Mars or Bust

 

Last week (May 6-8), George Washington University hosted the second annual "Humans2Mars" Summit.  Hundreds of scientists, astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss what it will take to get us to Mars. Manned space flight into the solar system has been dormant for decades - basically ever since the US beat the Soviets to the moon. Since then, no one seems to have had the energy, the imagination, or the resources to put together a program to get a human being beyond Earth orbit - not even to the moon.

The goal of the H2M conference was to address the major challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030. Agenda topics included human and robotic precursor missions, science and engineering needed for the program, creating a viable space economy, agriculture and food production, biomedical challenges, international cooperation and other subjects. Among the many agenda topics were robotic and human precursor missions, launch systems, Mars transit challenges, space suit design, biomedical challenges, entry, descent and landing, in situ resource utilization, surface power, science goals, agriculture and food production, international cooperation, and creating a viable space economy. [Picture is from the NASA website. "This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light."]

Well at least people are beginning to think about it. And it's not just limited to the H2M gang. The April issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" had an interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Space Adventures and the head of two other companies including Planetary Resources, which plans to extract minerals from near-Earth asteroids. James Fallow's article was titled "Life on Mars". Anderson's vision is breath-taking: "In the next generation or two - say the next 30 to 60 years - there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony." He thinks the location of this permanent colony will be Mars and that it will grow within a hundred years from a few thousand people to a few million. Anderson considers economics to be the only real challenge - that technological and engineering solutions already are available. Mining the asteroids is the path he thinks will make the economics attractive.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the featured speakers at H2M, has devised a master plan for missions to Mars – the “Aldrin Mars Cycler” – a spacecraft transportation system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Aldrin explains the concept in his new book, Mission to Mars. The cycler would require a "substantially large vehicle that would provide radiation shielding and spacious quarters in order to guarantee the safety and comfort of outbound-to-Mars and inbound-to-Earth astronaut crews." The Aldrin Cycler would travel around the sun, making close flybys of Earth and Mars - a trajectory that is continuously repeated every two and a half years with astronauts boarding and disembarking the cycler via a "small but speedy space taxi". Taking advantage of Newton's Laws of Motion, the Cycler could shuttle continuously "without requiring a significant amount of propellant to keep on track." [Photo is of Buzz Aldrin on his moonwalk.  Buzz was the second man on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Mission to Mars gives a comprehensive picture of the "Flexible Path architecture" for going to Mars. Flexible Path architecture combines a lunar strategy with near-Earth-asteroid-mining missions and uses the Martian moon Phobos as a way point to Mars. Aldrin suggests that "going to Mars means permanence on the planet. It cannot be run as a series of one-shot deals as were the moon landings - you know: fly there, plant a flag, take a picture and come home. Rather this will involve astronauts committing to "living out his or her life on the surface of Mars." As he points out: "Living far from Earth in a remote and confined will surely induce physiological and psychological stresses." Hmm, to say the least...it will also take a pioneering spirit beyond anything we have had on Earth during the Age of Exploration from the late fifteenth century on. Indeed the permanent residents of Mars will be homesteaders rather than explorers. In Aldrin's vision, they will employ in situ resource utilization to reduce the costs of resupply.

It's good that we dream these dreams. Without such, we will never move into the greater universe. But there is a practical side too - namely, the benefits Earth can derive from a permanent colony on Mars, which has, after all, a land mass equivalent to that of Earth.

(To be continued...)

 

Links

 

News article on H2M conference from space.com .

 

Humans2Mars Conference website

 

Space Adventures website: "the only company to have sent private citizens to space"

 

 

Sunday Round-Up - May 12, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the still-open Guantanamo Bay prison, Secretary of State Kerry's Moscow visit and Syria, Italy's failure to form a progressive government after the February elections, and the Bangladesh factory collapse. Excerpts are from TomDispatch.com, The Guardian, The Asia Times, Pravda, and The Nation.

Guantanamo Bay Prison

One of the first things Barack Obama did when taking office in 2009 was to pledge the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Guantanamo was being used as a facility for the indefinite detention of prisoners in the "war on terror". Well, four years later, prisoners are still being held in indefinite detention and a hunger strike is underway.   Hopefully Obama will make good on his latest pledge to finally close this, as Peter Van Buren calls it, "crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002." Van Buren continues in his May 9 post on TomDispatch.com: "The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling. No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state....Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned." Most of these vetted prisoners are Yemeni and Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring prisoners there.

 

 

Syria and Kerry's Visit to Moscow

Secretary of State John Kerry was in Moscow Tuesday, May 7, on a "working visit" trying to enlist Russian assistance in ending the Syrian civil war. The civil war has resulted in more than 70,000 deaths. The recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria and the Hezbollah and Syrian reaction to it have brought to the forefront the potential for the situation to spill over and destabilize the entire Middle East.  Stephen Lendman notes in a May 9 post in Pravda: "Russian condemnation of Israeli air strikes preceded Kerry's arrival. Moscow's Foreign Ministry called them 'a threat to regional stability.' ... Moscow wants Syrians to decide who'll lead them. Foreign intervention is rejected. It doesn't want another allied regional government toppled. Doing so leaves others more vulnerable. It gives Washington greater control. It harms Russia's strategic interests." The Asia Times continued the theme of the strange run-up to Kerry's Moscow visit. Besides noting Moscow's angry reaction to the Israeli airstrikes, M K Bhadrakumar writes "the US senate's foreign relations committee took up a draft bill proposing American military help for the Syrian rebel fighters. It was no doubt a barely-disguised pressure tactic threatening Moscow that unless it compromised on Syria, Obama would arm the anti-regime fighters." In the end, Kerry and Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, "pledged [their countries] to convene an international conference aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, hoping to give the situation a new diplomatic push following two years of bloodshed...Kerry said at the midnight press conference that the conference would be held 'as soon as practical, possibly, hopefully as soon as the end of the month'. " [The Guardian]  Then in a Friday editorial, The Guardian endorses the persuasive arguments of the European Council on Foreign Relations for de-escalation and a diplomatic solution. "It means pressuring the Gulf states to starve rival militias of arms. Without that happening, there is no political solution....For Russia and Iran to cut their military support, Assad's fate has to be a product of the transition, not a precondition of it." As events of the past couple of weeks show, a "war that has already killed 70,000 Syrians, displaced 4 million and forced 1 million to flee could get a lot worse. That is why it is right for Barack Obama to resist pressure from Britain and France to arm the rebels, and to instead make another attempt at an internationally brokered settlement with the Russians."

 

 

Italy's New Not-So-Progressive Government

 

Italy's new government of center-left and center-right coalitions was formed two months after the elections after Beppe Grillo refused to take his Five Star Movement party into any coalition.   Frederika Randall writing in The Nation examines Italy's failure to form a progressive government. She writes: "There was one sunny week this spring when it looked like change might finally come to Italy. A week when an ossified and gerontocratic political class looked like it might give way to new faces and new ideas. When the combined forces of youth and progress looked strong enough to defy European austerity." Unfortunately, "hopes for a progressive government failed, thanks to suicidal divisions among the center-left and Beppe Grillo’s demagogic posturing."

 

Bangladesh Garment Factory Tragedy

Finally on May 8, The Guardian carried a sad update on the factory collapse in Bangladesh. The death toll had risen above 800.   "The disaster is the worst ever in the garment sector, far surpassing fires last year that killed about 260 people in Pakistan and 112 in Bangladesh, as well as the 1911 garment disaster in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory that killed 146 workers." As to the possible cause of the collapse, officials "say the building's owner illegally added three floors and allowed the garment factories to install heavy machines and generators, even though the structure was not designed to support such equipment." (By Friday, the death toll had soared over 1,000.  That day, there was a miraculous rescue of a seamstress who had been trapped in the rubble for 17 days. [Washington Post/AP])

Sunday Round-Up May 5, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at views and news on income inequality, bees and pesticides, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the Israeli campaign to get the United States to bomb Syria.  Special thanks to Le Monde Diplomatique, Mother Jones, The Guardian, and Haaretz.

In a May 1 article in Le Monde Diplomatique, Serge Halimi writes of the growing worldwide social and economic inequality.  He quotes Francis Fukyama: “Inequality per se has never been a big problem in American political culture, which emphasises equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes...But the system remains legitimate only as long as people believe that by working hard and doing their best, they and their children have a fair shot at getting ahead, and that the wealthy got there playing by the rules”. Halimi's analysis of the current economic situation (for example: "The 63,000 people — 18,000 in Asia, 17,000 in the US and 14,000 in Europe — who have a fortune of over $100m collectively own $39,900bn.") leads him to conclude that "All over the world this age-old faith, whose effect can be calming or anaesthetising, is evaporating." And the impact on democracy is telling.  In the US, Congress often does not enact laws that the majority want because of the influence of and pressure from well-funded lobbyists. "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ( Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice from 1916 to 1939)

In MotherJones, Tom Philpott reports on the European Commission's April 29 vote "to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are a widely used class of chemicals suspected of contributing to a severe global decline in honeybee health...In the wake of Europe's decisive action, the US Environmental Protection Agency dithered."

 

 

In Friday's Guardian, Ian Black reports on the attempt by a group of European leaders to break the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Elements of the appeal include recognizing the following: The Madrid and Oslo agreements "are moribund. Solutions based on the West Bank but excluding the Gaza Strip while perpetuating the split between the PLO and Hamas, will not work. The EU...must have a more equal role alongside the US. The Palestinian territories are under occupation. A 'peace process' that maintains and finances the status quo must end." One of the signatories Sir Jeremy Greenstock notes, "Whatever his rhetoric Barack Obama has not done anything significantly different from George Bush on this issue. We wanted to say with emphasis: 'It's time for a fresh start.' "

With Saturday's news that Israel launched an airstrike into Syria [see article in Huffington Post], this item from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz appears timely. Gideon Levy warns that Israel's "fear campaign calling upon Obama to bomb Syria has one real goal in mind. It's not helping Syria's civilians. It's a strike on Iran." Let's hope Obama is smart enough to ignore the Israeli advice and not get tricked into another war in the Middle East.

May Day

International Workers' Day was celebrated May 1. It's a bank or national holiday in much of the world. - although not in the US or Canada where the contributions of workers are celebrated in September.

Across Europe and even here at home, May Day protests were held against austerity programs that aim to reduce deficits in a time of recession by cutting benefits for the less well off and decreasing government jobs. CNN's website has a series of photos and videos of the European protests.  NBC News has coverage of the Seattle and Los Angeles demonstration.

So where do the workers of the world and of the US stand 123 years after the first May Day was observed?

On the plus side:

• The eight-hour workday is fairly universal in the industrialized West. This was what workers in the late 19th century were struggling for: eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours recreation.

• Discrimination against women and minorities in the workplace is ending. Here at home, we had to pass the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 to reverse a 2007 ruling by the conservative US Supreme Court that placed new time limits on when discriminatory pay complaints could be filed.

• In the US, the only Western industrialized nation without a single payer health care system, businesses over a certain size must now (starting in 2014) provide a health care plan for their full-time employees thanks to the Affordable Care Act. SCOTUS has already ruled on its constitutionality but Republicans continue to mount attacks against the act. We are not out of the woods yet on this one. Congressional legislators can affect the funding and Republican-controlled state legislatures can hamper implementation.

On the negative side:

- It still can be dangerous to be a worker.

• A recent explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant killed 15. Apparently the various agencies responsible for monitoring the safety of the plant (the agencies whose regulations Republicans abhor and try to defund) as well as the plant management failed to recognize the danger of storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate.

 

• A building collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 500 garment workers. [Huffington Post] These deaths occurred a day after a five-story crack opened in the building. The workers had been threatened with a loss of pay if they did not go to work the day of the collapse. If companies want to reap the benefits of globalization, they need to act morally. That is, they (or at the very least our government) should demand the same safety and health standards be applied in developing countries as in our own.   Saying that you contract out your work does not relieve you of the responsibility for the safety of the workers nor does it relieve you of the obligation to ensure that safety audits of contracted facilities are conducted competently.

- The global recession continues unabated throughout most of the world.

• Unemployment in the Eurozone (the 17 countries using the Euro) reached an overall record high of 12.1% in March. Greece and Spain are much worse than the average - at about 27% unemployment in each. Youth (15-24 years old) unemployment is staggering with Greece and Spain again the worst off (56% in Spain and 59% in Greece).
• The austerity nonsense (read this as "deficit reduction in the midst of a recession") that is in vogue in Europe and the US has clearly been unable to help countries recover economically. In Great Britain, which is not in the Eurozone, unemployment in February rose to 7.9%. In mid-April, after cutting its forecast for UK economic growth, even the IMF is asking Prime Minister David Cameron's governing coalition to "consider easing up on its austerity drive amid a weak economic recovery." As the WSJ reports: "The U.K. economy has barely grown since Mr. Cameron took office and is at risk of shrinking for the second consecutive quarter in the first three months of 2013, which would push it into its third recession in five years."
• Here at home, official unemployment stands at 7.5%, down slightly from March's 7.6%. 165,000 new jobs were created in April - which is about what is needed to absorb the new workers entering the US labor force each month.
• Some common sense is prevailing - in, of all places, Italy. Italy's new Prime Minister Letta has said growth policies must be urgently adopted to counter an austerity drive under which the country was "dying". "Italy is dying from austerity alone," he said. "Growth policies cannot wait."
• Unfortunately, no such common sense seems to exist in the US where economic ideologues, the so-called "deficit hawks" are driving the discussion towards the same measures that have failed to work in Europe. How Obama can be taken in by these right wing arguments is beyond my comprehension. Trying to reach a "Grand Bargain" with the proponents of the economic philosophy that drove us into this ditch and that has prevented us from emerging from it (supply side economics (aka trickle down); deregulation) - with the opponents still geared to denying him victories even as a lame duck president - is ludicrous. (See Senator Toomey's comments on the failure of gun legislation.) The shadows of Reagan and Thatcher continue to cast their palls on recovery in the US and UK. 

- Income inequality is growing - particularly in the United States.

 

 

 

• The gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us in this country continues to grow. It is no coincidence that this gap has grown as the influence of unions and union membership have declined.  In the graph above (taken from the Center on Budget and Policy Prioities website), the influence of Reaganomics and the policies promoted by the Chicago School can be clearly seen.  Until about 1980, all income levels were sharing in the growing prosperity.  Afterwards the slope of the curve for the wealthiest begins to deviate significantly from the slope of the curves for the rest of us.  Trickle down?  I don't think so.

• Per the Global Post webpage on the income gap and the Gini methodolgy used by social scientists to measure inequality: "Income inequality is surging, and there are few countries where it is rising faster than the United States. The distance between rich and poor is greater in America than nearly all other developed countries, making the US a leader in a trend that economists warn has dire consequences."   In the Gini methodology, 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents a state where everything is owned by one person.  Among the member nations of the OECD, only Mexico and Chile have greater inequality than exists in the US.

 

Other Stuff

May Day

International Worker's Day is celebrated on May 1. It is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated unofficially in many others. It originally started as a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, which began as a peaceful rally in Chicago in 1886 in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; scores of others were wounded. [Wikipedia]

 

 

 

Union Membership

In January, the NYTimes reported that the percentage of unionized US workers had dropped to its lowest level in 97 years.  In spite of a gain of 2.4 million jobs in 2012, union membership dropped by 400,000.  The percentage of unionized workers is down from 32-35% in the post WWII years.  It bears repeating: the exponentially widening income gap in the United States is partly due to the weakening of unions in this country.  The other part of the equation is the shifting of manufacturing jobs overseas.  Manufacturing jobs are being replaced by less-well-paid jobs in the services industries. 

So I guess I'll close with Paul Robeson's fantastic rendition of the worker's song Joe Hill.  And a hope for a rebirth in the validity of the American Dream for our upcoming generations.

 

 

 

Masters of War

[Click here for a Pearl Jam rendition of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War". ]

[Sorry, folks, I couldn't find a video of Dylan performing the song.]

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it's your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly.

I've been a Bob Dylan fan for many years. The places he went with his music spoke to me from the time of his earliest recordings. I especially appreciated his sense of outrage at the injustices in society in those early years. I did however think that his anti-war song "Masters of War", the first two verses of which are given above and that is now 50 years old, was a bit naive. It seemed to lay blame more at the feet of the arms manufacturers than at the feet of the politicians that lead us into wars. Well, I no longer feel that way. To varying degrees, both are to blame.

Look at armed conflicts in Africa, military interventions in the Middle East, US gun homicides, international arms trade, terrorist attacks ...what do these have in common? Two things: the resort to violence as a means to an end and the availability of weapons to carry out this violence.

We may be unable to change a predilection to violence but we sure can do things to decrease the availability of weapons. Okay, maybe not anything as dramatic as the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, who made a nuclear missile already in flight simply disappear..but surely something more than the machinations of those US Senators who blocked a background check bill designed to keep guns out of the hands of felons, the mentally ill and, yes, terrorists.

The human toll due to war and war's after-effects are enormous. Not all wars make non-stop headlines in the United States. The Second Congo War (1998-2003), also known as the Great African War, is one example. Besides the deaths of tens of thousands of combatants, it has been estimated that the war has caused betweeen 2.7 and 5.4 million excess civilian deaths (through the present). This includes more than 350,000 violent civilian deaths (through 2001) with the remainder dying from hunger and disease unleashed by the war. [Wikipedia]

As the worst of the hostilities of the Second Congo War were coming to an end, the United States was beginning to gear up for the war with Iraq. That totally unnecessary invasion against a country that was no threat to us, that had zero WMD's and no connection to the 9/11 attacks resulted in more than 600,000 excess deaths according to a 2006 Lancet study. [Washington Post] During the time it was waged, the Iraq War became one of the biggest Al-Qaeda recruiting tools of all time. 

The ongoing gun slaughter on our streets is appalling. There is an undeniable correlation between gun ownership, gun laws and gun deaths. 10 times the number of people who died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 die each year in the US from guns. By 2015, annual gun deaths in the United States are expected to exceed deaths caused by automobiles. We license and test people before they can drive cars, which is, after all, just a means of transportation. How much more so should we demand background checks on people who want to own guns, the purpose of which is to kill? Sadly we are treated to a spectacle of the NRA contributing to Congressional campaigns and lobbying against not only an assault weapons ban but also against universal background checks and for cutting funding to research gun violence.

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

In this January article, Mother Jones destroys 10 gun myths perpetrated by gun-rights groups and lobbyists. Here's one myth: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people. " Fact: "The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher than those with the lowest gun ownership rates."

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could

The arms lobby's money may not buy forgiveness but it sure can influence votes...at least in the United States. Fortunately, not so in the United Nations. On April 2, 2013, delegates from 154 nations, including the US,the largest arms exporter in the world, voted to adopt the first-ever international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Per the UN ATT Conference webpage, the ATT will regulate "the international trade in conventional arms, from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships. The treaty will foster peace and security by putting a stop to destabilising arms flows to conflict regions. It will prevent human rights abusers and violators of the law of war from being supplied with arms. And it will help keep warlords, pirates, and gangs from acquiring these deadly tools." Let's hope the US Senate will approve this treaty when Obama presents it...else the Senators join North Korea, Syria, and Iran in voting no to the ATT. [See Oxfam America and UN ATT Conference webpages.] 

 

Sunday Round-Up - April 28, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the failure of gun control legislation to pass the US Senate and at Italy's new government formed after two months of electoral paralysis.

Gun control fails in US Senate

The rest of the civilized world is still shaking its collective head about the failure of background check legislation and practically any other meaningful Federal legislative action to reduce gun violence. Two of the most thoughtful commentaries come from The Guardian (UK).

In his article, Gary Younge writes that atrocities like the Boston bombing are hard to tackle, but gun crime isn't. The UK should know. With their stricter gun laws, their per capita gun death rate is less than 3% of that in the United States (0.25/100,000 per year in the UK vs. 10.2/100,000 per year in the US). [Wikipedia] Comparing the Boston marathon bombing with the Newton shooting of 20 children and 6 teachers, he notes: "The contradictions in the political responses to the two tragedies and the issues they raise could not be more glaring or obscene."

In a somewhat similar vein,Michael Cohen questions why America loses its head over "terror" but ignores its daily gun deaths. Referring to the lockdown in Boston following the bombing: "So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties."

 

Italy (Finally) Forms New Government
 

In February, Italy held its general election. The popular vote was close. The center-left Italy, Common Good coalition picked up 29.5% of the popular vote and center-right Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom coalition picked up 29.1%. The third place finisher was a new anti-establishment political party Five Star Movement headed by Beppe Grillo.  Five Star Movement came in with an astounding 25.5% of the vote! What's notable about this is that Beppe Grillo is a "comedian, actor, blogger, and political activist" [Wikipedia]. The "five stars" of the movement are a reference to five key issues: public water, sustainable transport, development, connectivity, and environmentalism. The coalition of the previous prime minister, Mario Monti, received 10.5% of the popular vote.

 

Now, two months after its divided elections, Italy finally has a new Prime Minister. Enrico Letta of the center-left Democratic Party will be the 25th person to hold the office. Letta's next step will be to form the Cabinet and assign the various ministries. According to La Repubblica, Letta stated his hope that the new government will be a "government of service to the country" and looked to make institutional and electoral reforms to prevent a reoccurrence of the paralysis resulting from the February election. This is about the fortieth cabinet formed in Italy since 1946. The new prime minister responded to a question regarding the center-right People of Freedom's conditions for forming a government: "This government will be born, but not at all costs."

 

President Obama and Congress please take note: Austerity has failed to revive the Italian economy. The jobless rate of young people (15-24 years old) there is now at 35%. Retail sales dropped for the 8th consecutive month. 25% of the people voted for a comedian.

Earth Day 2013

Today, people in 192 countries are celebrating Earth Day. Human-induced climate change is happening and regular readers of this blog will recall that it's become almost de rigeur for science-fiction writers to propose some climate catastrophe or another as background for their near-future stories.  Other major threats to the world ecosystems include pollution and overfishing.   I've pulled a number of pictures from the Web that remind us what is at stake if we don't get our act together on the environment.
 

 

 

Earthrise - Apollo 8 - NASA

 'nuf said

 

 

 

 Polar Ice Caps

From the "Enjoy Going Green" webpage - Melting of the Polar Ice Caps

 "At the current rate the ice caps are melting, a child born today could see a North Pole completely without ice in their lifetime....If the Greenland glaciers alone were to melt completely..., they could raise the water level by 20 feet. For some this is already a very real threat – buildings built in Russia on permafrost have already begun to twist, warp and crumble due to the melting land."

 

 

 

Coral Reef near Fiji

UK Guardian article on World Research Institute's 2011 Report: "Reefs at Risk"

Coral reefs are one of the most beautiful of the ocean's natural wonders.  They also provide one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.  According to WRI's 2011 report: "Three-quarters of the world's coral reefs are at risk from overfishing, pollution and climate change...By 2050 virtually all of the world's coral reefs – from the waters of the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean to Australia – will be in danger."

 

 

Honey Bee

U.S. Green Chambers Webpage:-The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Bees

"Honey bees are of vital importance, and their declining populations are an incredibly critical issue. As pollinators, they are responsible for over 130 different fruit and vegetable crops that we eat." Remember the disappearing bees?  Well, they are still disappearing and, though the case is not completely solved,  Reuters notes that "three...studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids....In the U.S. alone, these pesticides...coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products."

 



Night Lights

NASA's Earth Observatory

 Do what you can and then sleep tight.

Previous Environmental Posts

Earth Day 2012
Past the Point of No Return (November 2012)
Rio +20 (June 2012)
Now That's Hot (May 2012)
Silent Spring, Nuclear Winter, Gaia and Medea (August 2011)

Global Warming 101 series (August 2011)
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV