Survival // Current

Michael Pollan: Help protect our farmers from assaults by Monsanto

Save our seeds.

JanforGore
added this
1 day ago
|
5 comments

Are Violent Video Games Preparing Kids For The Apocalypse?

You can never be too prepared! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTbYUd1jUc4

remanns
added this
13 days ago
|
12 comments

The IHC: The Institute for Human Continuity

Sony has lost their minds, sign up right away or you'll be left on your own. No... more

quanta
added this
1 month ago
|
3 comments

Off-the-Grid Living – Self Reliance Through Home Solar and Wind Power and Farming - Popular Mechanic

Afew of the people that live off the grid and how they do it.

quanta
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzar

Daryl Jane and the story of how he survived 14 days and nights trapped in his vehicle... more

quanta
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzar

Fred Ullrich, Scout Leader with 65 Boy Scouts, all trapped in a destroyed shelter... more

quanta
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzar

Frank Valpon wearing a mail-order firefighter's outfit battles the fourth largest ever... more

quanta
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Climate Change Is About Water, Too

Excerpt: Yesterday morning, as Senators Boxer and Kerry unveiled the Senate's new... more

Vierotchka
added this
1 month ago
|
3 comments

Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?

Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.

That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."

By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO2. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?

Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.

Continued at link . . .WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene... more

pjacobs51
added this
1 month ago
|
7 comments

People Living under the Vegas Strip

They have a neat, if compact kitchen, a furnished living area, and a bedroom complete... more

LukesAlive
added this
2 months ago
|
19 comments

Dead-end agriculture says it will feed the world

Don't fall for their lies.

Excerpt:

The compelling humanitarian goals expressed today at the corporately sponsored Global Harvest Initiative symposium were laudable, as were some of the hunger-relief projects cited. Missing, however, was an honest assessment of the limits of dead-end chemical agriculture to play a leading role in actually feeding people.

Also absent from the high-powered forum was a prominent role for what organic agriculture is already doing to meet the most important goals on the food-hunger-nutrition side of the problem.

The event, despite all the good people presenting and all the calls for curbing the environmental harm of chemical ag, amounted to glitzy green packaging for the same unnecessary gift of chemical dependence for the world's farmers. GHI is sponsored by ADM, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto. (Yes, the same Monsanto which has promised to double its profits by 2012 with continuing introductions of "high impact technology" seeds.)

In his opening remarks, GHI executive director William Lesher placed the focus firmly on the need for more food, highlighting a projected "productivity gap" that will require a doubling of current world food output by 2050. This thinking follows the outlines of a white paper by GHI in April: "Accelerating Productivity Growth: The 21st Century Global Agriculture Challenge: A White Paper on Agricultural Policy." Yet more food alone won't help starving people until the global agricultural system radically shifts its focus to address the barriers of poverty (the inability to buy food) and distribution (getting food people want to where they are).

By framing global food security in terms of "not enough food," the Global Harvest Initiative seems stuck on doing the same old thing harder and faster. It backers still push expensive seeds and continued dependence on climate-damaging inputs. Organic and near-organic techniques offer robust, biodiverse, productive and regenerative systems that can out-produce chemical approaches in drier and wetter seasons.

The symposium's highlighting of groups seeking environmental and social benefits may do some good -- if the groups can break industrial ag's profit-driven willingness to sacrifice soil vitality, agricultural biodiversity, human endocrine and neurological health, farmer control of seeds and a nation's nutritional well-being. Or it may just be the best agri-greenwashing money can buy.

Sustainable Agriculture Group:

http://current.com/groups/sustainable-agriculture/Don't fall for their lies. Excerpt: The compelling humanitarian goals expressed... more

JanforGore
added this
2 months ago
|
1 comment

Woman stranded in Rockies, survived by drinking rainwater not Mountain Dew

A woman who survived a terrifying car crash and nearly a week injured and undiscovered... more

FreshPlastic
added this
2 months ago
|
1 comment

So, What's the Scariest Game This Generation So Far?

There hasn't really been that many horror games so far this generation, and there have... more

Genghis_Sean
added this
2 months ago
|
1 comment

How to make a Fancy Feast Cat Food Can Backpacking Stove

watch - and - learn.

vistapoint
added this
2 months ago
|
0 comments

Paradise Lost

Its not just about Politics, though Politics is also important here. Its not just... more

Kazim
added this
5 months ago
|
0 comments

Life Without Soul

Every morning while on the way to office or coming back in evening it’s not possible... more

Kazim
added this
3 months ago
|
0 comments

Sans Papiers

Sans Papiers

The youth of our age, surrounded by a swarm of difficulties and problems is in search of a solution, but what he eventually finds is more and more of difficulties and disappointments. When unemployed and poverty numbs all his senses, paralyzes all his muscles, he feels life is nothing but a futile effort, a bottomless pit of poverty and indigence. According to one estimate, in past 10 years, around 10 thousand Pakistanis have been killed by security forces, crossing Greece-Turkey border illegally. In pursuit of an ever evading happiness, who are these ill-informed people and who are the traffickers involved in this heinous trade of human trafficking. The real issue is how come the educated ones of our country fall prey to these human traffickers. Poverty and related problems are the main reasons behind human trafficking and illegal immigration. Your pursuit of happiness can bring this much misery and suffering, one can only know by meeting the people under Custody of FIA, who have recently been deported from the Turkey Border. It seems an obvious enough advice to have a safe albeit simple life at home, than to a have risky prosperous life abroad. But mired deeply in the troubled waters, it’s only dreams of a happy living that make these people go through all sorts of troubles.

I just pray that my country Pakistan finds a leader, a person who can improve the situation in our country, so that no one thinks about leaving this country and going through this humiliation This heinous crime of Illegal immigration, despite efforts by the State, is flourishing. One obvious contributors of this crime are the people who become a victim of agents’ treacherous promises, lost their lives’ savings and became a victim of dark alleys.

The question that haunts us all is till what time these traffickers would dupe the gullible of their livelihoods and till what time the carcasses of the youth of our country would be feasted by the beasts in unknown wildernesses.

Directed and Produced By
Kazim Raza
Masmedia Productions
Pakistan
923333705114Sans Papiers The youth of our age, surrounded by a swarm of difficulties and... more