The last one

This is my last post on this blog.

For those of you who have followed this blog, and especially those of you who have commented, I want to say a heartfelt "thank you!"

I won't delete this blog, because maybe someone will stumble across it and find it interesting. I've devoted a great deal of time to finding all the links, so I'll leave them here.

Before I go, there are two more issues I had planned to post about, so I'll touch on them briefly.

The North American pika has been called our "canary in a coal mine." A few degrees increase in temperature could mean extinction for this little rodent, which lives in the mountains in western North America. Pikas are very sensitive to temperature, and even a few degrees rise in average summer temperatures are forcing the pika to climb higher and higher into the mountains looking for cooler air. They are running out of places to run to, and are also running out of food and shelter at higher altitudes.

For more information on the very real plight of the pika, you could start here at planetgreen.discovery.com, and here at worldwildlife.org.

Coal ash has been closely tied to contaminated groundwater, and increases everyone's risk of cancer. Every year coal-burning plants across the country generate enough ash waste, 130 million tons of waste, to fill a cargo train that would stretch from Washington DC to Melbourne, Australia.

Nearly 600 toxic waste ponds, almost twice as many as previously thought, are scattered across the US in 32 states.

The coal ash is poured into unlined storage ponds and dumped into abandoned and active mines across America, where it poisons drinking water with arsenic, lead and a host of other chemicals. Our own household trash, even banana peels and apple cores, is more strictly regulated than coal ash.

Click here to read about what "60 Minutes" had to say about this problem, and to watch a very short video. You can also find a map here at publicintegrity.org, so you can see if there is a toxic coal ash pool contaminating the groundwater near you.

"You can tell how high a society is
by how much of its garbage is recycled."

~ Dhyani Ywahoo
(Native American)

I wonder what North American would look like today, if it had been left to its indigenous people, the Native Americans, the First Nations. Just a thought. . .


I hope to see you at my main blog!

Love,
MOM

International Day of Climate Action

This Saturday, October 24, is the International Day of Climate Action, sponsored by 350.org. On this day, over 4400 actions and events will take place in over 172 counties to spread awareness of the effects of climate change.

350 is the most important number in the world right now. It's what scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are already above this mark, hovering around 390, and the number is rising.

For more information, or to get involved, visit 350.org (here).

Some timeless words of wisdom:

"We stand now where two roads diverge.
But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem,
they are not equally fair.
The road we have long been traveling
is deceptively easy,
a smooth superhighway
on which we progress with great speed,
but at its end lies disaster.
The other fork of the road -
the one "less traveled by"
- offers our last,
our only chance
to reach a destination that assures the preservation
of the earth."
~ Rachel Carson

"Never doubt
that a small group
of thoughtful committed citizens
can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead

Blog Action Day

October 15, 2009, is blog action day, a day when 13,000 blogs, posting 31,000 blog posts, from 155 countries, reaching over 17.9 million readers will be writing about climate change. With the world's population projected to reach 7 billion in 2011, and up to 10.5 billion by 2050 (http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6038), the time to act to change the course we are on is NOW!

To find out more about Blog Action Day, or to participate in this annual event, go here: http://www.blogactionday.org/.

According to 350.org, 350 ppm (parts per million) is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Our current level is 390 ppm, which the leading scientists of 92 countries and many environmental and health organizations agree is causing damage to the planet and its most vulnerable people.

Africa is among the first places where people and animals are acutely affected by climate change already. In East Africa, in the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia, nearly 20 million people rely on food aid because of drought caused by climate change. A recent report by dw-tv (http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4711350,00.html) details the humanitarian crisis. The drought-related starvation there is already widespread among both humans and animals.

In Kenya, drought and poaching have killed over 100 elephants already this year, the same threatened elephants one million tourists flock to the savannah to see every year (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32755115/).

In Mali, in West Africa, the worst drought in 26 years is killing the last remaining desert elephants (http://baraza.wildlifedirect.org/2009/05/22/most-severe-drought-in-26-years-killing-malis-desert-elephants/).

For more information about these issues and more, please visit the the Oxfam International website (http://www.oxfam.org/en/climate).

To find out about the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, which takes place this December, please visit the official conference website (http://en.cop15.dk/).

According to the Pew Center on Climate Change (http://www.pewclimate.org/), one of the most significant challenges in addressing global climate change is reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emmissions resulting from the use of coal.

Currently approximately 20% of the global greenhouse gases are caused by coal which is used primarily to generate electricity. Rising energy demands in the US, China and India will continue to drive up coal consumption in the future

Click here to see the complete list of coal and climate change facts.

If you live in the US, you can find out exactly where the coal to generate your electricity comes from at ilovemountains.org (http://www.ilovemountains.org/mc/show_connection.php?zip=+Zip&x=30&y=21). Since much of the coal is now mined through mountaintop removal, coal is becoming an even bigger environmental problem, leaving toxic waste and flooding in its wake wherever it is mined.

Please refer to http://www.ilovemountains.org/resources/ for more information about mountaintop removal mining.

And if that isn't enough, I just read today that the Arctic ice cap is expected to disappear in 20 to 30 years (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091014/ts_afp/britaincanadaarcticclimateenvironmentscience).

Do we really need any more reasons to get motivated and do what needs to be done?

We humans have gotten the world into a mess in a relatively short period of time. We need to do something now to change the course we are on.

Mother Earth can survive quite well without humans. But humans won't fare so well without a healthy Mother Earth.

Love,
MOM

You can change the world

I found this terrific blog today and thought you might be interested. You can click on the picture above or go to http://reducefootprints.blogspot.com/ for all kinds of helpful information about how we each can make a difference and make Mother Earth a cleaner, better place for us all. And for our children and grandchildren.

We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors,
we borrow it from our children.

Remember, we can do great things if we all work together.

Love,
Mom

Water, water, everywhere. . .

. . . and not a drop to drink. . .

Did you know that 1.1 billion people worldwide are estimated to have no access to clean drinking water? That's one in every 6 people on our planet. Many of them are children.

Please watch this very short video from charity: water (charitywater.org) which brings this truth much closer to home:




If you are interested in helping, children's safe drinking water (cdsw.org) has a program which distributes PUR packets to make potentially deadly drinking water drinkable. For as little as $1, you can provide a child with fresh water for 50 days.

Recently, I became aware of one of the more tragic stories regarding water quality and shortages. A few months ago 1,500 farmers in India’s agricultural state of Chhattisgarh committed mass suicide in response to the devastating effects of water shortages on their crop production. You can read more about it at BlueLivingIdeas (click here).

Did you know these facts about water?

1. In some organisms, up to 90 percent of their body weight comes from water.

2. Up to 60 percent of the human body is water.

3. The human brain is composed of 70 percent water.

4. Human lungs are nearly 90 percent water.

5. About 83 percent of our blood is water, which helps digest our food, transport waste, and control body temperature.

6. Each day humans must replace 2.4 litres of water, some through drinking and the rest taken by the body from the foods eaten.

So you can see just how important clean water is to the survival of all of us. For tips on how to conserve water, visit the "Water Use it Wisely" website (click here) or here for 49 tips from Americanwater.com.

"When you know better
you do better."
~Maya Angelou

Love,
MOM

World Oceans Day

Today is World Oceans Day. Hawaii was the first U.S. state to observe World Oceans Day in 2008, thanks to the efforts of three girl scouts: Chanel Gemini, Nika Kashyap, and Sabina Van Tilburg. The concept for World Oceans Day was first presented to the United Nations by the government of Canada in 1992. You can read more about the project here.

Today more than 50 nations and 200 organizations are encouraging people around the world to respect and protect our magnificent oceans. Another great source of information is World Ocean Network.org.

Click here for a short video about what you can do to help prevent more plastic from ending up in the environment. (This link takes you to Endangered Spaces.blogspot, which is also listed in my Interesting Green Places Blogroll on the left of this blog.)

Recently I've been seeing more and more information about endangered animals,and two of the most recent I've learned about live in the ocean. The first is the Hawaiian Monk Seal.

The Hawaiian Monk Seal is considered the most endangered seal in American waters, and only about 1200 are left. They are disappearing due to starvation and erosion of native habitat. There is some interesting information about the seals here, at the wild ones.org.

Tragically, a pregnant female and a male seal were recently found shot to death. You can read about it here at the Marine Conservation blog.blospot. The Marine Conservation Biology Institute's website (click here) is another good source of information about the Hawaiian Monk Seal, as well as many other ocean-related topics.

I recently read that there are only 120 Western Gray Whales left in the Ocean, making it one of the most critically endangered whale populations on earth. Only 25 to 30 of these are reproductive females. Their primary threat is large international oil land gas corporations.

Gray whales were saved from the brink of extinction once before in the 1940s when they were overfished by commercial whaling operations. There are two populations of gray whales in the Pacific Ocean. The eastern Pacific population, which lives along the U.S. and Mexico coast, is doing well now, with about 20,000 whales. But the Western population is in deep trouble. If you are interested, there is more information here, at the IUCN Western Gray Whale Conservation Initiative, and here at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) website.

You can sign up to receive your own ocean-related e-mail updates from Oceana.org (click here) or visit the Oceana.org website's main page here.

Love,
Mom