Synergic Earth NewsNews of the Best of Times and the Worst of TimesGetting Beyond Denial- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Tom Engelhardt writes: It's been a curious experience, each evening recently, turning on the NBC or ABC nightly news, with historic levels of flooding in Iowa as the lead story. ("Uncharted territory," National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Pierce called these floods.) After all, there are those stunning images of Cedar Rapids, a small city now simply in the water. The National Weather Service has already termed what's happened to the city an "historic hydrologic event," with the Cedar...http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174945/john_feffer_are_we_all_north_koreans_now_ More Bee Stress- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Science -- A lack of suitable flowers may be forcing bumblebees to seek out aphids to feed on their sugary secretions. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BCT) said it was a behaviour that appeared to be becoming increasingly common.Images captured by the BBC Scotland news website in a garden in Nairn, in the Highlands, show the bees visiting tree leaves covered with aphids. The secretions offer a substitute for nectar, but do not contain the protein the insects need to stay healthy.There...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/7470859.stm Losing Our KnowHow- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Science -- Almost one in four secondary schools in England no longer has any specialist physics teachers, a survey suggests. The report into the supply of physics teachers, published by academics at the University of Buckingham, warns of a threat to the subject's future.The government has set targets to promote the number of physics teachers in secondary schools. But the report's authors warn that half of the schools in inner London do not have specialist physics teachers.The report, by...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7478302.stm A Community Dwelling Machine- (Found July 15, 2008 ) In 1971, Buckminster Fuller and a team of architects began the design for a new city. The project was called Old Man River City. It was to be a single community dwelling machine for 125,000 humans. The following description in Fuller's own words is excerpted from the book Critical Path published in 1981: Old Man River's City, undertaken for East St. Louis, Illinois, takes its name from the song first sung by Paul Robeson fifty years ago, which dramatized the life of Afro-American blacks.http://futurepositive.synearth.net/2008/06/29 No Time for Rhetoric!- (Found July 15, 2008 ) In 2002, Dean Robertson wrote: The United States, is heading at almost full steam, toward the biggest calamity of it's entire history, due, in part, I think, in the very poor structure of our current government. It would be much better, if it really was a democracy, but alas, it is not. I could quote ream on ream of various rhetoric, that has defined our current state of affairs, but it would change nothing. Someone with substantial charisma, and a following of people, say 10,000 individuals,...http://solutions.synearth.net/2008/06/29 When Words Fail- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Bill McKibben writes: I ALMOST NEVER write about writingin my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer Ive spent working on global warmingthe greatest challenge humans have ever facedthe more Ive come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We havent come up with words big enough to...http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3059 End of the Petroleum Age- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Michael Klare writes: At the hastily convened global oil summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on June 28, top officials of producing and consuming nations from around the world attempted to find a combination of solutions that would somehow extricate us from the current crisis over sky-high energy prices. These proposals ranged from increased output by major producers like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to restrictions on the activities of international oil speculators.But all were based on the premise that.http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5326 MARS capable of supporting Life- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Environmental Science -- Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - Nasa scientists believe. Preliminary analysis by the $420m (&163;210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet's soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected. Scientists working on the spacecraft project said they were "flabbergasted" by the discovery. The find has raised hopes conditions on Mars may be favourable for life."We basically have found what appears to be the requirements,...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7477310.stm What is the Olduvai Theory- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Fossil fuels are currently the primary source of the cheap energy that powers our modern Industrial Civilization. If we are running out of crude oil and natural gas, as some of the best scientists and engineers in the energy field are telling us, we have big problems.Think back for a moment to the year 1801, only two hundred years ago, that was a time when there was no gasoline, no refined oil, no natural gas, and no electrical power derived from oil and gas. As...http://solutions.synearth.net/2008/06/25 Optimizing Our Intelligence- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Timothy Wilken, MD writes: You may have noticed that a lot of the world's news is bad. Making a living seems to be getting a lot a harder. A lot of people are out of work. Prices are really getting difficult. Our economy seems not simply to be slowing into a recession, in fact it seems to be genuinely broken. Our leaders are not very reassuring. They have lots to say, but none of it makes much sense. Their actions seem only to make things worse.Our planet seems broken too. Our biologists tell...http://futurepositive.synearth.net/2008/06/23 |