Beyond Organic

The next ecological and social revolution is being plotted right now in the rainforests of South America.

Our small boat bobs along the unimaginably wide Amazon River, then heads up a fast-flowing tributary the colour of tea with cream, and finally turns onto a stream leading into the heart of the rainforest. Monkeys scamper in the trees above us as the motorboat chugs more and more slowly until the stream becomes too narrow to travel. This is where José Luiz de Oliveira and his 17-year-old son Alex live on a small farmstead alive with bird calls. Piglets frolic in the cool mud below their dock while ducks march in formation.In many ways this boat ride feels like a trip into the past. The forest is largely untouched here except for the sunny clearing around the house (although we did spot an illegal lumber operation downriver). The de Oliveiras live as people have for centuries—drawing their daily meals and livelihood from the land, the river and the livestock. It’s an enchanting place if you can get used to the mosquitoes. Yet beauty and peace do not translate into prosperity. The tiny house has no electricity, no telephone, no fans, no screens in the windows.

The great debates about sustainable development being waged in government assemblies and at environmental institutes, corporate headquarters and street protests around the world are really about this place. Is it possible to bring the de Oliveiras some of the advantages of modern life—like high school and shoes for Alex—without destroying other valuable things in the process? Valuable things like the Amazon rainforest itself, which is crucial to everyone on the planet as a source of ecological balance and potential new medicines. José invites us to sit under the thatched palm shelter at the end of their dock and we pass the time telling stories and spouting opinions. For them it’s a welcome break from working in the heat as well as an opportunity to show off baskets of freshly picked açaí, which they gathered from the tops of palm trees surrounding their home.

Açaí—a fruit slightly larger than a blueberry with a similar colour—is the reason we have come up the river. It has recently been discovered outside the rainforest as a “superfood”—a nutritious bundle of amino acids, fibre, essential fatty acids and more of the highly coveted antioxidants than either red wine or blueberries. People often report feeling a surge of energy after eating it—I certainly did when gobbling some after a long day on the river without lunch. Now that açaí (pronounced ah-sigh-EE) products are beginning to appear in health-food stores around the world, this berry offers new hope that development in the Amazon can become something more than a sad choice between environmental ruin and continuing poverty. My boat mate, Travis Baumgardner, a 31-year-old Texan who came to Rio to study environmental geography and now runs Brazilian operations for the U.S. company Sambazon, believes açaí will prove to the people of the Amazon, in cold cash, that it’s more lucrative to leave the rainforest standing than to chop it down to raise cattle or soybeans. That’s why this boat ride is more than a trip into the past—it’s a journey toward a sustainable future.

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New Meat Byproducts: Avian Flu and Global Climate Change

The growth of factory farms, their proximity to congested cities in the developing world, and the globalized poultry trade are all culprits behind the spread of avian flu, while livestock wastes damage the climate at a rate that surpasses emissions from cars and SUVs, noted Worldwatch Institute research associate Danielle Nierenberg at the AAAS conference on Monday in San Francisco.

In 2006, global meat production increased 2.5 percent to an estimated 276 million tons. Sixty percent of this production occurred in the developing world, where half of all meat is now consumed thanks to rising incomes and exploding urbanization.

“Many of the world’s estimated 800 million urban farmers, who raise crops and animals for food, transportation, and income in back yards and on rooftops, have been targeted unfairly by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization,” she told participants at the AAAS event. “The socioeconomic importance of livestock to the world’s poor cannot be overstated.” Read full story.

Fahrenheit 59 - What a child's fever might tell us about climate change

"It turns out that our bodies’ homeostasis can provide an analogy with which to understand the complexities of climate change—and the human response to it. Over geological time, the biosphere uses negative feedbacks in a way that maintains a stable global average temperature. When the Earth’s oceans heat up past a certain point..."

Urgent: Climate Wake Up Call!

Climate change is happening and we need to take urgent action now.The leaders of the world's most polluting countries will be meeting in Germany this June. The priorities for this summit are being decided right now.

We will be airing this TV ad in key world capitals to send them a wake up call.We need your help to make them hear us, sign our petition to tell world leaders that we need bold action NOW.

Film on Carbon Offsetting - MyClimate

From “Inconvenient” to Incontrovertible - Worldwatch Institute

Last year, the world was captivated by academy award and Nobel Prize nominee Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Now, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows the science is not only inconvenient—it’s incontrovertible.

Some 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries agree that there is at least a 90 percent probability that warming observed during the past 50 years is the result of human activity (up from 66 percent chance stated in the last IPCC report released in 2001).

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has said the report’s greatest contribution to the debate was in achieving consensus about the threat. The question now is: What can we do about global warming and how can we prepare our world for worsening storms, droughts, floods and other impacts?

See how…

• The United States (the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and whose action is necessary to encourage China and India to reduce their emissions) can displace a large portion of its fossil fuels by looking to the American Energy vision.

• Cities—which cover only 0.4 percent of the Earth’s surface yet generate the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—can make significant reductions in emissions by sourcing power locally and investing in energy efficiency.
  

Communities can plan for disasters due to the likely increase in sea-level rise, floods, heat waves, droughts, and hurricane intensity.

Grassroots Global Earth Activism v 1.0

Last week Ecological Internet (EI) launched a new environment social network entitled "My.EcoEarth.Info". This site is the latest addition to EI's leading climate environmental portals - Climate Ark and EcoEarth.Info - and the new social networking capabilities are going to be an important element in fostering "Grassroots Global Earth Activism".

The intent is to broaden EI's unprecedented global environmental advocacy network to allow more communication, sharing of information and collaboration between Earth Action network participants and EI itself. On the new site you can share your environmental concerns in an on-line diary, and even launch campaigns with petitions; all while networking with people from around the world that share your concerns and are working as you are to Save the Earth.

Please, at your earliest convenience stop by and take the 5-10 minutes it takes to setup your free profile as either an individual or organization. And then start adding content and networking with others. We look forward to feature requests as we continue to work on a version 2.0. Together we can will global ecological sustainability into being.

IPCC adopts major assessment of climate change science

Paris, 2 February 2007 – Late last night, Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopted the Summary for Policymakers of the first volume of “Climate Change 2007”, also known as the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

“Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis”, assesses the current scientific knowledge of the natural and human drivers of climate change, observed changes in climate, the ability of science to attribute changes to different causes, and projections for future climate change.

The report was produced by some 600 authors from 40 countries. Over 620 expert reviewers and a large number of government reviewers also participated. Representatives from 113 governments reviewed and revised the Summary line-by-line during the course of this week before adopting it and accepting the underlying report.

The Summary can be downloaded in English from www.ipcc.ch and http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu. A webcast of the final press conference has also been posted. The Summary will be available in Arabic, Chinese French, Russian and Spanish at a later date. The full underlying report will be published in English by Cambridge University Press.


BBC: Climate paper prompts call to act

Subsidizing Climate Change

Lester Brown - Earth Policy Institute

Each year the world’s taxpayers provide an estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. An Earth Council study, Subsidizing Unsustainable Development, observes that “there is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”

Iran provides a classic example of extreme subsidies when it prices oil for internal use at one tenth the world price, strongly encouraging car ownership and gas consumption. The World Bank reports that if this $3.6-billion annual subsidy were phased out, it would reduce Iran’s carbon emissions by a staggering 49 percent. It would also strengthen the economy by freeing up public revenues for investment in the country’s economic development. Iran is not alone. The Bank reports that removing energy subsidies would reduce carbon emissions in Venezuela by 26 percent, in Russia by 17 percent, in India by 14 percent, and in Indonesia by 11 percent.

Changing the Social Climate - Redefining Progress

Two things have happened since we began working on this publication in August of 2006.
First, California passed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, the nation’s very first piece of climate change legislation. Second, the White House announced a national plan to address global warming.

The California law is truly a landmark piece of legislation. And while the merits of the White House plan are debatable, together these news items convey one simple fact: The public debate about whether or not global warming is real is officially over.

The pressing need to do something about dramatic climate change has reached a critical mass across the globe and across the country. And it is an issue that has also reached into every aspect of our lives.

Global warming is not simply an environmental issue. It is an economic issue, a social justice issue, a lifestyle issue. It’s about race, class, and democratic participation. It’s about globalization and global democracy. It’s about national security and global security.

So how do we effectively organize around this growing crisis?

Tides Foundation invited Redefining Progress Executive Director Michel Gelobter to discuss that question—and many more—with our Senior Philanthropic Advisor Catherine Lerza at our offices in the San Francisco Presidio, on August 25, 2006.

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