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admin /29 March, 2009
Bathurst, NSW doctor Carole Hungerford has told rural newspaper, The Land, that depleted soils and food additives are among the major causes of disease.”Some of us are eating good food grown in bad soils, or good food that is not fresh. More of us are eating bad food that is neither fresh nor grown in good soils,” she said. She quoted cancer statistics that indicate the incidence of aggressive diseases such as cancer have doubled and are affecting younger people than they did forty years ago. “Nature didn’t stuff up, we stuffed up. We’ve started putting chlorine in the drinking water, sulfates in the wine, additives in the food … people don’t know where they are getting their headache from because they are reacting to everything,” she said.
admin /29 March, 2009
A senior advisor to the Liberal party has warned that Turnbull’s announcement about biochar earlier this month is based on wishful thinking. “I’m not sure that all the science is in,” he said. “In order for [biochar] to be economic, you would need to have a carbon price in place.” Biochar advocates point out that the technique has been used in the Amazon basin for over ten thousand years and there are a number of emperical studies carried out in Australian Universities. While a price for carbon would pay farmers for creating charcoal and burying it in the soil, the benefits in terms of soil health and better crop yields would make the process economically viable, even without the incentive of a price for locking away carbon in the form of charcoal.
admin /29 March, 2009
The National Farmers Federation (NFF) last week described the findings of the Senate Inquiry into the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act as environmental vandalism. Brett Heffernan, head of the NFF, said that the shift from Environmental stewardship to “lock up and leave” policy will result in feral animals and weeds running out of control in conservation areas.Greens Senator Rachel Siewet told the Senate that the ministerial discretion allowed under the current act had led to blatant examples of destructive clearing of forests and wetlands with disastrous impact on sensitive areas. THe review of the act is ongoing.
admin /29 March, 2009
The Sisters on the Planet project sponsored by Oxfam has released a DVD that features six women from around the world discussing the action they have taken on climate change. Four of the six women featured come from poor countries dramatically affected by climate change, Helen Henry is an Australian farmer living in Hamilton, a town in western Victoria that was almost closed due to lack of water and Melissa Davies Oliveck is a primary school teacher in the London suburb of Hackney. Oxfam has provided a range of activities and resources to promote the use of the DVD as a catalyst for action.
admin /28 March, 2009
Two billion Asians who depend on regular monsoon rainfalls face catastrophe as a result of the rapid melting of the arctic permafrost, according to an Alaskan ecologist. Katey Walker wrote in last week’s New Scientist that new lakes in Siberia have grown five times larger in the last two years and are releasing vast amounts of methane. The methane bubbles to the surface of these new lakes from plant material on the lake beds which has been frozen for thousands of years and is now thawed out and rotting. She is concerned that the recently measured rise in atmospheric methane is the first sign of this dramatic new development and will rapidly increase warming, altering ocean currents and switching off the tropical monsoons over Asia. “More than two billion people rely on those monsoons for drinking water and food,” she said.
admin /28 March, 2009
The US coal industry has spent almost $US10 million lobbying federal politicians on top of a $US38million advertising campaign extolling the virtues of clean coal Congress Quarterly reported last week. “We are fighting for our survival,” explained Steve Miller, CEO of the The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which spent the money. He claims that the $US3.5 billion set aside in the financial rescue package to research carbon capture and storage, makes the expenditure worthwhile, despite the view of many scientists that the notion is unrealistic and agreement by all parties that it unacheivable in the next two decades. The group currently seeks to prevent the emissions control bill currently before Congress from reducing the competitive advantage that coal has over other sources of energy.
