Urban farming invigorates Detroit neighborhood
In front yards, backyards and on vacant land where nothing but weeds and debris used to be, an urban farm belt is forming, bringing neighbors back to the earth where just a few years ago, no one would come outside.
via http://on.freep.com/10pFhnj
A Rough Guide to the Jet Stream: what it is, how it works and how it is responding to enhanced Arctic warming
Barely a week goes by these days in the Northern Hemisphere without the jet stream being mentioned in the news, but rarely do such news items explain in detail what it is and why it is important. As a severe weather photographer this past 10+ years, an activity which requires successful DIY forecasting, I’ve had to develop an appreciation into what makes it tick. This post, then, is a start-from-scratch primer based on that knowledge plus some valuable assistance from academia into where the current research is heading. Because of its length and breadth of coverage, I’ve broken it up into bookmarked sections for easy reference: to come back here click on ‘back to contents’ in each instance.
More than half of plant and animal species in UK dying out, says report - Telegraph
More than half of the plant and animal species in Britain, including hedgehogs and skylarks, are dying out, according to a report that confirms “your worst thoughts”, said Sir David Attenborough.
People have got an “extraordinary expertise in destroying things”, said the naturalist and television presenter in the wake of the State of Nature report, which brings together 25 leading conservation groups for the first time to assess the condition of British wildlife. The results paint a stark picture of a future without dormice, water voles and species of butterflies unless more is done to create havens for wildlife in farms and towns.
Whatever one’s evaluation of high-energy/high-technology civilization (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), it’s now clear that we are hitting physical limits; we cannot expect to maintain contemporary levels of consumption that draw down the ecological capital of the planet at rates dramatically beyond replacement levels. It’s unrealistic to imagine that we can go on treating the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
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The Collapse of Journalism, and the Journalism of Collapse
W O W! Great read!
I liked his example of how the ideology gets adopted even if not ever really spoken outloud.
“There is a growing realization that we have disrupted planetary forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We cannot predict the specific times and places where dramatic breakdowns will occur, but we can know that the living system on which we depend is breaking down.
Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live — groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity — and the news is bad.”
bad bad bad and getting worse
(via stopkillingourworld)
Yahoo poised to buy Tumblr for rumoured $1.1bn | Technology | guardian.co.uk
So what does this mean for us?
