Category Archives: ecology

Earthships Africa

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Michael Reynolds reports that the earthships flower in Malawi is complete, and now they are moving forward towards a community center.

NEW DONATION GOAL FOR MALAWI PROJECT: $60,000
For materials needed for the local people to continue building the Kapita Earthship Community Center after the EB crew and volunteers leave on October 20th.

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I’m so glad that they were able to realize their goal and help these folks in a sustainable fashion.  Yay!

Here’s to helping one another instead of, you know, torturing and killing….

 

Blackfish

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CNN has aired the Orca documentary Blackfish–specifically the captive Tillikum that killed trainer Dawn Brancheau.  Not only did he kill her, but another trainer twenty years before, and there was a dead man found on Tillikum’s back, mysteriously appearing one morning.  As the researcher states during the documentary, orcas are not known to attack human beings while they are free–it’s only in captivity that they have attacked humans.  My recent post on OSHA (or Sea World) refusing to release information on their protocol.

Before, when I commented on the Blackfish doc, I remarked how the “whale song” made me cry.  I didn’t understand why at the time….but now I am wondering that this whale’s cry is from being separated from its family and/or a mother whale being separated from her child….knowing that these mother whales cry as a human mother would after having her child taken away….it makes sense.

I posted a link on the Fu Manchu blog on an organization fighting  to stop holding whales captive.   It’s a brutal, selfish practice and it needs to stop.

At the closing scene of Blackfish, they show the orcas swimming freely as they were meant to, and how spirited they were–their dorsal fins are proudly straight–not flopped over like Tillikum’s.  It is awesome to watch them.   As I watch that segment, it occurs to me that perhaps if they took Tillikum back to the Washington State area where they captured him, perhaps he could find his family and rejoin them?   I know that sounds like a long stretch, because he has been in captivity so long, but I would think that his mother would recognize him.    It would be worth it giving it a shot.  He deserves that.

 

Solar in Canada

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Global News features a homeowner who installed solar panels and is now seeing the benefits.    He requested a meter that would feed the excess energy he doesn’t need back into the utility grid, but didn’t see it for months.  The power company exec offers no explanation, only to say that the problem has been fixed.  And the reporter stated that someone refused to be interviewed…I’m assuming it’s the power company’s representative? 

Anyway, I thought about all the excuses used for not pushing solar energy for the northern states–that there’s just not enough sunlight to make it economically feasible—and here we have someone in Canada, which has even less sunlight and because of the shape of Earth, is less intense energy from the sun, and yet they are still able to absorb enough energy to power their homes and have more to send back to the utility company.  Kind of blows that excuse, doesn’t it?

There are others here in the U.S. who go completely off-grid, where they’re not attached to the public utility, and they use batteries to store the excess energy for days that the sun doesn’t shine. 

The time has come for solar.  Cheap–when you factor in environmental damage by all other means of producing energy:  coal (mercury, lead, arsenic), oil (cancer), nuclear (cancer), gas (fracking–mercury, cancer, and God only knows what else).—plus their detrimental effects on climate change.

Clean.  Unlimited power source.

I did a web search and found a national geographic video on a solar farm–but the narrator states that unlike solar panels, they use mirrors that reflect light upward, and then a tube with synthetic oil captures the heat, to transport it.  With that information, I clicked off the video.  Why on Earth would they use synthetic oil??  It just seems that we are so creatively challenged that we can’t think outside the oil box. 

It’s just so harrrrd to think sustainably!!     /said with dripping sarcasm

Take Action for Food and Family Farms

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National Sustainable Agricultural Association has this action alert up on the latest fight for your food, family farms, and organic farms.    Again, we have corporate interests battling against….well, stuff that benefits the average person…..like clean air, water, and chemical free food.

Not to mention the diseases sure to come with the filthy practices of the factory farms.   (A side note~ chicken manure IS worth some money, if left to season.  It’s one of the best fertilizers out there.  And natural to boot.)

From the link:

Carole Morison: Perdue showed up on the farm when the Food, Inc. film crew was here. When the company finally figured out who was visiting, we received a letter threatening contract termination for “violating bio-security.” Their threat stemmed from me not having people sign a log book that the company had placed on our farm to monitor our visitors.

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Oh.My.God. Can you say Big Brother?  I knew that you could.  Violating bio-security?  Seriously?  bwahahahahaha, that’s rich!  How do they figure “security” is involved?  “Security” is the new “cloak” word—something to hide behind when you want to coerce people to do something against their better instincts….

And this is yet another example of the Too Big Too Fail as a way to monopolize a market–the detrimental aspects are seen with bullying these farmers to give into their demands “or else”, to unhealthy practices that most folks would find appalling if they knew, to the environmental impact of upsetting the ecology by having so many chickens crammed into such a small space.

And speaking of monopolizing the market, my blog here on Senators who voted against GMO labeling, links to gut inflammation, etc.

Strokes and youth

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This is sobering news.  Note that the article doesn’t go into diet, but if GMO’s were introduced in the 90s, and strokes started increasing at that time….is anyone going to look into the connection?

Also, colorectal cancer has increased in youth at the rate of 13%  from 1992-2005.  The article goes for the easy blame of fast food….without exploring the GMO connection or toxic environment.   I’m not saying that fast food isn’t a factor, because it is not healthy, but they need to go more deeply.

Also, neither of these articles explore economic factors where the families buy processed food because it’s cheaper, and the family’s health suffers because of it.

Breast cancer rates among the young, and especially young black women, are rising, too–tripling from 1976 to 2009.  Red flags all over the place, folks.

For me personally, one of my lumps has shrunk, the other has stayed the same, a little over a year after discovery.  Interestingly, I had read somewhere that women with fibrocystic breast disease respond well to iodine.  If you recall, last year, about this time,  I had three breast lumps and they were increasing in size.  After increasing my iodine, one disappeared and the other stayed the same size.

Within the mercury poisoning group, there is great debate about low thyroid and iodine.  Some folks are adamantly against iodine, saying if one has Hashimoto’s (which I suspect I have because it is autoimmune and goes with Celiac), that iodine will make it worse.  That hasn’t been my experience.  With the shrinking breast lumps, I would say that my intuition has been right in increasing the iodine.

Mercury interferes with iodine absorption.  the Barium sprayed from chem trails interferes with iodine absorption.    These are most likely factors in the increases in cancer, since the thyroid is a master gland controlling nearly every important body function, from the pituitary to the adrenals, to the gut, to brain function.  This is serious stuff, and messing with the environment is coming around to bite us in the arse.

 

Oil from sunken ships

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Global News has this up on the recovery of oil from sunken ships.  At first, I wondered at all the sunken ships and if they might be a resource for oil instead of drilling the Earth….and then they say the price tag for this is $50 million.

You would think with all the technology out there that they could come up with some system that would allow for easier recovery of oil from sunken ships.  Why couldn’t it be contained in some sort of rubber “balloon” that could more easily be recovered if a ship sank?  Surely they could come up with something like that?

Other sea creature news

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These have been washing ashore in California.  They quote scientist Phil Hastings as saying that these sea creatures “get confused” and end up here….but don’t explore the “why” of it–probably poisoned by mercury in the ocean or some other noxious chemical.  Maybe even corexit? Maybe their food has been poisoned?  There is a reason that they are washing ashore and that needs to be explored without consideration of polluters like BP and others.

 

 

….and a rainbow appears…

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Over the Mi’maq protest.

Singing praise for judge’s ruling. SWN loses bid to continue injunction.

Drums are not weapons

Songs are not weapons

Feathers are not weapons

Here’s a good piece from the Guardian writer Martin Lukacs.  He said there has been media coverage of the event…perhaps in Canada, but in the U.S.?  Doing a quick search, I only saw one U.S. reference by a blogger. Otherwise….*crickets*  It’s pretty telling when you see the nightly news plastered with commercials from BP and other energy companies.  All the news that money can buy, folks…

Lukacs makes a good point with how the coverage is slanted towards painting the First Nations people as violent, but not forthcoming with the great harm fracking will cause….and how many people will die from cancer and other diseases caused by the benzene and mercury and other horrible stuff in the chemicals used.  And of course, the media fails to mention the resulting earthquakes.

From Lukac’s article:

But Premier David Alward, hell-bent on opening up the province to shale gas, has spurned consultation with First Nations and the rest of the population. His latest step is demonization. “Clearly, there are those who do not have the same values we share as New Brunswickers,” he cynically announced on Friday. But the opposition to the Premier’s shale gas agenda is not just a supposedly isolated Indigenous community: it is two of every three people in Atlantic Canada. Little wonder he has repeatedly rejected a referendum on shale gas. It turns out the residents of Elsipogtog aren’t criminal deviants. They are the frontline of a fight for the democratic and environmental will of New Brunswick

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Now you’re talkin’.  The taxpaying public does not want fracking!

Stephen Harper’s history is a little warped, eh?  Um, I’m pretty sure there were people here before we ( “we” being Canada and U.S.)  before there were lines drawn by the Europeans.  And the people here were pretty much organized Nations.  They were here for 10,000 years and were much better stewards of the land and water.  You could drink from any stream.  There was no trash strewn across the land.  You could breathe.

Lukacs also brings up the repeated breaking of laws by those in power who then point fingers.  Do as I say, not as I do….

The fishing rights battles are eerily similar to the same battles in the U.S. with the Native Americans, having their boats rammed, and state officials created an atmosphere of incitement by showing films of Native Americans fishing in areas to the commercial fisherman who thought it should be theirs.  What was truly insulting to the Indigenous was the assertion by the Conservation Officers that the Native Americans would “overfish” the waters…when they had always practiced balance–they never took more than they needed.  If anything, it was the commercial fisheries that were destroying the fish populations.  The story is told in the book Now that the Buffalo is Gone by Alvin Josephy. Robert Satiacum was jailed for standing up for their rights.  Meanwhile, his wife and other women warriors defied the state officials by continuing to fish, using their wits to evade capture.  They were eventually caught, but I have to smile to myself in admiration of their wit and courage for fending them off as long as they could.

More pics here of the women warriors.