Why Safe Drinkable Water is Something that Many Kentuckians Cannot Take for Granted

by Nomad

Undrinkable and Unthinkable

Regardless of party affiliation, when you ask a voter what are the responsibilities and duties of a government, the answers are largely uniform.

Polls have found that there is bipartisan agreement that the federal government should play a major role in dealing with terrorism, natural disasters, food and medicine safety, and roads and infrastructure. 

Added to this list, the idea that the federal government should provide protection against environmental destruction has majority support across party lines. In theory, clean water ought to be a guaranteed position for any candidate of either party.

Good News Round Up- March 2018

by Nomad

This month's good news round-up is a real mixed bag. We have scientific breakthroughs, governments coming together to protect the environment, and two examples of unselfishness in action.

Good News Round-Up for Week Two of October 2017

by Nomad

With ugly events happening every place you turn, with stupid insensitive people running the show, and with so many people affected by man's inhumanity to man and all living things, you might sometimes think the world has gone to shit.

You might think that last remaining thing on the to-do list is to shovel the whole mess into a trash can and walk away.
That's one plan.

Giving in to despair might seem like the easiest thing to do. No question about that. That course, however, never made the world a better place, never saved a life and never inspired anybody to be a better person.

To remedy that, it is time for a round-up of the despair-immunizing news for the month. Let's start our search for good news in what might seem an unlikely place. The Carribean.

Orange Poison: How Toxins in Ohio Streams Are Being Turned into Works of Art

 by Nomad

When you hear Mr. Trump talk about opening new mines, there's something he doesn't mention about coal mines. We all know about the environmental damage caused by burning coal. Parts of China have been rendered uninhabitable from the coal smoke pollution. And of course, as a carbon, coal adds to the greenhouse gas levels.

However, what is less discussed is the harm caused by mines themselves. That's true even for mine operations that have long been shut down. Decades after the mines have been closed, and the companies have been forgotten, and any person who had anything to do with the mine has become a permanent underground fixture,  the poisons continue to leach out of the ground.

The Return of the Florida Panther: Something Close to a Success Story

 by Endless Summer

A remarkable tale of survival of Florida's wild cat.

A Small Band of Survivors

When European settlers arrived in North America wild cats roamed the entire continent. As population on the Eastern Seaboard increased, habitat for large predators became scarce.

For decades American farmers and ranchers hunted to eliminate predators like wolves and cats, hunted them to the brink of extinction. The survivors moved primarily to the west. But one small band of wild cats moved south. They survive today in Florida’s Everglades.

We know them as cougars and mountain lions, catamounts, puma and panther. Documented by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500’s, by the late 1800’s they had disappeared from the east and the mid-west. Survivors continued to move west, but by the late 1960’s they were threatened with extinction.

Good News Round-up for Week 1- July 2017

by Nomad

Starting this month, as a regular feature, I would like to offer a round-up of some recent  good news. For the sake of our sanity, it is important that we do not too bogged down in the mire and muck of the Trump age. It's easy to forget that the gloom is not global.
Here are five positive diversions.

Nomadic Meditations on Earth Day 2017

  by Nomad

Today, April 22, 2017, is Earth Day, which marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
In the 47 years that have passed, there have been triumphs and failures. It seems as though the spread of environmental awareness might not be a potent enough force against the tide of greed and ignorance and the pressures of mindless exploitation.

Land Grab Scam: How Ted Cruz May Have Found One Issue that Can Unite Both Parties.. Against Him

by Nomad

It's a rare and beautiful thing when the American people come together, forget their differences and agree on something.
GOP candidate Ted Cruz may have stumbled on that very issue. It's too bad for him that a study shows bipartisan public opinion, (including Independents) is overwhelmingly against him.

Under the Hammer

As loyal Nomadic Politics readers know, we have lately had a couple of posts (here and here) on Senator Ted Cruz and his support for a state-level Koch-brothers' initiative to force the federal government to turn over federally-protected lands, including national parks.
Well, it mainly operates at a state-level but as we have seen there are some Congressmen in Washington who are in on the scam.

To summarize (as far as humanly possible), it's part of a three-step arrangement that would also entail states taking on the financial burdens for expensive public land maintenance that they clearly cannot afford. The reason for that somewhat bizarre idea is to justify the auctioning off of protected land to the highest bidder.

But there's some bad news in store for Ted Cruz.

Progress, Reality and Cynicism: Lessons We Learned From Millennium Development Goals

by Nomad

Back in 2000, the UN brought world leaders together to draw up a plan to make the world a better place. This year, fifteen years later, that effort was analyzed and the results might surprise you.

When the Paris Climate Change Summit came to its conclusion recently, it was easy to be a little skeptical about the level of commitment of the nations that pledged to address climate change. 

Preventing global destruction is not going to be a piece of cake.  

In fact, it will require nothing less than a re-tooling of the world's economy and the energy industry. 
Who knows if it is possible given the time constraints? It's easy to be cynical and defeatist when it comes to tackling such a huge problem. 

Critics claim this is all merely window-dressing. Just a bunch of timid self-serving bureaucrats making useless paperwork that's not even legally binding. There's no way, critics say, to confront and punish violators. 

Of course, this view automatically assumes that global progress can only be achieved by force, by a threat of punishment or by intimidation. 

But, to turn the tables on those critics, where is the evidence that that has ever worked? Simply because something is difficult shouldn't mean we ignore our responsibility. 

President John Kennedy, during one of the darkest periods of the Cold War, once warned about allowing hopelessness and defeatist to overwhelm us. (In this case, world peace.)

Thinking something is impossible makes it that much harder to address in a rational manner. In 1963, he told the graduating class at the American University that we must stop thinking war is inevitable. Mankind is not doomed, and we must not yield to the idea that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. 

"We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made — therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.

No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable — and we believe they can do it again."

Even though the dream of world peace has not implemented universally even today, Kennedy's hard-nosed optimism is not wrong. Peace, he once said, is not a warm and fuzzy dream. It is a process. We make things harder by thinking that overnight we can solve all of the problems in the world, just by wishing and praying. 

While that may be a proper point to begin, just wishing for a better world isn't going to be enough.

It calls for a practical approach.

One of the problems is defining what it means when we say "a better world." What does that mean? Much better for a limited few, or slightly better for the majority?

In 2000, the UN General Assembly drafters of the Millennium Declaration had their specific notions and were determined to see progress in fifteen years. In that declaration, the representatives of all of the member nations recognized that:

"...in addition to our separate responsibilities to our individual societies, we have a collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level. As leaders we have a duty therefore to all the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs."

For One Beautiful Moment...

by Nomad

The Re-Greening of the African Continent: How African Leaders Came Together to Save the Planet

by Nomad

African leaders recently announced a new regional initiative to tackle one of the world's more important environmental threats.

During the recent Climate Summit 2015 in Paris, leaders from ten African nations came together to launch an initiative aimed at restoring 100 million hectares or about 400 thousand square miles of degraded or deforested land.

Countries that have agreed to join the AFR100 initiative include:

• Democratic Republic of Congo | 8 million hectares
• Ethiopia | 15 million hectares
• Kenya | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Liberia | 1 million hectares
• Madagascar | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Malawi | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Niger | 3.2 million hectares
• Rwanda | 2 million hectares
• Togo | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Uganda | 2.5 million hectares

The project, AFR100 (African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative) has been endorsed by the African Union and its promoters hope to reach this goal by 2030.  

One billion dollars in development finance and more than $540 million in private sector impact investment has been earmarked to support the restoration.

The announcement was made during the Global Landscapes Forum at the Conference of Parties (COP21) in Paris, where forest landscape restoration is a key ingredient of the global movement to adapt to and mitigate climate change. Commitments made through AFR100 build on significant climate pledges made by many African countries to support a binding global climate agreement.

The threat is immense, endangering not merely people and wildlife in the region, but the entire planet.

Are You Ready to Say Goodbye to the Elephants?

by Nomad

According to some experts, the African elephant could be extinct in the wild within a few decades. The International Union for the Conservation ofNature reported that the African elephant population had dropped from 550,000 in 2006 to 470,000 in 2013. The worst decline of the elephant numbers was in East Africa where the count went from 150,000 to about 100,000.

Start-up Company Wants to Use Drones to Reclaim the World's Shrinking Forests

by Nomad

One company wants to apply cutting edge technology to tackle one of the world's greatest threats to life on this planet- Man's global destruction of forests. 

Drones have quickly developed a lousy reputation for being Remote controlled killing machines. Their use in the war on terror has admittedly become the bane of the leaders of ISIS and Taliban camps but, like "smart bombs", there have also been growing questions about whether justice is being sacrificed for expediency and about the collateral damage these devices inflict on civilians.

In fact the military use of drones overshadows their civilian applications. The term "drone" refers to any remote controlled aerial device and that covers a wide spectrum, from hunter-killer surveillance craft to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

One start-up firm, UK-based Biocarbon Engineering, is looking at the unique problem-solving capabilities of drones to combat the destruction of global forests.

The Scope of the Problem
Franklin Roosevelt once said:

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.

That was back in the 1930s and the problem has not only continued but the global rate of deforestation continues to increase at a frightening speed.
The world-wide calamity of de-forestation cannot be left to future generations to resolve. Every year, it is estimated that over 25 billion trees are removed from forests while only 15 billion are planted.

According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). more than 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of forest, an area about the size of the country of Panama, are lost each year and they say that about half of the world's tropical forests have already been cleared.

How To Destroy A Perfectly Fine Planet

by Nomad

Paving Paradise: Austerity, Pristine Beaches and the Greek Fire Sale

by Nomad

Critics to proposed Greek legislation opening up beach development worry that in an effort to abide by harsh austerity measure, the Mediterranean nation will be selling off its greatest treasure, its untouched coasts. 

Teacher and chemist Irini Chassiotou, writing for a European environmental news portal, GreenFudge, describes how the Greek economic crisis has been used an pretext to undermine environmental protections and to open up areas to commercial exploitation.. 

The target? The country’s unspoiled beaches and 13,676 kilometres (8,498 mi) of coastline. On the surface, legislation proposed by the government was aimed at reducing bureaucracy and increasing investments. 

Project Yosemite

by Nomad

Photographer Colin Delehanty and filmmaker Sheldon Neill spend 45 days over 10 months in Yosemite National Park to capture this beautiful timelapse. Hiking over 200 miles in total to see everything the park has to offer, this is the sum of their work.

It's a world worth saving, don't you think?

Poetree: An Environmentally-Friendly Way to be Remembered

by Nomad

 John Kennedy once said,

 "Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."   

With thoughts of mortality come thoughts about how we would like to be remembered after we are gone. The costs of funerals are astounding and, for some people, the whole idea of burial in cement vaults and steel coffin is offensive and absurd. 

More and more cemeteries require  tombstones to be flush to the ground to expedite the maintenance. Those beautiful sculptural monstrosities that the Victorians loved are long gone. Now all that's left to remember you is a flat square tile in the ground. That's it.

But all of us want to be remembered- at least to some extent- after we're gone.

I recently saw one product that neatly addresses this while touching upon each of the points Kennedy mentioned. It's called "Poetree" and it's a simple but wonderful idea.

Ashes of the deceased are placed in a biodegradable urn. The urn doubles as a planter for a tree. (The picture shows boxwood but I can't see why there couldn't be a selection. Personally I'd prefer a willow or maybe an olive tree.)
At the base of the tree, there is a ceramic ring with the name and dates of the "loved one" and again, I suppose it could be further personalized as well. For urban dwellers, the boxwood tree could be decorative, I guess, but knowing my friends, it would end up being a handy ashtray or trash can.

Eventually, the tree could be moved to some open location and planted into the ground and, as time passes, form forests.

The minimalist concept comes from the mind of French designer Margaux Ruyan from DSK ISD International School of Design (India).

Buffalo Creek Flood of '72: Why Environmental Disasters are Nothing New In West Virginia

by Nomad

Next month marks the 42nd anniversary of one of West Virginia's worst man-made disaster, The Buffalo Creek Flood. We take a look back to learn what did and what did not happen and why it is important for the people of West Virginia in the aftermath of the recent chemical spill.

A Man-Made Disaster

On an early Saturday morning on February 26th, 1972, West Virginia was the scene of one of the worst man-made disasters in this country's history. Without warning, a retaining dam wall built by a local coal mining company to hold the immense coal-waste refuse pile gave way. The coal slurry rolled down from the nearby hill and thundered down into the long narrow Buffalo Creek Valley. 

The black wave of rainwater, black coal-waste water, and sludge from a coal washing operation- an estimated 130 million gallons of it- created a deadly a 20 to 30-foot tidal wave, catching the residents completely unaware. The tsunami traveled at a speed reaching 30 miles per hours and ended up devastating sixteen small communities. 

The slurry was deadly in another way too. Here is a list of the chemicals typically found in coal slurry and sludge. 

According to one source:

Chronic exposure to the metals found in coal slurry can damage virtually every part of the body. Health problems caused by these metals include intestinal lesions, neuropathy, kidney and liver failure, cancer, high blood pressure, brittle bones, miscarriages and birth defects among others. Studies of the effects of coal slurry on human cell tissues have found evidence that coal slurry causes cancerous proliferation, cell death and damage to kidney cells.

Of course, the victims had more to worry about than the long-term effects of exposure to toxic waste. Over 125 people died immediately, of those most were women and children unable to extract themselves from the sludge and debris. There were over 4000 survivors and in the end, 1000 of their homes and all of their possessions were destroyed.

Water Bottle Art: Eye-Catching Sculpture With a Environmental Message

by Nomad

Misplaced Priorities in Indiana: Bambi-Gate, Canned Hunting and the Zombie Deer Plague

by Nomad

Bambi-Gate

Here's a story by Mike Adams from InformationLiberation.com that provides some insight on perhaps why so many people hate so-called Big Government.

An Indiana couple saved a wounded baby deer and nursed it back to life, saving its life and giving it a home. They named it "Little Orphan Dani." When Indiana state officials got word of this courageous act of compassion, they ordered the deer euthanized. (Because government wants to kill everything you love.)

When the deer "escaped" right before it was schedule to be killed -- and yes, I think the couple probably set it free rather than have it killed -- the man and woman were charged with unlawful possession of a deer. 

They now face $2,000 in fines and 60 days in jail.

For more details about Bambi-gate, you can go to the ABC news story. Imagine being in jail and explaining to all the hardened convicts that you are behind bars for nursing a baby deer back to health.