Save the Rainforests - The Prince's Rainforest Project

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'.

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

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'.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.