s oil consumption increases 28% in January 2010 compared to same time last year. Meanwhile the UK’s former chief scientists says that the world’s oil reserves have been exaggerated by up to a third. Don’t say I didn’t warn you (here, here, here and here).
- The best laid plans of mice and men…. The best western intentions in improving water supplies in Bangladesh has ended in up to 20 million people being at risk of arsenic poisoning.
- Moscow’s ‘Day of Wrath’ protests (more here) show us that Russia mirrors other new capitalist countries with its widening chasm between rich and poor, and growing unrest.
- Contrary to ‘contrarian’ views that government are manufacturing climate change, Canada’s government is ‘hiding truth’ on the issue, a new report states. Obscuring facts as the world burns is nothing new though.
- The herbicide atrazine turns boy frogs into girl frogs. I wonder what it does to you and I?
- A Dangerous Mix of Water and Oil outlines yet another ‘feedback loop’ – here declining oil production will see our ever-more-scarce supplies of water used to get more energy out of the ground, and for other industry needs. Essentially, industry and the poor are increasingly pitted against each other in a tug of war over water.
- Australia’s ‘Big Dry’ continues, and our failure to address root causes is giving rise to energy-exorbitant desalinisation plants. (Check out the WWF report Desalination: option or distraction for a thirsty world? for more information on the energy costs of such systems.)
- Even the head of Nestle is worried about the water issue.
- And water is a bigger issue than world violence.
- Water disasters hold promise for some though.
- Drought hits Venezuela to such an extent that Chavez is stretching the Easter holiday by three extra days to keep people and industry closed – to save energy.
- People in Cyprus are so busy arguing they can’t even see their own water disaster looming.
- The internet is a threat to rare species.
Just plain interesting or odd (coz we’re curious creatures):
- I’ve seen and enjoyed some great work from Raj Patel – but I’m not quite sure I’m ready to call him the Messiah yet.
- Are Americans Too Broken by Corporate Power to Resist? An interesting discussion on corporate media, couch potatoes, and reporters who should challenge both.
- Apples in season for only a few months, but we eat them year round. Where are they for the other nine months?
- Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Homeschoolers – the U.S. opens its arms to a persecuted German family – who were being fined and harassed for deciding what and how their children should learn.
- A thirty year territorial dispute between India and Bangladesh over ownership of a small island in the Bay of Bengal is finally over – because the island is now submerged.
- Delhi unveils a giant air freshener to combat increasing pollution.
- Climate change makes birds shrink.
- 75 starlings drop out of the sky, plunging to their deaths – Suicide? Political statement? Foul play? Or just bad escape route?
- People who read George Monbiot’s post on putting a bounty on Tony Blair’s head might find this interesting.
- Greenpeace links Kit Kat consumption with orangutan extinction and rainforest destruction despite Nestle’s best efforts. More on the KitKatastrophe here.
- Meanwhile, 24 other monkeys worldwide face extinction amidst what could be history’s greatest mass extinction.
- I’m not sure where this seagull is based, but he’s pretty darned sneaky.
- The Rolling Stone magazine takes a look at King Coal’s environmental footprint, and asks if Obama can do anything about it.
- Regular low-intensity fires, as opposed to complete fire avoidance followed by debris buildup and massive resulting burnoff, are back in vogue.
- We all know animals are migrating, where they’re able, to cope with climate change. In efforts to save species one U.S. biologist is suggesting we can simply pick them up and move them!
- The supersize-me mentality we’ve had over the last decade or two is just the hockey stick end of a much longer trend, some say.
- Watch the world on the move….
Don’t forget to send me your links for next week’s linkfest!! – editor (at) permaculturenews.org