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| March 2007 |
Buying A Hybrid car may not be the most
immediate solution. We need cheaper
easier and quicker fixes for Global Warming, and we
need them now.
When walking along the LA River near Marina del Rey a typical sight to behold is the different varieties of birds, (ducks, cranes and egrets) and of course the plants and flowers. A closer look reveals another not so charming or picturesque view. There is stuff floating in the water and scattered along the banks, this stuff could be described as human trash. The birds swim around this human trash and some even try to eat it. It is horrible to see and a living nightmare when considering the impact on the environment. A microscope inspection of the trash offers a clue as to how litter is very much a form of unconscious pollution. Most of this trash is what is left over after we have eaten and drunk what is inside food packages and beverage bottles. Pictures often tell a better story, please take a closer look at the one included with this article, which offers a list of these human trash floaters:
There is some relief. The City of Los Angeles has a system of river trash removal, one designed to alleviate the build-up. After a heavy rain, a crew of city employees collect the trash at various collection points along the river. Another enviromentaly positive thing is on most Saturday mornings a group of teenagers collect as many floaters as possible in black bags, then haul the garbage to the dump. What remains uncontrollable is that there is still too much human trash and it continues to float and it continues to pile-up. It is hard to believe that the human race can be so dirty or irresponsible. Angeleans (people who reside in Los Angeles) are supposedly tidy and clean. As it pertains to our regulatory system, the City of Los Angeles has a host of rules and laws that are all about rubbish. These include hefty fines and elaborate removal systems. Thank goodness the United States with over 300 million litterers is one of the most sophisticated countries in the world when it comes to trash awareness. We expect and pay for, (with tax dollars) to have our streets and rivers clean. An idea springs to mind that there are saboteurs who litter on purpose? If so, who are they and can they be stopped? Also, where does this floating human trash end up? Let's hope not in the ocean. Perhaps we could ask why there are not more trash cans on our main streets? Maybe one at every corner, and lets not forget along the river! This might help all this human trash end up where it is supposed to go, in the dump. A better idea is to just stop buying all that stuff that ends up floating. Perhaps then plastic and polystyrene manufacturers will get the message. They will know that Angeleans really want to live in a cleaner city and a cleaner world. Maybe they they will invent containers made of sensible materials which are safer for our planet and most important, biodegradable.
Global Warming Claims Victim -Tropical Island Disappears!
UK's Independent Newspaper - Issue: December 29th, 2006
This is a chilling article from the UK’s The
Independent newspaper which documented for the
first time, swelling seas from melting glaciers due to
global warming. The melting has claimed an entire
INHABITED island, which has disappeared beneath
rising seas.
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented. It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta’s Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighboring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures. Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university’s School of Oceanographic Studies, says “it is only a matter of some years” before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen “vanishing islands” in India’s part of the delta. The area’s 400 tigers are also in danger. Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years’ time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction. Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.
The true price of disposable chopsticks
UK's Independent - Issue: March 27, 2006
China's appetite for disposable chopsticks eats up 25
million trees each year. With forests fast
disappearing, now the pressure is on for people to
adopt less wasteful eating habits.The burly diner in the dumpling restaurant peers at a copy of Beijing News, tears open a paper packet and slides out a pair of wooden chopsticks. In a scene repeated millions of times every day all over China, he snaps apart the bamboo sticks, joined at the end, and uses the utensils to maneuver a steaming meat dumpling into his mouth. When he's finished eating, a waitress empties the scraps and the chopsticks into a black plastic bag. It joins dozens of other bags of chopsticks and waste food out at the back of the restaurant. Disposable chopsticks in China are convenient, hygienic and everywhere. And they are incredibly wasteful - environmentalists say they are up there with plastic carrier bags, individual mini-cheeses and clear plastic CD cases. The Chinese use 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, which adds up to 1.7 million cubic meters of timber or 25 million full-grown trees, which means badly depleted forests. China is the world's largest maker of disposable chopsticks, with more than 300 plants employing about 60,000 workers. Since the start of the decade, the country has exported nearly 165,000 tons of chopsticks, with 15 billion pairs finding their way to dinner tables in Japan and South Korea. Environmentalists warn that if China continues to use timber at current levels, China's remaining forests will be gone in about a decade. Now a campaign against disposable chopsticks has come to symbolize China's efforts to try to halt the degradation of the country's forests and to protect the environment. In a surprising move, the government in Beijing has introduced a tax on "one- time" chopsticks from 1 April. "It's basic math. If one Chinese consumes two pairs of wooden chopsticks a day, how many trees have to be chopped down? A large portion of those chopsticks are shipped overseas," says Yang Dabin, a spokesman for Friends of Nature. Yang is a big fan of the new tax but is waiting to see how it works in practice. He points to the success in European countries, such as Denmark, of lowering use of plastic shopping bags by introducing a tax on the product. "People all knew that using plastic bags was environmentally unfriendly, but it was convenient so they kept it up until a tax was imposed. I think we Chinese people are usually practical on this point," he says. Hundreds of companies make chopsticks. Eisho in Guilin says it can provide a million chopsticks a day for export. One small producer of disposable chopsticks, Qingyuan Kangxin in southern Guangdong province, says the new tax will almost certainly affect its production plans. It may consider cutting production, particularly for export. China is now trying to persuade its people to use metal or plastic chopsticks instead of disposable ones. The country's environment is getting steadily worse - the World Bank says 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China and more than 400,000 people die prematurely each year from pollution-related illnesses. As well as deforestation, roughly a third of China is exposed to acid rain and around 70 per cent of the country's rivers and lakes are polluted. "We are losing our forest resources at an alarming rate to a rapidly growing economy. We cannot make people replace their wooden furniture with steel and switch to electronic newspapers. But we can have a law to make people pay for using disposable chopsticks.
An Inconvenient Truth
BRIGHT PERFORMANCE MESSAGE Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Folks, this is one of those very important elections that
hasn't received much press. Perhaps we should
ask why?
Measure L impacts the education system in Los Angeles, specifically the LAUSD. Your vote does count! Voting is an effective way to have your voice heard. Voting is part of an active democratic system and active democracy is always worth fight for.
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