demonstrative

I was over at Zoliblog, reading round and two articles promted me to comment. Funnily enough, the first was about comment censorship, the second was about Dr Doom. So the second comment was not allowed because my IP has been banned or something, which is sad because I quite like his blog, and my first comment was agreeing with him entirely, and I hate comment censorship - although I suppose my two quickfire comments make me look spammy.

Anyway the second article, which i am not allowed to converse on there is Dr Doom Plans to Save the Earth by Wiping out 90% of Humans. But since, once again, I've gone to the trouble and don't want it to just float away into nowhere, I have to talk here in my own safe space :). The story seems to go that this guy views us as a sort of bacteria, draining the planet till everythings gone. His solution is killing off 90% of us. I'm stoked at all this moral outrage, people who are so appalled that someone could actually think THEY should die! Ha! I love the contradiction. Noone cares that they are slowly jamming the world up with landfills, draining our oil supplies, polluting away the air until it's hard to breathe, chopping down the rainforests and coral reefs that sustain life and turn our C02 emissions into the oxygen we need to survive. Because, at the end of the day, we are humans and that essentially makes us god. And as we all know, God can do no wrong, even if he does do wrong. It doesn't matter that we don't mind discriminately killing other people, someone has just THREATEND TO KILL US! Who does he think he is? Does he not realise that we are WHITE? we are RICH? That the planet is NOTHING without us!  Zoli seems like a nice chap, but he is asking for this guy's resignation, he is hoping for his collapse, for daring to tell us that we are killing the planet and to make it survice, 90% of us must die. I think instead of this moral outrage, people should simply take a good inward look and make a few changes in their lives so that the planet can support 10.0000000001% of us, and so on and so on, until we no longer need to kill 90% of us in order to leave things for the rest of the planet's species to enjoy.

Hopefully, hopefully, this very brave man has done something the rest of us weaklings have failed to do: Make it quite clear that we will all die if we continue as we are, that at this rate, the planet can only sustain 10% of us. The shock is incredible.

I HATE those free coupons you get in the mail. We don't even have a letterbox and suffer all the hardships of not getting mail because we hate it so much. (Actually that's not strictly true, we hate it and we're lazy and we have alternative ways of receiving mail...) Anyway if you're in the US and like to recycle, then why not use RecycleBank? Basically, they provide you with a bin complete with barcode, that gets scanned when your recycling is picked up. As you recycle you earn points, and when you earn enough, sign into their website and choose the coupons you want (like $2 off every $20 you spend at the supermarket) Business 'donate' these coupons in return for the advertising they get as a result of their coupons (pretty sweet deal if you ask me). And everyone is happy. 

RecycleBank isn't 100% clear on how they actually run their business side of things, but the basic gist is that they earn money from cities reducing landfill fees, so you get the service for free.

 Interesting idea huh? We are so wasteful, there is money to be made in doing easy stuff to reduce it. Good on them.

Not generally one to promote others (hee hee), I have to make an exception for these guys. I had a conversation the other night about how bloggers will ever be as good as 'real' journalists, and I must say this is why. Inside WWF Philippines can show you a story not many others can. I would be adding them to my 'currently reading' section but Blogspirit has extremely inflexible templates and me moving the 'left column' to the 'bottom column' causes it to break as soon as I touch a module. So you'll just have to wait. Support them though, they fight hard, write well and show you a side to life you probably haven't really witnessed before.

Interesting post from Seths Blog about some improvements to the marketing of Global Warming. Yes, calling it 'Atmospheric Cancer' would inspire a lot more fear than 'Global warming', I would go so far as to say that anyone who cares should immediately switch names, gather together whatever horrific pictures they have (like the third degree burns we get here in NZ from the sun, the Antartic Penguins who feel it most and now have to travel hundreds of kilometers for food) and start the re-brand.

Or else, to move it away from a purely marketing exercies, we could get honest. "Noone feels Global Warming". I'm no scientist, but I was in Thailand during the Tsunami a few years ago, and I did get pummeled with media attention over Hurrican Katrina and I have heard of massive earthquakes that are killing hundreds of thousands, warped weather patterns and all sorts of scary stuff. But I've never really heard in mainstream media, the acceptance that this is/could be all part of global warming. The main problem with marketing the end of the world, is that no one really want to yet.

Songs of The Deep is one of those artilces that just leaves you stumped at the beauty of the world. The idea that whales communicate from one end of the earth to the other, they sing, they talk, they live for hundeds of years is notheing less than Awsome (an American on our dolphin watching experience said at one point' Now I undertstand why You Kiwi's use the word awsome so much, nothing less could describe this'). How the conversation immediately turned to whale meat is yet another example of how thick the human race has become, that people then felt justified in vocalising their opinion on Whale intelligence is another again. As someone put it:

"I agree. dolphins may be deeply philosophical, but can't even use fire. ants and bees function as a social unit better than chimps or humans could ever hope to. but as far as chimps looking like us, maybe we look like them.
we measure things against ourselves because we see ourselves as the ultimate creation.
but chickens don't test nuclear bombs in their own atmosphere."

Why we, who know nothing of space, the deepest reaches of the ocean and how to live a sustainable life feel we are any more intelligent than a slug is beyond me - our most scientific measurement of intelligence is brain size in comparison to body mass, and this is coming from a species that know so little of themselves we still must believe in god.

While I understand that beauty and magnificence alone is not an iron clad reason for the pessemist not to eat something, the fact that all our eating has led to near extinction should be. Or come to New Zealand and watch as motorways come to a standstill as migrating whales make their way through our ports, or the feeling of an Orca swimming under your boat or listen to the sound of dolphins as they speak to each other and race you through the ocean.

A New Zealand film called whale rider captures the immensity of these creatures.

"is having a 100 per cent Organic Fair TradeTM coffee with your Big Mac really a sign of victory for the organic movement?."

Does Corporate Organic change the Organic Landscape?  Looks at how another buzzword can be contorted to mean something that's not all that great at all, while those really achieving change can be shafted out of the market by the big pretenders. Yet another thing to look out for if your intentions are to benefit the world, not hurt it.

Just found this article about bottled water on Digg.com. It makes sense to me that countries like Mexico and India consume a fair amount - I have seen the tap water there. What I do find interesting is that:

"Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 US cars for a year," according to the study. "Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year." 

And a well known fact about Coca Cola, their blatant disregard for anything but profit has lead to some people being forced to buy bottled water - Coke stole all theirs from the ground.

The study warned that the rapid growth in the industry has also ironically led to water shortages in some areas, including India where bottling of Dasani water and other drinks by the Coca-Cola company has caused shortages in more than 50 villages.

I would have thought everyone knew this by now, but the sheer number of people who still think that buying water somehow makes it more... water like? Seems to make this statement still neccessary:

"In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water," the study says. "Often the only difference is added minerals that have no marked health benefits. 

One interesting point. Who pays for all these countless 'studies' that all lead to the same results yet fail to actually curb the amount of bottled water we drink or its reputation as the healthy alternative to the good old tap? 

I heard about this article just before, a rare occurrance in this day and age, to find hundreds of undiscovered species. Imagine what the world would be like without our human footprint, this sounds like everything you could possibly fathom - graceful, wonderul, brilliant creatures from every walk of life, living happily high up in the mountains undisrupted by the terror we spread.

"This is a place with no roads or trails and never, so far as we know, visited by man ... This proves there are still places to be discovered that man has not touched." (I assume woman has also left the place unvisited)

The comment that got me:

"What was amazing was the lack of wariness of all the animals. In the wild, all species tend to be shy of humans, but that is learnt behaviour because they have encountered mankind. In Foja they did not appear to mind our presence at all.

What I would give to have been an observer, what I fear most is what will happen now. 

If your nervous about the imminent end of the world's oil supplies, read this... Turns out in Brazil, they've been running their cars purely on ethanol since 1979... And, unlike with hydrogen, converting our current petrol stations over is extremely simple... How to Beat the high cost of Gasoline... Forever

We talk a lot about sustainable living these days, especially with the thought of getting our plot of land and building. The funny thing is how houses sell on 'gimmicks', we have friends who just sold their house for quite a hefty price and the real estate guy divulged that the owners fell in love with, not the stunning architecture, or cladding, location or layout, although all those things were nice, what they really loved was the vegetable garden. The vegetable garden? Who would part with over half a million dollars for a vege garden? Don't they know they cost less than $100 to make? Obviously they don't.

We have other friends, one of whom is a builder, the other of whom is bursting with ideas on starting a sustainable building company - still a relitively new concept, although embraced by the kitset home communty. We talk constantly about cool things houses can have, like those water tanks that are long and thin, so fit well in any old back yard, and ideas like having a hydroponic herb garden along one wall of your kitchen. All these things make our eyes sparkle with 'what ifs'... However, in the short term, we are renting, and had to settle with a container on our windowsill of a small selection of fresh herbs. I am still in love with the smell that wafts though our house, of mint and basil and that yummy fresh smell of things growing in dirt.

I reckon the way to move people slowly towards sustainable living is simple things that make a big difference, a vege garden, replacing your chemical cleaners with natural ones, composting. Simple things that get you back to nature a little. I don't consider myself a gardner, but give me a plant to look after and I treat it like my own child, and the joy you feel when watching the things you tend to grow and flourish? Who doesnt feel that? We are a long way from outing the idea of decentralised farming, but how nice is it to lessen our dependency on these things just a little?