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Home - HumanCoral. Here is my manifesto for rewilding the world | George Monbiot | Comment is free. Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail. There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across. The short-faced bear stood 13ft in its hind socks. One hypothesis maintains that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialised in driving giant lions and sabretooth cats off their prey. The Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens) had a wingspan of 26ft. During the previous interglacial period, Britain and Europe contained much of the megafauna we now associate with the tropics: forest elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions and hyenas.

Most of the deciduous trees in Europe can resprout wherever the trunk is broken. All this has been forgotten, even by professional ecologists. Leonardo DiCaprio Throws $7 Million Into the Ocean. Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor best known for his roles in Titanic and Catch Me If You Can, has pledged to donate seven million dollars to help save oceans around the globe. A seven million dollar donation to help save oceans around the globe has been offered by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, at the Our Oceans conference DiCaprio appeared at an event staged by the State Department, where he announced the donation to the creation of marine reserves.

“I got to know Leo particularly well during my campaign for president when he took time out of his life to put his celebrity to work on behalf of what he believed was the right choices for the country in terms of the environment particularly,” Secretary of State John Kerry said during the second day of the Our Ocean conference. The actor of The Wolf of Wall Street was a special guest that day. “Thru my foundation today I’m pledging $7 million to ocean conservation projects over the next 2 years. Source | Techtimes. Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures. Bathroom Disinfectant Cleaner - PROXI. New Mexico County is First in the Nation to Ban all Drilling and Fracking. Republished from grist.org By John Upton Mora County, N.M., has a message for the oil and gas industry: “You’re not welcome here.” County commissioners voted 2-1 on Monday to ban all oil and gas extraction in their drought-ravaged county near Santa Fe, home to fewer than 5,000 people.

A temporary drilling moratorium is already in place in neighboring San Miguel County, but it is believed that Mora County is the first in the nation to impose an outright ban on all oil and gas drilling. From E&E News, via NRDC: Commissioner Alfonso Griego said “he supported the measure because he feels that federal and state laws fail to adequately protect communities from the impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.” Any detractors? Wally Drangmeister, a spokesman for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said the potential of the natural gas deposits in the area may never be known if exploration isn’t allowed and that could result in lost revenues for the county, as well as the rest of New Mexico.

China begins taxing oil and gas giants. WikiLeaks Reveals Pollution Issues in China. The latest batch of diplomatic cables unearthed by WikiLeaks reveals China's failure to measure certain pollution levels and the government's silence about the issue. Several newly revealed cables, dating from 2006, show that certain types of air pollution aren't measured at all in China and that the Chinese government has ignored alarming findings from academics and scientists. "Air pollution in China has grown so bad that Chinese officials are acknowledging the challenge it presents, and various foreign scholars are offering alarming statistics about the financial and health costs it brings. ... However, fine particle (PM2.5) pollution — which is deemed to be of highest concern for public health — is not measured," a cable dated Aug. 16, 2006, claims. Another cable reveals that the levels of ozone (O3) in the Chinese province of Guangdong were at one point extremely high.

China has been praised in recent years for its efforts to reduce air pollution. [via The Guardian] Brazilian president's promises crumble under weight of Belo Monte dam | Environment. Brazil's new president, Dilma Rousseff, has never been popular among environmentalists. Since the early days of predecessor Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's presidency, when she occupied the post of minister of mining and energy, many activists have seen her as a leader with an old-fashioned view of development. Something like "economic growth is priority number one, no matter if some hectares of Amazon rainforest has to be chopped down". The animosity increased even more after Rousseff was promoted, in 2005, to the ministry of internal affairs – the post that paved her way to the presidency. With the second most important job in the republic, she was responsible for coordinating the government action plan, the Plano de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) – the "plan of growth acceleration".

It was a period when almost every infrastructure project – from offshore oil drilling to roads in the middle of the forest – were given licences, despite civil society criticism. Why are we a nation of tree-huggers? 3 February 2011Last updated at 15:44 By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine Plans to transfer ownership of many public forests in England have provoked a huge row. But why are we so protective of our woodlands?

It's about the rustling of the leaves and the crunch of twigs underfoot. It's the sensation of the rough bark on your hands and the light dappling into a clearing. Above all, it's a place where nature takes priority over humans. For the vast majority of us, living in towns and cities, visiting a forest is the easiest way to escape our mechanised, wipe-clean, ring-roaded civilisation and properly get back to nature. As the government is finding out, a forest unleashes something deeply primordial in otherwise domesticated, suburban Britons. Plans to radically change the ownership of some of England's forests have provoked a furious backlash.

Indeed, it is a response that tells us much about a country in which 90% of the population live in urban areas. Continue reading the main story. The Ecology of Work | Curtis White. Environmentalism can't succeed until it confronts the destructive nature of modern work—and supplants it by Curtis White Art by Teun Hocks Last of a two-part series. See The Idols of Environmentalism for part one.

I ENVIRONMENTALISTS SEE THE ASPHALTING of the country as a sin against the world of nature, but we should also see in it a kind of damage that has been done to humans, for what precedes environmental degradation is the debasement of the human world. I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. We are not the creators of our own world; we merely perform functions in a system into which we were born.

Unfortunately, on these shores the suggestion that there is something fundamentally destructive in work, money, and capitalism leads quickly to emotional denials. But let’s be honest. Spiritual rebirth will mean the rediscovery of true human work. New Bolivian Law Would Give Rights to Nature | Care2 Healthy & Green Living. By Erin La Rosa, ecorazzi It’s an annoying fact that not everyone recycles or turns the lights off or makes efforts to so much as conserve water. So, what if the government stepped in and forced everyone to do all of those things? That’s what lawmakers in Bolivia are taking steps toward with their “Law of Mother Earth” bill. It’s a piece of legislation that would grant nature equal rights to humans.

The laws would be the first of their kind, with 11 in total, and would recognize that the planet has an equal right to be protected. The Guardian outlined the laws as: “the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.” Hopefully Bolivia’s bold move will lead to laws like this being implemented elsewhere! (via Huffington Post) Trouble in Farm City, and How You Can Help – EcoLocalizer. Food Published on April 7th, 2011 | by Patricia Larenas Oakland Urban Farmer Novella Carpenter Urban farmer extraordinaire, Novella Carpenter, has recently hit a wall of bureaucracy with the city of Oakland that threatens the very existence of her small farm. Carpenter is the author of the popular and engaging book “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer”, and has been raising food on an open parcel of land that she owns in Oakland.

She was recently informed by local officials that growing vegetables on an empty city lot is illegal, and furthermore, raising livestock without a $2500 Conditional Use Permit, (she has chickens, goats, rabbits, and at one time had two pigs) is also illegal. I would argue that a lot with a farm on it is not empty, but that’s just my own twisted logic. Although the city of Oakland is slated to change the law to allow growing vegetables, the one banning livestock will remain. Transforming More Vacant Lots into Urban Farms Cover via Amazon About the Author. Earthquake Swarm. A series of earthquakes have been experienced in Arkansas and are slowly becoming the norm, though the reason as to why there have been so many remains elusive. According to the most recent geological report by the USGS, Arkansas has been experiencing about two-to-seven earthquakes a day ranging from about 1.8-4.0 on the richter scale, and the trend doesn't seem likely to stop with up to two dozen quakes sometimes being reported in a given day.

More than 800 earth quakes have been reported across the region in the past six months, and the region experienced its largest quake yet this past Sunday reaching nearly 5.0 on the ricter scale. Geologists have presented two possibilities for the constant earth flux, one being that this is a natural event such as a swarm of similar quakes that occurred in the 1980s that hit Enola, Arkansas.

The other theory points to a natural gas exploration technique called "fracking" as a possible cause. Video - Adam Hills in Gordon St Tonight - ABC TV. More reports of flesh-eating bacteria in the Gulf ? 12 y/o dies after only his feet touched the water. Extreme Super Moon To Cause Major Earthquakes? – Planetsave.com: climate change and environmental news.

Brazil's New President Vows to Defend the Environment. Photo: Antonio Cruz, via Exame Yesterday was a historic day in Brazil, and the end of an era for President Lula da Silva, whose leadership over the last eight years has made Brazil one of the most rapidly developing countries in the World, as well as a nation on the leading edge of environmental policy. Taking Lula's place to become the country's first female president, trained economist and former Marxist rebel, Dilma Rousseff, has pledged to help make Brazil "on of the most developed and least unequal nations in the world. " But, with developmentalism and environmentalism so often at odds, it is important to note where Brazil's Presidents stands on the intersection of these important and dynamic issues.While Brazil has been a major player in Latin America since its founding, the nation's current experiment with democratic politics has, thus far, been relatively brief.

In 2003, with the election of Lula da Silva, the nation began a profound transformation. Undercover Cop Who Posed as Environmentalist Tells All. Photo: Guardian--the new look The news story in the UK of the undercover cop who was posing as an environmentalist for seven years just keeps on going. This one has legs, as they say. Mark "Stone", really Kennedy, was the perfect environmentalist who was found out and has now turned against the police, dishing dirt which they say is dangerous to other agents still undercover. Environmentalists say that prior court decisions are now prejudiced. Photo: schNews--the old look The whole affair has become a bit of a circus, with Mark Kennedy re-doing his look: he is now shaved, with a neat hair cut and conservative clothing.

Kennedy claims that there are at least 15 other undercover agents who have infiltrated the green movement in the past and that four are still under cover. As for the pay at this gig, in addition to his salary of £50,000 (US $79,000), he was paid another £200,000 (US $317,000) to help him keep his cover. He says that he is on the run, in hiding and afraid for his life.