The Life Slant - Page 9

Community Food Forests To The Rescue

Community Food Forests

About 40 million Americans, including many children, experience food insecurity. An estimated 26.5 million people in the United States live in food deserts with little fresh produce on public spaces. Urban food forests to the rescue!

Community Food Forests
Atlanta’s Brown Mills Food Forest has a fruit and nut orchard, raised beds, herb gardens along with terrific walking paths across seven acres. Many hundreds of school children have visited and learned how to grow, tend and harvest the bounty.
Image credit: Sharon Lee

These marvelous oases on community lands often have three layers of food. Fruit and nuts trees make up the overstory, shrubs like raspberries and huckleberries occupy the mid layer, and an abundance of ground food like trailing strawberries or carrots, beets, potatoes and broccoli beautify the floor.

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Water, Wind And Worms, A Wonderful World

Natural systems and animals have been inspiring people for ages. Water, wind and worms are teaching us many new lessons to help caretake our ailing planet.

For example, Portland-based InPipe Energy has devised an ingenious micro-hydro system using a pressure recovery value (PRV) to regulate the flow of municipal water. It harnesses the energy within flowing water by spinning a microturbine, which makes electricity.

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Sensors within PRVs help municipal agencies to better manage water infrastructures by quickly pinpointing any leakage. In addition, InPipe Energy can erase the carbon footprint of pumping water throughout the system, an energy-rich process that currently relies mostly on the fossil fuel-powered grid.

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Imagine It! An Ideal Handbook To Heal Us And Our Planet

Laurie David and Heather Reisman have penned a terrific how-to take care guide for individuals, families and ultimately our Mother Earth.

They remind us that, “Our planet, like our bodies, is a system. Everything is interconnected.” Many of us have become disconnected. This book teaches us how to reconnect and nourish our bodies and minds.

how to heal the planet

To kick-start this process, they ask thought-provoking questions: “Is the amount of news about heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires really beginning to worry you? Do you sometimes feel as though our climate crisis is so big that your individual actions can make much of a difference?”

This concise handbook brings awareness to plastics, food, clothing, chemicals, paper, water and transportation. Each chapter begins with important facts that are followed by an inspiring story. And each one closes with a doable action plan to reduce your individual and family footprints.

Every small step is significant. David and Reisman’s winning formula helps us understand why we must break old habits that are detrimental to both Mother Earth and us.

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The Joy of Curiosity And Kindness

The human brain is a stupendous three-pound electrically-charged organ that has hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells. Those cells are so miniscule that thousands of them could comfortably fit into the period at the end of this sentence.

The brain is exceptional at both solving problems and making tools. It also constantly seeks to explore. In fact, we are all natural explorers, born to look around.

An old-growth rainforest is a heavenly community of nature’s finest fauna and flora in concert. 
Image credit: Reese Halter
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Man-Made Global Heating Is F*%#ing Hideous

Why is only one day, each year, set aside to pay homage to our Mother Earth? Is it, so that for 364 other days we can turn a blind eye, or worse, rape her with impunity?

Escalating deforestation, soaring mercury. Radio National Australia, The Science Show, Earth Day 2021

Our kith and kin, the animals, are terrified because ghastly man-made heatwaves, climate fires, climate droughts, climate floods and the GDP-driven Age of Extinction are accelerating at breakneck speed. Ladies and gentlemen, we need all the animals, old-growth rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands, salt marshes, mangroves, peatlands, kelp forests and marine grass meadows in-tact to survive and cohabitate on this hallowed blue planet.

The elephant in the room is human consumption and the insatiable fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion energy required to make more. Do you really need more?

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Fisheries Demolishing Our Only Home

The mysterious oceans occupy 99 percent of the blue planet’s living space (biosphere). The oceans are the cradle of life, climatemakers, oxygenmakers and home to unknown numbers of species.

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Today, the oceans are dreadfully ill with vast areas of boneyards. “The oceans are really a mirror of human health, if they are sick and dying then that’s the future of humanity as well,” admonished oceanographer David Baker, University of Hong Kong’s Swire Institute of Marine Science.

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Ecocide: Killing British Columbia’s Last Great Big Trees

How much is enough? More. Since 1981, I have witnessed the greatest and most diversified temperate old-growth rainforests in the world, those of British Columbia (BC), being raped and pillaged under the auspice of crown (provincial) forestry management propping up a couple hundred timber-harvesting towns and the opportunistic (and fleeting) multinational corporations that milk the system and taunt the people with jobs.

Giant British Columbia Trees
Reese Halter planting trees in the Northern Rockies, circa 1986.
Image credit: Jane Williams

Today, about a couple dozen old-growth wood-addicted communities with automated state-of-the-art mills remain. It’s a house of cards that over the previous decade has siphoned $3.65 billion from the provincial coffers to stay afloat. Lousy subsidies.

In reality, every day there are less wild rainforests and far less animals. Habitat destruction is horrible in an accelerating man-driven Age of Extinction. Additionally, those cutover forestlands are incapable of decontaminating putrid fossil fuel-tainted rainwater, which runs off into the sea or through your tap.

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Fossil Fuels Ruined Iconic Aussie Snow Forests

Fossil fuel stoked global heating has laid waste to the Aussie’s second favorite tree, the wonderful snow gums of the Alps.

Sprawling forest graveyards are strewn across Oz. From the lonely giants of the temperate southwest to the skeletons mangroves of the tropical northeast and along the bare high plains of New South Wales to the boiled ones of northeast Tasmania – it’s bloody grim.

snow forests
Cooma Monaro, New South Wales, is a vast high plateau where many ancient ones died of a strangling thirst egged on by recurring brutal heatwaves.
Image credit: Greening Australia

I’ve walked in these eerie, lonesome tree cemeteries and lamented their loss to the nation. How many more millions of acres must we lose of these complex, climate-making, biodiverse hotspots replete with water-rich bastions before governments stop the annual $5.3 trillion in subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest polluters, the fossil fuel industry?

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Ecocide: Norway Murders 1278 Climate-Stabilizing Whales

Thirty-nine years ago, the world agreed to end commercial whaling. Only two rogue nations, Japan and Norway, still refuse to abide by the rule of law.

In 2020, Norway’s bloodthirsty whaling armada slaughtered 503 minke whales, 74 more whales than they destroyed in 2019. This year, Norway has issued death warrants for 1,278 minkes. These crazed planet-killers have single-handedly annihilated more than 14,000 wonderful whales over the previous 39 years. What the frack!

End whaling in Norway NOW!
Image credit: Bill Waldeen

Are the Norwegians starving? Is there really a consumer demand to eat our mammalian kith and kin, the whales? No. Instead, these glorious masterpieces are brutally killed and minced into dog food. Wot.

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Climate Generation Going Vegan To Save Life On Earth

The climate generation (Gen Zs, or under 26s) comprises almost a third of the world’s population. These intrepid kind humans are fighting the climate crisis by ‘taking the rose by the thorn’ and eating plant-based diets to save Mother Earth. Happy dance!

Going Vegan

The purchasing power of the Gen Zs is formidable. It exceeds $3 trillion. Recently, the UK’s BOL Foods became an entirely plant-based company with planet-friendly food for the burgeoning Gen Zs vegans. Additionally, that company is now saving 200 metric tons of CO2 and 1.8 million gallons of water annually.

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Age of Extinction: Cowardly Hunters Massacre 200 Wisconsin Wolves

Many people loathe trophy hunters. Hunters have sullied the word ‘conservation’ and wreaked horrible pain and suffering upon the animal kingdom. Moreover, these worthless planet-killers are hastening the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction.

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The Trump administration inflicted tremendous damage on Mother Earth, national monuments, old-growth-forests and our brethren and sistren, the animals. See The Gen Z Emergency for gory details.

Since 1933, wolves have been persecuted in the United States. Forty-seven years ago the Endangered Species Act saved the gray wolves in the lower 48 states from extinction.

killing wolves
Wolves have two layers of fur, an undercoat and a top coat, which allow them to survive in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. In warmer weather they flatten their fur to keep cool.
Image credit: Public News Service
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Mayday, 5000 Bee Species Missing In Action

Bees are mysterious, smart and indispensable beings. They have stood the test of time for a 100 million years on this planet. Bees are in dire trouble today, and we know the main culprit all too well – many, many dozens of billions of pounds of man-made nerve poisons.

bees are in trouble
A 100 million year old Burmese bee entombed in amber.
Image credit: George Poinar

There are about 400,000 kinds of flowering plants that depend upon pollinators in order to successfully reproduce. Bees, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, beetles, bats, lizards, primates and birds pollinate the plants. About 20,000 bee species undertake the lion’s share of cross-pollinating the plant kingdom.

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Look How They Massacred My Game

If you never saw the Purple People Eaters browbeat quarterbacks or Joe Greene and the Steel Curtain blank opponent after opponent; if you never saw Walter Payton deliver crushing blows to prospective tacklers or Gayle Sayers dance his way to the goal line; if you never saw Paul Hornung covered in mud or an exhausted Kellen Winslow dragged off the field; if you’re not sure who the Super Bowl trophy is named after or who George Halas is or why the AFC trophy is named after Lamar Hunt, then to you NFL football may seem great, just fine, normal.  But to those of us who have been fans long enough to remember when the game was still football, today’s NFL is a sad and pale reminder of better days gone by.

New NFL Rules

From 1948 to 1960 a linebacker named Hardy Brown terrorized NFL offenses using a devastating right shoulder, which he used the way a boxer delivers a six-inch knockout punch, sending player after player from field to hospital.  During an interview for NFL Films in the 70s, after rule changes began to calm the game down, Hardy called the current state of football “a sissy game”.  As much as we hated to see him go in 1991, it’s probably better that Hardy never got a chance to see today’s much sissy-er version of the game he loved to play.

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Japan Drowns ‘Hope’, A Brutal Whale Murder

A horrible whale massacre took place last month near the infamous town of Taiji, south central Japan, renowned for its cruelty. It sickened (and rightfully so) millions of empathetic people as they helplessly witnessed cold-blooded executioners in-action.

Japan Drowns Whale

Try as it may, the minke whale could not escape from these wretched penned fishing nets.
Image credit: Ren Yabuki/LIA

On Christmas Eve 2020, a minke whale unsuspectingly swam into a pen of stationary nets near Taiji.  Ren Yabuki, an animal activist with the Life Investigation Agency, fortuitously saw it. Using a drone, he documented the whale’s plight and enlisted the global support of animal lovers to free our brethren and sistren of the sea.

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Ocean Heat, An Elephant In The Living Room

The oceans store more than 90 percent of all combustion heat. In 2020, record fossil fuel and wood pellet heat in the ocean was the energetic equivalent of detonating 315,536,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The energy within the oceans drives the climate, which is becoming less predictable and more violent.

Planetary ice is important for reflecting incoming solar radiation back to outer space. As the world’s temperature rises, planetary ice is in peril. In fact, Earth’s ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s. The world has lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice since 1994. That is enough meltwater to fill 10.2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or, cover the entire state of California in ~200 feet of water.

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Climate Victims: Whales And Sharks

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The year 2020 set another horrible heat record in the oceans, which make up 99 percent of the planet’s biosphere, or, where life can exist. Many billions of our brethren and sistren, the animals, are already dead. It’s simply too hot.

The ocean heat is in lockstep with burning fossil fuels and wood pellets. In 2020, the world’s oceans absorbed the equivalent heat to dropping 10 Hiroshima atom bombs every second of the year (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 {sextillion} joules).

Climate Victims
Since the 1990s the heat in the oceans has taken off as the amount of fossil fuel combustion has more than quadrupled.
Image credit: Kevin Trenberth

Allow me to remind you that the oceans drive Earth’s climate. Hence we are amid a worsening man-made climate crisis. It is never just about humans though. We share this glorious blue planet with a couple of million other life forms. All life is interrelated and we need everything that is left, alive.

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Poisoned Great Barrier Reef, Gruesome Green Turtles

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I was taught to respect my elders. The world’s largest coral reef system, or, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), is about 8,000 old. It is sacred, yet it has been horribly abused. Consequently, the GBR is terminally ill.

Great Barrier Reef
Burning fossil fuels and wood pellets and the resultant increased marine heatwaves are sweeping the planet and laying waste to reefs. Coral graveyards are expanding at a terrorsome rate. 
Image credit: Brett Monroe Garner
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Fossil Fuels Torture Dolphins to Death

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From Florida to Western Australia, our brethren and sistren, the bottlenose dolphins, are dying horribly. The culprits are the moneyed, banker-backed, government subsidized villains: Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal.

Each second, the heat from combusting fossil fuels is the equivalent of dropping five Hiroshima-style bombs into the oceans. Since 1994, that’s 3.6 billion atomic bombs worth of fossil fuel heat absorbed by the oceans. The oceans drive Earth’s habitable climate.

For every 1oC (1.8oF) increase, Earth’s atmosphere holds seven percent more moisture. Hence there are more extreme climate rain events today compared with a quarter century ago.

Fossil Fuels and Dolphins
Climate hurricane Harvey (2017) unloaded 27 trillion gallons of rainfall onto Houston, or, enough water to fill almost 41 million Olympic swimming pools. 
Image credit: Vox
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