EcoRadio

Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

  • Climate Chaos may benefit Europe economically

    Climate Chaos may benefit Europe economically

    Thermohaline currents around the world
    The Gulf Stream controls Europe’s temperature

    Climate chaos may provide further economic advantage to Europe, Science Daily reports this week.

    Evocatively described as the heartbeat of the planet, the Gulf Stream is an integral part of the world’s ocean currents and keeps the North West Coast of Europe, especially Great Britain, much warmer than its latitude would indicate. In previous global warming events it has switched off, creating Ice Ages that balance the initial warming. The paper in Science Daily predicts that the Gulf Stream will not plunge Europe into an Ice Age but will keep it relatively cool, protecting it from the worst excesses of Climate Chaos and further increasing the advantage that rich countries will have over poor ones in the economic disaster that inevitably results from major climate disruption.

    http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/abrupt-climate-change.html#bf-toc-2

    https://robertscribbler.com/2015/03/23/world-ocean-heartbeat-fading-nasty-signs-north-atlantic-thermohaline-circulation-is-weakening/

  • Biodynamic Workshop – July 16 and 17

    Biodynamic Workshop – July 16 and 17

    Peter Kearney leads this weekend's workshop
    Camp Mountain is a great location for a bio-dynamics workshop

    This experiential two day workshop  gives you a balance of both practical and theory in a great setting on 5 acres at 7 Hogan Court, Camp Mountain, QLD. Its only 30 minutes from the Brisbane CBD and 5 minutes to our local railway station. Low cost local homestay is available. The property has very well established gardens and has been worked with biodynamic practices. The place has a beautiful feel, the bird sounds are ever present.

    The workshop is suitable for food growers from small scale to hobby farmers who are interested in ramping up their organic food production in a sustainable way, whilst developing an appreciation of the deeper spirit of nature.Its ideal that you have some experience of organic food growing. If you have already studied permaculture, you will find the workshop extends your existing knowledge, adding a new and interesting perspective to maximising the effectiveness of your food growing activities.

    The workshop content is contexualised to the food growing spaces at the venue and the presenter also works closely with each participant to ensure there is an action plan to bring all content into the context of their own food growing spaces. As such, workshop participant numbers are limited to 12 people.

    During the 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, you will:

    • Work with our vegetable growing and orchard areas gaining practical experience of how to work with organic and biodynamic methods
    • Understand the philisophical framework that drives all biodynamic processes so you can work with them from a placing of knowing.
    • Immerse yourself in our beautiful nurturing space and be well fed with biodynamically grown food, so you appreciate the end point, healthy enlivened food 
    • Appreciate how biodynamic methods will fit into the rhythm of your organic food growing system to produce the highest quality organic food.

    Register and read more here

  • The John James Newsletter 152

    The John James Newsletter 152

    John James, author, healer and publisher
    John James, author, therapist and publisher

    To subscribe or unsubscribe email John

    Once to every man and nation
    Comes the moment to decide,
    In the strife of truth and falsehood,
    For the good or evil side
    James Russell Lowell 
    People are lazy. With television you just sit – watch – listen. The thinking is done for you
    Roger Ailes
    A Manifesto for The Platform
    There is a deep despair growing among good people as Trump promises to dismantle seventy years of Social Justice reforms and Environmental Safeguards. We have struggled and devoted our lives to implement worthwhile policies over our lifetimes, and they could be gone in a trice. I sense a forlorn hopelessness growing among us. Instead, The Platform offers an alternative. The Manifesto does not aim at concentrating all our efforts on fighting the polluters. We accept that so much heating is now built into the system that it does not matter what we do we will still suffer massive sea level rise and droughts, food scarcity and deaths. The Manifesto offers the positive message that we can make life better now and in the future, and that we, the people of Good Will, can succeed at this. The Manifesto for Our Platform offers the promise that we can do something, in place of succumbing to numbing despair.
    This is the amateur film I assembled for the October Forum “Tomorrows World”- A climate change potpourri
    Alarm Over “Witch Hunt” 
    Trump demands list of Civil Servants who worked on Climate Policy under Obama. “This action should not be viewed in isolation, The Trump transition team is teeming with individuals with a proven history of attacking climate scientists and undermining climate science. Several members now overseeing federal agencies have harassed scientists based on their research and have long signaled a desire to dismantle federal climate science research.”
    Flynn’s Wacky Worldview
    Skepticism about Michael Flynn’s fitness for the position of national security adviser appears to be growing as more media outlets are paying closer attention to his (and his son’s) core beliefs about the world. Such scrutiny also appears to be more relevant since President-elect Trump may be relying more heavily on Flynn than on the CIA or other government intelligence agencies for his own assessment of world events.
    It is the people who will be paying the price. 
    Trump will use the media to sugarcoat, falsify, distract, intimidate, glorify and massify the millions of people who believed, once upon a recent time, that he would “Make America Great Again.” As the profiteers of Wall Street and the war hawks blend with the corporate statists, the super-confident Trump is telling us what their products will be like and that he’ll be their salesman. If you think all this sounds predictable, there are going to be more than a few “black swans” (to use Nassim Taleb’s best-selling book title) coming over the horizon. It is time to mobilize as citizens in the Paul Revere mode.
    The December 19 Electoral College Vote : Anti-Trump Coup Attempt Underway?
    Trump won 306 Electoral College votes to Hillary’s 232, her’s heavily concentrated in the northeast, mid-Atlantic and west coast. He won 30 states to her 20 – 270 EC votes needed to be elected. It would take 37 electors, from states he won, to deny him their vote, thereby throwing the process to House members to elect the president.
    Methane has just spiked at 2436 ppb
    Methane levels over the Arctic Ocean were as high as 2436 parts per billion on the afternoon of December 5, 2016, with most rising from the water. Pre-industrial level was ~720 ppb and each molecule is 20 times more potent than C02. Add that up!
    Start-up company breathes new life into old tyres
    A biofuel from old rubber tyres that can run turbo-charged diesel engines while reducing emissions by 30 per cent.’We have zero waste from the tyre’
    CEFC backs 270MW Sapphire wind farm, in vote of confidence for merchant market
    A consortium between Vestas and Zenviron will deliver the project, with Vestas supplying and commissioning the turbines, and Zenviron delivering the balance of plant. TransGrid will build, operate and maintain an on-site substation connecting the Sapphire project to the national energy grid.
    FBI v. Assange
    Former Icelandic minister claims US sent ‘planeload of FBI agents to frame Assange’ during mission to the country in 2011.

    The startling rise in oral cancer in men, and what it says about our changing sexual habits

    Oral cancer jumped 61% from 2011 to 2015. HPV infects cells of the skin and the membranes that lines areas such as the mouth, throat, tongue, tonsils, rectum and sexual organs. Transmission can occur when these areas come into contact with the virus. HPV is a leading cause of cervical, vaginal and penile cancers. Younger men are more likely to perform oral sex than their older counterparts and to engage with more partners.
     
    A Drive To Save Saharan Oases As Climate Change Takes a Toll
    From Morocco to Libya, the desert oases of the Sahara’s Maghreb region are disappearing as temperatures rise and rainfall decreases. Facing daunting odds, local residents are employing traditional water conservation techniques to try to save these ancient ecosystems.
    Is Sustainability Destroying the Earth?
    Only one-quarter of all consumption is by individuals. The rest is taken up by industry, agribusiness, the military, governments and corporations. Even if every one of us made every effort to reduce our ecological footprint, it would make little difference to overall consumption. If the lifestyle actions advocated really do keep our culture around for longer than it would otherwise, then it will cause more harm to the natural world than if no such action had been taken.
    Saudi Arabia’s Glass: Half Empty or Half Full?
    The people of Saudi Arabia have long accepted the bargain imposed by the founding king, Abdul Aziz al-Saud, in which they are disenfranchised but acquiesce in political powerlessness as the state provides them with security and a comfortable life. Now they are being asked to do more for themselves while the government does less, regardless of the price of oil.
    Congress Votes To Give Jihadists Anti-aircraft Missiles 
    The Senate passed a bill that puts every American who travels by plane at risk.  It is among the stupidest pieces of legislation ever written – to provide shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles to lunatic jihadists who will undoubtedly use them to take down American or Israeli jetliners. The argument that these Islamic militants are fully vetted is complete nonsense as both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have repeatedly shown. Rebel groups “have entered into battlefield alliances with the affiliate of al Qaida in Syria formerly known as al Nusra to render the phrase ‘moderate rebels’ meaningless.”
     
    The “Golden Arches” Theory of Decline
    One of the answers to Trump, Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Salvini, Duterte, Le Pen, Farage and the politics they represent is to rescue democracy from transnational corporations. It is to defend the crucial political unit that’s under assault by banks, monopolies and chainstores: community. It is to recognise that there is no greater hazard to peace between nations than a corporate model which crushes democratic choice
    A degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms
    At 2C temperature increase the hot European summer of 2003 will be the annual norm. Anything that could be called a heatwave thereafter will be of Saharan intensity. Even in average years, people will die of heat stress.
    Beyond 2C billions of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive. To find anything comparable we have to go back to the Pliocene 3m years ago. There were no continental glaciers in the northern hemisphere (trees grew in the Arctic), and sea levels were 25 metres higher than today’s. In this kind of heat, the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland.
    Between 3 and 4C the summers get longer  as soaring temperatures reduce forests to tinderwood and cities to boiling morgues. Temperatures in the Home Counties could reach 45C – the sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech. Droughts will put the south-east of England on the global list of water-stressed areas, with farmers competing against cities for dwindling supplies from rivers and reservoirs. Air-conditioning will be mandatory for anyone wanting to stay cool and the abandonment of the Mediterranean will send even more people north to overcrowded refuges in Scandinavia.
    Between 4 and 5C it will be an entirely different planet. Ice sheets have vanished from both poles; rainforests have burnt up and turned to desert; the dry and lifeless Alps resemble the High Atlas; rising seas are scouring deep into continental interiors. Even in Canada and Siberia summers may be too hot for crops to be grown away from the coasts. When temperatures were at a similar level 55m years ago in the early Eocene, alligators were living in the Arctic.
    Between 5 and 6C at the end of the Permian, 251m years ago, 95% of species were wiped out. That episode was the worst ever endured by life on Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and desolate rock in space. On land, the only winners were fungi that flourished on dying trees and shrubs.
    Arctic Warming at Least Twice as Fast as Rest of World
    Much of this melt was almost certainly driven by the record warm Arctic temperatures seen during 2016. And according to NOAA, this year shattered all previous high marks for Arctic heat by a big margin — hitting 3.5C warmer than 1900. Overall, this rate of warming is at least twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
    Change in the Arctic this year was unlike any ever seen, scientists say 
    The annual Arctic Report Card documented air and sea-surface temperatures are higher, sea ice is sparser and more fragile and ocean waters absorbing more carbon, thus changing their chemistry to more acidic levels, while warming tundra is now expelling more carbon than it is drawing in from the atmosphere.

  • Decoding ‘orphan crop’ genomes could save millions of lives in Africa

    Decoding ‘orphan crop’ genomes could save millions of lives in Africa

    Howard-Yana Shapiro, a scientist with the Mars confectionery company, will make the information free to boost harvests

    Howard-Yana Shapiro wants to make the genetic makeup of some crops freely available on the internet. View larger picture

    Howard-Yana Shapiro wants to make the genetic makeup of some crops freely available on the internet. Photograph: Gabriela Hasbun/Redux/eyevine

    The future wellbeing of millions of Africans may rest in the unlikely hands of a vegan hippy scientist working for a sweet company who plans to map and then give away the genetic data of 100 traditional crops.

    Howard-Yana Shapiro, the agriculture director of the $36bn US confectionery corporation Mars, led a partnership that sequenced and then published in 2010 the complete genome of the cacao tree from which chocolate is derived. He plans to work with American and Chinese scientists to sequence and make publicly available the genetic makeup of a host of crops such as yam, finger millet, tef, groundnut, cassava and sweet potato.

    Dubbed “orphan crops” because they have been ignored by scientists, seed companies and governments, they are staples for up to 250 million smallholder African farmers who depend on them for food security, nutrition and income. However, they are considered of little economic interest to large seed and chemical companies such as Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta, which concentrate on global crops such as maize, rice and soya.

    According to Shapiro, there is huge potential to develop more resilient and higher-yielding varieties of most orphan crops by combining traditional plant breeding methods with new biotech tools such as “genetic marking”. This does not involve the altering or insertion of genes that takes place with controversial genetic modification.

    “The genetic information will be put on the web and offered free to plant breeders, seed companies and farmers on condition it is not patented. A new African plant-breeding academy will also be set up in Nairobi, Kenya,” he said.

    “It’s not charity. It’s a gift. Its an improvement of African agriculture. These crops will never be worked on by the big five [seed] companies. They don’t see them as competition.”

    Shapiro, a leading plant scientist who founded organic seed company Seeds of Change but sold it to Mars in 1997, now cuts an idiosyncratic figure in the corporate food world, sporting a long beard and listing motorcycles as a favourite pastime. But he said that the culture of the family-owned corporation had advantages. “It took less than a nanosecond to decide not to patent. Ownership was not an issue,” he said.

    Shapiro is angered by the stunting caused by malnutrition that affects 30% of African children. By improving the crops, he said, the African orphan crop consortium, which includes corporations such as Life Technologies and the conservation group WWF, could eradicate a “plague” that costs Africa $125bn a year. “We will start with genomics, go to analysis, then to plant breeders, then to the field, then the seed companies, and then to the farms,” he said.

    Open-access publication of the cacao genome in 2010 is now bearing fruit. The genes that determine resistance to fungal infections and yield have been found and a new generation of cacao trees is being grown which should eventually quadruple production. “We haven’t changed a single gene. It’s inheritability. It’s all done with grafting.”

    But the “improved” seeds expected to come out of the $40m orphan programme could change Africa in unexpected ways. Nearly 80% of all seed used in Africa is selected, saved and exchanged by farmers without money changing hands. The result has been an immense diversity of crops suited to particular localities and cultures. The new, “improved” seeds of the orphan crops may increase yields or disease resistance but could be unaffordable and might oust traditional varieties. It is also possible that the genetic decoding could open the door to genetic modification.

    yam Yam harvests could increase significantly as hardier varieties are developed.”Anything that keeps the [genetic] information out of proprietary hands is a good thing. But it’s important to maintain the traditional varieties that have not been ‘improved’ and to keep a non-monetised path for the farming economy,” said Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. “It’s important to recognise improvements in crops are not just about genetics. How plants are managed is equally important.”

    Agricultural investment in Africa will be a key point at the G8 hunger summit in Northern Ireland next weekend. Governments and 45 of the largest agribusiness corporations are expected to unveil initiatives to boost African farming.

    West and east African small farmers’ groups have joined British charities to say that small-scale family farmers were being excluded from the talks even though they feed 80% of Africans. “It’s very important that governments prioritise investment to support family farmers and their more ecological food production,” said Patrick Mulvany, chair of the UK Food group.

    “Technological advances in food production can be part of the solution to increase yields. But the world already grows enough food yet one in eight people go hungry every day. G8 leaders can begin to tackle the scandal of global hunger by closing the tax loopholes, improving land rights and increasing public investment in developing country agriculture,” said Lucy Brinicombe, spokesperson for the If coalition of 200 groups which includes Oxfam and ActionAid.

  • New environment laws increase flood risk

    New environment laws increase flood risk


    130509_Lokyer_wackers_bridge_jan2013Lockyer resident Diane Bruhn has produced evidence showing that clearing riverine trees increases sedimentation and increases flood risk. She said that the Queensland Government has used the recent floods as an excuse to repeal the sections of the water act controlling clearing of land in the riparian zone of Queensland’s rivers and streams.

    (more…)

  • Qld amends 18 nature laws

    Robin McConchie QLD Country Hour 

     The Queensland Government has passed sweeping changes to rural land and water regulations.

    It’s amended 18 pieces of legislation, to implement some of the recommendations of the Floods Inquiry.

    The changes include extending the expiry date for water licences from 10 to 99 years, and removing the need to get a permit to destroy vegetation on a watercourse.

    Natural Resources Minister Andrew Cripps says there is no evidence to suggest the removal of the requirement for riverine protection permits to remove vegetation will result in the large scale clearing of riverine vegetation, nor will it cause degradation to watercourses.