The Best Way to Impede Climate Change: Eat Eco-Friendly

Changing one's diet to local, organic, vegetarian, and/or vegan are by far the most effective ways for an individual to lessen their eco-footprint, more so than driving hybrid cars, carrying reusable grocery bags, or purchasing energy-saver light bulbs (although everything helps of course).

This is particularly clear when one notes that, per year, a typical American puts 4.4 tones of CO2 in the air with their motor vehicle, while they put a whopping 60 tones of CO2 into the atmosphere with their food consumption.

However, a food's eco-friendliness appears ever-more complex. That is, it turns out based on a comprehensive study by the US Food & Drug Administration, it may be better for one to buy food from a little farther away if the production of that food is more carbon-neutral than your local offering. This is because 83% of the CO2 put out by food consumption is not how far it travels, which is about 11%, it is what it takes from start to finish to grow/raise it.

Let us play devil's advocate here. Say you are trying to lead a green life and yet you know your local farmers use crude oil to run every instrument and aspect of their farming facility while they don't recycle at all, and the next closest farm which uses biofuels and recycles much of its waste is too far away to make it environmentally sensible. What do you do?

OnEarth.org suggests a solution in its article, "Must I Throw Out the Whole Hog?"

To wit:

"A relatively small dietary shift can accomplish about the same greenhouse gas reduction as eating locally. Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year."

Deciding if and how to eat ecologically can be considerably confusing and frustrating, but this post and these few tips may make it somewhat easier to swallow changing your diet for our planet. Bonappetit!

More info on eco-eating:
"Food Footprint: Minimizing Greenhouse Gases"

Source:"Do Food Miles Matter"

"If left unchecked, global world food shortages could set the world back seven years in the fight against extreme poverty"

It's being called the "Silent Tsunami." In three years, prices for the basic staples that feed the world—wheat, rice and corn—have risen by a staggering 83%. For people in the developing world, affording enough food to eat is becoming a daily struggle for survival.

The New York Times is reporting that in Haiti, people are eating cakes made of mud mixed with a little sugar and oil to try and beat the hunger pangs. Without action to stop the upward spiral of food prices, 100 million people around the world will face deeper poverty and hunger, and hundreds of thousands will confront famine and starvation.

In the face of this suffering, we cannot be silent.

Last week, I asked you to send a message to President Bush and urge him to make solving this hunger crisis a priority on the G8's poverty-fighting agenda at its summit this July in Japan. Your response matched the urgency of the moment, and we smashed through our initial goal of 30,000 petition signers.

Just yesterday, we learned that Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda has sent a letter to the other seven leaders of G8 nations adding the hunger crisis on the agenda for the G8 summit. It's a critical first step and shows that our concern is being heard. Now we need to hear from President Bush and work to keep the focus on this ongoing crisis.

Help us reach our new goal of 100,000 ONE members urging President Bush to rally the G8 to take emergency action against hunger and to invest in agricultural productivity in the developing world.

Click the link below to send the following petition to President Bush:
http://www.one.org/hungercrisis/o.pl?id=297-3789065-vbrsxB&t=2

Will the Internet Destroy Itself?

Faster, Broader, but Less Deep

"What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.

The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks.

There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and 'best' was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now.

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum."1

The Internet: Too Much Too Fast

It appears that perhaps the most substantial problem with man's greatest modern invention, the internet, is its potential to overstimulate and mire our individual minds, and thus, counties, states, countries, continents, and world, in a meaningless directionless morass.

Isn't this almost exactly the threat to human significance and evolutionary coherence Robert Persig is talking about above, 34 years ago, except with the more primitive mediums of radio and t.v.? For even then, the question of placing to much power, faith, and focus in one single form of media capable of monopolizing human communications and perceptions of knowledge was recognized.

Doesn't the internet pose to perhaps splinter human advancement at least in as much of a way as it mirrors the ever-complexer labyrinth of websites which is currently regarded as spearheading that advancement?

Self-Destruction or Hyper-Evolution?

Will we be subsumed by our greatest creation, losing our identity and value in the process?



We may very well become the internet. And if/when we do, it may be left to Google's algorithm's to become the unifying and directing force of humankind.

But what kind of people, body, entity would humanity be then? A spider trapped in its own obscenely intricate web?

Moreover, one may be able to someday credit the internet with the destruction of an intelligent human civilization, and thus perhaps, eventually, itself.

On the other hand, we may employ the same insatiable curiosity and immense ingenuity which created the internet to harness its power and shepherd us towards a discernible, focused, and advantageous future, where possibly the fruits of a Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution are realized.

Why does any of this matter?

These possible outcomes of the confluence of man and internet are obviously extremes, and maybe sweeping generalizations of those extremes, but as Moore's Law becomes one of the most influential force's in the human world, the human clock has no chance at keeping pace with the technological clock - that is - unless we thoughtfully speculate far ahead into possible futures to help compensate - right?

Related Reading
"In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession"
"Technoslave"
Source
1 "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

The Truth Edited In

Have Scientists Found the Tree of Man - Alive?

Oldest Tree Discovered

Recently, a seemingly puny looking spruce tree was discovered in the Dalama province of Sweden that has been carbon-14 dated at around 9,550 years of age. In total, there are about 20 trees in this upper mountainous region of Sweden, all of which are approximately over 8,000 years old.

The oldest known trees prior to this discovery were bristle cone pines in North American estimated to be 4500 years old. Although still at about two thousand years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza, they are only half as old as their Swedish counterparts.

4500 year old Bristlecone Pine of North America.

9,550 and Still Going

So how is it possible for a tree to continue to live after 9,550 years?

According to ScienceDaily, "these trees have survived harsh weather conditions [as well as any human interference they may have encountered in the remote mountains of Sweden] due to their ability to push out another trunk as the other one died."

In other words, when these spruce trees are decaying and dying they employ their remaining energy to grow another trunk as an alternate for when the main one is fully dead, and it is with this other trunk the tree remains. Continually repeating this process has allowed these extraordinarily resilient trees to survive over nine and a half millennia.

The Tree of Man?

To give you some context here, the last Ice Age ended around 10,000 years ago, and, sometime around then human beings invented crop cultivation and the domestication of animals.

Noting this period, formally called the Neolithic Revolution, is consistently regarded as the seed of human civilization - it appears the oldest known tree on the planet has subsisted to see the germination of non-nomadic human society and witness the Digital Age which persists today.

Ergo, couldn't we, fairly, dub this tree: the Tree of Man, or perhaps: the Tree of Civilized Man?

"This 9,550 year old spruce has been discovered in Dalarna, Sweden. A favourable climate has produced an upright trunk since the beginning of the 1940s."

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/08

'We have broken speed of light'

Instantaneous Travel

"A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time," reports Telegraph.co.uk.

The article continues, "According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled 'instantaneously' between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences."

A Universe Beyond the Speed of Light

"For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: 'For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.'"

Source:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?