tagged w/ Population growth
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Our national melting pot on steroids
http://latestbloomer.uskoa.com/?p=2376
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11dim
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12 months ago
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eva2
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What if the world’s population of nearly 7 billion people lived in one giant megacity?What if the world’s population of nearly 7 billion people lived in one giant... more
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Contraception is almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a means of combating climate change, according to research published today (Wednesday, September 9).
Each $7 (£4) spent on basic family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a tonne. To achieve the same result with low-carbon technologies would cost a minimum of $32 (£19). The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.
Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/09/30/contraception-is-%E2%80%9Cgreenest%E2%80%9D-technology/Contraception is almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a... more
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Supreme Court ruling means no Lake Fastrill reservoir for Dallas
The ever-thirstier cities of North Texas will have to look somewhere other than the Neches River in East Texas for their future water supplies.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday drained the last bit of life from the city of Dallas and Texas Water Development Board plan to build a massive reservoir called Lake Fastrill along the Neches.
Instead, that land will become a wildlife refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The city and the state board had requested that the Supreme Court hear an appeal of a lower court's decision that favored Fish and Wildlife's plan. The court declined.
Fastrill was not intended to become a water source until 2060, but it was a significant piece of the plan to keep North Texas with adequate water this century.
Now, planning will have to shift, although how and where isn't clear.
More-
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/yahoolatestnews/stories/022310dnmetnolake.449c72a.html?plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:ad1fb78b-89d9-4103-904b-662a02dd5b39
http://joshhoke.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/mallard-duck-1024-768.jpgSupreme Court ruling means no Lake Fastrill reservoir for Dallas
The ever-thirstier... more
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Expanding U.S. economy through immigration beats shrinking
-( or is it a scam?)-
In an economy as bad as this one, it may take nothing short of disaster to bring about even a little immigration reform.
Responding to Haiti's devastating earthquake, the Obama administration is providing Temporary Protected Status to undocumented Haitians living in the U.S. As many as 200,000 people will be invited to stay legally for 18 months, receiving work permits to find jobs.
Even that modest humanitarian gesture has rekindled an emotionally charged debate about whether immigrants hurt the economic prospects of Americans.
With unemployment at 10 percent, this would be a risky moment for Congress to press ahead with sweeping new immigration policies.
Right or wrong, any move in that direction would invite a predictable backlash about immigrants taking jobs, crowding schools, filling emergency rooms and so on.
In many ways, linking immigration reform to the urgent goal of improving the nation's economic performance probably would be a stretch. But in one way, a high rate of immigration gives the U.S. economy a big boost, providing a "resource" that many other developed countries desperately need.
Babies.
More-- ( I recommend the discussion afterward as much the lead article )
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/burns-on-business/2010/01/growing-through-immigration-beats-shrinking.html
http://babywallpapers.net/images/wallpapers/Smiling%20Babies-1117.jpegExpanding U.S. economy through immigration beats shrinking
-( or is it a scam?)-... more
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It’s taken a long time, but the issue of global climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves. While enormous technical, policy, and economic issues remain to be solved, there is now widespread acceptance of the need to confront the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. Collectively, we are beginning to acknowledge that our long addiction to fossil fuels — which has been harming our national security, our economy and our environment for decades — must end. The question today is no longer why, but how. The die is cast, and our relationship to energy will never be the same.
Unfortunately, this positive shift in the national zeitgeist has had an unintended downside. In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies?
Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization.
Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race. We depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight.
But we are demanding more and more from our global agricultural systems, pushing them to their very limits.
Continued population growth.The massive environmental impacts of our agricultural practices rival the impacts of climate change.(adding more than 70 million people to the world every year), changing dietary preferences (including more meat and dairy consumption), rising energy prices, and increasing needs for bioenergy sources are putting tremendous pressure on the world’s resources. And, if we want any hope of keeping up with these demands, we’ll need to double, perhaps triple, the agricultural production of the planet in the next 30 to 40 years.
Meeting these huge new agricultural demands will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. At present, it is completely unclear how (and if) we can do it.
If this wasn’t enough, we must also address the massive environmental impacts of our current agricultural practices, which new evidence indicates rival the impacts of climate change. Consider the following:
Ecosystem degradation. Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. In fact, the area used for agriculture is nearly 60 times larger than the area of all of the world’s cities and suburbs. Since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change?
end of excerptIt’s taken a long time, but the issue of global climate change is finally... more
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Georgia, Alabama and Florida have been bickering over water for nearly two decades. The focus: a reservoir at Lake Lanier, north of Atlanta.
Georgia believes it deserves the water. Alabama and Florida say it is needed downstream. A federal judge recently ruled that Georgia doesn't have the right to take drinking water from the reservoir, but that is where 3.5 million Atlanta residents get their water. Now, some wonder whether the area can continue to grow without it.
Some 35 miles northeast of Atlanta, not far from Lake Lanier, is the town of Suwanee, Ga. In 1990, 2,400 people lived there; now, there are nearly 17,000. The growth was planned, but there is no doubt that the city benefited from a plentiful water supply.
Judicial Decision
Now there is a new worry. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Lake Lanier reservoir was built for flood control, navigation and hydropower — not for drinking water. So, the judge gave the governors three years to negotiate a deal.
If they can't, Congress must approve drinking water as an appropriate use, or Georgia must return to the amount it withdrew in the 1970s, when the Atlanta area was only one-third its current size.
Suwanee Mayor Dave Williams says going back is not an option.
"If you're asking me, do I think we're literally going to have no water — I don't think that's going to be the case," he says. "But I don't think we're going to probably ever again take for granted the fact that we can build as much as we want and the water is going to be there to be had."Georgia, Alabama and Florida have been bickering over water for nearly two decades.... more
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It is now seen as an article of faith that the world suffers from overpopulation but exactly who are there too many of? You, me, my friends? For World Population Day 2009, we should be celebrating our increased numbers and looking forward to more not less of the earth’s richest resource, humanity. Volunteers present the case in this inspiring riposte to modern Malthusians.It is now seen as an article of faith that the world suffers from overpopulation but... more
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Pretty compelling information about what we in California have known for a long time.
The overpopulation of the United States isn't for us, We The People, it's for the benefit of those evil (ignorant) people in evil (make that ignorant) corporations, period. There is no other justification for it.Pretty compelling information about what we in California have known for a long time.... more
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A Man With A Plan
Inventor Gerald Garrison's World Food Plan.
His strategic plan is to create thousands (if not millions) of huge indoor gardens to serve communities with fresh, nutritional produce. These highly efficient, local food production factories are capable of growing food indoors using his state-of-the-art and sustainable technologies. Most importantly, these food production centers can generate crops 365 days a year, regardless of how harsh the outdoor environment becomes.
The idea is to take an environmentally controlled room – well insulated from the outside world – and grow food under his digital light delivery systems. The energy required to power the factories will come from wind and solar power generation sites.
Some cynics scoff that taking food production indoors is tantamount to admitting defeat. “Have we really screwed up the climate so much that we have to grow plants indoors now?”, is the most common question. And the idea of using solar and wind power to generate artificial sunlight is a difficult concept for many people to accept. However a growing number of people, especially within the indoor gardening industry, are starting to switch on to his ideas.A Man With A Plan
Inventor Gerald Garrison's World Food Plan.
His strategic... more
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When we think of sustainability, images of organic farming and low impact machinery come to mind, along with crops that are environmentally gentle; but we forget about wasted resources.
This week, I stumbled upon a small store in an obscure part of Montreal which, sells ...
Read the whole story on Alternative Channel and learn how an imperfect swirl can be the answer to hunger.
http://www.alternativechannel.tv/blog/en/comments/how_an_imperfect_swirl_can/When we think of sustainability, images of organic farming and low impact machinery... more
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By the end of this year a first-time record of 3.3 billion people, more than half of the world's population, are expected to live in urban areas according to the UN.
This was announced in a documentary entitled Eco-Cities, Sustainable cities for the Future launched by IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature West Asia/Middle East Regional Office and Ministry of Environment during the Eco-Cities of the Mediterranean 2008 conference held in Jordan from 18-20 October, 2008.
The idea about this documentary, funded by the IUCN global Water and Nature Initiative (WANI), came from the pressing need to address the concept of sustainable cities or eco-cities as a solution for all the environmental and economic challenges facing cities in the Middle East and North Africa.
The film focuses on the environmental challenges, current actions and future plans in Jordan and Egypt. Highlighting the issues of water quality and scarcity, solid waste, urbanization and air pollution the documentary also tackles the solutions and actions to face those environmental challenges such as renewable energy, water treatment and harvesting, solid waste management and recycling and the results of those solutions not only on the environment, but also on the economy and society.
I think all of us have responsibilities to look very seriously at the impacts of our actions on the environment. And if we don't, then the future of our children and grandchildren will be bleak, HRH Prince Hamza bin Al Hussein of Jordan said in the Eco-Cities documentary.
The cost of environmental degradation in Jordan and in the Arab World is around 5% of the GDP, so once we reduce that through better environmental management, we improve our economy, according to HE Khaled Al Irani, Jordanian Minister of Environment.
I believe eco-cities is a process rather than a product; it is a way of life. It is an approach that people need to change their lives and worldviews in order to make sure that harmony between nature, people and markets is taking place, says Dr Odeh Al-Jayyousi, IUCN West Asia/Middle East Regional Director.
According to the 25-minute documentary, Jordan's annual water supply is 900 MCM, while the demand is 1500 MCM. The majority of the deficit comes from the unsustainable groundwater use. More than 65% of our water in Jordan is used for irrigation, says HE Khaled Al Irani, Jordanian Minister of Environment.
16 million people living in Cairo depend on the Nile. Yet its river basins are subject to untreated sewage and industrial effluence. We are trying to save the quality of water of the Nile, but our main concern is industrial waste, says Dr Mawaheb Abul Azm, CEO Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency. Before 2001, 100 MCM of untreated industrial waste were dumped into the Nile each year according to governmental figures. However, inspections and enforcing environmental laws have stopped industries polluting the river.
By the end of this year a first-time record of 3.3 billion people, more than half of... more
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A recent report released by the Office for National Statistics has shown that the UK has the highest population density of any major country in Europe.
An increase in immigration has pushed the pop. density up by five people per sq. km. meaning that, on average, every square kilometre in England has 395 people residing in it.
Apparently Malta has a higher density but also only has a population of 400,000, but us Brits love to claim we're the best at any opportunity, even if it's not 100% true...Or maybe that's just me...A recent report released by the Office for National Statistics has shown that the UK... more
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Booming demand for food, fuel and wood as the world's population surges from six to nine billion will put unprecedented and unsustainable demand on the world's remaining forests, two new reports said on Monday.
The reports from the U.S.-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) said this massive potential leap in deforestation could add to global warming and put pressure on indigenous forest dwellers that could lead to conflict.
RRI is a global coalition of environmental and conservation non-government organizations with a particular focus on forest protection and management and the rights of forest peoples.
Booming demand for food, fuel and wood as the world's population surges from six... more
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A Turkish lake three times the size of Washington DC has completely vanished in 15 years. Just how much of this planet can the human race totally destroy in the next 15 years? The global water crisis is another topic that is not seen as "sexy" or newsworthy. However, it is the most crucial environmental crisis we now face. Without water we have no life. And at the current pace of population growth combined with waste and the effects of climate change, more people in all regions of this world will have no water, which means no food, no way of life, no sustainability. It is amazing to me how we keep tripping over the elephant in the room to concentrate on the peanuts.A Turkish lake three times the size of Washington DC has completely vanished in 15... more
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