Hallogreen
October 31st, 2007 by Vihar ShethPosted in Agriculture, Animal Cruelty, Children, Climate Change, Transportation
I know, tacky subject line. If you don’t like it start writing your own freakin’ blog. Two months left in 2007 and the ghouls and goblins of global warming are alive and well. A couple of victories against coal have brightened an otherwise gloomy month of news. I’m not going Thomas Friedman on you yet but sometimes I do get the feeling we’re “nickel and diming” at the inevitable.
Agriculture | Organic produce ‘better for you’ | “The £12m four-year project, led by Newcastle University, found a general trend showing organic food contained more antioxidants and less fatty acids. But researchers did admit the study showed some variations. The findings call into question the current stance of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), which says there is no evidence that organic food is better.” | BBC News | The most disturbing part of this article is that the FSA in England says there’s no evidence organic food is better. While the study includes inexplicable variations, that organic food has most nutrients and antioxidants at least some of the time is clear. I’m with the Soil Association in their position that the FSA should at least change its stance, perhaps to say that while inconclusive, most likely organic food is better for you than food treated with pesticides. I’d bet some conclusive evidence is food in the next few years, if not earlier.
Animal Cruelty | Breeders’ Cup ends in tragedy again | “The Breeders’ Cup weekend ended in tragedy for the second consecutive year on Saturday when Irish raider George Washington was put down after breaking his leg. The unsettling sight of the Irish colt standing alone in the dusk in Monmouth Park homestretch with his shattered limb dangling grotesquely beneath him recalled images of Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who waged a long but ultimately unsuccessful fight to survive a similar injury.” | Steve Keating, Reuters | Idiots. You know a good way to stop killing horses? Don’t race them you stupid morons. Apparently people are shocked when a massive animal, who’s forced to run faster and longer than it ever should, breaks a leg. Oh, my poor, pretty horse got a boo boo. I can’t back this up with a citation but I read somewhere, many years ago, that for every horse that makes it on to a track and is pampered, approximately 400 are sent to the glue factory. Ironically, one to 400 is also the ratio of Americans helped by President Horse’s Ass to the people hurt by him. It’s one big circle.
Children | India activists decry Gap child labor | ‘The Indian children reportedly found making clothes for Gap Inc. should be reunited with their families and compensated by the government, activists said Monday amid a spreading scandal about the use of child labor by the international clothing chain. The reported discovery of children as young as 10 sewing clothes for clothing retailer Gap Inc. in a New Delhi factory has renewed concerns about child labor in India, but government officials offered no comment Monday. “The biggest responsibility here lies with the Indian government — they don’t develop a way of monitoring” factories, said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer who works with Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or the Save Childhood Movement.’ | Associated Press | Perhaps it’s cost-prohibitive for companies to watch over all of its suppliers, and business surely relies on a certain amount of trust. But, multi-national corporations should have departments that investigate the people they do business with. It only takes a few thousand people to stop spending a few hundred dollars a year at a retailer to justify the cost. Get on it!
Climate Change | 20 years on, world in dire straits, U.N. says | ‘Two decades after a landmark report sounded alarm bells about the state of the planet and called for urgent action to change direction, the world is still in dire straits, a UN agency says. While the UN Environment Programme’s fourth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4) says action has been successfully taken in some regions and on some problems, the overall picture is one of sloth and neglect. “The global trends on climate, on ozone, on indeed ecosystem degradation, fisheries, in the oceans, water supplies … are still pointing downwards,” UNEP head Achim Steiner said in a short film accompanying the report’s release.’ | Jeremy Lovell, The New Zealand Herald | Sloth and Neglect would make a great band name. That’s pretty much the only positive I gathered from the article. The most frightening paragraph says, “Fishing capacity is nearly four times more than is sustainable, species are becoming extinct 100 times faster than fossil records show, and 12 per cent of birds, 23 per cent of mammals and over 30 per cent of amphibians face extinction.” That doesn’t sound bad at all.
Transportation | How do you get through this? | “The new configuration of lanes, stripes and traffic signals at Highway 30 and Summit Drive/Gravois Bluffs Boulevard is called a continuous flow interchange. It was designed to reduce delays on Highway 30 just west of Highway 141 — a bottleneck-prone location where traffic can back up a quarter-mile during rush times. An average of 48,000 vehicles pass through the intersection daily, according to last year’s traffic counts.” | Elisa Crouch, St. Louis Post-Dispatch | I haven’t driven through the continuous flow interchange but a few of my coworkers who live in this area (and commute 25+ miles to work!) have said it’s . . . interesting. According to some of the people quoted in the article, it just takes time to get used to. I welcome the new design though, because if it stops back-ups, then it also stops idling, unnecessary gas burning, stress, and commute time - all good things. The entire world’s traffic should flow continuously on a global system of ground-scalators!
