The study authors have calculated the cost of the “lost ecosystem services value” our planet has suffered in the last decade and a half. According to their calculations, the loss due to land degradation averages US $43,400 to $72,000 per square km, some US $870 to $1,450 per person, globally each year. The percentage of the world’s land affected by land degradation has grown a lot in the last decades – it has doubled between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. And the process is far from its end.
“This study by ELD shows the immediate and global impact of land degradation and highlights that actions to tackle it pay off,” Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Fisheries and Maritime Affairs commented on the paper.
“Increased land degradation is also one of the factors that can lead to migration and it is being exacerbated by climate change. On our planet, the area affected by drought has doubled in 40 years. One third of Africa is threatened by desertification. As President Juncker said in his State of the Union speech last week, climate refugees will become a new challenge – if we do not act swiftly.”
Aung San Suu Kyi
Imprisoned for actions likely to undermine the community peace and stability. Aung San Suu Kyi is the chairperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the leading opposition party. She was placed under house arrest shortly before the 1990 general election in which the NLD received 59 percent of the vote, and served a total of 15 years. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
Burma by aiww (via https://instagram.com/p/926eGqKDwU/)
The planned city of La Plata, the capital city of the Province of Buenos Aires, is characterized by its strict grid pattern. At the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, the new city was awarded two gold medals for the “City of the Future” and “Better performance built.”
Then there’s Elgaland-Vargaland, which was thought up by two Swedish artists – and is meant to consist of all the areas of “No Man’s Land” across the world, including the land marking the borders between other nations and any bits of the sea outside another country’s territorial waters; any time you have travelled abroad, you have passed through Elgaland-Vargaland. In fact, of all the countries Middleton has looked at, this is the closest to his starting point, Narnia – since the artists claim that any time you enter a dream, or let your mind wander, you have also crossed a border and temporarily taken a trip into Elgaland-Vargaland.
Ancient trees can also create separate entities within their structure to protect themselves from disease. “It’s a strategy for longevity,” says Brian Muelaner, chair of the Ancient Tree Forum. “The Fortingall yew is fragmented and it may be so compartmentalised that part of it has become sexually ambiguous. We are all continuously learning about ancient trees – the ageing process of trees is a new science.”
The Arlit Uranium mine is located in Arlit, Niger. French nuclear power generation as well as the French nuclear weapons program are dependent on the uranium that is extracted from the mine - more than 3400 tonnes per year.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of a massive scandal that cannot seem to be reversed involves Annie Dookhan, a chemist who worked at a Massachusetts state lab drug analysis unit. Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities, Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases. Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can’t figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.
Now, in the case of climate change, because there’s so many possible solutions, it’s not like the Manhattan Project. I don’t think anyone’s saying, “Hey, pick just one approach, and pick some ranch in New Mexico, and just have those guys kind of hang out there.” Here, we want to give a little bit of money to the guy who thinks that high wind will work; we want to give a little bit of money to the guy who thinks that taking sunlight and making oil directly out of sunlight will work. So there’s dozens of those ideas, and there’s enabling technologies for those ideas. That’s the kind of thing that we should be funding more of.
“Yes, the government will be somewhat inept […] But the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.”
In
The Prophecy, a striking series by Dakar-based photographer Fabrice Monteiro, majestic alien creatures wear hoop skirts and headdresses made from soda cans, garbage bags, fishing nets, tortoise shells, and the odd baby doll. It isn’t just fashion photography at its most theatrical and cinematic: There’s a vivid environmentalist message here, though it doesn’t look like any anti-pollution campaign you’ve ever seen.
“Don’t ask permission from a state beholden to oligarchs, and definitely don’t expect those oligarchs to do any of this for you. Guerilla gardening is the model, but look further. Guerilla solar panel installation. Guerilla water treatment facility restoration. Guerilla magnificent temple to the human spirit construction. Guerilla carbon sequestration megastructure creation.”
When Hansen testified before a Congressional committee in 1988, the atmospheric level of CO2 was just passing 350 parts per million. Now we’ve gone beyond 400 ppm, we’ve seen the rapid melt of the Arctic, the acidification of the planet’s oceans, and the rapid rise in extreme weather events. (Just lately: “thousand-year-rainfalls” in South Carolina and Southern California so far this month, and now a typhoon dropping a meter or more of rain on the Philippines.) Thanks to Exxon’s willingness to sucker the world, that world is now a chaotic mess. We’ve finally begun to see the rise of a movement large enough to challenge the power of the oil companies, and that means that Paris will come out better than Copenhagen, but the quarter-century wasted will never be made up.
Two boats pass through the sea walls surrounding an oil extraction platform in Kazakhstan’s zone of the Caspian Sea. This area is known as the Kashagan Field, an offshore oil field that is estimated to have a recoverable reserve around 13 billion barrels of crude oil. However, due to harsh conditions - specifically sea ice during the winter, yearly temperature variation from −35 to 40 °C (−31 to 104 °F), extremely shallow water, and high levels of hydrogen sulfide that eventually need to be removed from the extracted oil - many consider it to be one of the most challenging oil megaprojects in the world.
The Arachnid Orchestra by the amazing Tomas Saraceno at the CCA in Singapore. The sound of the spiders spinning their webs is relayed into the gallery. (Photo by @ntu_ccasingapore) by honorharger (via https://instagram.com/p/9M6GQlMuvZ/)
A Plastic Tool is the new #photobook by Maya Rochat. The book questions the value of the contemporary image, using strategies of détournement and deconstruction to form complex visual ensemble, based on her photographic #photographs. Interweaving these images with the print technology, she creates multi-fold narratives. The book is printed making use of various print technologies – Offset, stencil print and #silkscreen – that overlaps on the page, producing a unique materiality. Conceived in layers, the works evolve in the expanded fields of #photography, #collage and painting, blurring the borders between analogic, manual and #digital. It invites the spectator into an organic universe, exploring emotional and conceptual readings. For their third editorial project together, Maya Rochat and #Delphinebedel are exploring further the haptic relation between print and photography, in a cutting-edge publishing #experiment. #supportyourlocalbookshop #tipibookshop by tipibookshop (via https://instagram.com/p/9OG14PNWp8/)
“Sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has an apt term for this tendency to establish a firm split between the online and the offline; he calls it “digital dualism” and argues that it underpins much of contemporary debate about digital technologies, particularly evident in widespread concerns that “the virtual” is impinging on “the real” or that online connections are somehow inferior to offline ones. In reality, however, things are never that neat, and the universe we live in is rather a hybrid of the two worlds—moreover, it has always been that way (Jurgenson’s arguments, while limited to various digital technologies, fit within a broader intellectual critique, advanced most persuasively by historians and sociologists of science, holding that the splits between humanity and technology and nature and society are themselves artificial and have a history).”
–Morozov, Evgeny.
To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane, 2013. (viacarvalhais)
Hundreds of migrants have cycled into Norway from Russia after finding a new route into Europe that avoids the deadly Mediterranean crossing. They are not allowed to cross the Arctic border on foot, so a lucrative trade in bicycles has opened up, with migrants buying bikes and pedalling the final few metres.
Global temperatures are running far above last year’s record-setting level, all but guaranteeing that 2015 will be the hottest year in the historical record — and undermining political claims that global warming had somehow stopped.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American agency that tracks worldwide temperatures, announced Wednesday that
last month had been the hottest September on record, and in fact took the biggest leap above the previous September that any month has displayed since 1880, when tracking began at a global scale. The agency also announced that the January-to-September period had been the hottest such span on the books.
The extreme heat and related climate disturbances mean that delegates to a global climate conference scheduled for Paris in early December will almost certainly be convening as weather-related disasters are unfolding around the world, putting them under greater political pressure to reach an ambitious deal to limit future emissions and slow the temperature increase.
The immediate cause of the record-breaking warmth is a strong El Niño weather pattern, in which the ocean releases immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. But temperatures are running so far ahead of those during the last strong El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, that scientists said the records would not be occurring without an underlying trend caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
“
The bottom line is that the world is warming,” said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with NOAA, in Asheville, N.C.
Source: NYTimes
