Fr. Peter's Environmental Notes

My I wish you, who are so kind as to visit here and read my words, a very happy Christmas, and a very healthy and peaceful 2012; may God bless you.

2011-12-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Song of Solomon 2:3 As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Jesus Christ The Apple Tree; sung by the choir of King's College Cambridge.

1. The tree of life my soul hath seen,Laden with fruit and always green: the trees of nature fruitless be compared with Christ the apple tree.

2. His beauty doth all things excel: by faith I know, but ne'er can tell the glory which I now can see In Jesus Christ the apple tree.

3. For happiness I long have sought,and pleasure dearly I have bought: I missed of all; but now I see 'tis found in Christ the apple tree.

4. I'm weary with my former toil, here I will sit and rest awhile: under the shadow I will be, of Jesus Christ the apple tree.

5. This fruit doth make my soul to thrive, it keeps my dying faith alive; which makes my soul in haste to be with Jesus Christ the apple tree.

Christ is indeed in everything.

GLOBAL WARMING LATEST FACTS AND FIGURES

2011-12-09T11:31:00.000-08:00

As I write this the Police in Scotland have told people not to travel, as winds of up to 165mph have hit the country, and have left more than 30,000 people without power. Hundreds of schools have shut and bridge and road closures are causing disruption.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland are also being hit by wind and rain as in Cumbria, heavy rain caused flooding in the Windermere area, roads were closed, vehicles stranded in water and over 300 passengers are stranded on the Rotterdam-Hull ferry off the East Yorkshire coast. But that’s enough of the UK, let’s see what has happened to the world over the last 10 years.

2001: End of long-running La Niña episode which influenced temperature and precipitation in many parts of the world. There were extreme cold temperatures in Mongolia and the Russian federation, with minimum temperatures of near -60°C across central and southern Siberia for two weeks in January. Alaska recorded warmest winter on record. Canada recorded the eighteenth straight warmer-than-average season.

2002: Return of El Niño. Exceptionally heavy rains in central Europe (including Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Romania, and Slovakia) caused flooding of historic proportions, killing more than 100 people and forcing the evacuation of more than 450 000 people. Damage was estimated at US$ 9 billion in Germany alone.

2003: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh witnessed exceptionally harsh pre-monsoonal heat waves. Continental Europe had the hottest summer since at least 1540. Europe recorded in august 2003 its worst heat wave. In many locations, temperatures rose above 40°C. In Belgium, France, German, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, 40 000 to 70 000 deaths were attributed to the heat waves. In the European Alps, the average thickness loss of glaciers reached the equivalent of about three metres of water, nearly twice as much as during the previous record year of 1998. The heat waves resulted from strong high pressure over Western Europe related to a marked ridge of high pressure in the large-scale upper atmospheric wind flow.

2004: Widespread winter storms in the Mediterranean region. Extreme hot conditions persisted in Japan during the summer, with record-breaking temperatures. a record number of 10 tropical cyclones made landfall in Japan (the previous record was six), including Typhoon Tokage, the deadliest to hit Japan since 1979. In March, the first tropical cyclone since the start of satellite records made landfall on the southern coast of Brazil. In Afghanistan, drought conditions that had plagued the country for the past four years continued in
2004. In spring, parts of the north-east People’s Republic of China experienced the worst drought conditions since 1951, and southern China received the lowest autumn rainfall since 1951.

2005: 2005 ranked in the top two warmest years along with 1998. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active season on record with an unprecedented 27 named tropical storms, including 14 hurricanes, which caused devastating losses across Central America, the Caribbean and the United States of America. Seven of these were classed as “major” hurricanes. In Central America and the Caribbean region, the most damage occurred from Hurricanes Dennis, Emily, Stan, Wilma and Beta. In the United States, Hurricane Katrina was the deadliest hurricane to hit the country since 1928, killing over 1,300 people, mostly in the southern states of Louisiana and Mississippi. Hurricane Wilma was the most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Long-term drought continued in parts of the Greater Horn of Africa, including southern Somalia, eastern Kenya, south-eastern Ethiopia, and north-eastern United Republic of Tanzania and Djibouti, with 11 million people at risk of starvation. In Brazil, the state of Amazonas experienced the worst drought in nearly 60 years, resulting in record low water levels in the Amazon River. In October, drought conditions extended further south into neighbouring Paraguay. By the end of the year, drought affected much of the central United States from the southern Great Plains to the western Great Lakes. Australia officially recorded its warmest year on record, with data indicating that the annual mean temperature was 1.09°C above the standard 1961–1990 average.

2006: Heavy rains ended prolonged drought in the Greater Horn of Africa, leading to the worst flooding in October/November in 50 years. Drought in many parts of the United States led to the worst wildfire season on record. Disastrous tropical cyclones hit some south East Asian nations, including Typhoon Durian which killed nearly 1 200 people in the Philippines.

2007: Nome in Alaska was frost-free from June to September – its second longest frost-free season on record. Exceptionally heavy rains in a number of African countries (Burkina Faso, Sudan, and Uganda) caused widespread flooding. Mexico suffered the worst flooding in five decades in November, causing the worst weather-related disaster in its history. Severe to exceptional drought continued in the south-east United States, with the driest spring on record and the second worst fire season after 2006. Australia suffered a sixth straight year of drought in Murray-Darling Basin. In 2007 sea ice extent reached its lowest September value since the beginning of measurement in 1979.

2008: China witnessed the worst severe winter weather in five decades in January, with over 78 million people affected by the freezing temperatures and heavy snow. The exceptional cold extended westwards across Asia as far as Turkey, there was an unusually mild winter over most parts of Scandinavia; with monthly anomalies exceeding 7°C for much of Norway, Sweden and Finland, it was the warmest winter ever recorded. Tropical Cyclone Nargis with maximum winds of 215 km/hour was the most devastating cyclone to strike Asia since 1991, causing Myanmar’s worst natural disaster ever. Heavy rain and flooding in Brazil in November affected 1.5 million people and resulted in 84 fatalities. Severe prolonged drought hit Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, where large areas reported one of the driest years on record.

2009: Australia was marked by exceptional heat waves, which affected the south-eastern part of the country in January/February. This was associated with disastrous bushfires that caused more than 170 fatalities. Victoria recorded its highest temperature with 48.8°C at Hopetown, the highest temperature ever recorded so far south in the world.

2010: The year 2010 ranked as the warmest year on record, along with 1998 and 2005. (The difference in global surface temperature between the three warmest years 1998, 2005 and 2010 is within a small range of 0.02°C, making the difference statistically indistinguishable.) The 2009/2010 winter was characterized by extremely cold temperatures over large parts of the northern hemisphere, including parts of Europe, Asia and North America. Hundreds of records for daily minimum temperatures were broken in the United States. Heavy snowfall disrupted air and road traffic in Europe, the United States and China. By contrast there were very mild conditions over the arctic and Canada. These conditions were associated with large-scale atmospheric disturbances connected to the arctic and North Atlantic Oscillations and the El Niño event. The summer of 2010 witnessed a sequence of devastating extreme events, frequently associated with unprecedented impacts. Over the course of the 2010 monsoon season, Pakistan experienced the worst floods in its history. Heavy rainfall, flash floods and river floods combined to create a moving body of water equal in dimension to the land mass of the United Kingdom. The floods affected 84 of 121 districts in Pakistan, and more than 20 million people – one-tenth of Pakistan’s population – devastating villages from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. More than 1 700 people were killed, and at least 1.8 million homes damaged or destroyed. July 2010 was the warmest month ever in Moscow since the beginning of modern meteorological records. Temperature exceeded the long-term average by 7.8°C (the previous record in July 1938 was 5.3°C above average). More than 20 daily temperature records were broken, including the absolute maximum temperature in Moscow and the high temperatures which extended from July to the first half of august triggered massive forest and peat fires in the European part of the country, with smoke and smog adversely affecting tens of millions of people. The devastating heat wave in the Russian federation and floods in Pakistan were associated with a “blocking event” in the northern hemisphere jet stream, which kept weather patterns stationary over certain countries. La Niña conditions, which prevailed during summer 2010 and subsequently, have been associated historically with increased likelihood of wetter-than-average conditions over the Indian subcontinent. In many parts of China, high temperatures broke historical extremes. Floods, landslides and mud-rock flows also caused serious economic damage. In August, Zhouqu County, Gansu Province was hit by the most devastating flood and mud-rock flow in the country’s history of the China, killing more than 1 500 people. Greenland recorded its warmest decade (2001–2010) since modern measurements. Most stations in West Greenland, especially in the southwest, recorded their warmest ever year in 2010. In august, ice measuring more than 200 km2 calved from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland – the largest chunk in the past 50 years of observations and data (since 1962). Tens of thousands of icebergs calve yearly from the glaciers of Greenland, but this one was exceptionally large; because of its size, it more typically resembled icebergs in the Antarctic. The Sahel region and West Africa were hit by extreme precipitation events. Niger, which had been gripped by prolonged drought, suffered devastation from flash floods in July. Hundreds of thousands were made homeless in Benin by flooding. Australia faced its worst flooding in about 50 years. The year 2010 was the third wettest year for Australia as a whole and the wettest for the state of Queensland, where the floods were the most devastating.

And still many think that it's a hoax, so for all of them, the words of Jeremiah 5:21. Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not:

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed” (Ghandi)

2011-11-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

With more than 13 million people in dire need of food in the Horn of Africa, food prices set to remain high and volatile, and almost a billion people going to bed hungry every day, it is clear that existing policies and responses are inadequate to solve the problem.
It is possible to reduce hunger dramatically – countries like Brazil and Vietnam have shown how it can be done, what is lacking is the political will by world governments to take the decision to address the causes of hunger. Such as scrapping harmful biofuels targets, subsidies and tariffs which are turning food into fuel, the regulating of commodities markets to curb excessive speculation and increasing the food reserves in poor countries so they can cope with shocks and extremes in prices. In addition the stopping of land grabs by Western and Far East countries and a commitment to increase gender equality in agriculture is needed.

The World Bank estimates that 44 million people fell below the poverty line in the second half of 2010 due to high food prices, and research for Christian Aid’s East Africa Appeal and Oxfam’s GROW campaign indicates that the price of staple foods such as maize could more than double in the next 20 years. Poor households, which spend up to three-quarters of their income on food, are worst affected by the crippling price hikes. The world does have the capacity to produce the food, the groaning supermarket shelves in the 'developed' world scream this out, what is lacking is the will for the 'developed' world to share it.

Prov. 28:27 If you give to the poor, your needs will be supplied! But a curse upon those who close their eyes to poverty.

Do you want to know why there is a protest outside St Paul's?

2011-10-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

It's simple! When the failed banks need money, they get it, lots and lots and lots of it, more than enough so they can even pay out huge bonus payments and it's our money.

The Euro presently has huge problems, so it gets propped up by austerity measure and with lots and lots our money.

If finance is needed to cover the cost of wars in, just by coincidence, oil producing states, money is available, lots and lots of it, and it's our money.

When there is a massive oil spill disaster it get paid for in the end by our money, lots and lots of it.

So here in the UK we are obviously not a country that is broke, enough money is available for all the above, so what is it that there is not enough money available for?

When finance is needed to cover the cost of green energy this has to be funded by additional taxes, despite the fact that here in the UK we spend billions of pounds year after never ending year looking after spent nuclear fuel.

And when finance is needed for schools, hospitals, adult social care, children's hospices, for community projects for more nurses and teachers and police, for the fire and ambulance services or for those that have lost homes or jobs or those now living on the streets it's either in very short supply indeed or completely unavailable.

That's why there is a protest outside St. Paul's and in Wall Street and all the other places... that's why, because it's not the banks or big business that should be bailed out, it is those that really need the cash, like those in the last paragraph.

What we all need to protest about is the same as Jesus did, and that is greed and economic inequality.

As Jesus said “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” (Luke 12:15)

"If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?" (John 1:17-18) A good question indeed...

So, where does YOUR money go?

2011-10-22T05:48:00.001-07:00

It was when I was at theological college that I first met my fellow student and now friend and fellow minister Angela Steele. One of our tasks was to preach at a combined staff and student’s service. Her first line when she did is still with me. “Do you know where your pension funds are invested and how that money is used? Is it invested in ethical companies or those that abuse others in some way for your future income?” The point she made was that where we spend and invest our money is actually a large part of our faith.

It was a lesson that I have tried to live up to, so... do YOU know what the organisations YOU spend or invest your money with do with it, are they involved in exploitation and are they as environmentally sound as they claim?

Is it invested in companies such as Caterpillar Inc? They are a multinational company involved in earth moving equipment, they also make the large armoured bulldozers that the Israelis use to bulldoze homes in the Palestinian areas, and they made the one that killed US peace activist Rachel Corrie. OK, so perhaps you do not have any investments in Caterpillar Inc, but Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Waitrose all openly sell settlement produce from land the Palestinians’ were forcibly removed from, the very thing that Rachel was trying to stop.

How about buying that chocolate bar with the ‘Fairtrade’ mark? Think first, because ‘Greenwash’ abounds! For example That Kit-Kat bar with the Fairtrade logo is a Nestle production; a company that is supplied by companies involved in Rain Forest destruction, operates in several tax havens and with several oppressive regimes and is involved in political lobbying and mis-promotes baby milk.

The Canadian Tar Sands project is an environmental disaster in the making, This huge project has investors from many countries, including a large stake, invested by a company called Husky Energy. They posses around 511,000 acres of tar sands leases and have a 50/50 partnership agreement with BP for a 50/50 to develop the tar sands project.

Husky Energy is owned by Hong Kong based Hutchison Whampoa, a multi-national company with operations in 55 countries across the globe and a turnover of around £31,034.9 million per year. In the UK Hutchison Whampoa own Superdrug!

VW... Now they make environmentally sound car... or do they? The latest UK TV ads show a range of cars (at times informing the viewer that at the bottom of the screen that some of these are only available in left-hand drive, we use right-hand drive in the UK!) including concept cars with images of wind farms in the background and saying that an electric car is planned for production in the near future. What VW don’t tell you is that it's lobbying against climate change laws, funding lobbying groups to the tune of millions of Euros to stop Europe reducing its Greenhouse Gas emissions from 20% to 30% by 2020.

Do you spread Flora on your bread? If so then remember that the company that produces it, Unilever, test products on animals, lobbies politically, promotes Geneticall Modified food, uses factory farmed eggs and meat and operates in several tax havens and with several oppressive regimes.

The safest way to make sure that others do not profit from your spendong power is to buy locally produced items whenever possible and check where your pension funds are being invested. Someone some where profited from the death of my fellow Christian Rachel Corrie.

"Why are you an Environmentalist?" is a question I am often asked

2011-10-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

It really is simple; God made creation for all to share and I am working for those yet to be born to ensure that the generations to come will learn to love, enjoy and share the work of God's hands just as I do.

It is our responsibility as His hands, feet, eyes and ears to ensure that our generation is looked back upon as the one that, when aware of the environmental problem, acted.

We live in a generation where things are loved and people used, it should be the other way round, we should love those in our families yet to be born and leave them an environmental legacy to be proud of.

"Ecclesiastes 3:11 Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end."

I will go with that!

(CARBON) FOOTPRINTS

2011-09-02T02:38:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed a dream.

I was walking along the beach with My Lord. Across the dark sky flashed all the scenes from my life, for each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; I asked The Lord “Why do I see two sets of footprints?”

The Lord said to me “Those are your very own personal carbon footprints, and despite your efforts they are still over twice the global average

Our journey continued on and when the last scene of my life flashed before me I looked back at the many footprints in the sand, but noticed that at times there were only one set. I realized that this occurred at the very lowest and saddest times of my life. This bothered me greatly and I questioned The Lord about my dilemma.

"Lord” I said, “You told me, when I decided to follow you, that you would be with me and talk with me all the way, but I'm aware that during the most troublesome and problematical times of my life I must surely have been alone. I just don't understand it, why it was that when I needed you most you left me?" But why are there only one set of footprints?

He whispered, "My son, my precious child, I love you and will never leave you, never, ever, during your trials and testing’s. When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I arranged for your central heating oil delivery order to be mislaid, your electricity to fail, your car to break down, your flight cancelled or your passport lost."

I was shocked at this and tried to remonstrate with The Lord.

The Lord looked with sadness at the sea gently lapping on the sands and said to me “Well I had to try and do something, this sandy beach was supposed to be a fertile valley”.

Murdoch – News International / News Corporation – World-Wide Lies, Deceit and The Bottom Line.

2011-08-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

I have witnessed the Murdoch Media at far to close quarters, the way it expertly wraps lies in half truths and damages lives, so when the facts about the way it works finally emerged I cheered, and when Murdoch said to an MP committee that ‘this is the humblest day of my life’ my heartfelt hope was that it would not be. The video here shows just one aspect of the Murdoch Empire’s influence... but it certainly does not stop there... please, please read on!

Recent revelations have at last uncovered the extent of the Murdoch media's corruption in the UK. His staff hacked the phones of thousands, including grieving widows and murdered schoolgirls. They stole a Prime Minister's bank information, paid huge sums to police officers, and staged a cover up, which included James Murdoch authorizing hush money to victims.

But Murdoch is a global problem, famous for dictating editorial positions to his papers. He has corrupted and controlled democracies by pushing politicians to back his ideas on war, torture and a host of other planetary ills, and destroying careers with smear campaigns unless they do his bidding, or to be more accurate, blackmail.

In the US, he helped elect George W. Bush and now appears to have many Republican presidential candidates on his payroll. His Fox News Network lied to promote the war in Iraq, pushed resentment of Muslims and immigrants and promoted the right-wing tea party. Not only this, he has worked non-stop to block urgent global action on climate change.

Now Murdoch’s political friends, who used to listen avidly and seemingly obey his every word, have dumped him. In the UK his ex CEO Rebekah Brooks faces criminal charges and two of London's most senior police officers, Sir Paul Stephenson and Assistant Commissioner John Yates have resigned and now it is reported that there are US and Australian investigations into the Murdoch News Corp empires.

Since becoming the UK’s Prime Minister sixteen months ago, David Cameron had 26 meetings with Murdoch’s executives. PM Cameron, against the advice of his deputy prime minister, also employed former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his communications director. Coulson, who has been at the centre of the hacking probe, was arrested on July 8.

Rebekah Brooks, who resigned as CEO over the escalating scandal, is the only person Mr Cameron has invited twice to Chequers, a privilege not extended even to the most senior members of his Cabinet.

Fox News is owned by The Murdoch Empire; see the below and read on!

The Mail on Sunday recently suggested that previous UK PM Tony Blair will face scathing criticism of his role in the launch of the Iraq war when the report of the inquiry under Sir John Chilcot is published in the autumn. The Observer newspaper reported that the terms of an oil deal struck between BP and the Baghdad government would provide the company and its Chinese partner with a 'stranglehold' over the Iraqi economy. Secret documents referred to by the Observer reveal that BP and the Chinese National Petroleum Company have been guaranteed full payment at an agreed price for the oil they extract from Iraq's richest oil field at Rumaila. The oil field - about 20 miles from the Kuwait border - is about half as big as the entire North Sea and accounts for more than 40% of Iraqi oil production. Oil, in turn, provides 95% of the country's export earnings. If extraction from the field is curtailed - because of quotas imposed by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, for example - the Iraqi government will pay the partnership for the 'lost' production. Similarly, if natural disaster, terrorist attack, or any of a series of other possible developments, disrupts production for more than 90 days, the administration will compensate the partnership for the 'loss'.

The Observer speculated that news of the arrangement will likely 'increase the prejudice of those who saw the UK's involvement in toppling Saddam as part of a "war for oil"' - a consideration which Tony Blair has always insisted played no part in his decision to support the drive towards invasion.

This raises the question of what Mr Blair and Mr Murdoch were talking about in the conversations we now know they held in the days leading up to the invasion on March 20, 2003, because Murdoch was, from the outset, blunt about his reasons for supporting the war. The reason was not to find weapons of mass destruction, or to overthrow a tyrant, but to secure economic interests through control of the flow and price of oil.

Just weeks before the invasion, Murdoch said that "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax-cut in any country."

Mr Blair and Mr Murdoch had three conversations in the nine days before March 20. They spoke on March 11, immediately after Jacques Chirac had announced that France would veto any second UN resolution sanctioning invasion.

The next day, Murdoch’s Sun Newspaper proclaimed: 'Like a cheap tart who puts price before principle, money before honour, Jacques Chirac struts the streets of shame. The French President's vow to veto the second resolution ... puts him right in the gutter."

On March 13, as conflict over a second resolution intensified, the two men talked again. On March 14, The Sun returned to the theme: 'Charlatan Jacques Chirac is basking in cheap applause for his "Save Saddam" campaign - but his treachery will cost his people dear ... This grandstanding egomaniac has inflicted irreparable damage."

On the evening of March 19, as tanks prepared to cross the border, PM Blair and Murdoch talked again; as they did every single one of Mr Murdoch's 127 newspapers around the world, with a combined circulation more than 40 million, urged its readers to back the war, a war that has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands so far and will result in the death of many, many more in the future. This is because more than 1,820 tons of radioactive nuclear waste (i.e. depleted uranium) has exploded in Iraq so far in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb so the U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust represents far more than fourteen thousand Hiroshima's.

The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded in the Middle East will continue killing for hundreds of years because that's how long these particles of radioactive dust will continue to blow around to be lodged in an individual’s lungs or be ingested.

No WMD's (Weapons of Mass Destruction) were found in Iraq, they were however imported to that country. Reported birth defects among Iraqi newborns are up 600% from before the war, the defects are typical of the kind produced by exposure to radioactive poisons.

The civilian population of Iraq were ‘liberated’, liberated for Murdoch’s desire for cheap oil, aided and abetted by the Western World’s addiction to oil, and at last, the truth is about to emerge!

Sources; the newspapers and media quoted and www.abovetopsecret.com

UK Farms In Crisis; Is it the same where you are?

2011-06-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

We have been lucky to live in a farming area for some 34 years now; it once was a farming community but then the supermarkets with their values of the bottom line and sourcing from the cheapest producers from any part of the world closed down many local small farmers and growers. Growers’ in the UK could not compete with, for example tomatoes grown in Africa where the cost of labour and production is low even though the cost of shipping, and the carbon footprint, is high. Our two village market gardens closed down as the majority of our counties grocers shops, unable to compete with the supermarkets closed. One of the market garden owners committed suicide.

The same supermarket pressure has been applied over the last few years to our milk producers, and many are going out of business on a weekly basis. When Pam and I were at the recent South of England Show I took this picture of a milk producer's stall. The most important words read;

Supermarket price approx 85p per litre
Cost of production approx 29p per litre
Farmer paid approx 25p per litre
Outcome 3-4p loss on every litre of milk produced. Thousands of British farms going out of business every year.

The supermarkets focus on buying at the cheapest price and then selling at the highest possible margin. Forget their claims of ‘giving you more’ or even ‘every little helps’ just look at their end of financial year profits to see where their focus really is.

What has happened to the UK farming industry is the equivalent of “selling the family silver”, when the time comes, and it will come soon, that we need the UK’s farmers they will no longer be there... then what?

How the European Food Safety Authority got GM 100% wrong!

2011-06-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

In 2007 the EFSA said that ““A large number of experimental studies with livestock have shown that recombinant DNA fragments or proteins derived from GM plants have not been detected in tissues, fluids or edible products of farm animals such as broilers, cattle, pigs or quails.” This was subsequently adopted as the official advice of the UK’s Food Standards Agency in “Transfer of GM material from feed”

GUESS WHAT?

New research from Canada has found a Bt toxin produced by GM insect resistant crops in the blood of women and clear evidence that it was passed to foetuses. The new study was carried out by a team at Sherbrooke University Hospital in Quebec and has been accepted for publication in the peer reviewed journal Reproductive Toxicology. The team took blood samples from 30 pregnant women prior to delivery, 30 samples from umbilical cords immediately after birth and samples from 39 non-pregnant women who were undergoing treatment. All the women were of a similar age and body mass index, and none worked with pesticides or lived with anyone who did. Pesticides used on GM herbicide tolerant (HT) crops were also detected.

The same Bt toxin as detected by the researchers is present in Mon810 maize, which has EU cultivation approval but is currently banned in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Luxemburg and Greece.

The results show that the toxic Bt protein Cry1Ab was present in blood serum from all three sources (93% of pregnant women, 80% in umbilical blood and 67% of non-pregnant women). The researchers suggest that the most probable source of the toxin is GM food consumed as part of a normal diet in Canada, where GM presence in food is unlabelled. The Canadian scientists have not speculated on any health effects from the presence of Cry1Ab protein as this was beyond the scope of their study.

Safety concerns have been growing since the introduction of GM herbicide tolerant crops, including links to Parkinson’s disease and cancer in the case of glyphosate. Residues of these herbicides in food are infrequently monitored, and the maximum permitted residue levels for crops directly sprayed with glyphosate, such as GM HT crops, were raised over 200 times in the 1990s.

One of two GM crops approved for cultivation in the EU is genetically modified to produce the Cry1Ab toxin – the Bt maize Mon810 licensed to Monsanto and mainly grown in Spain. The other GM crop authorised for cultivation in the EU is the GM potato Amflora (grown on a very limited scale, 17 hectares in two countries in 2011), genetically modified to produce a starch used for non-food industries (not Bt toxin production), but the pulp would be fed to livestock in the food chain.

I always remember the tobacco industry’s comments regarding lung cancer that “doubt is our product”, the same applies to the GM industry, just ask yourself the question “why is it that no insurance company will insure GM?”

WATER – THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR IT

2011-05-15T13:23:00.001-07:00

The 'River' Charante, France, August 2010.

As I write this I am looking out on our field that has received little rain over the past two months. I am in South east England where in April less than 10% of normal rainfall was recorded; it was the second successive very dry month here. Provisionally, it was the 6th driest April over England in a series from 1910, a sunny month across all of the UK, with amounts generally close to 150% of normal, making it the sunniest April in the series from 1929. Even in normal times, London actually receives less rainfall than Istanbul, but in April even that lower figure was exceeded.

Our field shed has solar panel powered lighting, as there is a substitute for mains electricity. In my garage I am working on a solar electric vehicle, as there is a substitute for oil; but there is no substitute for water...

Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water use, and farmers around the world are the first to suffer from lack of access to a usable long-term reliable supply. The 2010 Russian Drought caused an export ban on Russian wheat, while elsewhere in the world, floods caused crop destruction. China experienced droughts in some areas and floods in others, as did Australia. The May 2010 Tennessee floods were a 1000 year event. There was flooding in Central Europe, Pakistan, France, and Singapore, far too much water in some areas and nowhere near enough in others. Crops were wiped out by drought and crops were wiped out by flooding, and in response 2010/2011food prices rose and the worlds poorest suffered.

This is a problem now and not for the coming years, the world will run out of accessible water for agriculture long before the world will run out of oil. Unilever CEO Paul Polman was reported as saying that his company is concerned that the regions that produce its tomatoes, Greece, Spain and California “will have enough water in the coming decade to guarantee the harvest that will meet our business needs”.

Water is a marginal consideration to many Western governments; but very soon it will be a central issue, without water there is no life.

Jesus mentioned water often, 'living water' is fresh water, and Jesus was never without water. There is a lesson there for as all as we seemingly can only look on as the drought effected areas of the world get ever bigger, more and more are forced to leave their homes in search of life giving living water.

Germany Abandons Nuclear Power

2011-04-06T01:35:00.000-07:00

The words on the Nuclear Power Plant chimney read "Nuclear power damages Germany."

According to a Reuters Report Germany is to phase out all nuclear power in the country before 2020.

At long last a major European Country has decided that the dead end (I chose my words carefully) that is Nuclear is to go.

Thank you Germany!!!

EU Funds Dangerous Nuclear Power Plants; could a Japanese Nuclear type of disaster happen in the EU?

2011-03-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

I looked in shock as first Japan was first hit by an earthquake of unimaginable proportions, then by a wall of water so high, wide and long that it wiped out all in its path, then as the weather changed and survivors sheltered from the bitter cold, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power Plants, unable to function due to the damage, went critical. Now there is the threat of a deadly unseen radioactive cloud that could damage or destroy life.

As I write this there are some workers at the plant displaying breath taking courage by staying there and trying to contain the damage, accepting the fact that their lives are being offered up to save the lives of many others.

We in the West and in my case in the EU, (the UK) are told that this could not happen here as our standards are so high and we are not subject to the same geological problems as Japan. Yet, as Japan's nuclear disaster continues it has emerged that EU is funding a nuclear expansion programme in the Ukraine, despite real safety concerns, that will increase the export of energy to the main body of the EU.

The safety risks and concerns that surround the nuclear industry in the Ukraine that were there in the old Soviet era still remain.

In the EU, after the radiation leaks at the Japanese Fukushima plant, Germany is now to postpone the decision to extend the life of that country’s nuclear power plants, closing some of its older reactors down, while still funding the increase of nuclear power generation in the Ukraine.

It is the intention of the Ukraine Government to increase the number of nuclear power plants there from 12 to 22, and this work has been granted close to one billion Euros, jointly, from the EBRD, (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the EIB (European Investment Bank) with the funding supporting the 'Trans-European Energy Network projects' which will enable the Ukraine to export energy produced in that country to EU Member States.

There are however huge concerns regarding the safety of these plans, especially since the Ukraine Government is keen to increase the working life of its existing Soviet-era reactors from 30 to 45 years. This may well be a financial necessity as the Ukraine government does not have adequate facilities in order to decommission their radioactive waste. Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath, from the environmental watchdog Bankwatch who monitor the activities of The EU said: “Twenty-five years after Chernobyl it [the Ukraine] has not solved technically and financially the problem of management of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel. Furthermore, without enough resources to fulfil its utopian strategy of constructing 22 nuclear reactors by 2030, the government is now extending the life of existing nuclear blocks, which increases the risks of operational accidents”.

Part of the problem is the power of the EU Nuclear Lobby groups with their claim that Nuclear Power is low carbon and so part of a solution to Climate Change. The EU invests then in the Ukraine Nuclear Industry so as it can import ‘low priced’ and 'low carbon' energy into the EU.

The words of Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath sums the EU situation up perfectly. “Unfortunately it takes a disaster like the one in Japan for EU's decision-makers to acknowledge these risks. As the Chernobyl accident showed 25 years ago, the EU is vulnerable to the impacts of possible nuclear disasters in its immediate neighbourhood”.

See the full bankwatch report HERE

Whenever I read of the increasing number of nuclear plant accidents that we were told 'could never happen' I am reminded of the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer when the first nuclear weapon was unleashed upon Japan; "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

My thoughts and prayers are with those in Japan who now, after surviving earthquake and Tsunami face the ultimate nightmare of an uncontrollable and unseen nightmare created by mankind. Once the Nuclear Genie is out of the bottle it cannot be put back. The words we use to describe our species are Homo Sapiens; they mean 'wise man', I personally have my doubts.

SPAIN'S SOLAR POWER SUCCESS - 75% FROM RENEWABLE ENERGY

2011-02-24T07:35:00.001-08:00

On January 6 the tradition in Spain is that children receive gifts from the three wise men. Forget Santa Claus, for children this is THE day! Unless they have behaved badly ... then... they are given coal.

So, on January 6th as Spanish children open their gifts and in many cases plugged them into the nearest electrical power point, coal was all but outlawed because on that day 75% of Spain's electricity was from renewable sources while coal reached a measly 4% of supply.

OK, on that day conditions must have been ideal for renewable energy production, but on any day last year Spain was producing renewable clean energy. Last year (2010) coal-fired power was lowered by 34% and gas-fired by 17%. Greenhouse gas emissions were cut by 20% and renewables are now providing jobs for nearly 100,000 people. To rub salt in the Nuclear/coal/gas lobby, Spain's renewables were the source of power for France, as for the very first time France was a net importer of Spanish electricity.

So, it can be done.

I write this from the UK, where the sun is not much in evidence at the moment but we do have exposed windy areas and an inexhaustable supply of tidal power... or does the above cartoon say it all?

IT'S OFFICIAL... OIL IS RUNNING OUT!

2011-02-19T05:15:00.000-08:00

And who says so? It's those nice people the investment experts who tell you where to invest your money! Not that I have money to invest you understand, but I like to know what is really going on in the world of finance. 'Invest in food/land' was a recent journal heading, "you can't eat money" was an unforgettable line of that article, which perhaps explains the rising cost of food as investors gamble on food futures.

The latest edition informs its readers that the increasing demands for and the ever dwindling supply of oil is a threat to the global economy, but is also a big opportunity for investors.

Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency stated at a recent conference that "The age of cheap oil is over" and so oil companies are hunting far and wide to locate new oil sources, like tar sands. The demand for oil is increasing as, for only one example, China will need more oil. In the EU around 50% of people have cars, but in China, it’s around 3%, and China has a huge population, and now we have the recent political turmoil and upset in the Middle East, a region we in the West are oil dependent on. Iraq oil production, the article informs, is a critical element in increasing future oil supply, so that explains the war then...

The problem for the West is that as the political problems in Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and Libya spreads to their much larger next door neighbour, Saudi Arabia, that the oil price will increase and push the fragile Western economies over the edge of another slump.

The article talks about natural gas as one alternative, pointing out that it is located in politically hospitable areas. My thoughts are that Russia is not the most politically hospitable area, but compared to the Middle East they may have a point I suppose. So what are the investment tips? They are nuclear and renewable energy, and I bet that nuclear gets the nod.

The inescapable facts are though that our transport infrastructure is oil dependent and there is no alternative to oil, it is our primary energy source and it is running out. The sooner the world wakes up to those facts and values what there is the more chance that our children and grandchildren will have a viable future.

The death of Greenland's canary in the 'Climate Change Coal Mine'?

2011-01-22T03:43:00.000-08:00

Without the ‘Greenhouse Effect’ life would not exist on earth. The Earth’s atmosphere lets in just enough ultraviolet and visible light, but traps some of the infrared radiation and heat and works just like a greenhouse; light enters and heats up the inside and the glass traps some of it in. This is a delicate balancing act the atmosphere performs, because our atmosphere is very thin, the equivalent to the thin layer of varnish on a 3foot diameter globe.

The ozone layer is a diffused layer and if it were at normal air pressure it would be about 1/8th of an inch thick. It absorbs some 97% to 99% of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, if it did not do so all life on Earth would be seriously damaged, yet this layer, depending on the place and the season, is located between only eight to 24 miles high above the Earth.

The problem we now have is that the amount of Greenhouse Gasses, mainly CO2, in the atmosphere has been increased by the use of fossil fuels and the burning of the rain Forests. It really is quite simple; more greenhouse gas equals more heat being trapped in the atmosphere and less escaping into space, what we have done is the same as insulating the greenhouse roof with bubble wrap! It is this increase in trapped heat that changes the climate, altering weather patterns and the greater heat trapped in the atmosphere results in the more frequent and severe weather events that now occur. It is not simply the immediate increase but also the lengthened time scale that this increase occurs over. If for example you insulate the roof of your house the heat does not escape so readily but stays for a longer period. For the Earth then the spring season can start earlier, the summer season extend and autumn arrive later due to the fact that that early and late heat does not escape as it once did and simply builds up within the atmosphere.

Proof of the longer seasons was evident when researchers found that Greenland's annual melting season lasted 50 days longer than average last year when compared to the years between 1979 and 2009. Satellite data indicates that shrinkage of ice sheets may contribute more to sea level rise than was thought. Were the Greenland Ice Sheet to completely melt, which is very, very highly unlikely indeed, then there is the potential of a 5-6 meters sea level rise in the ice sheet which is almost 2 miles thick in the centre.

In Greenland, 2010 summer temperatures of up to 3C above the average were combined with reduced snowfall, and Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, had the warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873.

Greenland’s ice sheet and its melting patterns are quite simply a canary in the climate change coal mine. The canary has started to die, but if action is taken quickly, it can be saved.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

2011-01-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

... it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way (Charles Dickens; 'A Tale of Two Cities').

2010 felt like that to me, 2 steps forward, 1.9 steps back, fighting environmental battles for the truth regarding Climate Chaos, GM and others with minimal resources against an enemy with limitless assets who cares for nothing other than the bottom line, then I remember Ola. To stand up and be counted is not easy, but to be a young girl in Babylon Iraq, and stand up outside the gate of Ishtar and be counted makes my fight seem easy.

350.org is an international grassroots campaign, 350 being the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Scientists measure carbon dioxide in "parts per million" (ppm), so 350ppm is the number humanity needs to get below as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change. To get there, we need a different kind of PPM—a "people powered movement" that is made of people like us in every corner of the planet.

To see 350 campaigner Ola with others in other countries, please watch the film below, Ola appears at the 24 second mark, proving to me that I should never forget the Power of One.

May I wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas

2010-12-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

From the moment the minister nods her head to the very last note, for me this is simply the best choral work ever.

Thou must leave thy lowly dwelling,
The humble crib, the stable bare.
Babe, all mortal babes excelling,
Content our earthly lot to share.
Loving father, Loving mother,
Shelter thee with tender care!

Blessed Jesus, we implore thee
With humble love and holy fear.
In the land that lies before thee,
Forget not us who linger here!
May the shepherd’s lowly calling,
Ever to thy heart be dear!

Blest are ye beyond all measure,
Thou happy father, mother mild!
Guard ye well your heav’nly treasure,
The Prince of Peace, The Holy Child!
God go with you, God protect you,
Guide you safely through the wild!

And may the love of God enfold you and bless you

Wikileaks about GM.

2010-12-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Wikileaks release of U.S. classified information has been headline news as the sites that are the source of the information have been under attack from every known virus available. It has however been a treasure trove of details on the working of the U.S. Government and their foreign policy.

One mention of agriculture in the released information is in a document that outlines priorities for intelligence gathering in the African countries of Burundi, the Republic of Congo, and Rwanda. In this document is a list of what information the U.S. Government wants to know about the those countries, i.e. their government policies on food security and food safety, information on the impact of rising food prices, agricultural yield statistics, infrastructure improvements, data on deforestation and desertification, water issues and invasive species are included. But also on the U.S. priority list is this:

Government acceptance of genetically modified food and propagation of genetically modified crops.

Says it all!

GM = GENETIC MUTILATION

2010-11-30T00:12:00.000-08:00

One baby has Hydrocephalus; water on the brain, the link to this photo can be found HERE, scroll down this link for more images and for a fully documented scientific report in English, see HERE.

The image of the other child, with the back deformation, was taken by Dr Graciela Gomez.

Suffer the little children to come unto me indeed...

Argentina has become a giant experiment in farming genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready (RR) soy, engineered to be tolerant to Roundup, Monsanto’s formulation of the herbicide glyphosate. The Argentine government, eager to pull the country out of a deep economic recession in the 1990s, restructured its economy around GM soy grown for export, most of which goes to feed livestock in Europe. In 2009, GM soy was planted on 19 million hectares - over half of Argentina’s cultivated land - and sprayed with 200 million litres of glyphosate herbicide. Spraying is often carried out from the air, causing problems of drift.

In 2002, two years after the first big harvests of RR soy in the country, residents and doctors in soy producing areas began reporting serious health effects from glyphosate spraying, including high rates of birth defects as well as infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and cancers. Environmental effects include killed food crops and livestock and streams strewn with dead fish.

One of the first medical doctors to report problems from glyphosate spraying of GM soy was Dr Darío Gianfelici, from Cerrito, Entre Ríos, Argentina. According to Gianfelici, there are two levels of toxic effects from glyphosate: acute effects, such as vomiting, diarrhoea, respiratory problems, and skin rashes; and chronic effects, which take 10–20 years to show up. These include infertility and cancer.

Gianfelici said: “Our town experienced drastic changes before and after soy. I’ve seen people die from cancer at age 30. I have witnessed pregnancy problems and a significant increase in fertility problems. I have seen an increase in respiratory diseases, as has never been seen before. GM soy has been a death sentence for humans and for the environment. No money can compensate for the damage that has been caused – the contamination, the deaths, the cases of cancer and malformations.”

Reports of birth defects in glyphosate-sprayed areas of Argentina gained scientific credibility in 2009, when senior Argentine government scientist Prof. Andrés Carrasco went public with his research findings, fully published a year later, that glyphosate causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying. “The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy,” said Carrasco, “I suspect the toxicity classification of glyphosate is too low ... in some cases this can be a powerful poison.”

At a recent conference, Carrasco, professor and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology, University of Buenos Aires Medical School and lead researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), said a frequent result of malformations in human embryos is miscarriage. He said that it was now not unusual for women in GM soy producing regions of Argentina to have up to five miscarriages in a row.

The research findings of Carrasco and his colleagues were not welcomed by some sectors of government and industry. After he announced them, four people from Argentina’s crop protection trade association CASAFE were sent to try to search his laboratory and he was “seriously told off” by Lino Barrañao, Argentina’s science and technology minister.

Things took a violent turn in 2010, when an organized mob of thugs attacked people who gathered to hear Carrasco talk in La Leonesa, an agricultural town that has become a centre for activism against agrochemical spraying of soy and rice crops. Three people were seriously injured. Carrasco and a colleague shut themselves in a car and were surrounded by people making violent threats and beating the car for two hours. Witnesses said the attack was organized by local officials and a local rice producer to protect the economic interests behind local agro-industry. Amnesty International called for an investigation, see HERE.

As with all my posts and unlike GM, all the details above have been thoroughly researched.

THE ROUTE TO SOLAR POWER IN THE US (AND THE UK) IS A ROAD NOT TAKEN.

2010-10-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House West Wing. The panels were used to heat water for the staff eating area and were a symbol of a new solar strategy that Carter had said was going to “move our Nation toward true energy security and abundant, readily available, energy supplies.” In 1986, President Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels while the White House roof was being repaired. They were never reinstalled.

In 1991, the panels were retrieved from government storage and brought to the environmentally-minded Unity College near of Bangor in Maine. There, with help of actress Glenn Close, the panels were refurbished and used to heat water in the cafeteria up until 2005. They are still there, although they no longer function.

Swiss directors Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller follow the route the panels took, using them as a backdrop to explore the American oil dependency and the total lack of political will to pursue alternative energy sources.

In the movie ‘A Road Not Taken’, the filmmakers took two solar panels from Unity, placed them in the back of two students’ 1990 Dodge Ram pick-up truck, which runs on vegetable oil, and delivered one of them to the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum in Atlanta and the other to the National Museum of American History in Washington.

In 1979, Carter warned in the speech he gave when the panels were first commissioned, “a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people - harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

Two of Carter’s solar panels are now museum pieces, the chance was missed, and instead we have, in President Carter's prophetic words "our crippling dependence on foreign oil”.

SO, WHAT’S WRONG WITH MISSHAPEN FRUIT AND VEG?

2010-10-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

Left are rejected potatoes

A few weeks ago a colleague and I walked the fields around West Malling in Kent. We passed rows of lettuce ready for picking but left in the field to be ploughed in, why? Easy answer, they was not quite the right shape and /or size.

A couple of weeks later I drove past Kent orchards where apples had been left on the tree and are now rotting on the ground, why? Yes, you are there already, they were not quite the right shape and /or size.

All over the UK some of the potatoes, cauliflowers, apples, carrots, tomatoes and other produce we grow are rejected by supermarkets because they are not the right size, shape, or colour. Tomatoes, like apples and many other fruit and veg actually have to be a certain grade of colour and as for apples; those that are picked in the UK have a reject rate of around one fifth, they are perfectly OK to eat but don’t quite make ‘the standard’. The UK imports 70% of the apples bought and these have to conform to the supermarkets standards; they need to be blemish-less and weigh on average about 150g. The size and appearance of fruit and veg is all important, I would hope that taste comes in there somewhere but I have the idea that it’s somewhat behind the shelf-life demands!

The class structure in the UK has now filtered down to fruit and veg; there is ‘Class 1’, so this must be the best surely? ‘Class 2’, so obviously not so good, and then we may well have ‘cooking’ or ‘fun size’. I find myself somewhat confused when the term ‘cooking’ is applied to an onion, does this mean it cannot be eaten raw or used for pickling? When ‘fun size’ is applied to apples, does this mean that the other apples are a miserable lot?

In the supermarkets drive for sales, presentation seems to be all. Fruit and veg are displayed in a way that would have seemed over the top in an amateur grower’s competition. Farmers are dictated to by the supermarkets as to what they will purchase and so have to conform or go out of business. There is concern in the UK about the ever increasing spread of polytunnels on our farms but it is neither realistic nor economic to grow, for example, strawberries in the UK climate to the standards demanded by the supermarkets without tunnel protection.

So instead of selling almost all of the fruit and veg we produce much is fed to animals or simply ploughed back into the soil, and instead the UK imports, among many others, apples from all over the world, green beans and salads from Africa, and tomatoes from Spain. I know that the same applies in the U.S., in Australia and New Zealand also, and I expect also applies in much of the EU as well.

So the consumer is educated away from anything that looks less than perfect, the price they pay goes up and produce is then imported from abroad to make up for the rejected shortfall. Food miles increase enormously, pollution increases enormously, and, as I said prices increase enormously. Are there times when you look at a situation and feel that reality and common sense are unrelated?

SUPER DAIRY PROBLEMS IN THE UK & US.

2010-10-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

In the UK, a company by the name of Nocton Dairies Ltd is planning to build an 8,100 cow ‘Super Dairy’ at Nocton in Lincolnshire. The cows will be permanently housed indoors and subjected to a high-yielding regime producing over 250,000 litres of milk per day. You may think that cows housed permanently indoors is wrong and that they should be grazed on grass as God intended but Nocton Dairies director, Mr. Willes believes otherwise, or at least he did until he realised what he had said in a BBC interview with Ian Glaister; hear this 50 second broadcast HERE, an amazing example of totally ignoring/denying what was said!

It is a fact that Intensive, indoor factory farm methods have long dominated pig and poultry production with the average pig unit housing as many as 5,000 pigs at any one time – the biggest units house upwards of 20,000. In the UK however, the average dairy herd size is just 120. Naturally here are some larger, but vast majority are still much smaller, family-run businesses based in rural areas.

Factory farming is simply about the economics of scale. The needs of individual animals are often seen as totally unimportant in relation to the financial productivity of a herd or flock and are tantamount to torture. If I kept a dog in the way that chickens are factory farmed I would soon be in court and I have no doubt that the same would apply to keeping a dog in the same way that Nocton cows would be kept. The Nocton concept will actually be, if approved, Europe's largest dairy farm.

Anyone that is in a farming area is aware that farm animals attract flies / insects/ vermin; it is an accepted part of life in the country, there are cows grazing the field next to us, but there are no problems with them, but 8,100 confined indoors... can you imagine the problems with the their slurry, let alone the flies / insects / vermin?

The environmental impact is, according to Nocton Dairies, a matter of concern they will address. The environmental standards will be 'beyond the highest environmental and animal welfare standards ever seen in the UK'. A number of benefits from the project have been trumpeted, including slurry from the farm being be fed into an anaerobic digester – producing power for the plant and 2,000 local homes – water sharing arrangements which would see resources managed in conjunction with neighbouring farms and reused, and the creation of a visitor centre, as well as facilities for schools and training and as many as 85 new jobs at the dairy, many filled by local people.

Of course, these high standards will be expensive... very expensive... so an ‘expression of interest’ form was submitted to the EMDA (East Midlands Development Agency) earlier this year by Nocton Dairies seeking an undisclosed sum to part-fund the development. The application to EMDA is for money administered under the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE), itself funded by the European Union and the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, (DEFRA).

Guess what happens if Nocton don’t get the funding? Director Willis Nocton Dairies director admits that if no or reduced levels of RDPE funds are obtained, then ‘enhancements to cattle housing and parlours such as honey comb grooving to concrete floors would not be adopted; water abstraction rights sharing arrangements may not be adopted; waste handling could revolve around lorry based movement and spreading of untreated slurry. At the very least the anaerobic digester would be delayed to a second phase of development.’ Willes also said that ‘importing trained staff from the traditional dairy areas of the country rather than training a local force’ would be a consequence of not securing RDPE cash.

Pat Thomas from Compassion In World Farming said: ‘The owners of Nocton have stressed publicly again and again that they aim to achieve high animal welfare standards. And yet behind the scenes they are saying this can only be achieved if the taxpayer supports them. It’s important to remember that Nocton Dairies has made a financial rod for its own back by choosing to produce milk on an industrial scale and it’s not up to the public, or the government, to bail them out.’

The Ecologist went to California to see just how their 'Super dairies' had affected the local area; you can see their short film HERE.

As a UK dairy farmer said. “This kind of intensive dairy farming (i.e. fed almost constantly and milked thrice daily) was practised in Israel in the early 1970s and was one of the main reasons for my leaving the kibbutz that I worked on. The cows were kept inside 24hours per day. They had to be forced into crushes where food that they were not hungry for, was doled out to them constantly to improve their milk yield. If they ever got out of the sheds, which happened once in a while, they went wild to be outside and just didn't really know what to do. I couldn't bear the effect that this had on the cows; their intelligence and their natural instincts were both being bred out and generally thwarted. In my opinion, cows make milk for their calves and generously overproduce enough for us to have some too but it is NOT their main function to produce milk for human beings. They deserve our respect and they deserve to be looked after with gratitude for the milk and cheese they produce for us”. ... Amen to that!

In the US as well as the UK it seems that very few are happy about the move to ever larger dairies and most farmers don't blame Nocton Dairies for going big, it is, they say, the inevitable consequence of pressure from supermarkets and consumers for ever lower prices.

In addition to the above, fellow Christian/environmentalist Pete Redwood has informed me that Peter Willes was fined several hundred pounds for environmental pollution at his existing super dairy, Parkham Farms, near Bideford, Devon last year, so one assumes that that he knows everything there is to know about pollution control.

Parkham Farms produces 4,000 tonnes of cheddar cheese per year, most of it for Tesco from their own 1,750 cows. This requires 90 tonnes of feed per day with each cow consuming around 60kg of feed (132 lbs) per day. And, as Pete remarked, "what goes in must come out!"

The Nocton project is actually five times the above, I bet that will cause a drop in local property sales/prices...

A GM / GE 2010 update

2010-08-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

I am a committed environmentalist. This is a part of my Christian faith; I believe that we should protect the work of creation, the economy being a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. Due to this, and the facts that I have gathered, I am 100% in opposition to the Genetic Modification or Genetic Engineering (GM – GE) of our food supply. I am still surprised at the general public’s lack of knowledge regarding GM – GE; most seem unaware that it is, in this context, the totally alien insertion of fish and animal genes into plant life.

My concern locally in the U.K. regarding GM is well known having an anti GM letter published recently in the Southern Farmer magazine. I received only messages and letters of support for my position, recently having yet another message from a prominent Wealden farmer, who is also a District Councillor, that he “would never grow GM on his land”.

Therefore I was more than shocked when only a few days into the present U.K. administration it was announced that the new U.K. Environment Secretary, Caroline Spellman had authorised the trials of GM potatoes at a protected and guarded location in Norfolk.

The general public who are aware of GM’s ramifications are not in favour of GM, but the GM companies have now remarketed themselves by informing people that GM will feed the world's hungry. From the evidence there is already about the effect of GM, it would appear that this is not the case. Incidentally, there is already enough food in the world to feed the world (the groaning supermarket shelves and obesity problems in the western World are evidence to this) as until recently the world produced one and a half times the food needed to give everyone an adequate diet, yet millions starved because the world lacked the will to share it. (Source; UN Food & Agricultural Organisation)

We have been told repeatedly by "people in the know" that food production needs to double by 2050 in order to feed the world. In fact, that "statistic" was produced by Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the American Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at a speech he made to the United Nations in June 2008. It has been trotted out mechanically ever since by politicians, scientists and manufacturers. Jacques Diouf took the liberty of "rounding up" a figure from his own organisation's report World Agriculture: Towards 2030/2050.

That report stated that the developing world would need to increase cereal production by at least 70% by 2050 in order to satisfy the predicted demand for a change to a "western" (American) diet - i.e. richer in meat. Food that is grown for animal production is not food for feeding the population. It is grown for feeding to animals to produce meat - one of the most energy intensive processes imaginable requiring ten tonnes of cereal grain to produce one tonne of meat. In more friendly terms 10 kilos of cereal could produce a meal for 100 people but 1 kilo of meat might feed a family of four with hearty "western" appetites. So one high profile figure makes an exaggerated statement and the rest of the world takes it as fact. Even our own government is using it with regular monotony, I believe that, in the U.K., DEFRA is aware of the true facts but has made no attempt to correct it.

And let us not forget either that we, in the West, throw away a third of the food that is produced. It can never reach the supermarket shelves as it can be the ‘wrong’ shape or size, it can be discarded by the supermarkets as it becomes out of date, or it can be binned at the household or restaurant.

In India many farmers grew GM cotton hoping for the promised higher yields, the reverse happened, yields were down to a fifth, the income was a seventh and hundreds of farmers committed suicide. (Source: The Official Report of the Government of Andhra Pradesh) It would seem that the Christian Aid report ‘Selling Suicide, Farming, False Promises and Genetic Modification in the Developing World’ has certainly come true. Perhaps Mrs. Spellman, who is a trustee of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, should read it.

In Canada, cross contamination means that no oil seed rape in the country is GM free so the Canadian parliament, against the wishes of 80% of the public, want GM to be accepted as very few want the crops and the price is low. It only took 7 years in Canada for this cross contamination to take place. On this scale it would only take 3 years in the UK for the same catastrophe to occur.

The world's biggest seed/agrochemical company, Monsanto, told the New York Times that assuring the safety of food was not their job but the job of the FDA (Food and Drugs Administration.) The FDA asked Monsanto for a report on a growth hormone and this was carried out by Monsanto employee Margaret Miller. After the report was finished Miller then went to work for the FDA and her first job was to approve the report that she had written for Monsanto. (Source; Organic Consumers Association of America)

GM Maize (Mon [santo] 863) is approved despite French scientists who 'found serious flaws in the (Monsanto) study at every stage'. The study was not available for scrutiny as it was claimed it was confidential, and then a German court forced Monsanto to release the full report, incidentally The Institute of Science in Society considers GM Mon [santo] 863 as toxic. The fact is that GM companies have a control over many of the world’s seed stocks. Basmati rice is ‘patented’ (the intellectual rights have been granted to a GM company) and Monsanto have attempted to patent the pig. Despite claims GM crops use MORE pesticides. We are witness to a cynical ploy to bring in GM using the poor and hungry for an excuse; GM is not about feeding the world it is about profit.

Greenpeace India raised the alarm and legally challenged the American biotechnology firm Monsanto over the claimed safety of their GM Aubergine, BT Brinjal. Monsanto was then forced to allow tests to be carried out which were conducted by Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen. The tests on rats showed that those given the genetically modified food had signs of liver and kidney damage. The toxic food also affected female rats by raising their blood sugar levels and also levels of triglycerides which are fatty substances in the body.

Many GM crops are claimed to offer advantages to areas hit by Climate Change, with reduced water supplies or more salty inundated groundwater, however, this argument is merely jumping on the Climate Change "bandwagon". The real reason that GM crops are being promoted by the Life Sciences companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer is in order to sell their pesticides, fungicides and fertiliser petrochemicals that are needed to grow and protect their own GM crops.

The GM companies, mainly US owned, are well connected; Donald Rumsfeld, former US Defence Secretary was president of Searle Pharmaceuticals, now owned by Monsanto. A US secretary of Agriculture, Ann Veneman, was also on the board of directors of Calgene Pharmaceuticals which is an affiliate of Monsanto. Linda J. Fisher, a former Monsanto official, was nominated by Bush to be second-in-command at the Environmental Protection Agency. She was Monsanto’s representative in Washington from 1995 to 2000 and co-ordinated the company’s strategy to those opposed to Genetically Modified food. Stansfield Turner, former Director of the CIA is a member of the Monsanto Board and there is Earle H. Harbison former president of Monsanto and CIA officer for 19 years. Michael Taylor worked for Monsanto as an attorney before being appointed as deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1991. While at the FDA, the authority that deals with all US food approvals, Taylor made crucial decisions that led to the approval of GE foods and crops. Then he returned to Monsanto, becoming the company’s vice president for public policy. Add to that the fact that Monsanto's chief lawyer was appointed to the Supreme Court by George Bush Sr, and you can't get better connected than that and, if my memory serves me correctly, he was also the supreme Court Judge that took the oath of George Bush Junior when he was sworn in as the US President.

During the Iraq invasion the targets included the Iraq seed stores. Records show that before the invasion Iraq farmers saved 97% of their seeds from previous harvests, but now have to buy in seed from the agrochemical consortiums under the 2004 regulations that prevent farmers from saving seed. They not only have to buy the seed but also the matched pesticides and herbicides that ensure the seed flourishes. I wonder if Mrs. Spellman will include prayers for these farmers when she hosts the 2010 Conservative Party Church Service?

Mrs. Spellman, as we know, is now the U.K. Environment Secretary and well known for her support of genetic modification after, I am informed, spending many years in the agricultural industry setting up the biotechnology lobbying firm Spelman, Cormack and Associates with her husband. Mrs. Spellman’s maiden name is Cormack. Upon appointment as Environment Secretary she immediately approved GM potato crop trials in Norfolk.

I am told that in May 2010 she resigned her Directorship of Spelman, Cormack and Associates, but the Dorridge-based company, specialising in advice involving food & pharmaceuticals, is in the hands of her husband Mark, who, I believe is also Managing Director of Accenture, a procurement company, one of Accenture’s subsidiaries being Accenture Defence, a firm procuring military equipment. Caroline Spellman’s role has been dubbed "a clear conflict of interest" by critics such as the Sunlight Centre, who campaign for greater transparency in government and recently demanded that Mrs. Spellman’s links to biotechnology be investigated.

Professor Brian Wynne was vice chairman of a steering group set up by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) to gauge the public mood on genetically modified (GM) food but Prof Wynne resigned when it became clear that the consultation was biased in favour of GM. He said the public consultation was "rigged" from the start in favour of the controversial new technology. "It is another arm of propaganda to try and push the opinion of the British public in the ‘right’ direction. In that sense it is in line with so much public policy in Britain that assumes the public is anti-science," he said.

Prof Wynne, a sociologist at Lancaster University, is the country's leading expert on public engagement with science and has also advised House of Lords and EU committees. He was vice chairman of a steering group of 11 experts appointed by the FSA in November 2009 to begin a dialogue with the public on the growing use of genetically modified crops in our food. Prof Wynne said within a few months it became clear that the consultation was "rigged" to soften up public opinion on GM. "Apparently No. 10 was lobbied by the food industry on GM, the so-called public dialogue was agreed to and passed onto the FSA," he said.

Earlier the same week another member of the group Dr Helen Wallace, Director of the non-governmental organisation Genewatch, resigned in protest at the FSA's allegedly close links with the agri-chemical industry.

The majority of the world food supplies exist on seed saving. Saved GM seeds, when replanted, do not produce anything like the same crop. I quote a comment made by a third world farmer. “There’s nothing they [the GM companies] are leaving untouched; the mustard, the okra, the oil seed plants, the rice, the cauliflower, the corn. Once they have established the norm, that seed can be owned as their property, royalties can be collected. We will depend on them for every seed we grow of every crop we grow. If they control seed, they control food, they know it, and it’s strategic. It’s more powerful than bombs. It’s more powerful than guns”.

GM is opening a Pandora’s Box of disaster. In one example of several, differing companies (GM) Transgenic Canola (rapeseed) has left many farmers’ fields in North Dakota, and is growing along roadsides at some distance from farms and, reported by the news arm of Science Journal Nature that the two differing GM Canola varieties, from Monsanto and Bayer, each resistant to a different herbicide had cross fertilised to produce a plant resistant to both of those companies herbicides, glyphosate and gluphosinate. In late 2004, “superweeds” that resisted Monsanto’s iconic “Roundup” herbicide, were reported in the U.S. media to have popped up in GM crops in the county of Macon, Georgia. Superweeds have, according to other media reports since, alarmingly appeared in other parts of Georgia, as well as South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.

Bees will fly miles and pollinate different varieties of plants with different pollen and this GM cross fertilisation will happen again and again.

Why should the general public have forced upon us a costly and unsafe genetically modified crop when God has provided us with plenty and without any dangerous to health toxins? For millennia, human civilization has subsisted perfectly well without any genetic modifications, so why now?

To see and hear more please log onto to the 'Seeds of Deception' video mentioned below in comments... Thank you.

Global Warming and Peak Oil

2010-07-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

When you read the conflicting reports of these in the media, written by journalists, politicians or environmental scientists, who do you trust?

Forget the hyperbole, and let us face simple and irrefutable facts. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have seen our air polluted by smog, acid rain and other pollutants, our water also polluted by the chemicals of industry and farming with little or no concern to the life of humanity or the plant water born life that relies on clean water for survival. A ministerial colleague talks of these signs as the ‘canary in the coalmine’, how right he is.

The earth’s resources are finite. Coal, oil and natural gas are running low. The easy and cheap sources of Middle East oil are long gone, the Canadian Tar Sands are the best example of this. The difference between the two is like walking into a pub one week and having a pint of the best bitter drawn off through a pump on the bar, and being told the next week that there is no more available, but what they are doing is to take up the carpets and steam out all the beer that has been spilt there over the years instead.

25 years ago, in the UK petrol cost 98p per gallon or 21p per litre. It now costs 119p per litre, £5:40p per gallon, the days of cheap energy are long gone. That is the main reason why car manufacturers are starting to plan and build electric cars.

The BP Gulf of Mexico oil disaster was not the first of its kind, just tap ‘Piper Alpha’ into any search engines to see that the miracle is, that in drilling down through 4 miles of rock under 1 mile of ocean, the disaster has not been repeated many times over.

The media in the UK reports that Nuclear Power is the only clean energy that will supply our future needs. This conveniently ignores the fact that it takes around 12 energy consuming years to build a Nuclear Power station, then up to 30 years to decommission it after its life span, and then nuclear waste produced will need to be securely stored for thousands of years.

The only answer is to the twin problems of Global Warming and the end of cheap oil, is to research, manufacture and produce clean renewable energy that will allow mankind to have a brighter future, and this needs to happen now... not next year... now. Mankind will not survive unless we do, the created world will survive of course, because it does not need us, but we need it.

There are organisations that have had the courage to face the facts that ase above, in the uk TRANSITION TOWN TOTNESS was the first. If you log on to the link, you will find a lot of information sbout the movement with many useful links. Another Transition Initiative is TRANITION TOWN LEWES, again well wort a visit.

A GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE...

2010-07-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

In NY USA it was ‘snowmaggedon’ this February and ‘boilmaggedon’ this July. There were record temperatures in Pakistan recently, while in the UK there is a drought in Cumbria at present, after floods in Cumbria late last year.

In December 2009 the UK MET Office forecast record world temperatures for 2010 and in April 2010 the Environmental News Service reported that March 2010 was the hottest on record. The same contrasting events have also hit Australia, floods and droughts in the same area.

Glaciers are disappearing, as is Artic ice while more and more areas are subject to water shortages,

Forget the climate sceptics.. see what the real experts at both the UK Met Office and NASA have to say, otherwise than that, trust the evidence of your own eyes and don't forget, there is no 'them and us', only 'you and I'.

As you can see from the above links, 'Global warming' actually equals 'Climate Chaos'.

Biofuel. The truth behind the spin that biofuels are the answer to energy security and dwindling oil reserves. Miles per Gallon or Meals per Gallon?

2010-06-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Industrial Biofuels are fuels produced from agricultural crops. The main agricultural crops used for biodiesel are oil seeds such as palm, soy, sunflower, rapeseed and jatropha, and for petrol, starches such as maize, (corn) wheat and sugars. In small quantities, they are easily blended with existing fuels.

In the UK two biofuel refineries will be converting about 1 million tons of wheat every year into biofuel. This could make around 15 million pitta breads a year (no, that number is not a typo!) and feed the whole population of Kenya for 25 days. Biofuels are then competing for wheat, just as are pitta breads and pitta breads are the losers, as those in poor countries cannot compete on the open market.

“While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it’s getting more and more difficult every day.” Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, 2008

The food crisis, and skyrocketing demand for industrial biofuels, are exacerbating the situation for poor people and undermining their right to food. The World Bank estimated in 2008 that the crisis had already pushed a further 100 million people into poverty. ActionAid estimated at the time that 30 million more people were now hungry as a result of biofuels.

“It is a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel.” Jean Zeigler, (speaking in 2007) United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 2000-2008

By November 2009, maize prices in Zambia, Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique were still around 60% higher than at the start of 2007; in Tanzania it was 150%. Small wonder that the food crisis sparked riots across the globe from the Philippines, Bangladesh and India; to Egypt and Senegal; and to Mexico, Haiti and El Salvador.

“Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV/4X4 with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn – which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year.” Professors Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, 2007

Industrial biofuels do not offer a solution to fuel security. Rather, industrial biofuels are fuelling poverty and hunger because they are now competing with food crops, dramatically increasing the prices that poor people pay for food worldwide. At the same time, biofuels are having disastrous local impacts on food security and land rights for many of the communities where they are grown. Industrial biofuels are the main cause of the food crisis and recent rises in hunger. Despite this, political action on hunger and biofuels has been minimal. Industrial biofuels provide a false solution that allows rich nations to continue their love affair with the internal combustion engine, and industry to continue its business-as-usual approach. It has allowed developed countries to avoid the urgent and difficult realisation that our current levels of transport fuel consumption (and energy more generally) are unsustainable and need to be reduced.

Miles per Gallon should never win over Meals per Gallon.

‘Guerrilla gardening’ in action.

2010-06-11T14:04:00.000-07:00

In the UK, Lewes, East Sussex, there is a community garden springing up in a run-down industrial estate.

A few have started starting an ‘Earth Repair’ project. They have removed the rubbish, cut back the brambles, made paths for the people who use it as a walk, making living willow arches, bowers and hideouts for children.

Reclaimed pallets are being filled with soil, edible perennials and vegetable seeds are being planted and young gardeners are teaching other people how to make compost and grow biodynamically.

In Lewes a ‘desert’ of waste land is again starting to bloom, or, as Isaiah says "Like a lily the land will blossom. It will rejoice and sing with joy".

Actions speak louder than words!

2010-05-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

There are times when the only way to get over the problems and frustrations of the daily environmental news, oil spills, floods, extreme heat, etc, etc, is to actually get down and get on with something that will combat it, however small that attempt may seem to be.

Less than a year ago, eight months to be exact, I took over an allotment garden, well, actually a part of a field that was once, many years previously (20+) an allotment. Working there certainly eases the stress and strain that the daily round entails with the next door hens clucking away, the conversation of fellow workers, the horses in the next field and the constant bird song.

I have not spent enough time on the project, or so I thought, then I looked at the photos I had taken there and realised that there had actually been a lot of progress over the period. I tend to be somewhat obsessed regarding the appearance of a project and this is no exception and a delight is that so many that have passed by on the footpath have said they enjoy my efforts.

I used to cycle around Kent when I was in my early teens and always admired the look of the hop fields, so I have replicated this construction in the support for my beans and have placed soft fruit in the centre as well as sowing wild flower seeds at the margins. Even if it is not as productive as I am hoping, the bees and the passers-by will enjoy it!

The BP Oil Rig Disaster

2010-05-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Like you I have been focussed on the BP (Beyond Pollution) oil rig disaster that recently claimed 11 lives.

It has been reported that the leaking pipe, one mile down is spewing out oil at the rate of 5,000 barrels, 210,000 gallons a day. A safety valve that was supposed to shut off the flow of oil at the seabed in case of such an accident failed to operate, and so there is no way to stop the leak. The oil well taps into one of the largest U.S. reserves, quite simply this is an unprecedented environmental disaster.

Hundreds of imperilled species in the Gulf will be harmed by the toxic oil, the full extent of the damage will not be known for years to come as the oil could pour out for three months, efforts to contain the pollution being largely ineffective. We are but spectators.

As difficult as it is to deal with an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is indescribably more difficult in the Arctic, but Obama has authorized Shell Oil to conduct exploration drilling this summer in the seas off Alaska, with the same technology that was used at the BP disaster.

Our society and its wealth is based on cheap oil, but as the more accessible sources of cheap oil run out so the price of oil goes up and it then becomes economically viable to drill and strip the less accessible areas in order to fuel societies addiction to it. Think of how a drug pusher gets clients hooked on heroin and then pushes the price up and you have a comparable analogy.

Is it worth it? The families of the 11 that died, and those along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida whose lives are going to be changed for years may well be asking themselves the same question.

Can we now put the sort of investment that is going into the clean-up operation into Solar Power? Safe, clean and cheap. We will have to make some adjustments to enable the technology to come into action, but compared to the adjustments the families of the 11 dead and those that are to be affected by the oil spill polution, these will be as nothing.

We can start the change while there is still time in order to scale down our reliance on oil, or we simply wait for reality that is to come to hit us.

The chances are that I will never see my great grandchildren

2010-03-22T02:03:00.000-07:00

But when they are born the world they will live in will be very different to today's world. They will look back on their history, that is actually our present, and ask what I did to avert the environmental disabled and oil scarce society they have inherited once I knew what was going on. They may wonder if I protested in marches, if I tried to stop creation being plundered, if I tried to lead by example, if I tried to shout out the implications of climate change for their generation but was often drowned out by those in my generation who were only interested in money and power and if I really cared about what I bought, eat, and drove. I hope and pray they do not think that I let them down.

The ‘Robin Hood Tax’; this is a tiny tax on bankers that would give billions to tackle world poverty and climate change.

2010-02-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

This tax on banks – not you or I - has the power to raise hundreds of billions every year. It could give a vital boost to the health service, schools, and the fight against child poverty as well as tackling poverty and climate change around the world.

It is simple and obvious and given the risks that the bankers took with the lives of the many that then had to bail them out, a small price to pay for the greed of many in their industry.

In the UK The Royal Bank of Scotland made a 3.6 billion pound loss. The bank, which is 84% taxpayer owned after having been supported by a 45 billion pound loan has just paid out 1.3 billion pounds in bonus payments.

Somehow this seems all wrong to me...

Have a look at the video and see what you think. The idea is not popular with the banking industry. I wonder why?

Greenwash, have you been taken in by it?

2010-02-11T02:03:00.000-08:00

Many large companies have now awakened to peoples environmental concerns, but have resorted to ‘Greenwash’ in order to appear green. Exxon Mobil screened an advert in the UK claiming that “natural gas is one of the world’s cleanest fuels”. This advert, which had wind turbines as a part of the background, was soon banned from being broadcast by the UK Advertising Standards Authority because the claim was misleading.

Sadly Greenwash is still all around and when I saw the Solar Dave Spoof Commercial below, I had to link it. It sums up much of what some advertisers feed us with today

Continued Economic Growth Is Not Possible.

2010-01-27T05:01:00.000-08:00

I am assured that we (the world it seems) are now back to a period of continued economic growth. I will happily accept the idea of continuing economic growth as soon as an economist demonstrates to me that the Earth will also grow at the same rate. Let’s face facts, indefinite global economic growth is unsustainable.

Let us imagine that an economy grows at 5% a year.

1st year 100%
2nd year 105%
3rd year 110.25%
4th year 115.76%
5th year 121.55%
6th year 127.63%
7th year 134.00%
8th year 140.71%
9th year 147.74%
10th year 155.13%
11th year 162.89%
12th year 171.03%
13th year 179.58%
14th year 188.56%
15th year 197.99%
16th year 207.89%

So, in the space of just 16 years our imagined economy is producing and consuming at over twice the rate it started at and at 20 years the figure is 252%. Isn’t this where our problems all started, when we put the word ‘gross’ (really gross) into "gross domestic product"?

Like the hampster below... it's impossible!

The world’s economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.

2010-01-25T03:19:00.000-08:00

Which is something that the majority of the world's economists, bankers and financiers somehow manage to overlook.

I was reading The Book of Revelation recently when I read with new eyes part of 11:15-19 where judgement is the subject.

"The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and those that reverence your name, both great and small and for destroying those who destroy the earth".

To use creation for selfish greed, desecrating the earth and so reducing its bio-diversity is not simply a crime against humanity it is blastpheny. It wrecks God's work of creation and blights not only those affected by Climate Change today, the poor and the vulnerable, it also blights the future of our children, grandchildren and those as yet unborn, and they are the ones that the present has actually been borrowed from.

Haiti; sometimes the world's events seem as so great as to defy comprehension...

2010-01-15T11:06:00.001-08:00

Christian Aid has launched an emergency appeal for Haiti after a major earthquake struck the country. Thousands of people are dead, many are buried alive and countless have been left homeless.

If you can help financially, however little, please click on HERE.

'The Widow's Mite'.
He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury; and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins. And he said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had." (LUKE 21:1-4)

Say It With Cans!

2010-01-09T11:39:00.001-08:00

In the part of the US where keen environmentalists Andrea and Pete live, (Spokane, Washington) you can make some money by recycling cans. This young couple have decided to get married (great) but have agreed to pay for the wedding by earning money from recycling aluminium cans, now comes the problem.... they need to recycle 400,000 cans, about 5 tons....

Since in the US there are enough aluminum cans thrown away to build 8000 Boeing 747’s every year, this is a great idea and will focus peoples concept of waste in a way that is, so far, unique.

See HERE for more detail of this amazing couple!

Water; More Important Than Oil

2010-01-04T07:05:00.000-08:00

The time of cheap and easy access to water is ending, posing a potentially greater threat to businesses than the loss of any other natural resource, including fossil fuel resources. The collapse of the world’s financial system are our warning because we live in a water 'bubble' as unsustainable as the bubble that burst in the world’s financial markets.

The Earth does not have an infinite supply of water. There is exactly the same amount of it available as there has always been. We are now, with some 6.7 billion individuals, sharing this same amount as the 300 million did at the time of the Roman Empire. Water use has been increasing per individual, during the 20th century the world population increased fourfold, but the amount of freshwater that it used increased nine times over. Almost 97.5 per cent of all water on earth is salt water, leaving only 2.5 per cent as fresh water. Nearly 70 per cent of that fresh water is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland, less than one per cent of the world's fresh water is accessible for direct human use.

The Nile is the longest river on earth wandering for more than 4000 miles. Only two per cent of Egypt’s territory is arable along the Nile River and since the building of Aswan Dam, the discharge of the River into the Mediterranean has greatly reduced. The Tigris and Euphrates River system flowing through Syria and Iraq is being overused by the dams erected in Turkey and Iraq. The Kingdom of Jordan will need about 1.54 billion cubic meters of water to meet the needs of its population by the end of next year but will actually face a shortage of almost 319 million cubic meters. For the problems the Middle east faces, see HERE.

China’s Yellow River which flows some 4000 km’s through five provinces before it reaches the Yellow Sea, has been under mounting pressure for several decades. It first ran dry in 1972 and since 1985 it has often failed to reach the sea. China has built hundreds of water dams on the Yellow River during the last 50 years especially in the upper ranges. Thus record low water levels in the River have been witnessed in recent years.

The 2,900 km long Indus River, the lifeline of Pakistan’s economy is dying a slow death due to the shrinking Tibetan glaciers and construction of dams and barrages upstream. It also happens to be the main source of water supply to Pakistan’s major cities including Karachi. The drying up of Indus River has adversely effected the growth of mangrove forests as well as the fishing industry in Pakistan.

Friction between countries triggered by problems of water scarcity is on the rise. The regions of Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa are the most vulnerable in this regard. The armed conflict between Israel and Palestine over the Jordan river has been going on for more than 50 years and is getting worse by the day on account of increasing water shortage. Disagreements over water are also erupting along the Mekong River in Indo-China as well as around what remains of the Aral Sea in Eastern Europe. There have been longstanding disputes between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over the control of Nile River.

Lake Chad of Central Africa which supports some 30 million people has, due to global warming, shrunk to one-tenth of its former size over the past three decades. The conflict in Darfur owes its origin to decreasing water supply and the consequent shortage of pastures. In Kenya in January 2005 thousand of people fled their homes due to clashes over water in Kenya’s Rift valley.

Few years back, clashes broke out between two southern Indian states, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over access to Cauvery River which flows from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu. Karnataka blamed Tamil Nadu of wasting water and expanding its irrigated land, while in the US, hydrologists have declared thirty-six states of the country as ‘water-stressed’ states.

There are some alternatives available for oil, but none whatsoever for water.

In the rush and noise of the last few days, please listen to this...

2009-12-23T11:31:00.001-08:00

May God bless and keep you all...

Copenhagen – Success or Failure?

2009-12-22T16:41:00.000-08:00

Overall, it may seem as a failure, because the big polluters US and China wanted a weak agreement. President Obama was heavily constrained by Congress captured by lobbyists from a front group for the largest corporations in the polluting lobby, including oil and coal companies like Exxon Mobil. They were major backers of President George W Bush, and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars blocking Obama's attempts at change.

People were out in force in Copenhagen while polluter lobbyists worked in the shadows, their voices loud only in our politicians' ears.
US negotiator Todd Stern said that as far as the US was concerned the fact that climate change was happening as a result of emissions from rich countries had no relevance to the negotiations. You may have heard or read that the African countries walked out of the negotiations at one point, well this was due to the fact that the Danish hosts prevented discussion on the only legally binding agreement there is, the Kyoto Protocol.

"Copenhagen's failure was the inevitable result of rich countries refusing to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility for global warming" said Christian Aid's senior climate change advocacy officer, Nelson Muffuh.

So what good did come out of it?

There were world-wide demonstrations for climate justice, in London alone around 60,000 took part in a march, and I was one of them
100,000 marched in Copenhagen
Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered a staggering 512,894 Copenhagen pledges to the United Nations in front of a crowd of thousands.
There were 3000 know climate vigils held in 140 countries.
As I write this an Avaaz climate petition now has almost 15 million signatories.
Faith groups combined under the Odyssey Network, these included Anglican, Buddhist, Hindu, Lutheran, Methodist, Muslim, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic.

As Edmund Burke was said to remark, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing” and in my books, as in the YouTube video above, good people have been doing and will continue doing much.

Faith Groups Unite at Copenhagen

2009-12-14T10:16:00.000-08:00

Odyssey Networks is a UK coalition of Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith groups promoting tolerance, peace, and social justice through media production. The video above is of a joint initiative for climate justice by two young people, one Christian and one Muslim.

I found it inspirational, I hope you do also.

Carbon Trading & Cap and Trade can be likened to the person you love most paying someone to be celibate while having as many affairs as they like...

2009-12-03T03:18:00.001-08:00

... so as you can imagine, it will appeal to some people...

If you would like to see an easy explanation of how this 'works', please click onto the attached lower link.

The Story of Cap and Trade

Posted using ShareThis

Our Atmosphere Needs Protecting.

2009-11-26T06:03:00.000-08:00

So, just how far away is 'space'? The Federation Aeronautique Internationale has established this to be an altitude of 100 km or 62 miles, NASA considers people to be astronauts once they've travelled higher than 80 km (50 miles).

Oxygen in the atmosphere runs starts to run low at 12,000 feet, about 2 ¼ miles and Mount Everest, you have to be very fit to climb her, is ‘only’ 5.497 miles high and many have died there without oxygen.

The NASA image seen on the left shows just how thin the earth's atmosphere is relative to the earths's size, evident in its radius. This scene captures the silhouette of several thunderstorms with their cirrus anvil tops spreading out against the tropopause, the first dark blue line over the earth. The height of this varies according to where it in Lattitude, it can be between 6 and 8 miles high and temperatures can be as low as - 80c.

It is the thin area below this that needs our protection and the reason why pollution control is so important in maintaining God's creation for future generations.

Good Environmental News

2009-11-12T06:01:00.000-08:00

There are times when I wonder if the environmental movement in general looks at the environmental problems and forgets about the environmental successes. These are usually seen at a local or small level and yet often have a huge impact for the environmental cause. The following is one such local level initiative.

Our village had an allotment field (community garden) which is owned by the parish council. This had fallen into disuse over the years and had not been used for at least 20 years except to graze horses. With the increased awareness of environmental concerns generally and local food production in particular, one of the parish councillors thought it would be a good idea to get the field back into use again as individual allotment gardens.

After managing to get a grant and getting the work organised to reinstate the field in order to provide new fencing, gates, a water supply, marking out and initial allotment rotivating, the individual in question then held their breath, concerned as to whether or not the 12 allotment gardens would be taken up.

Within two weeks they all were and now the area is a hive of activity with some chickens as well as vegetables on the allotments. Last week I passed one of the allotment holders walking back from the allotment with the vegetables he was about to cook for dinner, food miles had been reduced to food yards.

Some are sharing their allotments; a group of three have got together and have formed a hen and egg syndicate on one allotment, and a local community has sprung into life. One of the allotment holders said to me recently that she had spoken to more local people in the last 2 weeks that she had over the last 20 years.

There is so much that is going on in the environmental field by such as you and I and from Transition Towns to planting a single seed each and every initiative is a success and I sometimes think that we do, at times, overlook them.

A Global Warming Warning Advert That Has Upset So Many... Why, could it be that the truth is inconvenient?

2009-11-02T02:48:00.000-08:00

I must admit to being amazed by the response to this UK TV advert, especially from our U.S. cousins. The comments being made are that those that agree with the adverts sentiments are Nazis, Communists and Marxists, one individual suggested that we in the UK move to 'the land of the free.'

I am not a fan of the present UK government but when they get things right, and they do get things rights, just as Her Majesty’s opposition gets things wrong, then I am in support of their actions.

I have been involved in environmental concerns over the last 25 years and one of the causes for this is my concern about what kind of environmental legacy we are going to leave our children and grandchildren. This advert then gives a voice to all of my concerns and I was more than pleased that our government had the courage to have it made.

There are, of course, some scientists and experts who do disagree with those that consider the advert's science to be correct, just as there were indeed eminent scientists, doctors and experts that said that there was no danger of lung cancer from smoking... they were wrong as well.

Harnessing the power of the oceans and seas

2009-10-23T03:48:00.000-07:00

Here in the UK we are surrounded by the sea, and yet the non-stop tides that are an unending part are seemingly ignored as a source of never ending carbon free cheap energy.

A way of harnessing this resource is an ‘energy island’. This is basically an outer ring, rather like an atoll, but with the inner area sealed off from the surrounding water. The island would use wind power to pump out the water from the inner area and then generate electricity by allowing water from the outer to again enter the inner via electricity generating turbines.

There are already wind turbines in the some offshore UK locations, as indeed there are all around the world, and the spare capacity they generate could, if this type of ‘island’ was constructed around them, mean that the potential energy in the trapped water would be the same as the trapped energy in a battery. Often the criticism levelled against renewable energy, especially wind energy, is that it may not be available at times of need, but with this Dutch system, that perceived problem could be overcome.

An attraction of this concept is that it potentially allows a large amount of new energy storage to be brought online quickly and, compared to nuclear or ‘clean’ coal, cheaply, and most importantly this storage would be along the world's coastlines, where most of the world’s population lives.

The power of the seas and the oceans are the most overlooked of the big renewable energy resources and yet they are there 24hrs a day 365 days a year.

THE PROOF OF GLOBAL WARMING... On Blog Action Day.

2009-10-15T01:33:00.000-07:00

As a part of Global Warming the world is experiencing many '100 year
only events. many of these are extremes in weather, extreme storms
are but one, and you can find more details of these HERE.

Rising sea levels threaten many low lying areas and countries are
facing disaster, the Maldives is one. For more details see
HERE.

The above is the breaking up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, for more
details, see HERE.

In Bolivia, the glacier melt water that many rely on for life has
all but gone. For more detail see HERE.

The picture above is of Terry Cochrane in the U.S., and the dock that he is
standing on should be on water 30 to 40 feet deep where he is. For more
details see HERE and HERE.

The above is Scotland in early September this year,for more
details see HERE.

In Kenya, the drought will effect millions and bring starvation
to many, for more details see HERE.

Australia has been gripped in many areas by drought conditions,
as a result recent high winds have caused Dust Bowl conditions
in Sydney, for more details see HERE.

For more details of the demise of Lake Chad, one of the worlds
biggest inland seas, click HERE.

Save the Rainforests - The Prince's Rainforest Project

2009-10-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

Due to destructive logging activity and the clearing of land for large-scale farming, both offer high financial returns, the world's rainforests are being destroyed at an alarming rate, and the deforestation threatens the many vital ecosystem benefits that these forests provide.

Cutting down and burning tropical forests to clear the land in this way enables rainforest nations to provide globally traded commodities, such as timber, palm oil, beef, cocoa, coffee, rubber, bio fuels and soy as well as mining and cattle ranching.

The world’s population is likely to increase from 6 billion to 9 billion over the next 40 years. This population growth, combined with rising incomes, will lead to a continual increasing demand for food, animal feed and fuel. And this, in turn, will lead to more destruction of rainforests – with devastating effects for everyone.

Rainforests benefit us all, not just those who live in the nations in which they are found. They store water, regulate rainfall and are home to over half of the planet's biodiversity, but most importantly, they absorb and store carbon dioxide (CO2). So they play a critical role in helping to limit the amount of fossil fuel emissions (greenhouse gases) that build up in our atmosphere every year. To make matters worse, when they are cut down and burned as they are at the present rate, they are releasing more emissions than the entire global transport sector!

Rainforests absorb almost a fifth of the world’s man-made CO2 emissions every year. But tropical deforestation releases an extra 17% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. It is these emissions that are causing global warming. In simple terms, if we didn't have any rainforests to absorb CO2, the temperature of the earth would rise, as would sea levels.

Climate change is already happening. We can all see it all around us in the unexpected weather patterns, the flooding, even plants flowering earlier than usual. We are no longer in a position where we can reverse this process, but we might be able to slow the process down to manageable proportions, even if we cannot stop it completely.

In the past 50 years, a third of the world's rainforests have been felled and burned, and deforestation continues, now at the rate of 15 million hectares per year, the equivalent of approximately 8.5 million soccer pitches a year, or 23,483 a day. Although this deforestation averages a loss of less than 1% of the forests per year, it is believed that after the loss of 30-40% of a rainforest that the remaining forest ecosystem may become so destabilised that it will collapse.

In 2007 The Prince of Wales, following reports from the top climate change experts and scientists including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Inaugurated The Prince's Rainforests Project (PRP,)in order to promote the urgent need to take action against tropical deforestation. The Prince of Wales has long been concerned about climate change and about how destruction of the world's rainforests contributes to rising temperatures and sea levels and as a prominent public figure has often faced appalling sarcasm and criticism for his views.

I am a huge fan of the prince's environmental aims and opinions, as he has the courage to stand up and be counted for what he knows is right. For many of us his views may not have been new, but we are the very, very small minority and Prince Charles certainly reaches the parts of society that so many of us will never even have a chance get near.

In The Prince’s own words: "If deforestation can be stopped in its tracks, then we will be able to buy ourselves some much-needed time to build the low carbon economies on which our futures depend. I have endeavoured to create a global public, private and NGO partnership to discover an innovative means of halting tropical deforestation. Success would literally transform the situation for our children and grandchildren and for every species on the planet."

Please visit the site via this link and, if your are able, sign via the below.

Blessings.

UN Climate Change Conference, Climate Week and 'The Age of Stupid'.

2009-09-18T03:42:00.000-07:00

The Age of Stupid Global Premiere Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

During the week of September 20th, 2009, hundreds of government and business leaders from around the world will converge upon New York City for a series of high-level meetings and events focused on the most urgent issue of our time: climate change. This takes place just seventy days before the UN Climate Change Conference.

This "Climate Week" starts off 7 days of events in New York. The summit's purpose is to get world leaders together in advance of the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

Climate Week will be a high-power event because UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for this emergency meeting, and both Barack Obama and Hu Jintao will be giving landmark speeches.

The film trailer above (it may take a few moments to load... please be patient) is for an unprecedented global film event, the eco-premiere of the critically hailed documentary THE AGE OF STUPID. This will be broadcast live from New York City's World Financial Center on Monday September 21 to more than 700 locations in over 50 countries simultaneously, uniting nearly one million people for climate change reform during Climate Week NYC, setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest single screen shared audience experience ever.

This film has already had vocal condemnation from some quarters, much as Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' did. I am always heartened when certain parts of the media attack something like this as I am then certain that my thoughts, opinions and ideas are correct.

The truth is just as inconvenient now as it was 2000 years ago, but it cannot be silenced.

TERRA PRETA – CARBON GOLD & CRABON CAPTURE

2009-09-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

When plants grow they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Under the normal carbon cycle when plants die they either rot or are burnt and the carbon they absorbed is returned to the atmosphere but although this is better than using fossil fuels for compost or heating/light, the process does not remove carbon from the atmosphere. The same applies to Bio fuel. The crops from which bio fuels are made take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while they are growing, but as soon as that bio fuel is used, the carbon is returned to the atmosphere through emissions. If, instead, waste biomass is turned into Biochar, it can be buried in the ground, locking in the carbon for hundreds or even thousands of years and have a positive impact on crop outputs.

I recently went to see a pilot system of making Biochar. The Biochar in this case was small branches that would normally be burnt or used for wood chippings. The project I looked at uses a sealed system so the gasses from the wood actually burn the wood, and 90% of the carbon is still locked in the Biochar.

But what then do we do with this material?

Scientists have known for years that adding Biochar could improve soil fertility. The early Amazonian Indians introduced Biochar to their soil over 3,000 years ago, forming the Terra Preta, black soil which remains fertile to this day. It is only recently that the reasons why this happened have been understood. Biochar is extremely porous; the surface is like a sponge. This encourages the growth of micro-organisms which produce enzymes that release the mineral ions trapped by the heat stabilized plant resins in the charcoal and make it available to the root hairs of the plant as nutrients. Furthermore, the resins within the charcoal act like an ion exchange resin, absorbing traces of mineral ions onto the charcoal particle surfaces from the rain water, and trapping it within the charcoal’s molecular structure. The trace minerals always present in rainwater actually act as a fertilizer - providing the nutrients needed by the crops, year after year.

Or as Johannes Lehmann - Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A said, “Important lessons can be learned from Terra Preta about development of civilization in the Amazon, basic functioning of soils, carbon sequestration, and sustainable land use”. I especially liked that last point, ‘sustainable land use’.

So we have a win-win situation, we create Biochar, locking the C02 away, and also create a proven fertiliser.

The systems to enable this are totally unsophisticated, as you can see. The materials are cheap and easy to obtain, a few building blocks, a sheet of metal and some oil drums. In the retort you can see in my photo’s the gas tight seal was obtained by a liberal application of Sussex clay, obtained from underfoot, while the trees that provided the wood grew around us. If you would like to know more about the Carbon-Gold project, please see HERE.

Genesis 1:12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

And not just good for beauty and food either it seems.

Let's dump the 'Disposable Economy'.

2009-09-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was on holiday in France recently when I heard a couple discussing the price of disposable nappies/diapers. When our son was a baby we only used cotton items with a disposable (paper) liner and when they were no longer needed we sold most of them as they were still in perfect condition. We certainly never had any problems with rashes etc. In the UK it is estimated that, based on sales, there are 690,000 tonnes of nappy waste each year; most of which are land filled.

In the UK, Throwaway products arrived in the 50’s and sold as convenience items that would also boost the economy, in fact one products proud boast was “You use it once, then you throw it away!”

The trickle of items turned into a flood, and now it is hard to find the original items as paper has taken over from cloth for handkerchiefs, dish cloths, table cloths and napkins, plastic has taken over from glass for liquid containers, paper for wrapping and cloth for bags. It all has to go somewhere, as this place, ‘away,’ does not actually exist. In the UK it is estimated that the last landfill site will shut in 2020 and that those around London will be full by 2010. In addition to running out of landfill in the UK, the world is running out of the cheap oil needed to produce, through manufacture and raw materials, these throwaway items.
This problem is worldwide; China,India, and the other emerging economies also have problems because they now want the living standards of the West.

So now for the surprising figures!

If China and India had two cars for every family, the UK average, then China and India would have more cars than the rest of the world combined. By 2030 China is estimated to need, at the present rate of use, 98 million barrels of oil a day, so say goodbye to the Western lifestyle for your children and grandchildren.

The facts are obvious, the Western throwaway economy will not work for China nor for India, which by 2030 may have a larger population than China, and what of the rest of the world that wants the Western way of life, where will they get their oil, food and water from?

We all must work for a replacement economic way of life with renewable energy, and a reduced consumption of recyclable or multi-use products. What constantly amazes me is that we have the technology to do this now.

The World's Climate Tipping Point!

2009-08-20T05:37:00.000-07:00

For those not in the UK, the Conservative party is one of our three main political groups and may well form the next government. I was reading a booklet from them about local government and the environment when the following sentence stopped me in my tracks.

“It is too late to avoid climate change but taking action now could avoid it’s more extreme and dangerous impacts”.

In plain language we have passed the point of no return, the tipping point so long warned about and yet so long ignored by the vast majority. We know the result of tipping points in nature, once a species numbers fall below a certain level it becomes unsustainable and numbers will dwindle to zero, the same happens in the worlds fishing grounds, numbers fall and the fishing grounds are fished out. Earlier civilisations have gone through tipping points. The irrigation-related salt build up in the Sumerian soil overwhelmed the capacity to deal with it and for the Mayans a time came when the effects of deforestation and then the follow on loss of topsoil were unmanageable. For more info see HERE

Social tipping points are not easy to define, but obviously the more developed parts of the world can, and does, have the resources to deal a new threat or threats far more effectively than the undeveloped countries. AIDS is the most obvious example of the ability as infection rates in the developed world are less than 1% in some undeveloped countries it is around 20%. Nearly 80 million people are added to the world’s population each year, yet the majority of them are born within in countries among the least able to support them. These ever increasing pressures on a struggling economy and infrastructure are leading to social breakdown.

Although for the developed areas water shortages are lawn threatening rather than life threatening in many countries this is not the case, in India and other parts of Asia The need to cut carbon emissions has been blindingly obvious for many years now, but so far there is not a single carbon neutral country. Technically possible, yes, but is it politically possible???

Oil abstraction has peaked, and although the ‘popular news media’ talks this threat down, I was amazed to find confirmation of this fact in the investment focused MoneyWeek where there was also the warning "The planet's metal supply is fast depleting, and the quality of what's left is lower, where 30 tons of copper ore once produced a ton of copper, it now takes 500 tons, even water's running out”. The number one issue is, of course food and water, the Sumerian and Mayan civilisations are the long-gone evidence of this.

The effects of the Climate Chaos we have no option but to deal with are now causing heat waves in various countries, but these will not only affect them, but also us as the Tropical Zone is now expanding, also see HERE and HERE.

The World’s tipping point is past, the next problem is in our countries political systems, can they pass the tipping point of understanding regarding Climate Change while we are still able to take , as the booklet I quoted from said “action now could avoid it’s more extreme and dangerous impacts”. We have the technologies available to enable us to stabilise the Earth’s climate, just as we have to feed the hungry and heal the sick, the question is though, is the political will of the voters there also?

In Revelation 21:1 we are promised a “new heaven and a new Earth.” I have often wondered if this is because the old earth has been damaged beyond repair. At the time of Revelation, when God looks at the damage that has been done to His creation and asks who is responsible I want to be able to say ‘not guilty’, are you going to join me?

Roof Top Gardens, when the only way is up!

2009-08-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

At-risk teens who live at Covenant House, a Christian run open to all homeless shelter in New York, have decided that they want to make a change in the city they call home and have set about to create a citywide “skyscraper garden” across Manhattan.

The roof of a nine-story building in Manhattan is their first project that they have completed and was done in collaboration with ‘Seeding the City’.
Through the program they will be water and tending the seedlings that will be planted on other roofs around the city. The hope is that by the time they are done they will have help to create a rooftop garden that is spread across the whole city.

Covenant House began over 30 years ago when six young runaways were given shelter from a snowstorm, in Manhattan. Covenant House now has programs in 21 U.S. cities and in Latin America. More than 77,000 young people at risk are aided annually by Covenant House in its national and international programs and the New York centre deals with nearly 7,000 young people a year, providing safety, shelter, food, and a listening ear.

The goal of the project is to get the young people to think outside of themselves and about their community and their affect on the environment. In addition, with the national emphasis on green jobs, Covenent House staff wanted to raise the awareness of potential green job opportunities.

When on The Cross Jesus promised one of those with Him "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise." The meaning of the word 'paradise' in the the language Jesus used is a garden enclosed by a wall, created in order to encourage new life and enjoy its contemplation.

So this roof top garden certainly qualifies then, and in more ways than one.

Solar power cuts down pollution, and is part of the answer to Third World energy poverty.

2009-07-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

The sun provides enough energy in one hour to supply the needs of the earth for one year. Those in most need of energy are those in the Third World, yet in the main they are in the areas where there are the most sunlight hours.

Solar lighting enables hospitals, homes and businesses in the third world to operate in safer conditions when it gets dark, as often the only other available source of light is from paraffin lamps which are fire hazards and give off toxic fumes. In India alone the average household without access to electricity uses around 120 litres of expensive paraffin a year, which equates to around 310 kg of carbon released into the atmosphere, multiply this by millions and I am sure you will get the picture. In the poorest and remotest areas of the world, where paraffin is not available, the inhabitants have to use wood for lighting as well as cooking and these are usually the areas where wood is a now a scarce resource. Were you aware of the fact that inhaling smoke from indoor fires is the fourth greatest cause of death and disease in the third world?

A UK based charity, Solar Aid, has the aim of fighting both global poverty and climate change by bringing clean, renewable energy to the world’s poorest people.

Please play the above video and see just what can be done for so little cost and wonder, perhaps, why governments are not involved.

Deuteronomy 4:19 And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.

So the power of the sun is for all people and for such little cost, they can be enabled to share it...

This video was made in the Antwerp , Belgium Central (Train) Station on the 23rd of March 2009.

2009-07-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

With no warning to the passengers passing through the station, at 08:00 am a recording of Julie Andrews singing 'Do, Re, Mi' begins to play on the public address system. As the bemused passengers watch in amazement, some 200 dancers begin to appear from the crowd and station entrances.

They created this amazing event with just two rehearsals.

If you have had a bad day or feel down or jaded, this will make you smile, and when it does, pass it on. After all, if you were in a group headed by someone that could turn water into wine, you would smile a lot.

Job 8:21 He will yet fill your mouth with laughter
and your lips with shouts of joy.

“Why are you still an environmentalist?”

2009-07-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

The question to me was well meant, after all I have been shouting about the environmental problems for well over 25 years now, but the next remark made me think deeply.

“Don’t you see that it is almost hopeless?”

My answer was that at first I thought that I could change people before it was too late for the environment, but even when I realised that this was a near impossibility I still had to go on.

“Why?” was the next question.

My answer surprised me; I had to carry on because even if I could not change people, what I certainly did not want, was for them to change me.

Funding for Climate Change and Global Warming deniers

2009-07-09T00:32:00.000-07:00

Imagine the situation. YOU are the director of a large multi-national company that relies on the use or sale of of fossil fuel, say coal or oil, in order to pay your salary when along comes someone that points out that what you are doing, business wise, is destroying the future environment. What do you do, do you say ‘quite correct’, change things and risk shareholders wrath and risk losing your profitability, bonus and lifestyle, or do you rubbish the messenger calling him, her or them ‘long hair hippies’, ‘bleeding hearted tree hugging environmentalists’ or ‘religious creationist nutcases?’

OK, so you have taken the line of least resistance and gone the second route, after all, you have the advertising revenue and so control over much of the media. It all works to your plan, then along comes respected and influential Al Gore and says that the long haired tree huggers etc are right... what next?

Easy, you rubbish Al Gore and that way you also rubbish all those that agree with him!

Do you remember the cigarette industries promotion of those that said that smoking did not harm your health and criticism of those that said it did? Don’t lose sight of that image and read on.

To directly oppose the climate change lobby would seem, for an fossil fuel reliant company as being a tad incorrect, but how about funding bodies that oppose them? For instance, in the UK there was a film on TV called the ‘Great Global warming Swindle’ that was peddled as the answer to Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. This argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940. A pivotal point in the film was the use of a graph showing that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, according to the film, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.

The program makers labeled the source of the world temperature data as "NASA" but it turned out that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate skeptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

Recently Al Gore, (and by implication all that agree with him) has been again attacked by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (a think-tank that had close links with the Bush administration) in the US with misinformation, ‘Greenwash’ and adverts in that fly in the face of the facts about the problems of Global Warming. With more than a $3 million annual budget, CEI is supported by both conservative foundations and corporate funding. Known corporate funders in addition to ExxonMobil include the American Petroleum Institute, Cigna Corporation, Dow Chemical, EBCO Corp, General Motors, and IBM.

Company accounts have shown that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to such lobby groups. In 2008 recipients included the National Centre for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000, and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published "misleading and inaccurate information about climate change." Examples given by Ward include a Heritage Foundation report that said: "Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007". Scientists, including those at the UK Met Office disagree with this. Ward also cited that an NCPA comment that "while the causes and consequences of the earth's current warming trend is still unknown, the cost of actions to substantially reduce CO2 emissions would be quite high and result in economic decline, accelerated environmental destruction, and do little or nothing to prevent global warming regardless of its cause" was misleading and inaccurate.

For over a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming. While it did its own scientists were advising that the evidence was exactly the opposite. William O’Keefe, at one time a leader of the Global Climate Coalition was a senior official of the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for oil companies.

Scientists and economists were offered $10,000 each by the AEI to undermine a major climate change report. Letters sent by them offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012.

A passage from the UN Development Program's 2007 Human Development Report stated that "Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. Failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem."

CEI adverts state that a robust climate bill would cause "death on a massive scale" and "absolute disaster" in developing countries...

The words of Psalm 5:9 come to mind “Not a word from their mouth can be trusted; their heart is filled with destruction. Their throat is an open grave; with their tongue they speak deceit.

A dummies guide to Climate Change. (Even I can understand it)

2009-07-01T23:51:00.000-07:00

The Earth's climate has always varied, so the term climate change is now generally used to describe the changes caused by human activity - specifically, greenhouse emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane, which build up in the atmosphere and trap heat.

Is it the same as global warming?

As human activity increases the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere far beyond their natural levels, means that much more heat is trapped. Hence, the term climate change is often used interchangeably with global warming but the term 'global warming' is most certainly not a technicaly accurate term, because 'global warming' causes more extreme weather conditions and these will vary depending on the location. The winters may be longer and colder in one country or countries while rain becomes heavier, causing floods in others. At the same time droughts will take place in other parts of the world. The problem is that people confuse 'weather' (local) with 'climate' (world-wide).

Can it be explained by natural causes?

Earth's surface measurement show that average temperatures have increased by 0.4C since the 1970s, scientists are confident this change can be blamed on human emissions because the increase cannot be explained by natural causes. Although natural factors such as changes in the sun and large volcanic eruptions are known to have warmed and cooled the planet in the past, these effects are not powerful enough to explain the rapid warming seen recently. Only an increased greenhouse effect caused by higher amounts of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere can explain it.

What is the main greenhouse gas?

Surprisingly for many, water vapour in the atmosphere produces the strongest greenhouse effect, but it has been in balance for millions of years. Human emissions have tipped that balance, think of it as being the last straw. Carbon dioxide is the chief greenhouse gas produced by human activity. It is produced when we burn the fossil fuels: oil, gas and coal and the carbon dioxide locked in them is released. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm). Before the industrial revolution, the carbon dioxide level was about 280ppm; we know this because of ice core analysis. It is now 386ppm and rising by 2-3ppm each year. When other greenhouse gases such as methane are included, the total level in the atmosphere, known as the carbon dioxide equivalent, is closer to 440ppm.

What future temperature rise is expected?

Scientists say continued emissions will cause the planet to heat up further. To work out how much, they use computer models based on the programs used to predict the weather. These models are certainly not perfect. The more we know the more we realise that we have a lot to learn, but running different models and taking an average of the results, the predictions are that with emissions increase at the present rate, average temperatures will most likely increase by 4C by 2100. There are uncertainties, though - for example, the planet's oceans, forests and soils, such as the permafrost tundra could release their massive stocks of methane as the world warms, leading to much greater temperature rises than human emissions alone..

Why are warmer temperatures bad?

Most plants and animals live in a narrow ecological niche. Some are able to adapt or move to find their desired conditions, those that cannot will perish. Some animals, such as the penguin and polar bear, will have nowhere to move to. A warmer climate will affect agriculture and water availability. Increased temperatures are also expected to limit rainfall in some regions and bring more extreme weather events such as storms to others. Sea levels will rise - gradually at first as the extra warmth works its way into the oceans and makes them expand; more quickly if the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and west Antarctica start to break up.

How can we tackle Global Warming?

It takes time for the heat to build up in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time and so there is a lag in the system, which means the effect of any changes will not be felt for decades. Put bluntly, we are headed for about another 0.5C of warming whatever we do. The global warming supertanker is, at present, still running on. Scientists say the only realistic way at present is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How to do that - and where - is a political hot potato as this will involve unpopular government action and just how unpopular will be shown at the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, The Copenhagen Climate change talks.

So what are the Kyoto protocol and the Copenhagen climate talks?

The world's only existing treaty to limit emissions, the Kyoto protocol, had very limited success, and expires in 2012. Politicians are working to develop a replacement that would include countries excluded from Kyoto, such as China, and those that refused to join, such as the US. The Kyoto agreement was continually watered down and was eventually known as ‘Kyoto Light’. From December 7, environment ministers and officials will meet in Copenhagen to agree out a successor to Kyoto. This two week event is the crucial opportunity to create an international agreement on meaningful cuts in emissions that will prevent the worst consequences of climate change. This event is the world wake up call.

Can renewable energy help?

Yes! We already have the vast majority of the technology we need to bring down emissions significantly. These include renewable energy sources such as windmills, geothermal and solar panels, as well as more efficient cars and power stations.

What about carbon trading?

The idea of Carbon Trading is that a country or a group of countries (i.e. the EU) agree a maximum emissions level and companies are then given, or must purchase Carbon Credits. If a company does not use their Carbon Credit to the full, by cutting down on their pollution, they can sell the unused Credits on the open market. This may sound good, but in the EU the number of permits issued was so high that the resale value was minimal and so there was no incentive for business to cut down on pollution.

What about carbon offsetting?

I regard this as an excuse not to change our behaviour. The idea that you can pollute by flying then remove the effect of the high level pollution by paying someone to plant a tree is Alice in Wonderland environmentalism! In addition this is, in the main, an unregulated market.

What about storing the CO2 underground or blocking the sun?

One technology that would allow us to continue burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil without increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere is carbon capture and storage (CCS). This involves extracting CO2 at power stations then pumping it underground. OK, this sounds good, but does not, at yet, exist other than in small scale testing situations, although to listen to UK government ministers you may assume that it is already in place. A more drastic approach is so-called geo-engineering. These are major technological fixes such as seeding clouds to bounce some of the sun's radiation back into space or stimulating the growth of algae in the oceans to soak up CO2. These are much more speculative, but John Holdren, Barack Obama's scientific adviser, is contemplating them.

What do the real experts say?

The leading UK scientists are at the Met Office, and you can find their Climate Change information HERE, the Climate Projection page will show you what your children/grandchildren will inherit from this generation. The leading US scientists are at NASA and you can find their information HERE, and while you look at the NASA site, run you curser over the 'Vital signs of the planet'at the top of the home page.

What can I do about it?

Act locally, think globally. Turn off lights when you are not in the room and use energy saving bulbs. Turn off standby appliances, insulate, buy local produce from local providers and local shops. If you are in the UK do you really need green beans from Kenya in January or strawberries from Egypt in March?

If at all possible, grow your own food, cut down on car mileage, cut down on plastic packaging, avoid ready meals and the associated manufacture, packaging, storage and transport environmental costs. Recycle, Repair, Reuse, and Respect God's amazing creation, because when He first made it, it was good.

Just those few items above will make a huge difference to the environment, both local and worldwide, to your pocket, and to your health.

PS. The next post will be about the multinational companies that finance climate change denial groups, misinformation adverts and greenwash...

The Amazon, Chevron /Texaco and the rest... is this the true cost?

2009-06-22T03:33:00.001-07:00

The Amazon basin covers over seven million square kilometres in nine countries, contains the world's largest tropical rainforest, houses nearly fifty percent of the planet's terrestrial biodiversity and is being devastated by deforestation in order to strip it unsustainably of its natural resources.

The in progress and proposed large-scale development projects, such as as new roads, power lines, oil & gas pipelines, dams, and massive timbering operations are financed by economic globalisation. These projects blight millions of hectares of pristine frontier rainforests and the lives of the indigenous people who depend on these forests for their physical and cultural survival.

To take one event of many that happen in the Amazon, just outside the Northern Peruvian town of Bagua, indigenous people were protesting against the free trade decrees issued by President Garcia under special powers granted by Congress in the context of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. This had been going on for 56 days without incident when, in the early hours of June 5th, police began to approach the demonstrators as they were sleeping along the Fernando Belaúnde Terry road and fired teargas grenades and live ammunition. Eyewitnesses report that police also attacked from both sides firing live rounds into the crowd as people fled into surrounding steep hillsides, many becoming trapped.

This resulted in 25 protesters confirmed dead and over one hundred wounded, although the actual figures may be far higher as many eyewitnesses in Bagua reported that they saw police throw the bodies of the dead into the Marañon River from a helicopter in an apparent attempt by the Government to underreport the number of indigenous people killed by police. Hospital workers in Bagua Chica and Bagua Grande corroborated that the police took bodies of the dead from their premises to an undisclosed location. Several people reported that there were bodies lying at the bottom of a deep crevasse up in the hills, about a mile from the incident site, but when the Church and local leaders went to investigate, the police stopped them from approaching the area.

So how was this reported in the West? The main report was in the LA Times under the headline ‘Insurgents threaten Peru's Stability’ and that ‘Protests by indigenous communities over oil drilling and mining in the Peruvian Amazon region turned violent Friday, leaving at least 13 people dead in clashes with police and subsequent rioting’.

It is difficult to report on events thousands of miles away and I have been checking this out as thoroughly as possible, hence the gap between posts, but the inescapable facts are that when both witnesses describe and readily available photographs show armed police in full riot gear on the ground and in helicopters firing teargas grenades and live rounds on unarmed protesters wearing shorts and t-shirts it is quite easy to work out what occurred.

There are more images of the above event HERE and details of the Chevron/Texaco involvement in the Amazon disaster HERE

I wrote this and remembered St. Paul’s words in Corinthians that “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres".

The events that I have described above, the killing young men, woman and children who are concerned enough to protest about their future and the destruction of their environment is simply 100% evil.

It is the answer to our environmental problems.

2009-06-11T12:30:00.001-07:00

“What difference can I make?” I hear this question on many occasions when the global environmental problems are mentioned. Another comment is “The problems are massive, I feel that’s it’s a case of ‘Eat Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we die’, don’t you?”

Well, actually, no I don’t!

Do you remember the story of David and Goliath? There is no way David should have won, but he did. What about Nelson Mandela, he was imprisoned for 27 years and yet ended up as South Africa’s first Black president. He supported reconciliation lead the transition towards multi-racial democracy in South Africa and has been praised by many including former opponents. On a more recent scale, James Dyson took ten years to get his vacuum cleaner onto the market, because no existing manufacturer wanted to make it.

All the above did what they did because they knew what was right. To hell with what almost all believed was impossible they had right on their side and despite popular opinion and the odds that were stacked against them they were not going to give up.

Opinion Pollsters publish the results of their efforts and inform us what is possible and the environmental movement, we are told, is simply a ‘Green Bubble’. I wonder what the odds the pollsters would have given David’s chances against Goliath, or Nelson Mandela’s chances of becoming President Mandela, or of Dyson’s vacuum cleaner making it to production...

It’s the backyard vegetable gardener who is disparaged as ecologically insignificant by many, but the chaos theory shows how the flap of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane, and as Rosa Parks showed an individual action can start a chain reaction.

So, what if the backyard gardener believes that what is important is to do what is right, and by dedication and example in looking for a better way to live, for themselves and their families, others begin to question the way that they live? What if in their questioning others look closely at the way they live and the resources they use?

Believe in yourself, because while you you may not be a backyard gardener, you are the butterfly’s wings.

Please left click the picture because you are never to old or to young to start.

Roz Savage, environmental campaigner par excellence

2009-06-04T12:58:00.001-07:00

I am a huge fan of this young woman (and not for simply the reason that may first come to your mind either) because this British ocean rower is an eco activist who came to prominence in 2005, when after 11 years as a management consultant, she embarked upon a new career by rowing solo 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.

It is an unlikely and amazing transformation from a late 30 year old office worker to a 40 year old ocean rower, but now Roz is attempting to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific, after this she will then walk from London to Copenhagen (no, you read that correctly... walk) armed with an environmental mission called 'Pull Together'.

This initiative aims to inspire people to take action on CO2 levels by walking more and driving less. Calling upon her supporters around the world to 'Pull Together', Roz will challenge them to match her 10,000 oar strokes each day with 10,000 steps. All the steps logged by participants around the world on the site will be aggregated and expressed by a number of laps around the earth completed during the challenge. For every 53 people that complete 1,000,000 steps, an earth lap will be added. Just before her 24 May launch, she provided the opening remarks to attendees of Al Gore’s Climate Project Summit and became a Climate Change Ambassador.

Her efforts will focus on the upcoming climate change conference in Co2penhagen in December. In partnership with 350.org, on 24 October -- a designated global day of action on climate change -- Roz and thousands of supporters will assemble at Big Ben in London and, over a period of six weeks, march more than 600 miles to Copenhagen to address the conference delegates. At this time, Roz will deliver the results of the initiative, essentially a walking petition, as a symbol of joint commitment to taking immediate, aggressive action to reduce global CO2 levels, for more info click on her website HERE.

Global warming is mainly the result of CO2 levels rising in the Earth’s atmosphere; both atmospheric CO2 and climate change are accelerating. Climate scientists say we have years, not decades, to stabilize CO2 and other greenhouse gases and this level needs to be 350ppm (parts per million). OK, so what is the C02 level now? It is 389.47... for more info click on to 350.org website HERE.

And while you are there, don't forget 'World Environment Day' which is Friday 5th June. If you want to organise an event or be involved in an event to coincide with C02penhagen in October then click HERE.

Bayer GM / GE Rice, the facts...

2009-05-27T04:29:00.000-07:00

Rice is the world's most important staple food - with more than half of the global population eating it every day. It has been grown for over 10,000 years and is cultivated in 113 countries. Rice is also a key ingredient in a wide variety of processed foods ranging from baby food to the more obvious rice noodles, but all this is under threat as genetic engineering (GE/GM) continues to creep up on our most valuable food.

The German chemical giant Bayer is trying to sell a herbicide resistant variety of GM rice to countries - for commercial planting. Conventional and organic rice is at great risk from being contaminated by GM strains and controlled by multinational corporations and governments.

The rice made by Bayer (called LL62) has been genetically engineered to withstand high doses of glufosinate, an herbicide sprayed on rice fields to control a wide range of weeds; Bayer also makes the glufosinate so any use of the GM rice will boost their chemical sales as a consequence. While this will be good for Bayer, it places farmers, consumers and the environment at risk. Glufosinate is considered to be so dangerous to humans and the environment that it will soon be banned in Europe in accordance with recently-adopted EU legislation.

Genetic engineering is a threat to food security, especially in a changing climate. GM crops repeatedly failed under extreme weather conditions, and some GE plants yield consistently less than their natural counterparts. Earlier this year, GE farmers in South Africa, for example, lost more than 80,000 hectares of corn for unknown reasons. The best insurance policy against climate change and erratic weather conditions is diversity.

Glufosinate is used on potatoes in order to kill of the green crop above the ground, its residues are then found in the potatoes and these are not affected by boiling. When being assessed by an EU working group the conclusions were reached that it could pose a risk to the unborn child and to fertility.

Currently, Bayer is pushing for legal approval of its GE rice in Brazil, South Africa, the EU, India and the Philippines. In the USA, the Bayer GE rice has already been approved for commercial planting, although farmers in the US are reluctant to plant it as they fear the loss of important markets due to the risks of accidental contamination. This fear is not without reason as Bayer already has a history of causing damages that have been estimated at more than USD 1.2 billion to the global rice industry, when one of its experimental GE rice varieties accidentally entered global rice supplies in 2006.

To see just how environmentally dependent growing rice without chemical input is, in order to safeguard biodiversity, please see the amazing and 100% inspiring video link HERE.

As previously mentioned, Bayer field trials in the US lead to the worlds rice supplies becoming contaminated by GM rice. Contaminated goods were pulled from shelves world-wide as bans on US rice came into force yet Bayer claimed that they were not liable for this event as the incident was ‘An act of God’. Yes Bayer, the god of THIS world and age.

Speculation in the food markets

2009-05-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

While most of the solutions to the current crisis of high food prices will require substantial reworking of our global, fossil fuel-dependent food system to create a more localized and organic one, one relatively easy solution could bring quick and significant reductions in world prices. Financial speculation in commodities’ futures markets has increased dramatically in the last 3-4 years, artificially driving up prices of a host of commodities, from food crops to oil and natural gas, to metals and minerals.

Commodities markets were formed because for farmers, selling grains was a very unpredictable and chaotic task. Individual farmers negotiated with sellers and faced widely varying prices and uncertainty. After this farmers agreed with a buyer to deliver grain at a specific date in the future for an agreed upon price, this is called a forward contract. Later futures contracts were created, these are similar to forward contracts, but instead of being directly between a producer and a buyer, are traded on an open exchange called the futures market where others can participate. Buyers on the futures market rarely, if ever, actually receive the physical product but are able to profit off changing commodity prices.

By the late 1800s, futures markets had been created for various products, with speculators betting on whether prices would rise or fall. But the influx of investors not actually involved in agriculture or food production was a problem. A casino-type atmosphere reigned with huge amounts of money entering the market procuring easy profits. Abuses, from fraud to spreading rumours in order to alter prices to buying inside information, were used to influence the market. Large fluxes in investments also affected food prices unnecessarily.

Financiers did not immediately invest in the food commodities markets as they provided lower profits than other areas of investment. This changed after the stock bubble burst in the year 2000 and the further deregulation of commodities futures markets in 2001. Investors pulled vast amounts of money from the stock market, deflating the bubble. Much of that money was placed in the housing market, thus creating a bubble in that market. As the housing bubble burst, many investors have now switched to commodities futures, and they are able to plough immense amounts of money in these markets.

Hedge fund manager Michael Masters recently testified before the US Congress on this issue. He said that institutional investors (pension funds, university endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etc.) have increased their investments in commodities futures from $13 billion in 2003 to $260 billion in March 2008, and the price of 25 commodities have risen by an average of 183 percent in those five years. He explained that “commodities futures prices are the benchmark for the prices of actual physical commodities, so when speculators drive futures prices higher, the effects are felt immediately in the real economy.”

Clearly these huge influxes of money are having dramatic effects on today’s rising food prices. One particularly troubling aspect of speculator demand is that it actually increases the more prices increase. We already see this happening as investment advisors increasingly encourage clients to invest in commodities futures. This would result in catastrophic increases in food prices.

If the financial markets devised a scheme whereby investors bought large amounts of pharmaceutical in order to profit from the resulting increase in prices, making these essential items unaffordable to sick and dying people, society would be justly outraged. This is happening now in our commodities’ system, driving up food prices worldwide, and the poor, especially in the Third World, are those that suffer the most.

The financial markets are making everything a commodity but food is not a commodity to be traded because food is a need, not a want. In trading food what is really being traded are lives.

In the Lord’s Prayer the first request after the salutations to God is “Give us this day our daily bread”. Food is one of life's essentials, not the chips in some surreal poker game.

Global Warming causes the Carteret Islands to be abandoned.

2009-05-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

I would have thought (hoped) that this story would have been headline news throughout the world, but the news agencies have, in the main, ignored it, so here it is anyway!

The Carteret Islands are part of Papua New Guinea located in the South Pacific being a scattering of low lying islands in a horseshoe shape with a total land area of 0.6 square kilometers and a maximum elevation of 1.5 meters above sea level. You see the problem, 1.5m above sea level.

Some say that the islands' sinking is caused by them being located on shifting tectonic plates, but Australia's National Tide Facility has measured an annual rise of 8.2 mm in sea level on the islands in every year they have monitored the situation. Within the space of a generation, the islands' shoreline has receded over 60 feet. During storm surges, salt water washes away homes, destroys vegetable gardens, and contaminates fresh water supplies and for a population of 2,000+, largely dependent on subsistence agriculture, the impact has been devastating. The image that looks as though it is two islands, is actually of one that is now being flooded as sea levels rise.

So 2,000+ people are, as I write, in the process of being relocated to other locations. How ironic that the Carteret Islanders, people with a carbon footprint among the lowest in the world, are now among the first to have to abandon their islands because of rising seas caused by emissions from other nations.

The photos are used with the kind permission of www.SunComeUp.com and I would 100% recommend, ask, plead, that you visit their site HERE and view the film trailer as it tells the story of the islanders in their own words on their vanishing homeland. It may take a few seconds to load but this is worth any wait. If there are problems in linking from this then the environmental resource contacts at the left hand side also has a link.

The only mainstream journal to have covered this story in depth is The Ecologist, and you can read their on-line report HERE.

Can money make you content?

2009-05-11T07:16:00.001-07:00

I am lucky, I remember what it was at one time to have little, come from families that had even less and so can appreciate what we have now.

In the West the appalling poverty and awful living standards that were the norm for my parents childhood generation have all but gone and are now but memories in books and black and white images such as you see, where men could sit up for a nights sleep and get a morning bowl of soup for a penny, the beds nearby cost three pence a night. Double left click on it to see what life in London was like for so many in years past.

Unlike those you can see in that image the vast majority of our people no longer exist in conditions and circumstances that mean they own only the clothes they stand up in and to say that since I have been born standards of living have risen considerably would be an understatement. The ‘fridge and freezer have changed the need for shopping from an almost daily event to a once a week or even longer event, the washing machine has eliminated the drudgery of the washing day my mother knew and the communications revolution has allowed mass access to information.

Women have, thank God, been given their unquestionable rights to freedoms that would have been inconceivable even when I was a child. The car has allowed mobility in a way that would have been in the realms of science fiction in my grandparents’ day and they would have likewise viewed the pill.

So what has gone wrong?

In the West alcoholism is on the increase, as are the use of drugs to relieve stress, depression and anxiety. Anti-social behaviour is no longer unusual, violence is increasing, aggression is the norm on the roads and suicides in the UK are now at their highest numbers in males aged 15-44.

Here we all are, enjoying a material prosperity such as the world has never seen before, yet we have witnessed the loss of a society and community that cares. Society now has unparalleled material wealth yet is the same society that has unparalleled discontent with its lot. Could this be because in the rush to acquire, to possess, there is little room for anything more in peoples’ lives? Could it be that having acquired that new possession the euphoria soon wears off and what was desirable now becomes the norm?

I have seen society change and the driving force behind this has been the acceptance of three principles.

Success is to be measured materially
Material success will bring happiness
Therefore in order to be successful (and happy) you must make your aim in life material goals.

OK, that's a tad simplistic but basically it is what many people believe and to go against this is to be in conflict with what we are fed daily. Look at any TV or newspaper and there will be the message that if you want to have a fulfilled life then you must consume. If you want success then you must possess and if you want status then do both in a highly visual way.

The fallacy is that money can produce contentment, when even the most casual observer can see that this is not true. I have become to realise that there is a far more addictive product than cannabis, heroin, alcohol or anything else available, and that is money.

There is, of course, nothing essentially wrong with money, the problem is that the bulk of our society is addicted to it 100%. For many it completely controls what they do and when things go wrong, more has to be printed for a society that is addicted, obsessed and in love with money. Some grow their own drugs, governments print money in order to satisfy societies major addiction, in fact when I look around today I do realise that “the love of money is a root of all evil” and that indeed “Some people, in their eagerness to get rich, have wandered away from the faith and caused themselves a lot of pain”. **

I am privileged to be a frontline volunteer member of a suicide intervention team, and I can say from experience that “the love of money” and the damage caused by those “eager to get rich” has resulted in a lot of pain to many innocent others. **

Carl Marx once said that "Religion is the opiate of the people". He was wrong, money is the opiate of the people.

** Italics from 1 Timothy 6:10

Incidentally, the facilities you see in the images were provided by the Salvation Army in Blackfriars, London in 1902. The S.A. may be short in liturgy, but they have always been long in action.

Swine Flu – is this the reason why?

2009-05-04T08:36:00.000-07:00

In the US state of Iowa there are almost nine times as many pigs/hogs as people and in 2005 (yup... 2005) the University of Iowa, (Centre for Emerging Diseases)warned that these intensive animal farms were a tremendous potential reservoir for the flu virus.

The source of the virus is yet to be fully confirmed but the facts are that near La Gloria, a village East of Mexico City, there are pig/hog farms that intensively produce almost a million animals a year. In La Gloria almost 60% of the inhabitants have been affected by flu symptoms and some have died.

Dr. Gregory Grey at the University of Iowa was involved in a major study that concluded that “virus-laden secretions from pigs may be more concentrated, and reductions in ventilation and sunshine exposure may prolong viral viability. Thus, a confinement operation worker’s probability of acquiring the Influenza virus infection may be increased compared with that of a traditional swine worker.”
The study warned that swine workers could “initiate epidemics” by mixing the viral strains which would then trigger a pandemic. “They may serve as a conduit for a novel virus to move from swine to man or from man to swine,” the study said.

The Mexican factories are alleged to have very low standards of hygiene and were owned and run by an American company Smithfield, who were at the heart of one of my previous postings.

There is a video on that post of Smithfields accepted practices. Please view it, look at the animals conditions, see just what those involved had to say about the effect the factories operations had on their health and draw your own conclusions.

Greed + global warming = 1,500 farmers in India recently committing suicide, (did you know about it?)

2009-04-23T08:27:00.001-07:00

This is a complex issue, there are several causes but in the main they are drought, international trade agreements, and policies of international loan agencies (IMF, World Bank). The global warming aspect has meant that for farmers in some areas the water level has gone down below 250 feet where it used to be at 40 feet a few years ago.

The lack of irrigation water will be further influenced by increased global climate change which is expected to raise the Indian Sub-continent temperatures by up to 4°C by 2100 according to a report in The Hindu. This is expected to cause major problems with the monsoon season that is so critical to crop growth and ground water replenishment.

The international trade agreements are mostly influenced by the transnational corporations. A trade agreement between the United States and India, the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), was backed by Monsanto and other transnational corporate giants.

The World Bank loans to the poor countries pave the way for the transnational corporations to take control and exploit local markets and natural resources. In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open its seed sector to transnational corporations. This allowed for the seizure of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, its trade sector by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.

As a result of this, traditional farm saved seeds have been replaced with genetically engineered seeds. Their precarious situation was aggravated as a result of the aggressive marketing and subsequent disappointing results of Monsanto GM Cotton seed, marketed as disease resistant and high-yielding, when in fact it turned out to be neither.

This GM cotton seed is sterile and cannot be saved. The farmers then have to purchase seeds for each growing season, which is a costly investment for them. In most cases this has led to poverty and severe indebtedness. In order to relieve themselves of debt, some farmers have even sold their own organs.

Cotton farmers in Andra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have defaulted on bank debt, and then become further indebted to illegal moneylenders. When these attempts have failed to rectify their financial situations, many farmers committed suicide.

According to the Indian National Crime Records Bureau records, there have been 166,304 farmers’ suicides in a decade since 1997 in India. Of these, 78,737 occurred in five years between 1997 and 2001. The next five years - from 2002 to 2006 – proved worse, seeing 87,567 take their lives. This means that on an average, there has been one farmer’s suicide every 30 minutes since 2002.

These suicides are an example of how global climate change and big business will affect the poorest in society first. Perhaps some of the shame of these farmers’ debts and suicides should be borne by those who over-consume and live for the bottom line only, while others actually pay the price.

For more information see HERE HERE and HERE

This man is a Cyber Terrorist!

2009-04-16T02:50:00.000-07:00

According to John Austin MP I had “engaged in what appears to be a campaign of cyber-terrorism, intended to crash my and the House of Commons IT system which threatens to prevent me dealing with the very urgent needs of my constituents many of whom are among the most deprived in the country”. Ignoring the fact that for 22 years I lived in his constituency, what is needed to become a ‘Cyber Terrorist’?

First of all you need to have a concern for the environment that transcends the concerns for the here and now, looks for the long term future and are not afraid to stand up and be counted and take some form of action. If that is you then you have qualified for the above title! I have come to the regretful conclusion that governments and big business, especially the UK government and big businesses, seem to regard environmentalist much in the same way that they regard terrorists. This may seem an overstatement but let’s us face facts, due to the Web and blogs such as this, there is no longer any hiding place for either, the truth will out... unless it is suppressed. This may seem a little paranoid so let me take it further.

The proposed Kingsnorth coal fired power station in Kent UK will emit as much C02 as Nigeria and so several thousand climate protestors peaceably camped nearby and were met by 1500 police in an action that cost £5.7 million. The police claimed that many of their number were injured in ‘containing the protest’ yet these injuries turned out to be wasp stings, headaches, toothache, diarrhoea and so on. To see just how the police handled these horrendously dangerous protesting individuals watch here and for a firsthand account (Adrienne Campbell's writing of her husband's experience of arrest and release) see here.

In London recently there were G8 protests. I will not condone violence from any quarter, but my friends who were there at the peace camp said that the police presence was frightening and oppressive, shades of Kingsnorth, but then Ian Tomlinson, a bystander with his hands in his pockets, simply walking home was attacked by the police and died later, you can see the attack here.

The police had been talking up the threat of violence at the G20 protests for weeks. They briefed journalists and companies in the City of London about the supposed intentions of the climate campaigners intending to demonstrate there, but refused to let the campaigners attend the briefings and put their own side of the story. They also rebuffed the campaigners when they sought to explain to the police what they wanted to do.

My new title of being a Cyber Terrorist was due to me emailing several MP’s about a possible third runway at London Heathrow (something which will flatten a local village and cause even more pollution) and which many others did at the same time.

I was a member of a Christian group that took part in a Climate Change Church service that then joined several thousand others on a march in London on 8 Dec 2007. I was walking down Whitehall, past Downing Street when a police officer a few feet away took a close-up video of my face and using one of those directional microphones listened in to the conversation I was having so I am obviously on a database somewhere...

I believe that the concern that is now apparent from both authorities and big business about people like you and I, who have concern for the future of this amazing planet, is that we now via the web have both information and community, and as such are seen as a threat. Does that sound farfetched? If you think so then see one of my previous posts here, it is anti Monsanto, a company that I regard as often quite evil in the way it does business, and who was the first to reply to this post... it was Monsanto! Some of the larger companies, and perhaps governments, must have a department that trawls the web to search out dangerous individuals such as me in order to repudiate their views and claims, but due to the web, there are now few hiding places.

If it were not for the web then the videos above and the concerns expressed would have never been seen or read, and what then? I have found out, to my cost, that the press and TV rely on their advertisers and proprietors in order to fund them and they are not likely to offend either, especially when the propriators and advertisers activities involve environmental damage that attracts the attention of environmentalists. When that happens the environmentalist concerns are usually rubbished by the media, have you noticed that?

So where do my Christian beliefs fit into this? Easy, we have to stand up and be counted when we see brutality and oppression, and if we do not condemn it, we condone it.

Alone in all creation a chicken cried out at the betrayal of God

2009-04-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

Mat 26:34 Jesus said to him, Truly I say to you that this night, before the hour of the cock's cry, you will say three times that you have no knowledge of me.

They sure have been made to pay for it ever since....

Just some of the places to visit before they go under the sea!

2009-04-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

The Maldive Islands, they are on average just 1.5m above sea level.
Tuvalu, with its highest point just 4.5m above sea level.
Kiribati, just ½ m more and its arable land will be gone.
The Carteret Islands will be underwater by 2015 and it had 2000+ inhabitants in 2003.
Key West in Florida... although parts of the area are 6m above sea level, less than 1m and much will be flooded.

I wonder which is the one that will wake the world up when the flooding happens?

The cure to the world’s financial disaster is more of that which caused the pain! (You didn’t believe that, did you?)

2009-04-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal, or batteries run flat, leak and ruin the stuff. Or Microsoft stop providing you with updates, or your SIM card gives up or the goods become obsolete the year after you have bought them and so they all end up stored in garages, basements closets or in units on industrial estates while you are still paying for them on your credit card. Instead store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”.

Ok, so that is not exactly what Jesus said in Matthew 6:19-21, but could this be what He would be saying to us today?

In the UK the latest concern is that in reaction to the financial disaster, the British people are saving rather than spending when we are all told that what is required to get the economy going again is to consume again, to buy new goods. Yes, that’s it; the answer to the world’s financial disaster is to replace all that ‘old’ stuff that we all own.

This is of course what every almost advert in any media tries to persuade us to do. That TV that still works is now outdated and certainly needs replacing by one of those latest flat screen models. The latest Apple computer is so slim that it takes up no space at all compared to that ‘old’ one you bought only last year and you can now choose the colour as well. That jacket you have still fits perfectly, but its last year’s style as are those shoes you have on and have you seen just how low the fuel consumption is on the latest model cars?

While this happens and people are being persuaded to ‘spend, spend, spend’ and ‘borrow, borrow, borrow, (which is how the world got into this unholy financial mess in the first place) Planet Earth is treated as a never ending source of raw materials for the manufacture of never ending goods and a never ending dump facility, with many of its people a never ending resource to be exploited, if necessary by never ending violence, in a world where only those people that have the never ending means to buy and consume have any value whatsoever in the economic system.

Most people do not consider themselves to be ‘rich’. They might consider that Tiger Woods or Lewis Hamilton or Sir Richard Branson are, but not themselves, because they have become an integral part of a culture that works to (and always will) leave them dissatisfied with their lot. The fact is though that if you have a sound roof over your head, enough food to eat, clothes to wear, running water, a sewerage system, easy access to affordable transport and a computer then you are in the top 20% of the world’s population. Most people in the West are rich, but have allowed themselves to be blinded to the fact! Jesus is very clear about materialism; a life that is centred on our possessions is a life that is not fulfilled in His eyes.

We are, of course, all consumers of one sort or another, shelter, clothing, and our ‘daily bread’ of food and drink, but it is when we focus on possessions beyond our normal needs that we lose the focus of our lives also. It is then that companies such as ‘Mini Storage’, ‘Self Storage’ and ‘Lock and Store’ thrive and the possessions become the possessors as their owners pay to store items they may never use again. “Store up for yourselves treasure in heaven” He said, He did not say in a container in an industrial unit!

So what would Jesus prefer? Would He like to see us borrow more and spend it so we can mine and exploit both more resources and more people in order to buy more and more possessions and fill ever more facilities full of old stuff? Or would he like to see us being happy with what we need rather than what we want and to get rid of the excess by donating it to charity or sold and the money given to those in need? The answer He gave in Matthew 19:21 to the young man who asked Him what he should do to inherit eternal life was straight to the point “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." The young man went away sorrowing because his real God was his possessions.

My dread is that with all the money that is now being pumped into the world's economy (and just where did it all come from?) and the encouragement to spend, spend, spend we will eventually again be back where we started. In the words of George Santayana “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

The simple fact is that the less we possess and the more we divest ourselves from our unneeded and unnecessary, the less we will be bound by earthly things and the better life will actually become for us, for the environment, and so for the future generations as yet unborn, who are having their futures decided and mortgaged by the present generation.

I am to academia what an oxyacetylene welder is to a repairer of Swiss watches.

2009-03-26T10:34:00.001-07:00

So I read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent talk about the environment with delight because it was so easy to understand that I did not need a theological dictionary as I read it.

One phrase leapt out of the page for me “The ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself, as humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity”.

The human race has the amazing talent of burying its collective head in the sand and the environmental catastrophe we face is like the banking crisis, only worse. By 2030world population is expected to hit 8.3 billion, causing a 50 percent increase in the global demand for food and energy and a 30 percent increase in the demand for fresh drinking water—a resource that is already in short supply for about a third of the world’s people.

This though is thought of by many as a problem for the distant future, to be ignored along with future long periods of drought, short periods of flooding, ever higher summer temperatures as the years pass and all accompanied by food scarcity with crop failures and cattle unable to cope. Actually, if you are in Australia, especially Sidney, reading these words they more than just ring a bell, they are daily facts.

Scientist Martin Cope of the state-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization said that rising summer temperatures due to global warming, drier weather and smog from transport and bushfires will make Australia's lifestyle capital a health hazard.

Most at risk will be the increasing number of elderly from heat stress and anyone with asthma or heart complaints, he said. By 2060 is was expected that "We are looking at a 20 percent increase in the number of days above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) ... You can be looking at a 100 percent increase of the small number of extreme temperature days," he said, referring to temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius.

Australian computer modeling predictions suggest that if global emissions continue unabated, then rainfall will decrease in the southern states and increasing further north. As if to demonstrate that, Queensland, in the North, is currently experiencing widespread flooding after rainfall of historic proportions while in the Southern Australia is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, which has stretched for more than seven years in some areas and has forced restrictions on water use in the country's big cities.

A government-commissioned report on climate change last year warned that exceptionally hot years, which used to occur once every 22 years, would occur in years to come every one or two years, making drought a permanent part of the Australian environment. The present drought has hit farmers so badly that one commits suicide every four days.

Water is actually more valuable than oil, ask a farmer in any of the drought stricken areas of the world and not just Australia and Africa, but in California and the surrounding states, parts of Spain, China, Malta, The Amazon in Brazil, Mexico, The Middle East, and the list goes on. Australia and the others are in crisis now, who is to be next?

The Archbishop of Canterbury Said in his talk, “We need ways of redefining business excellence in terms of sustainability and deliberate encouragement of low-carbon technologies”. Quite right ABC and we need them now, because if the well runs dry then even the woman at the well in John 4 won’t be able to help. In the fight against Climate Chaos we are our brothers and sisters keeper.

And the picture? That’s Australia.

WE can reverse our ways and change the future, it does not have to be like this

2009-03-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

I am part of a lost generation
and I refuse to believe that
I can change the world.
I realise this may be a shock but
‘happiness comes from within’
is a lie, and
‘money will make me happy’
so in thirty years I will tell my children
they are not the most important thing in my life.
my employers will know that
I have got my priorities straight because
work
Is more important than
family.
I tell you this
once upon a time
families stayed together
but this will not be true in my era.
This is a quick fix society.
experts tell me
thirty years from now I will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of my divorce.
I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making.
In the future environmental destruction will be the norm.
no longer can it be said that
my peers and I care about this earth.
It will be evident that
my generation is apathetic and lethargic.
It is foolish to presume that
there is hope.

there is hope.
It is foolish to presume that
my generation is apathetic and lethargic.
It will be evident that
my peers and I care about this earth.
no longer can it be said that
in the future environmental destruction will be the norm.
I will live in a country of my own making.
I do not concede that
thirty years from now I will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of my divorce.
experts tell me
This is a quick fix society.
but this will not be true in my era.
families stayed together
once upon a time
I tell you this
family.
Is more important than
work
I have got my priorities straight because
my employers will know that
they are not the most important thing in my life.
so in thirty years I will tell my children
‘money will make me happy’
is a lie, and
‘happiness comes from within’
I realise this may be a shock but
I can change the world.
and I refuse to believe that
I am part of a lost generation

See what happens when you choose to reverse it?

And his headmaster said 'society needed to be protected against him', how wrong can a man be?

2009-03-18T02:22:00.000-07:00

Roger Hosking's Mum walked out on the family when he was 5 years old. He became angry and aggressive and was sent to a special school at the age of ten and when he was fifteen the headmaster wrote to his Father saying “Society needs to be protected against people like Roger”.

Later in life Roger became a Christian and came to the conclusion that Jesus spent little time in the synagogue but lots with those on societies margins and as Roger had firsthand experience of how it felt to be rejected, despised and on the margins he and his wife Beryl decided to help those who had been through the same types of experiences, and set up Highfields Happy Hens in Etwall, Derbyshire.

“I never wanted to be a farmer”, Roger said, “I just wanted to look after young people and this seemed to be the best way. Angry hands became gentle hands collecting eggs, the youngsters learnt to count, read, write, handle money and customers. In short they learned to respect themselves and became able to become positive members of society.”

Roger and Beryl are also proud of the fact that of the hundreds of teenagers who have attended the farm over the years, not one, according to the youth offending service, has reoffended. And Roger has no doubt that most of the youngsters go on to better things. "The majority enrol in further education or find full-time employment. We know this because so many return to thank us. We also receive positive feedback from their former teachers. The Highfields experience is a like chain reaction – we have thousands of chickens producing thousands of eggs each and every day. Those eggs need to be collected, counted, packed and delivered. Even the most damaged young person can find a place where they can fit in and feel useful, and our staff has the time to talk to them in an atmosphere of love and healing".

Every week during the school year, young people help the Hosking’s on their farm. All are struggling in mainstream education, are the victims of bullying or else have a difficult home life. The aim is to teach these teenagers new skills to boost their self-esteem and give them a sense of achievement and direction.

Speaking of the youngsters Roger said one of them was particularly disgusting, “He was snotty, dirty, his language was the pits (despite our efforts), he could neither read write or count but he could collect eggs and one day he asked if he could do it on his own. I explained that he couldn’t as he needed to count and record the eggs – “well then teach me” he said. In 3 weeks he could count accurately up to 5000 and later learnt to keep the records, he became clean and pleasant.”

“Recently we had a lovely young girl with us, she has been tagged but we could not understand how she had got into trouble (we never ask, this is a new life) before she left us she banged a nail in our cross (they have a Christian Cross on the farm) and later wrote to us, the letter closed with ‘Thank you all so much for welcoming me in the way that you did when others would never have given me a chance’. It was so simple and has happened so many times”.

"But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? Job 12:7-9

As Roger and Beryl have shown, creation heals, but now needs healing from the damage inflicted upon it by greed and ignorance if it to be able to continue its healing work.

So what is to be the fate of the worlds poor?

2009-03-11T04:13:00.001-07:00

In Bangladesh, a million people a year are displaced by loss of land along rivers. Rising river and sea levels and more frequent tropical storms are facts of life in many Third World countries.

Prince Charles and his wife are presently in Latin American, promoting energy efficiency and measures to combat climate change, and he summed up the future that so many will face if actions are not taken to carry out these actions. He said "If we do nothing, the consequences for every person on this earth will be severe and unprecedented, with vast numbers of environmental refugees, social instability and decimated economies -- far worse than anything which we are seeing today. How can we begin to address poverty if we haven't first ensured our planet is actually inhabitable?"

As if to underline this, at Co2penhagen, climate scientists said on Monday, that the U.N.'s climate change panel may be severely underestimating the sea-level rise caused by global warming, and called for swift cuts in greenhouse emissions. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf reported that "The sea-level rise may well exceed one meter (3.28 feet) by 2100 if we continue on our path of increasing emissions. Even for a low emission scenario, the best estimate is about one meter." "It's the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Key findings of the report include:
• 75-250 million people across Africa could face water shortages by 2020
• Crop yields could increase by 20% in East and Southeast Asia, but decrease by up to 30% in Central and South Asia
• Agriculture fed by rainfall could drop by 50% in some African countries by 2020
• 20-30% of all plant and animal species at increased risk of extinction if temperatures rise between 1.5-2.5C
• Glaciers and snow cover expected to decline, reducing water availability in countries supplied by melt water

The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world. Eighty-nine percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world. But is it just the Third World that would suffer with a 1 meter sea level rise? No, because more than 70 percent of the world's population lives on coastal plains and 11 of the world's 15 largest cities are on the coast or estuaries.

If sea levels rise a meter, the streets of Miami could end up underwater while New Orleans could become part of the Gulf of Mexico. The Thames Barrier would, when faced with a North Sea tidal surge such as occurred in 1953 combined with higher sea levels, be unlikely to cope with the event and much of Holland, where 1,800 people drowned in the 1953 event would be flooded, as would much of Norfolk on Englands East Coast.

But that is not immediate; the flooding due to climate change is already reaping havoc in the Third World now, and their future? That is actually in our hands. How we behave, what we purchase, all our actions, from turning off lights to reduce our carbon emissions to giving to charities that help them, will affect them right now, and us in the future.

Matthew 34-40. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

The worrying sections of the above I have not included are verses 41-46... Do you have the courage to read them?

Monday 16th addition.
After I wrote the above, on Wednesday 11th, SCIENCE DAILY published on Monday 16th an article entitled "Sea Level Rise Due To Global Warming Poses Threat To New York City".

You may never read anything as important as this...

2009-03-03T14:24:00.000-08:00

and it was written by John Seymour John died in 2004 and is much missed, but this world is enriched by his life's work and his prophetic words.:

"THE AGE OF PLUNDER is nearly at an end. The Age of Healing is ready to be born and whether it arrives or not depends upon two people: you and me.

The Age of Plunder was the natural successor to the so-called Age of Reason: the Age in which humankind decided that it knew better than God. For 200 years now the greedy and ruthless have been plundering the planet but their time will soon be up. The whole thing is going to come crashing down.

It could not have gone on much longer anyway - because soon there will be nothing left to plunder. The forests have almost gone from the Earth, the fish of the sea are all but exhausted, the air surrounding us and the waters of the Earth will soon be able to take no more poisonous wastes and, most serious of all, the soil is going. For we soil organisms this could be terminal. As long as the oil reserves last agribusiness will be able to produce the agrichemicals needed to keep some sort of production of vitiated food going from the eroded soil, but the oil deposits - that Pandora's Box of evil things - will soon be exhausted and then the final account, long deferred, will come up for payment. The bailiffs who present it will have strange names, like Famine, Pestilence and War.

But, thank God, maybe the old Earth will not have to wait for this to happen. The whole great edifice of international trade and finance - the whole mighty plunder-machine - is quite likely to burst like a balloon that has grown too big. The whole thing is becoming unsustainable: it has grown too huge to manage.

OWING TO THE incorrigible tendency towards cannibalism by the huge industrial corporations - the tendency of the bigger ones to swallow up the smaller ones - these molochs are becoming too large for humans to control or the planet to support. Ten years ago no economist would have predicted the complete collapse of the mighty Soviet machine that had engulfed half the Earth. International capitalism will follow.

It is in the nature of a limited company that it can have no responsibility either to the environment around it or to the people who work for it. It is no use blaming the directors - if they do anything that might reduce profits for the shareholders they will quickly be replaced. And the shareholders not only have no liability for debts incurred by the company - but they take no responsibility for the world of nature around them. If the directors can secure bigger profits by dumping poisons into the nearest river - they have to do this. If they do not, they will very quickly be replaced. If they can make more profit by halving the work force - they will have to do so or again they will be replaced. If both shareholders and directors suffer from that most uncapitalist thing - a conscience - to the extent that it interferes with profits - that company will be swallowed up by another giant that has no such inconvenient scruples.

One of the most dramatic effects of the Age of Plunder has been to drive most of the world' s population into vast conurbations. These huge assemblies of uprooted people, called cities, are not only ugly but also dangerous. The billions who live in them can only be kept alive by an enormous system of transport which brings water, food, power, fuel and all the necessities of life, often great distances. Any breakdown in the supply of all this would be disastrous. And the great plundering molochs of companies which run it all get fewer and fewer, and bigger and bigger, and more and more people find themselves out of work, not needed, redundant and disempowered.

AND MEANWHILE THE tiny scattering of people left on the land, which is the only source of true wealth, have been forced by their paucity of numbers to resort to more and more destructive methods of producing the huge amount of food needed to sustain these billions. They have been forced to ignore the laws of husbandry, which could have retained the fertility of the soil as long as the world lasted, and farm instead with chemicals and huge machines. The soil is becoming poisoned and eroded. The only beneficiaries of this have been the huge chemical companies but they will destroy themselves in the end because they are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

If we open our eyes, we will realize that all this is bound to come crashing down in the end. Then, in the ashes of the Age of Plunder, a new age could arise. The real New Age: the Age of Healing!

We will set about it, just you and me, to heal the ravaged Earth. If we do not - if we fail - then there will not be an Age of Healing: there will be an Age of Chaos and it will not be nice. And we do not have to wait for the end of the Age of Plunder to start the work. We must start now. And how can we - just the two of us, you and me, who are so few and disempowered - start this great work by ourselves?

Firstly, say to yourself, and I promise I will do the same, the following resolution: "I am only one. I can only do what one can do. But what one can do I will do!" Then consider what you can do.

Refuse to work for the plunderers. Refuse to buy their shoddy goods. Give up the ambition of living like a Texan millionaire. Boycott the Lottery, not because you think you won' t win it, but because you don't want to win it! Refuse to shop in the plunderers' " supermarkets" . Work, always, for a decentralist economy. Support local traders and producers - try to get what you need from as near your home as you can. Take part in your local politics - boycott the politics of the huge scale, the remote and far-away. The current non-violent defiance of the law by people protesting against the export of live animals from Britain is a fine example of citizen-power.

Work for an economy in which land and property are fairly shared out among the people so that " everybody has enough and nobody has too much" . We must withhold our work, our custom, and our investment from plundering industry. This may cause us "financial hardship" : then we must endure " financial hardship" .

Road transport is the most destructive thing of all. If you live in a city, you do not need a car. (When you go to the country you can hire one - it' s much cheaper than owning.) If you live in the country, you may need one - use it as little as possible. Boycott most goods brought from far away. Take some trouble to find locally produced goods and buy them. Heavy road transport is enormously polluting. Oppose new road building. Building new roads never relieves traffic congestion - it simply generates more traffic. The only way of solving the traffic problem is to have less traffic.

If you possibly can, do not work for huge organizations. If we withhold our labour from them, they will wither away. (Do not be afraid that this will lose " jobs" . It will create more jobs - a multitude of small firms create more " jobs" than a few big ones). Support local cultural activities. Boycott mass " culture" coming from countries far away. Encourage, support, and initiate, local credit and finance organizations. Buy, if you cannot grow, organically produced food. Thus you will help destroy the polluting chemical industry - and you will be healthier. Boycott, absolutely consistently, all products that have involved cruelty to animals. Support the local and the small-scale. I will do the same as I ask you to do.

The tiny amount you and I can do is hardly likely to bring the huge worldwide moloch of plundering industry down? Well, if you and I don' t do it, it will not be done, and the Age of Plunder will terminate in the Age of Chaos.

We have to do it - just the two of us - just you and me. There is no " them" - there is nobody else. Just you and me.

On our infirm shoulders we must take up this heavy burden now - the task of restoring the health, the wholeness, the beauty and the integrity of our planet. We must start the Age of Healing now! Tomorrow will be too late".

Use NOT abuse!

2009-02-18T04:07:00.000-08:00

While I am not a vegetarian, I believe that Factory Farming is abhorrent. I was at the Pilsdon Community yesterday, and while there, members were building a run for their pigs. It was a large section of a field and they are going to put 3 or 4 animals in it. They will live free range in good conditions and be fed decent food for all their lives. Compare this to what Factory farmed pigs have to put up with, tiny crates and not seeing sunlight or touching the earth.

After much public concern, interest and attention, the UK pig breeding standards were raised and are now the highest in the EU... sadly the public that were so concerned found out that high standards costs more, and so many UK pork breeders went out of business as the public went for the cheaper imports.

Above is a film trailer about a company called Smithfield. This relates to the United States market as well as the UK and EU as they are Factory farming pork in Poland to flood our markets with pork reared using antibiotics in conditions that are, in my opinion, quite frankly tortured.

We would, I am sure, quite rightly call our animal welfare organisations if a neighbour kept their pet in such a way, so why should we tolerate our food chain animals being so treated?

In Matthew 22:4 - Jesus told a parable of a king who killed oxen and fatted cattle for a wedding feast. Meat eating is a symbol of partaking of the blessings of God's kingdom so I do not believe that Jesus would use something immoral to symbolize the blessings of the kingdom, but I do not believe for one moment that he would approve of His creation being abused in the way the film above shows.

Thy will, is sadly not being done on earth, or in Heaven...

2009-02-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

Cosmos 954 was a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite (RORSAT) which was powered by a nuclear reactor. Cosmos 954 had a special problem however; on January 24, 1978 it went out of control.

Cosmos 954 fell out of orbit and came crashing into the Great Slave Lake area of the Northwest Territories in Canada, disintegrated during re-entry into a shower of radioactive debris which spread over some 124,000 square kilometres. A massive search was begun to locate the debris that was made up of over 200 troops from both the Canadian Air Force and the US military and lasted until October. After the clean-up, the Canadian Government sent a $15 million bill to the Soviets. The Soviets paid less than half of this amount and agreed not to take back the spacecraft. The Canadians were happy with the amount they received and were happier still that the Soviets had acknowledged the spacecraft's existence.

Of the thousands of radioactive fragments that reached the earth's surface, some were potentially lethal however, less than 1% of radioactive material was recovered so 99% of the radioactive parts of this satellite are still out there in NW Canada.

Fast forward to Feb. 11, 2009 and two big communications satellites collided nearly 500 miles over Siberia. The crash produced a pair of massive debris clouds, and the magnitude of the situation will not be known for weeks at least, said Nasa spokesman Kelly Humphries.

"We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Centre in Houston. The collision involved a commercial satellite, launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be non-functioning. The commercial satellite weighed 1,235 pounds and the Russian one nearly a ton. No one has any idea yet how many pieces were generated or how big they might be."Right now, they're definitely counting dozens," Matney said. "I would suspect that they'll be counting hundreds when the counting is done." As for pieces the size of micrometers, the count will likely be in the thousands, he added.

At the beginning of this year there were roughly 17,000 pieces of man-made debris orbiting Earth, Johnson said. The items, at least 4 inches in size, are being tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, which is operated by the military. The network detected the two debris clouds created Tuesday.

So not only does mankind pollute the God’s earth, we now pollute His space and I only hope and pray that when that debris does fall to earth, as its orbit finally decays, then it will not be radioactive or fall on an inhabited area.

There are times when simplicity rules over sophistication.

2009-02-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

The Zeer pot could not be simpler or easier to make or operate and yet as a refrigeration device it is truly an example of just how simplicity can work when sophistication cannot. It is a simple fridge made of local materials, clay and sand, consisting of one earthenware pot set inside another, with a layer of wet sand in between. As the moisture evaporates outwards from the wet sand through the outer earthenware pot it cools the inner pot, keeping up 12kg of produce fresh for up to three weeks. The shelf life of Tomatoes and Guavas are extended from 2 to 20 days, carrots from 4 to 20 days and Rocket from 1 to 5 days.

Fruit, vegetables and water are all kept fresher for longer – providing much needed help to starving families and can mean the difference between potential starvation and having enough food.

The Zeer pot is cheap, easy to make (see the video) environmentally friendly and works on Solar Energy. Now didn't Paul say something in Phillipians 4:19 about God meeting our needs?

You can find more about Practical Action's work in the Third World here

An answer to UK's energy security?

2009-02-04T01:09:00.000-08:00

Bio Gas is already used in the Third World but in the West has little take up. However this could soon change, as a report from Ernst & Young, commissioned by The National Grid reports that if the UK’s various waste streams were harnessed to produce biogas, half of the nation’s homes could be heated from it. The biogas would be generated from sewage, animal manure, and other waste, and be connected to the existing natural gas grid.

While there are no technical or safety barriers in generating this much biogas, the UK government will need to enacted to develop a waste management policy to ensure each waste stream is directed to the appropriate biogas technology and an incentive scheme to encourage biogas producers to send their gas to the natural gas grid, rather than generate electricity from it as is currently promoted in the Renewable Energy Obligation scheme.

All it needs is the money... about £10 Billion should do it and make the UK far less dependent on imports of gas from unstable regions of the world.

We have all these God given resources so, UK government, how about it? The banks were given £37 Billion last year and reliable reports say that this will rise to £75 billion in 2009, it's a gift at £10 billion surely?

AT LAST I KNOW WHERE I HAVE BEEN GOING WRONG!

2009-01-23T04:05:00.000-08:00

All these years and I didn't realise it... amazing... it's just clicked, you see I live in a Parallel world!

In my world there is pollution caused by, for example, aircraft, but in the other world all you need to do is buy Carbon Credits and that high level pollution is immediately removed from the sky. It's incredible... However you pollute Carbon Credits make it immediately better, why doesn’t it happen in my world?

In my world there has just been a financial collapse in the banking industry and there is a recession. There is a huge amount of debt, an increase in the jobless figures and a lack of trust and confidence in governments. In this other world governments are giving the banks money and encouraging the banks to lend to people so they can take out debt and go out and buy things, why is it different in my world?

In my world resources are scarce, peak oil has been reached and pollution is huge problem yet in this other World while they have these problems they don’t have to plan for them or worry about them. Where have I gone wrong?

In my world feeding the hungry in Africa and other countries is a pressing need but in this other world what really matters is the holiday destination and the latest sports results. The fact that food is used to make fuel is also OK so why is it different in my world?

I could go on but I need to find this other World ASAP.

A Dream Comes True

2009-01-20T04:12:00.000-08:00

On December 1st 1955 Rosa Parks sat and would not budge so Martin Luther King could dream, arise and march. On August 28th 1963 Martin Luther King marched so Barack Obama could stand and run in the 2008 Presidential race. America judged Barak Obama to have won the that Race and on 20th January 2009 he was sworn in as the United States 44th president.

The world can change for the better, but it does need people of courage to make that change.

Have you ever prayed for money? Lydia George did. Her prayers were answered and just look what happened...

2009-01-13T03:08:00.001-08:00

Before she went to Oxford University, Lydia had a Gap Year and worked six months for CCD (Christian Care Foundation for Children with Disabilities) in Thailand. CCD provides care and support to abandoned children with disabilities, regardless of gender, nationality, creed or religion.

When Lydia left CCD they were very short of money, and were struggling to finance the finishing of the new Rainbow Rehabilitation centre. Wasan, the Thai director, had even spent all his own life savings in an attempt to finish the project - such was his level of commitment, Lydia though had nothing to give them.

Lydia was back in the UK and working part time as a waitress in an Oxford bar and restaurant, when the producer of 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' approached her to appear on a 'freshers and professors' special.

In her own words... “I was auditioned on camera, and thought nothing more of it, until I had a phone call a few weeks later saying I had been successful, and that filming was in a week! The wonderful thing about it all was that I had been praying about a way of raising some money for CCD before this opportunity came up. When the opening came along I knew, therefore, that it was a gift from God, and that if I was to win any money, I should give it all away.

To my surprise, I ended up on the hot seat after winning 'Fastest finger first'. I won £32,000 along with the professor, which worked out as £16,000 each. I said on air that I would give it away, and that’s what I did. CCD was able to complete the building project, and the first ever purpose-built rehabilitation centre for disabled children was officially opened.

As a result of this, the Daily Telegraph did an article on my story, and then many more of the press became interested. Sky News approached me to make a documentary called 'Giving it away', which was filmed during my Christmas Holidays from university. Through these and various other media sources, about £30,000 was donated to CCD. I was absolutely blown away by the generosity of the public and the number of people who were genuinely moved when they saw the conditions of the orphanage on television.

My expectations were blown once again when Starfish Trust, a Bristol-based charity, contacted me to say they would like to donate to CCD, which enabled them to buy some land adjacent to the rainbow centre. Their donation was in total about £100,000, the largest donation to CCD ever!”

Following this Lydia was nominated for and won a 'Pride of Britain' Special award. Again, something amazing also came out of this.

In Thailand Lydia grew very close to a little girl called Ornanong, which means ‘Scrawny’. Scrawny was a malnourished and unstimulated 3 years old weighing just under a stone. Her parents, who were unable to care for her, were a seventy year-old man and a 30 year-old woman, who was an alcoholic. Lydia spent a lot of time with Scrawny at the weekends when in Thailand, taking her swimming, shopping, to the playground – all those things that normal children love to do so much, but which we all take for granted.

At the Pride of Britain awards Lydia had been talking to an American couple called Bill and Cindy Sasser the previous night, and they mentioned that they had it on their hearts to adopt a little girl. On the night of the awards the Daily Mirror flew Scrawny to London to surprise Lydia on stage. Scrawny meet the Sassers, who were very touched by her, and decided to try to adopt her. As a result Scrawny is now settled in with her new family in their home in Mobile, Alabama.

Lydia has continued to work for abandoned children in Thailand and has now has now raised hundreds of thousands of pounds, an amazing return on her heart-felt teenage prayers. If you would like to know more about CCD, and the ongoing story, please see HERE.

Angola's Miss Landmine 2008.

2009-01-08T03:39:00.000-08:00

On the right is Miss landmine 2008 Maria Restino Manuel a 26 year old who had her leg blown off in 1998 when she ran across a mined field to escape a gang of soldiers who had threatened to rape her. When she said that she wanted to promote world peace she really meant it.

On the left is Mum-of-four Filomena Da Costa who has married a fellow amputee.

Anita Pedro in the centre has three year old twins.

Civil war broke out in Angola after independence from Portugal in 1975. More than 500,000 were killed in 27 years of fighting and all sides used landmines. 43,000 have been removed so far but it will take 10 or more years to remove the remaining millions. Every year, 400 Angolan locals step on mines.

Approximately every thirty minutes someone, somewhere in the world is injured or killed by an encounter with them. In southeast Asia, an accident happens every day, shattering lives, hopes and dreams.

So, where did these vile weapons come from?

Apart from the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, the most mine-affected countries in the world received all of their mines from sources outside of their borders.

Major producers of anti-personnel landmines in the last 25 years include Austria, China, France, Germany, Italy, the former Soviet Union, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia. The most commonly found mines around the world were from China, Italy and the former Soviet Union.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) says 13 countries have not banned anti-personnel landmine production: Burma, China, Cuba, India, Iran, Nepal, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, United States and Vietnam. Some of these countries have not actually made AP mines in recent years, but refuse to ban production officially.

The tragedy is that those that profited by the manufacture of these items are not the ones that are having to pay for them, and I don't mean in financial terms.

If you would like to know more and add your support to those who face danger daily in order to rid God's World from the pollution of these evil items then see HERE

The one who throws the stone forgets, the one who is hit remembers forever... An Angolan Proverb.

At the dawn of 2009, just what do the future years hold?

2008-12-23T04:58:00.000-08:00

The picture is of Salisbury Cathedral and the path you see I walked many times when at the theological college in the Cathedral Close.

I learnt a lot there, especially from my fellow students but also from the cathedral building because while the work of construction started in 1220 AD the 404 ft (123M) tall tower, the part that it is most famous for, was not completed until 1380AD. The designers of the building were fully aware that they would never see the completed work, just as the designers of the great gardens knew they would never see the 200 year old Oaks they envisaged in their planting schemes.

So where is the forward planning of the 20/21st Century? What legacy has been left for those who will follow in our footsteps in 800 years time?

The family that you descended from were working for the good of their families, their children, their grandchildren and for you, yes for you when Salisbury Cathedral was being built. That last part may seem a bit mind-blowing, but let’s face facts; if you have children and are concerned for their future and your (possible) grandchildren then you are concerned for the offspring of your grandchildren as well. You, like the designers of Salisbury Cathedral may never see the result of you efforts, but you know that as sure as eggs are eggs, there will be a result and that little old you, yes you, can influence the future NOW.

So, what will your descendents inherit from our age? Will there time be one of crisis with no energy from fossil fuels? Will it be a time when finding enough food is an everyday problem? Will Climate Chaos have damaged beyond hope the ability of this amazing creation know as The Earth to survive much longer? Will our future descendents survive to see the year 2900? We cannot forecast with any real accuracy the year 2900, but there are some things that we can forecast with accuracy long before then, in fact for most of us we know what will happen to creation in our children’s lifetimes, let alone our grandchildren’s.

We know that the island nation that is Tuvalu will be no more due to raised sea levels. In Australia we know that at the present rate life in Sidney will be totally changed by the heating effect of Global warming. In the US we know that Lake Mead, the lake created by Hoover Dam that provides water for 22 million people in the Southwest of the US as well as 90 % of Las Vegas' water could dry up by 2021 as the rains fail to materialise. We know that in Alaska, Canada, and Russia the melting of the permafrost and the release of trapped methane will influence life in those regions and beyond. We know that glaciers are retreating all over the world, and will cause water shortages to those regions that rely on melt water, for example, in Chile glacier melt will cause water shortages at the southern end of South America.

OK, so we all know that the problems are massive and that governments are far happier working for short term gain rather than planning for the long term but don’t blame them, because but that is actually partly our fault. If you want to be re-elected then you don’t talk in terms of centauries, you talk in terms of months. That’s why money is given to firms that produce cars no one wants. That’s why money is given to the banks that failed us all in the first place, which is rather like asking the burglar to come back and change the locks after breaking in and robbing you. Let’s face facts, its short term gain that matters to so many, not short term pain.

So, have there been any successes? Have our ‘little’ voices out in ether of Bloggerland been heard amid the noise and chaos of 2008...? Oh yes they have... and how! Just look at these few examples...

In Europe, German Chancellor Merkel scaled back her demands for loopholes that would have resulted in millions of tonnes of C02 emissions and handouts to heavy industry. This was due to the actions of more than 200,000 Avaaz members including over ten thousand in Germany, who emailed and participated in actions in Brussels and Poznan.

World Vision, one of the world's leading relief and development agencies works on a global basis with over 100 million people in nearly 100 countries in the struggle against poverty, hunger and injustice and has changed the lives of so many for the better with small donations from many.

In Canada, largely to the efforts of ForestEthics and its allies, the Ontario government committed to protect 55 million acres (more than 20 million hectares) of the northern Boreal Forest—an area half the size of California, or six times the size of Belgium from industrial development.

In the UK thanks to supporters of Friends of The Earth the UK Parliament was pursuaded, after a 3 and a half year campaign, to pass a law that commits the Government to deep cuts in the UK's emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Third World Microfinance charity Kiva, the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, has now been enabled to make thousands of loans every week directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world due to the kind generosity of thousands of small lenders.

Thanks to the support of supporters, Greenpeace managed to prevent pro-GMO countries from wrecking an important December 2008 EU environment ministers' meeting on Genetically Modified Organisms and food safety. Over 70,000 messages were sent to EU politicians, including over 3,000 sent directly in 48 hours to the UK and German ministers.

Over 350,000 people have contributed to the supply of over 824,000 mosquito nets costing $5, £3 each and have now saved 1.5 million lives from the scourge of Malaria in Africa.

And so it goes on, hard fought for and won success after hard fought for and won success... but what about the future for the environment? Well there are problems ahead because for some areas of God's creation the tipping point has already been reached. The future will however eventually become brighter as long as we never give up and carry on emailing, supporting, blogging, pursuading, putting our concerns in front of the decision makers and leading by example.

There is certainly a massive amount of work to be done regarding the problems and challenges humanity is facing in safeguarding creation for the generations as yet unborn. Like the designers and builders of Salisbury Cathedral we may never see the full result of our efforts, but after a lot of hard work and effort the problems will eventually be overcome because, in the words of President Elect Obama, “We are the ones we have been waiting for”.

May I wish everyone a very happy, healthy, peaceful and above all, loving Christmas...

2008-12-22T11:05:00.000-08:00

Please excuse me because this is for me a total indulgence. The musical equivalent of chocolate or cheesecake, it's The Shepherd’s Farewell by Berlioz. It's not only my favorite carol but my favorite choral work of all time, I sang it often as a choir member and love it dearly.

A Christmas Thought

2008-12-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

We live in a time when the focus of civilisation is on speed. Fast cars, fast trains, fast aircraft, and fast food. For many of us it would be hard to imagine a world without these things and yet, not long ago, none of these existed. This was bought home to me several years ago when we went for a walk on Christmas Day. There were no cars driving on our local roads, not even an aircraft passing overhead, in fact, there wasn’t any sound of machinery, and yet this is how the world was in the recent past.

The legacy of the past is its slowness, its peace, its patience, its care for others, its knowledge of the seasons of nature and of life, and it’s sharing in the sense of community.

The legacy of the present is the mobile phone, the car with its windows vibrating because it is fitted with a sound system that would be sufficient for a small concert hall, the reliance on a supermarket for a quick in and even quicker out once-a-week shop, 24 hour TV, the microwave, piped music everywhere, boil-in-the-bag food, ready meals and car alarms.

For many today life is but a non-stop treadmill and they are running ever faster on it yet getting nowhere whatsoever in a quest to achieve or maintain that certain something that for so very many has lost its meaning, that certain something being a ‘high standard of living’. This ‘high standard of living’ ignores the simple pursuits of life, gardening, cycling, maintaining and making friendships, sitting listening to music , cooking, and reading. Instead there is the instant garden of the garden centre, the car, the snatched email, background music while doing another task such as reading the never finished book and watching celebrity chefs on TV.

Then... once a year... there is Christmas.

For many this is the only time they are together as a family group, sitting around a table and eating together and often in the Bible shared meals are mentioned. I often think that theologians ignore the fact that must have been great fun to be with Jesus, anyone who can turn water into wine must have been a sure-fire hit at parties!

In the past for the vast majority the ceremonial centre of the house was the kitchen table. All the main events of the household were celebrated by communal meals there, births, deaths, birthdays; Easter, Christmas, and going away as well welcome home meals were shared and eaten there. The kitchen table, with the air around heady with the smell of cooking, turned into a place of discussion and debate, of experiences shared, of friendship shared and renewed and of warmth and comfort.

Often these meals were, by today’s standards, very simple and ‘unsophisticated’ affairs. Food would have been local, grown or reared in the area and stored extremely carefully. Wine from the other side of the world and fresh beans from Africa or strawberries from South America would not have been on the menu, nor would have been a huge joint of meat but the words of Proverbs 15:17 would have summed up the atmosphere perfectly. "Better a meal of vegetables where there is love than a fattened calf with hatred".

I pray that your table may be weighed down with love this Christmas.

Less can mean more... and more can mean less

2008-12-16T02:07:00.000-08:00

The picture on the left is of Sarah from Westlake Village, California. Her video of the time she spent in Nepal, the first time she had left the US, can be viewed here. It is more than well worth seeing.

The carol ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’... it sounds non-religious... but...

2008-12-12T10:09:00.000-08:00

This carol has its origin as a teaching tool for young people at the time when Catholics were unable to practice their beliefs openly, and the following is what is behind the song.

“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me”. The true love represents God and the “me” is the Christian who receives these gifts.

The “Partridge in the Pear tree” is Jesus who died on the tree (cross).

The “two turtle doves” are the Old and the New Testaments.

The “three French hens” were faith hope and love, the three gifts of the spirit that abides (1 Corinthians 13).

The “four calling birds” are the four Gospels.

The “five gold rings” are the first five books of The Bible that are known as the ‘Book of Moses’.

The “six geese a-laying” are the six days of creation.

The “seven swans a-swimming” are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Peter 4: 10-11).

The “eight maids a-milking” are the eight beatitudes.

The “nine ladies dancing” are the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23)

The “ten lords a-leaping” are the Ten Commandments.

The “eleven pipers piping” are the eleven faithfull disciples.

The “twelve drummers drumming” are the twelve points of the Apostles Creed.

So the next time you hear this carol, you may well be the only one that really understands its meaning.

A letter received from Zimbabwe, please read it.

2008-12-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

The following letter does not make pleasant seasonal reading, but for some it is reality. I have been asked to pass it on to as many as I can so please, please cut and paste it or put a link to this and so pass it on...

I reckon that these are the last days of TKM and ZPF. The darkest hour is always before dawn.

We are all terrified at what they are going to destroy next........I mean they are actually ploughing down brick and mortar houses and one family with twin boys of 10 had no chance of salvaging anything when 100 riot police came in with AK47's and bulldozers and demolished their beautiful house - 5 bedrooms and pine ceilings - because it was 'too close to the airport', so we are feeling extremely insecure right now.

You know - I am aware that this does not help you sleep at night, but if you do not know - how can you help? Even if you put us in your own mental ring of light and send your guardian angels to be with us - that is a help -but I feel so cut off from you all knowing I cannot tell you what's going on here simply because you will feel uncomfortable. There is no ways we can leave here so that is not an option.

I ask that you all pray for us in the way that you know how, and let me know that you are thinking of us and sending out positive vibes... that's all. You can't just be in denial and pretend/believe it's not going on.

To be frank with you, it's genocide in the making and if you do not believe me, read the Genocide Report by Amnesty International which says we are - IN level 7 - (level 8 is after it's happened and everyone is in denial).

If you don't want me to tell you these things-how bad it is-then it means you have not dealt with your own fear, but it does not help me to think you are turning your back on our situation. We need you, please, to get the news OUT that we are all in a fearfully dangerous situation here. Too many people turn their backs and say - oh well, that's what happens in Africa

This Government has GONE MAD and you need to help us publicize our plight---or how can we be rescued? It's a reality! The petrol queues are a reality, the pall of smoke all around our city is a reality, the thousands of homeless people sleeping outside in 0 Celsius with no food, water, shelter and bedding are a reality. Today a family approached me, brother of the gardener's wife with two small children. Their home was trashed and they will have to sleep outside. We already support 8 adult people and a child on this property, and electricity is going up next month by 250% as is water.

How can I take on another family of 4 - and yet how can I turn them away to sleep out in the open?

I am not asking you for money or a ticket out of here - I am asking you to FACE the fact that we are in deep and terrible danger and want you please to pass on our news and pictures. So PLEASE don't just press the delete button! Help best in the way that you know how.

Do face the reality of what is going on here and help us SEND OUT THE WORD... The more people who know about it, the more chance we have of the United Nations coming to our aid. Please don't ignore or deny what's happening. Some would like to be protected from the truth BUT then, if we are eliminated, how would you feel? 'If only we knew how bad it really was we could have helped in some way'.

[I know we chose to stay here and that some feel we deserve what's coming to us]

For now,--- we ourselves have food, shelter, a little fuel and a bit of money for the next meal - but what is going to happen next? Will they start on our houses?

All property is going to belong to the State now. I want to send out my Title Deeds to one of you because if they get a hold of those, I can't fight for my rights.

Censorship! ---- We no longer have SW radio [which told us everything that was happening] because the Government jammed it out of existence - we don't have any reporters, and no one is allowed to photograph. If we had reporters here, they would have an absolute field day. Even the pro-Government Herald has written that people are shocked, stunned, bewildered and blown mindless by the wanton destruction of many folks homes, which are supposed to be 'illegal' but for which a huge percentage actually do have licenses.

Please! - do have some compassion and HELP by sending out the articles and personal reports so that something can/may be done.

'I am one. I cannot do everything, --- but I can do something... And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do.'

After reading the above my 'problems' don't seem to matter at all

A Prayer

2008-12-02T02:11:00.000-08:00

May God bless you with discomfort
at easy answers, half truths and indifferent relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears
for those who face pain, hunger and war,
so that you may reach out your hands to comfort them.

May God bless you with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make a difference in the world,
so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

Anon.

Oh dear...

2008-11-26T03:03:00.000-08:00

I have been tagged by Mrs. Green and asked to “share 6 interesting things about yourself”, but in describing me the words “interesting” and “yourself” sit uneasily in the same sentence, so will “weird”, “different” or “unusual” do Rae? Here goes then:

1. When I drove race cars, I lost a race at Brands Hatch by touching, with a flailing hand, an oversensitive ignition kill switch in the Lotus I was driving as I exited the final corner. You would be amazed just how fast other race cars can overtake when you have turned the ignition off!

2. I have a talent that few other ministers possess; I can Oxy-acetylene, Arc and MIG weld.

3. Although I hate heights I once did a charity abseil down a multi story office block because I said ‘yes’ to the question “can you help us raise some money?” before I asked ‘how?’ I promise that will not make that mistake again...

4. I have been to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party... Actually my wife was the one that was invited but I accompanied her.

5. We live in a 300+ year old cottage that we bought 20 years ago as an uninhabitable near tumbledown wreck. After I estimated 6 months to ‘do do it up’ I then spent 2 years in doing so! Interestingly I discovered that the lath and plastered over wooden beams were oak ships timbers. So if the cottage is 300 years old, the ship was 50 years old when it was cannibalised and the Oak trees that the beams were cut from were 100 years old then the wood of our beams was growing some 450 years ago in the 1550’s, long before the Pilgrim Fathers were born, let alone reached America, mind you, the ship the beams once were may have...

6.Many years ago when I was ten-pin bowling with friends, I managed to start my run to the line while still raising a heavier than usual bowl to my face. There was painful contact and I knocked a front tooth out

Are you going to buy a new computer for Christmas?

2008-11-24T04:40:00.000-08:00

Please play the above before you 'recycle' the old one, it is very important that you do so... thank you.

Do you ever think that what you do can’t last?

2008-11-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

When you next see a Space Shuttle on the launch pad have a look at the SRB’s (Solid Rocket Boosters) attached to it. These are made in Utah by Thiokol and the designers may well have liked to make them bigger, but as they had to be moved by train from the factory to the launch site the designers were restricted in their dimensions by the dimensions of the tunnels they had to pass through.

US rail tunnel dimensions are dictated to by the width of the train and this is dependent upon the railroad gauge which is 4’8 ½” inches between rails, about 143.51 centimeter. To say this is an odd figure is an understatement, so why was that dimension used?

Simple, this is because the first railways in the USA were built by British expatriates who brought over their jigs and tools with them. They first used these for the horse drawn wagons, then they used them when they built the railways.

Why did the British use that spacing? Easy to answer! When they started building horse drawn transport in Britain they had to use that 4’8 ½” spacing because to do otherwise would destroy their wheels because they would not match the ruts that were already there in most of the old, already existing roads.

Who or what made those existing ruts in Britain’s old roads? They were made, around 2000 years ago by the Romans.

There then is the answer. Over 2000 years ago someone decided to measure the hindquarters of two horses and decided on the wheel spacing of 4’8 ½” because it was the perfect dimension for a war chariot. So a major design feature of one of the world’s most advanced transportation system, the SRB's on the space shuttle, was in fact determined over 2000 years ago by someone in a stable measuring a horse.

And around 2000 years ago something else occurred in a stable that also determines many lives of today...

I will drink to that!

2008-11-15T04:31:00.000-08:00

As someone that started out in life in engineering and design I am in complete awe of the design talent of God.

Everything is multiple-use and nothing is ever wasted.
For example in our garden we have an Oak tree, it must be 500 years old. In that time has fed itself and the plants around with leaf mould, the local squirrels have fed on its acorns and taken away and buried them for store, forgotten where they were which explains some the younger nearby Oaks. The Oaks fallen limbs have been taken over by fungi and insect life and we are burning some of the thinned branches on our open fire now and so the story goes on, but you get the picture, the tree is not just carbon removing, oxygen enhancing and beautiful, that is just the start.
So why can’t we follow that principle and when we design items have multi use in the design remit?

The beer bottle that you see in the image was envisaged in the early 1960’s by beer brewer Alfred Heineken and designed by Dutch architect John Habraken, the “brick that holds beer” was ahead of its time. The final design came in two sizes - 350 and 500 mm versions that were meant to lay horizontally, interlock and layout in the same manner as ‘brick and mortar’ construction. One production run in 1963 yielded 100,000 bottles some of which were used to build a small shed on Mr. Heineken’s estate in Noordwijk, Netherlands, but the idea never caught on.

The Buddhist monk is standing in the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in Thailand's Sisaket province. He and his fellows collected around a million normal beer bottles to build the temple he stands in, for more detail see here.

And the final image is from the UK. The walls of this structure are made from orange plastic crates, for more details see here. Wouldn’t the world be a much better happier, safer and cleaner place if, rather throwing things away or using energy to recycle them they had a use just as they were, just the same way as God designs things?

For some, the penny has finally dropped!

2008-11-08T02:33:00.000-08:00

I am a member of our village Parish Council and as such I recently attended an emergency planning conference. Local (Parish) Emergency Plans were started just after WW2 when the concern was a Russian nuclear attack. The parish councillors who were involved in the plan were supplied with a short- wave radio, built up a store of food, and, assuming they survived, had to list where local facilities were for storing and disposing of any victims and looking after the injured living etc. It was then decided to add the concern of disaster (plane crash whatever) to the emergencies list and then, as the usefulness of the Parish Emergency Groups became apparent and the cold war was over, the concern of natural disasters took their place.

Two of the speakers described how their parishes had dealt with major floods, not applicable to the major part of our parish which is a few hundred feet above sea level, and then we had a Met Office (see HERE) scientist to give a talk, the site will also link to weather in other countries as well. She gave for many a new insight into emergency plans when she said that we now had to plan for the safety of our vulnerable when we had Global Warming related extremes of weather, giving, as an example, the European heat-wave of 2003, see HERE for more detail. When this occurred there were around 20,000 heat wave related deaths in Europe including 3,000 in Paris alone where the death rate increased by 142%! These summer temperature events will, we were told, be the norm by 2040, and by 2060 will be considered cool. What she did not touch on was what would happen further south of the UK. In Africa, in South America, in Australia Malaysia, Indonesia, India and so on, what, I thought, would happen to the people there when the temperatures increased?

The good point of her talk was the rapt silence that she was listened to, because for many of my climate change sceptic fellow councillors, the penny, at has last has dropped... it’s for real...

Non-polluting nuclear power???

2008-11-04T02:51:00.000-08:00

Sellafield on the coast in the remote and staggeringly beautiful area of Cumbria is the largest industrial complex in the UK. It produces little yet employs 10,000 people and has armed police guarding its perimeter, why? Because it contains the world's biggest stockpile of plutonium and uranium. Sellafield now produces no electricity. Instead it re-processes spent fuel to produce more unwanted plutoniurn and uranium. Some of this could be turned into fuel, but the MOX plant built to do this at a cost of £400 million has produced, in the seven years since it was built, only 7 tonnes of fuel compared with a production target of 840 tonnes.

Much of the nuclear waste comes from other countries that send their spent fuel to Sellafield to be re-processed and sent back home so that Britain would not become "the nuclear dustbin of the world" but guess what, it has stayed at Sellafield, going nowhere.

Sellafield has a safety record that is a total disaster; from 1950 to 1986 alone there were over 250 safety related incidents. In 1957 there was a fire at the plant; the UK Atomic Energy Authority had built two nuclear reactors (or “piles”) on the site of a World War II explosives factory to manufacture the radioactive element plutonium for use in British atom bombs. Radioactive uranium fuel at pile number one caught fire in 1957 and radioactive material was spread over a large area of North West England. At one point eight tons of uranium was burning. Milk from 600 farms in an area of 500 square kilometres was banned from human consumption and an unknown number of people received additional radiation doses in the form of an isotope of iodine. It is a fact that if just 1% of the Plutonium (the most dangerous nuclear material) stored there was released, it would be ten times as devastating as Chernobyl.

MP Nigel Evans raised the case of a family who were in the area that had suffered horrendous health problems but a government enquiry was refused, see here for the details. There were also suspicions that more was know by the authorities than they wanted to admit about radioactive contamination when it was discovered that workers body parts had been removed at autopsies for testing, see here.

In the words of Dr Simon Taylor University of Cambridge. “The name having acquired controversial and menacing associations, Windscale was re-named in 1981 back to its original name of Sellafield”

The Irish Government and the Northern Irish assembly were understandably irate when it was found the ‘low-level’ waste was being discharged into the Irish Sea and the Irish Sea is now thought to be one of the most radioactive in the world and some beaches in the immediate area are still closed off. What also concerns me is that the waste at the plant will be unsafe for a quarter of a million years. The next time that someone talks about non-polluting nuclear energy, ignore them, because the same sort of incidents have taken place all over the world at nuclear facilities. There is however another way to pollution free power...

The main picture is Sellafield and the other of the Romney Marsh Wind farm on the South Coast of England. It is next to the now defunct Dungeness Nuclear Power Station and you can see more photos of them, the Nuclear Facility and the story of the area here.

This is OUR planet, a unique creation... well worth protecting for all humanity.

2008-11-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

Please play the film.

So, what would you do with the $4 trillion that has been committed to rescue the global economy?

2008-10-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

Would you provide safe water and sanitation to the 2.5 billion people in the world without it at a cost of only £37.5bn, around the amount (£37bn) given by UK government to RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB banks? That amount would hardly be noticed!

Would you feed the starving? As Jacques Diouf, head of the UN's food and agriculture organisation, said it would cost a mere $30bn a year to avert all future threats of conflicts over food. "How can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find US$30bn a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?" How indeed...

Would you spend some on Ecosystems and biodiversity? A study on the costs and benefits of investing in the wealth of nature has provisionally found that most of the world's forests, mountains, rivers and seas could be protected for only about $45bn annually. A cheap investment surely?

Would you, if you are in the UK, invest in plans to generate 36% of all electricity from renewable sources by 2020 an amount roughly costed by the Treasury at $100bn, over 12 years?

If you are in the US would you spend $4.4tr, (yes I know it's all the money, but it is spread over 30, yes 30 years) to replace all the US's coal and oil-fired electricity generation by renewable electricity, reduce the world's carbon emissions by nearly 20% and provide hundreds of thousands of jobs?

How about protecting the world's most important ecosystems? It is estimated this would cost $1.3tr, but again spread over 30 years. For this sum, nearly 15% of land and 30% of the oceans would be protected from illegal logging, overfishing, pollution and would go most of the way to protecting the most endangered animals.

Or would you give it ALL to the financial systems that failed us???

A prophecy waiting in the wings?

2008-10-24T04:54:00.000-07:00

In the desert regions of the world there is the potential to grow food and supply enough power for the entire world, impossible? Well actually no, because there are two projects already in progress showing just how that can be done.

Desertec, see here, concentrates sunlight, solar power, (CSP) via mirrors onto steam turbines to drive generators, as in a conventional power station, the bottom image shows how little area would be required to supply the world, the smaller squares show the corresponding areas for the EU and the Middle East and North Africa. The middle image shows a solar collector panel, this is not pie-in-the-sky technology as there are already similar plants in the US and Spain, see here and here.

As for growing food in the desert the same clean CSP technology would pump seawater into the greenhouses in the top image where it would desalinate in solar collectors, leaving the salt behind and so allowing the now clean water to be used in cultivation. Interestingly enough for the overnight storage of heat to enable electricity production when the sun is down, then large saline (salt) filled tanks are needed.

In the words of Michael Pawlyn, who worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team, (see here) "Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry, desert locations. CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we'd be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse. CSP needs a supply of clean, de-mineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the Seawater Greenhouse produces large quantities of this."

In the words of Isaiah C35 v1&2
The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy...

That day certainly can't come too soon for me!