Synergic Earth NewsNews of the Best of Times and the Worst of TimesWall-E for President- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Frank Rich writes: SO much for a July Fourth week spent in idyllic celebration of our country's birthday. This year's festivities were marked instead by a debate -- childish, not constitutional -- over who is and isn't patriotic. The fireworks were sparked by a verbally maladroit retired general, fueled by two increasingly fatuous presidential campaigns, and heated to a boil by a 247 news culture that inflates any passing tit for tat into a war of the worlds.Let oil soar above $140 a barrel....http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06rich.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=opinion... Last Birthday Why America is Failing- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Timothy Wilken writes: When America was founded in 1776, the North American continent provided relatively unlimited resources. The early colonists were in the right place at the right time. The right place was the nearly empty continent of North America. Millions of acres of arable land and forests, filled with abundant water in millions of steams, rivers, and lakes and stocked with uncountable numbers of wildlife. This was further enriched with enormous reserves of iron, coal,..http://futurepositive.synearth.net/2008/07/06 Plan C- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Concerns over climate change and energy depletion are increasing exponentially. Mainstream solutions still assume a panacea that will cure our climate ills without requiring any serious modification to our way of life.A new book by Pat Murphy, Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, explores the risks inherent in trying to continue our energy-intensive lifestyle. Using dirtier fossil fuels (Plan A) or switching to renewable energy sources (Plan B) allows people to.http://www.communitysolution.org/plancbook.html One Third of Coral Species in Peril- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Earth Science -- A third of the world's reef-building coral species are facing extinction. That is the stark conclusion from the first global study to assess the extinction risks of corals. ..."The picture is frightening," said Alex Rogers from the Zoological Society of London, one of 39 scientists involved in the assessment. "It's not just the fact that something like a third of all reef-forming corals are threatened, but that we could be facing the loss of large areas of these ecosystems..http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7498502.stm Who Owns Science- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Science -- Britain's Sir John Sulston says that profits are taking precedence over the needs of patients, particularly in the developing world. He was speaking at the launch of a new research institute into science, ethics and innovation.Sir John shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine for his work on the genetics controlling cell division. He is well known for his commitment to public medicine and his opposition to the privatisation of scientific information. Eight years ago he led the...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7490384.stm Growtown- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Community -- Could growing fresh vegetables help save crumbling inner cities around the world and tackle hunger That is the ambitious aim of a charity called Urban Farming, which has its headquarters in Detroit, the capital of the US's wilting car industry. The idea is very simple: turn wasteland into free vegetable gardens and feed the poor people who live nearby. Motown has lost more than a million residents since its heyday in the 1950s and it is common to see downtown residential...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7495717.stm Drought Deepens in Australia- (Found July 15, 2008 ) BBC Environment -- A long-running drought in Australia's main food-growing region, the Murray-Darling river basin, has worsened, a new report says. Three months of dry weather and the driest June on record have plunged the area back into drought, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission says.Crossing much of south-east Australia, the Murray-Darling is the country's most important river system. The basin produces 40% of Australia's fruit, vegetables and grain.Experts say the drought will hit...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7499036.stm Event Horizen- (Found July 15, 2008 ) James Howard Kunstler writes: There's a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling, back to earth thousands of feet below, with a distant, dismal, barely...http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/ Local Wisdom- (Found July 15, 2008 ) Jeff Fearnside Interviews Wendell Berry: For more than forty years, Wendell Berry has worked his family farm in Kentucky the old-fashioned way, using horses as much as possible and producing much of his own food. And he has published more than forty books, writing by hand in the daylight to reduce his reliance on electricity derived from strip-mined coal. Berry has been called a prophet by the New York Times, and his Jeffersonian values are so old they can appear startlingly new. His strong...http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/391/digging_in |