Tag: Earth Day

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Today is the 42nd Earth Day and, as noted by Chris Hayes Saturday morning on his MSNBC show Up with Chris, coverage has by broadcast media has fallen off sharply, as Media Matters reports:

Time Devoted To Climate Change Has Fallen Sharply Since 2009

Despite Ongoing Climate News, Broadcast Coverage Has Dropped Significantly. Since 2009, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate bill and a major climate conference took place in Copenhagen, the amount of climate coverage on both the Sunday shows (Fox News Sunday, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’ Face the Nation, and ABC’s This Week) and the nightly news (NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and ABC World News) has declined tremendously. This drop comes despite a series of newsworthy stories related to climate change in 2010 and 2011, including a debate over comprehensive climate and energy legislation in the U.S. Senate, a series of record-breaking extreme weather events, notable developments in climate science, the rise of so-called “climate skeptics” in the House of Representatives, and a deal struck at the most recent UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa.

Click on image to enlarge

Chris and his guests, Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency; Sam Seder (@samseder), host of the Majority Report podcast; Victoria DeFrancesco Soto (@drvmds, director of communications for Latino Decisions; Bob Herbert (@bobherbert), senior fellow at Demos; Antonia Juhasz (@antoniajuhasz), oil & energy analyst & activist and author of The Tyranny of Oil; and Paul Douglas (@pdouglasweather), meteorologist and founder of weathernation tv, try to rectify the lack of coverage with a comprehensive discussion of the environment and climate.

Christine Todd Whitman, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during President George W. Bush‘s administration, will join us. And we’ll look at recent environmental and financial conditions in the Gulf of Mexico on the two year anniversary of the BP oil spill with The Nation‘s Antonia Juhasz, who unearthed the “hidden health costs” in the aftermath of the spill. Plus, we’ll discuss the impact of a newly proposed Keystone Pipeline route, and Paul Douglas, a meteorologist who lamented the following, will join us:

   I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I’m a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a Penn State meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me very uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern.

Join in the discussion to celebrate and protect the Earth, our home.

In this I will just add a few reports I’ve come across this morning while waking up, might add some more as they trickle in.

Most of you who read my posts will agree that I prefer environmentally friendly industries, transport, and food.  You also know that I grow quite a lot of my own food, and a guide will be published here, this coming Saturday, at 7:30 PM when I guest host What’s for Dinner.

However, I am not a fanatic.  I understand that there are tradeoffs that are essential to maintaining our standard of living.  One of them is the semi trailer and the truck that pulls it.  Ten or twelve years ago, they were very polluting, but with the new standards for low soot and sulfur emissions, they are not bad these days.

Earth Day… see also… Robyn, AndyS, Jamess and Eddie C. (so far!)

Planet

On this Earth Day, I thought a few graphics might be in order, in honor of our planet…or home…the place where we all live.  And to make it a little bit more interesting than just some pixels fighting for your attention, I shall all some words to go with (as we used to say in Milwaukee).

There will be quite a few new graphics and a few old ones, like the one over to the right.  It only seemed fitting that I start off with a planet, since we live on one.

As always, clicking on one of the graphics should open a larger version in a new tab.

We (Women’s Studies) are offering our students here at Bloomfield College (just outside of Newark in northeastern New Jersey) free t-shirts today and the materials to paint their own shirts.  If it weren’t for the fact that I had meetings to attend today, I’d go take pictures and share them.  But I do have an important meeting (the first I will attend with the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, which I am moving to in the fall…or maybe I am moving there today, at least psychologically).

On Tuesday we offered Dirt:  the Movie.  I’ll be adding some words about our war against that which brought us to be and which we still need to sustain us:  the soil under our feet.

— Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases.

— Nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

— Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

— One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.

http://www.rain-tree.com/facts…

It is Earth Day.

Another strange confluence of random events, generated by random people on this planet has me vibrating with unsettled energy. Even my use of the word “random” is incomplete to my meaning, for my circle is proof positive that kindreds usually connect one way or another.

I spent the better part of the week thinking about Class War, humans degenerating to our basest natures and what it would take to awaken us to how to be in this world as part of the whole of it.

My mind buzzes around trying to work the layers of the personal/ego expectations with the geopolitical/economic and the humanity/morality aspects of everything that is going on. All at once. The intuitive flashes that are the knowing/unknowing swirl through my soul at unpredictable intervals.

I say things like “the center cannot hold” in my admittedly cryptic way. For someone who talks a lot, writes a lot, I apparently am very cryptic. Heh. To those who know me, or perhaps just know more, I always assume they dig the deeper part of this.

The big, bad scary isn’t just the shadow government, human abuses or economic failure.

Its simple, really. Human existence itself is no longer sustainable on a planetary level.

The rest is just mental masturbation trying to either make ourselves as comfortable as possible during these end times, or delude ourselves into thinking we can reverse the irreversible. More, it may be only the attempt to lie to ourselves and think we, as the enlightened will somehow survive this and create a better world.

Mathematically, scientifically, the odds are greatly against that.