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The Great Wall of China. Photo courtesy: Matt Barber / Creative Commons.
Once again, greed rears its ugly head; and, another irreplaceable relic from the past stands close to collapse. Mankind is the only animal that refuses to learn from past mistakes; and, will destroy anything or anyone who stands in the path of their financial gain.
China's rapid push to develop the country's resources is now threatening its most iconic landmark. According to recent reports, both legal and illegal mining near the Great Wall are causing parts of the ancient, 4,000-mile-long structure to crumble away.
"The Great Wall of China may have survived the Huns and Mongol hordes, but widespread neglect, underfunding, and mining means that it is now falling down," The Telegraph reported earlier this month, citing photographs that show "huge holes...punched through the wall in some areas" and entire sections up to 100 miles long in ruins.
"We have no idea how many enterprises are engaged in mining along the Great Wall," the British newspaper quoted Guo Jianyong, an engineer from the provincial architecture protection agency, as telling the People's Daily.
The stability of the centuries-old wall is threatened by prospecting for copper, iron, molybdenum, and nickel, with some mining operations coming within 100 meters of the famous structure, Reuters reported. It said the country's Land Resources Bureau is not required to consult with the Department of Cultural Heritage before issuing mining permits.
The Great Wall of China. Photo courtesy: thetelegraph
Villagers in Hebei Province told the Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency that "about 700 meters of the wall, which was built during the reign of Emperor Wanli during the Ming Dynasty (1573-1620), had already collapsed, and more walls and even towers are likely to collapse if the mining continues unchecked."
According to both The Telegraph and Reuters, maintenance of the wall has focused on the most-visited segments near Beijing, with other parts neglected and left to fall into disrepair. Xinhua quoted an engineer as saying that resources are so limited, many segments of the wall are only inspected once a year.
"There was a regulation to protect the wall in 2006, but the wall is so long it is hard to enforce... And the general awareness of the wall's problems is low," Dong Waohui, the vice-chairman of the Great Wall Association, told The Telegraph. "People just think of the famous sections and assume that the rest of the wall is in the same condition."
Some rice farmers have started using ducks for weeding instead of indsutrial methods. Photo courtesy: Anupam Nath/AP via guardian.co.uk
A move by farmers in developing countries to ecological agriculture, away from chemical fertilisers and pesticides, could double food production within a decade, a UN report says.
Insect-trapping plants in Kenya and ducks eating weeds in Bangladesh's rice fields are among examples of recommendations for feeding the world's 7 billion people, which the UN says will become about 9 billion by 2050.
"Agriculture is at a crossroads," says the study by Olivier de Schutter, the UN special reporter on the right to food, in a drive to depress record food prices and avoid the costly oil-dependent model of industrial farming.
So far, eco-farming projects in 57 nations demonstrated average crop yield gains of 80 per cent by tapping natural methods for enhancing soil and protecting against pests, it says.
Recent projects in 20 African countries resulted in a doubling of crop yields within three to 10 years. Those lessons could be widely mimicked elsewhere, it adds.
"Sound ecological farming can signficantly boost production and in the long term be more effective than conventional farming," De Schutter said of steps such as more use of natural compost or high-canopy trees to shade coffee groves.
It is also believed "agroecology" could make farms more resilient to extreme weather conditions associated with climate change, including floods, droughts and a rise in sea levels that the report said was already making fresh water near some coasts too salty for use in irrigation.
Benefits would be greatest in "regions where too few efforts have been put in to agriculture, particularly sub-Saharan Africa," he said. "There are also a number of very promising experiences in parts of Latin America and parts of Asia.
"The cost of food production has been very closely following the cost of oil," he said. Upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia have been partly linked to discontent at soaring food prices. Oil prices were around $115 a barrel on Tuesday.
"If food prices are not kept under control and populations are unable to feed themselves ... we will increasingly have states being disrupted and failed states developing," De Schutter said.
Examples of successful agroecology in Africa include the thousands of Kenyan farmers who planted insect-repelling desmodium or tick clover, used as animal fodder, within corn fields to keep damaging insects away and sowed small plots of napier grass nearby that excretes a sticky gum to trap pests.
The study also called for better research, training and use of local knowledge. "Farmer field schools" by rice growers in Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh had led to cuts in insecticide use by between 35 and 92 percent, it said.
De Schutter also recommended a diversification in global farm output, from reliance on rice, wheat and maize.
Developed nations, however, would be unable to make a quick shift to agroecology because of what he called an "addiction" to an industrial, oil-based model of farming – but a global long-term effort to shift to agroecology was needed.
It cited Cuba as an example of how change was possible, as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to supplies of cheap pesticides and fertilisers being cut off. Yields had risen after a downturn in the 1990s as farmers adopted more eco-friendly methods.
A school of scalloped hammerhead sharks, Cocos Island national park, Costa Rica. Photograph: Jeffrey Rotman/Corbis via guardian.co.uk
OMG!! If the angels in heaven aren't weeping over this one. I've done this blog for several years now because environmental issue are a huge; if not, overwhelming issue for me. Sometimes, I get to report a success; but, mainly I have nothing to report but bad news. This is one of those days when I begin to feel that I could be tempted to leave my pacifistic ways and return tit for tat.
Imagine cutting off the shark's fins and tossing it overboard to drown... and... in a wildlife sanctuary of all places. Eventually, karma will catch up with their sorry asses...if not this life; then, the next. Of this, I am totally convinced. Meanwhile, read on for details.
Colombian environmental authorities have reported a huge shark massacre in the Malpelo wildlife sanctuary in Colombia's Pacific waters, where as many as 2,000 hammerhead, Galápagos and silky sharks may have been slaughtered for their fins.
Sandra Bessudo, the Colombian president's top adviser on environmental issues, said a team of divers who were studying sharks in the region reported the mass killing in the waters surrounding the rock-island known as Malpelo, some 500 kilometres from the mainland.
"I received a report, which is really unbelievable, from one of the divers who came from Russia to observe the large concentrations of sharks in Malpelo. They saw a large number of fishing trawlers entering the zone illegally," Bessudo said. The divers counted a total of 10 fishing boats, which all were flying the Costa Rican flag.
"When the divers dove, they started finding a large number of animals without their fins. They didn't see any alive," she said. One of the divers provided a video that shows the finless bodies of dead sharks on the ocean floor.
Calculating an average of 200 sharks per boat, "our estimates are that as many as 2,000 sharks may have been killed," Bessudo said.
The sanctuary covers 8,570 square kilometres of marine environment that provides a habitat for threatened marine species – in particular sharks. Divers have reported sightings of schools of more than 200 hammerhead sharks and as many as 1,000 silky sharks in the protected waters, one of the few areas in the world where sightings of short-nosed ragged-toothed shark, known locally as the "Malpelo monster," have been confirmed. In 2006 Unesco included the park on its list of World Heritage sites.
Bessudo, a marine biologist, has spent much of her career in Malpelo and fighting to preserve the unique marine environment there.
But the high concentration of sharks in Malpelo and the remoteness of the marine sanctuary draws illegal fishing boats from nearby nations which trap the sharks, strip them of their fins, and throw them back into the water. Shark fin soup, considered a delicacy of Chinese cuisine, can fetch £63 per bowl in a Hong Kong restaurant.
Colombia's navy sporadically patrols the waters and maintains a small outpost on the 1.2 square kilometre island, which is 36 hours from the nearest port. At the time of the reported shark finnings, however, no navy ships were nearby.
Once the report of the finnings were made public, the navy dispatched a ship to the area and on Sunday reported the seizure of an Ecuadorian fishing boat, caught with an illegal catch of 300kg, including sharks and other species.
At the same time, Colombia's foreign ministry took up the issue with the Costa Rican government, which vowed to co-operate to help stop the practice by ships registered under its flag.
In a communiqué, the Costa Rican foreign ministry said it "energetically condemns" the reported finning and said it would prosecute if the participation of Costa Rican flagged ships were involved. At least three of the ships were identified by their names: the Marco Antonio, the Jefferson and the Papante.
When it comes to nanotechnology, the seemingly smallest motions can provide reliable and renewable energy. This is what is being discovered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison by Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Xudong Wang, postdoctoral Researcher Chengliang Sun and graduate student Jian Shi, who have created a plastic microbelt that vibrates in low-speed air movement, such as that of human respiration. But it not only vibrates--the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) used in the microbelt actually gathers an electric charge in response to this mechanical stress in what is known as the piezoelectric effect. This electric charge is sufficient enough to power tiny electric devices, the kind used in nanotechnology.
A device that could get its energy from the body's natural motions, such as respiration, blood flow, motion and heat, could drastically change the face of biomedical technology. With this consistent source of power, pacemakers, for example, would never have to be replaced, and devices could regularly measure blood glucose levels in individuals with diabetes.
To create the microbelt, Wang and his team used an ion-etching process to shave the PVDF thinner and thinner without removing its piezoelectric properties. In time, and with some improvements made to the process, Wang believes that the PVDF can actually be thinned to a sub-micron measurement. As an added bonus, PVDF is bio-compatible, making it a candidate for the advancement of micro-sized medical devices.
"Basically, we are harvesting mechanical energy from biological systems," Wang said. "The airflow of normal human respiration is typically below about two meters per second. We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face."
It's the "only in Britain" category for this one... The British Hen Welfare Trust (bhwt) has proudly announced that it has rescued 20 battery hens and "re-homed" them in a high security prison for women.
The jailbirds will live at the prison as part of a garden programme offering educational and therapeutic projects to the inmates.
The British Hen Welfare Trust is a national charity that re-homes commercial laying hens. Since its inception in 2005, they claim to have rescued 60,000 hens from slaughter and to have found caring pet homes for them.
The Trust also educates the public about supporting UK farmers and buying free range eggs. Its ultimate goal is to see a British egg industry where all the commercial laying hens have a good quality of existence.
While it is ironical that liberated battery hens are going to jail, the placement in the prison is a wonderful experiment for the Trust and the prisoners. There have been many stories about the therapeutic benefits of animal and plant rearing in prisons. As a spokesman said: "It is apt and extraordinary on so many levels that some of the prisoners will be able to take care of something as vulnerable as a battery hen that has had a restricted start in life, that has been kept, literally behind bars in a small cage without access to sunlight or fresh air. I truly believe in the therapeutic benefits of keeping animals and the value of being responsible for and caring for hens such as these."
Apparently the hens have settled in well and have lots of space.
The fact is that more and more people are taking chickens as pets and as sources of eggs and food. Chickens are wonderfully intelligent animals; and, make excellent pets. (My pet chicken's name was Henny Penny.) Even Tesco, the supermarket, is selling chicken coops. Nearly 700,000 Brit's now keep chickens, this is a rise of 80% in three years and the biggest increase since WW2. It probably has to do with households trying to cut grocery bills by growing their own food.
Not to mention, that home-raised, free-range eggs taste better and are better for you than eggs laid by battery hens. Plus, I believe more people are concerned about the living conditions of the hens that lay supermarket eggs. They want to continue to enjoy eggs (Brits [like me] love their eggs); but, don't want to contribute to the abuse suffered by battery hens.
This is probably not what most people would call a fun fact; but, it is a fact nonetheless.
From the climate files: British researchers have discovered that a species of microscopic plankton is migrating back to the North Atlantic, more than 800,000 years after its extinction in the region.
This is good news, you might be thinking; but, the shift is likely due to warming ocean temperatures and melting polar ice. And though the plankton is a food species, its return is not being welcomed, as it signals changes at the base of the marine food chain that could have harmful consequences for other species.
This video shows a mountain biker training in Africa. All of a sudden, out of nowhere comes this enormous buck racing at full speed. The buck and biker collide with the following result.
So, remember: when in foreign countries obey all laws, wear all safety gear; and, always give locals the right of way.
I thought I had seen the epitome of brazen criminal behaviour, right here in my own building, just a few months ago.
When one of my friends went down to the lobby at 5:30 am to leave for work she was shocked to see a grubby, skinny man using a blowtorch ...yes, I said blowtorch ... on our glass-enclosed entryway. Fortunately, the instant he saw her, he ran. She phoned police and.....
However, these thieves I'm about to tell you about have surpassed even that theft.
In Baltimore, thieves stole aluminum lampposts. In Philadelphia, you had to watch where you were walking, lest you fall into an open manhole; the covers were being stolen. Bar owners had to lock up their empty aluminum kegs. Meth heads were getting electrocuted stealing wire. It was all part of Peak Metal, where the commodity prices were getting so high that it was worthwhile for criminals to recycle just about anything metal.
In my neck of the woods, the problem is wiring and copper plumbing being stolen from abandoned homes. Of course, once they have the wiring and plumbing, the house is in rough shape.
Photo courtesy: Global informine/Public Domain
The creative recycling fell off as prices collapsed during the recession, but it is back as people get desperate. And in North Beaver Township, Pennsylvania, thieves have pulled off perhaps the biggest heist ever: an entire bridge, estimated to have $100,000 worth of steel. You can watch the worst news video ever about it here.
Image courtesy: googlemaps/Public Domain
Now, Consumerist reports that the thieves have been caught and according to the Post-Gazette, "face felony charges of criminal mischief, theft, receiving stolen property and conspiracy".
Although the bridge was rarely used, it apparently had some notoriety:
Some people in Lawrence County believe Covert's Crossing might have been haunted. The historical society, in a video about haunted spots in the county, says some residents claim that a beautifully dressed woman haunts the bridge on prom night.
Now, it can add being the first; and, hopefully, only bridge stolen under cover of darkness.
It's strangely calming to watch the Imja glacier lake grow, as chunks of ice part from black cliffs and fall into the grey-green lake below.
But the lake is a high-altitude disaster in the making – one of dozens of new danger zones emerging across the Himalayas because of glacier melt caused by climate change.
If the lake, situated at 5,100m in Nepal's Everest region, breaks through its walls of glacial debris, known as moraine, it could release a deluge of water, mud and rock up to 60 miles away. This would swamp homes and fields with a layer of rubble up to 15m thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. But the question is when, rather than if.
Mountain regions from the Andes to the Himalayas are warming faster than the global average under climate change. Ice turns to water; glaciers are slowly reduced to lakes.
When Sir Edmund Hillary made his successful expedition to the top of Everest in 1953, Imja did not exist. But it is now the fastest-growing of some 1,600 glacier lakes in Nepal, stretching down from the glacier for 1.5 miles and spawning three small ponds.
At its centre, the lake is about 600m wide, and according to government studies, up to 96.5m deep in some places. It is growing by 47m a year, nearly three times as fast as other glacier lake in Nepal.
"The expansion of Imja lake is not a casual one," said Pravin Raj Maskey, a hydrologist with Nepal's ministry of irrigation.
The extent of recent changes to Imja has taken glacier experts by surprise, including Teiji Watanabe, a geographer at Hokkaido University in Japan, who has carried out field research at the lake since the 1990s.
Watanabe returned to Imja in September, making the nine-day trek with 30 other scientists and engineers on a US-funded expedition led by the Mountain Institute. He said he did not expect such rapid changes to the moraine which is holding back the lake.
"We need action, and hopefully within five years," Watanabe said. "I feel our time is shorter than what I thought before. Ten years might be too late."
Unlike ordinary flash floods, a glacier lake outburst is a continuing catastrophe.
"It's not just the one-time devastating effect," said Sharad Joshi, a glaciologist at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University, who has worked on Imja. "Each year for the coming years it triggers landslides and reminds villagers that there could be a devastating impact that year, or every year. Some of the Tibetan lakes that have had outburst floods have flooded more than three times."
But mobilising engineering equipment and expertise to a lake 5,100m up and several days' hard walking away from the nearest transport hub is challenging in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world. People living in the small village of Dingboche below the lake say scientists and government officials have been talking about the dangers of Imja for years.
Some years ago one of the visiting experts was so convincing about the dangers of an imminent flood that the villagers packed up all their animals and valuables and moved to the next valley. They came back after a week when the disaster did not materialise, but say it's hard to dismiss the idea that there could be a flood one day.
"When I was 21, I went to the lake and it was black and really small," said Angnima Sherpa, who heads a local conservation group in Dingboche. "Two years ago I went there and it was really big. I couldn't believe it could get so big. It was really scary."
But scientists and engineers still cannot agree on whether to rate Imja as the most dangerous glacier lake in the Himalayas, or a more distant threat.
Mobilising international assistance for large-scale engineering projects during a global recession is also difficult. The Mountain Institute's initiative was to call in experts from the Andes, where Peruvians have developed systems for containing glacier floods since a disaster in the 1940s killed nearly 10,000 people.
Cesar Portocarrero, who heads the department of glaciology at Peru's national water agency, has overseen engineering works to drain more than 30 glacier lakes, building tunnels or channels to drain the water and reduce the risk of flooding.
But he conceded it would be an enormous challenge to apply these methods at Imja.
"It's not easy to say 'we are going to siphon the water out of the lake'," Portocarrero said. "Where do you find the people who can work at high altitudes? How do you move in the equipment? What do you do in bad weather? You have to have exhaustive planning." There are also other contenders for immediate action, with some 20,000 glacier lakes across the Himalayas, although many are concentrated in the Everest region. Bhutan alone has nearly 2,700.
Three of those, known as the Lunana complex, are practically touching, increasing the possibility of cascading floods far more devastating than any rupture at Imja.
"If the barrier fails between them we are going to have a massive glacier lake outburst flood," said Sonam Lhamo, a geologist for the Bhutanese government.
The United Nations Development Programme and other agencies have supported a project to drain the lakes but those funds are running out.
John Reynolds, a British engineer and expert on glacier lakes who has worked in Nepal, argues that the international community has focused on Imja because of its proximity to Everest and trekking routes popular with western tourists. He says there are other, more hazardous lakes elsewhere.
The Nepali government ranks Imja among the six most dangerous glacier lakes in the country largely because it is growing so quickly. More than 12 other such lakes are also seen as high risk.
But Reynolds argued: "Just because a lake is getting bigger doesn't necessarily mean that it is getting more hazardous. As the climate is changing, generally speaking more glacial lake systems are forming.
"The question is how to decide which ones are hazardous now and which ones have the propensity to become hazardous in the future."
Imja, though fast-growing, is held in by a relatively wide moraine, which makes it secure in comparison to some others.
Most glacial lake floods begin as high-altitude tsunamis. A large block of ice falling from a glacier at great height sets off a series of giant waves that wash over the moraine.
That's not such a risk for Imja. The glaciers feeding the lake are gradual in slope, which reduces the risk of a large chunk of ice falling from a great height and setting off large waves.
Watanabe concedes the geography of the lake could keep disaster at bay, at least in the next year or two. But, he says, there are signs that an outlet channel at the bottom of the lake may be widening dangerously.
Reynolds said Nepal and the international community need to think of a Himalaya-wide action plan.
"As the climate is changing more glacial lake systems are forming," he said. "The question is how to decide which are hazardous now and which are going to become hazardous in the future."
Business giving, and even campaigning, is nothing new. But it has been heartening to see how many food industry brands have rallied around the plight of the honeybees to develop serious, substantial responses — from Haagen Dazs' bee boy mayhem to The Cooperative Group's Plan Bee — to Colony Collapse Disorder and other threats to pollinators. It's almost as if they know that without bees, there would be very little food...
Now Honeydrop, a maker of natural teas and beverages, has launched a major campaign to save honeybees. And they are partnering with a leading New York urban beekeeper to do it.
For each purchase of Honeydrop's teas and natural beverages in the tri-state area, the company will make a contribution to NYC beekeeping guru and founder of Bees Without Borders Andrew Coté's efforts to revive urban beekeeping.
Crucially, for an issue that is having an impact across the Unites States, donations will be made according to regional sales to community beekeeping partners in each area:
Through "Buy a Bottle - Save a Bee," Honeydrop will help save the threatened bee population, as a percentage of profits from every bottle sold will be donated to the brand's community beekeeper partners, helping them to build and maintain new beehives. Each new beehive increases the bee population by 40,000-60,000 bees, actively combating Colony Collapse Disorder.
I'm fortunate to have several passions in my life. I am absolutely an eco-nut. I am always trying to find new ways to reduce, reuse, recycle. We, as a species, have done more harm to this planet in the short time we have been here, than any other catastrophe or happening ever has. It's up to us to fix it.
I care about the environment whether it is as small as a single cell or as large as the universe.
I adore creativity and think we can all do more with much less. This earth has enough resources for us all to live comfortably if we all learn to share. Wasn't that a lesson we were supposed to learn in kindergarten?
I also love the bizarre, unusual, the weird and the strange. Be prepared for the odd "different" blog.
The Great Wall of China. Photo courtesy: Matt Barber / Creative Commons.
The Great Wall of China. Photo courtesy: thetelegraph
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