The fact is, if we don’t do something, nature will. “Quite simply, we will run out of food. People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can’t sustain them.”
Source : The Independent
The presence of Spitalfields and other farms not only demonstrates ways in which Londoners are attempting to remain connected to how food is sourced and produced (as evidenced by the rise of boutique markets such as Borough and Brixton), but also serves as a means to maintain a multicultural identity and re-establish communal urbanism in a city that increasingly isolates its citizens.
Source : Polis
And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.3)
– Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Sharing the wealth is not a matter of Sustainable South Bronx franchising patented techniques to other cities—there’s enough work for them to do in the South Bronx, and they don’t need to extract value from other cities in order to achieve sustainability for themselves.
– Life Inc: Douglas Rushkoff
Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings.
Source: The Guardian
A recent poll of Southern California voters conducted by FM3, a public opinion research firm, confirmed the trend: nearly two thirds of respondents (64 percent) would prefer to live in communities that are pedestrian friendly, rather than in conventional residential communities that require driving to stores and other businesses. Sixty-five percent indicated they would rather live in communities with smaller lots and shorter commute times than in communities with larger houses and longer commutes.
Source : ULI
“The human race must finally utilise direct sun power or revert to barbarism,” wrote Shuman in a letter to Scientific American magazine the following year. But the outbreak of the first world war just a few months later abruptly ended his dream and his solar troughs were soon broken up for scrap, with the metal being used for the war effort. Barbarism, it seemed, had prevailed.
“In 1986, in direct response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he scribbled down some figures and arrived at the following remarkable conclusion: in just six hours, the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year.”
Source : The guardian
“Hans Brasker, foreign minister of Norway, thinks it’s a great idea, and not just to slow warming. “We very strongly believe that we will have established a genuine global partnership to save the treasures of the remaining tropical forest,” he told the delegates at the South African climate talks. Norway is spending about $3 billion to make REDD happen.”
Source : NPR
Collected Reading 