CO2 levels reduced in Europe for the third year in a row!

Which is good.

But needs to be a lot better
http://www.nu.nl/algemeen/1971243/uitstoot-co2-in-eu-verder-omlaag.html

For all of you that don’t like to eat fish

Here is a very good excuse not to.

Waste = Food

Cradle To Cradle

For a while now, I’ve been hearing about a book called Cradle to Cradle. In fact, it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, borrowed from a friend of mine.

This book is cool in a few different ways.

1. Firstly, it’s made of plastic. Which means you can actually hold it under the tap & it won’t get wet.  (The downside is the book is bloody heavy.)
2. Secondly, the ink washes off when heated (don’t leave the book in the sun in your car, then, I suspect).
3. Thirdly, and this combines the first two points: if you heat it, and wash off the ink (seeing as it’s waterproof), you have a purely plastic book without toxins. Which means it’s 100% re-usable!

The cool thing about the cradle to cradle philosophy is that if we would design all of the products we use (including our shoes, clothes, buildings, plastic bottles etc.) to be re-used 100%, we would be living in a sustainable world. So the basic idea is “Let’s make things that we can completely re-use again”. Kind of like the rest of nature. Everything that is ever used or born or eaten or processed on this planet (except for the junk we humans make) eventually gets reused. Manure becomes fertilizer, bones become dust, dead plants become fertile soil over time.

The reason a cradle to cradle concept is necessary is because we are fast using up all of our natural resources (as I have mentioned earlier on this blog). And this is something we need to stop doing pretty quickly, otherwise we will go the way of the Buffalo. Actually, if we don’t watch out, we’ll go the way of the Dodo. Totally extinct & ridiculous to boot.

Anyway, I could try to explain this idea, but others have done it much better than I have. Here is one of the creators of the cradle to cradle concept talking about it on TED.org (if you’ve never been there before you should go there now!)

And here is a 50 minute documentary on cradle to cradle on Google video’s

Just because you don’t have one, doesn’t mean you can’t be one

One of my favorite writers at the moment is Donald Miller, who writes about Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality and other such subjects.

He grew up without a dad & has recently started a really cool ‘Mentoring Project’ for boys without dads. The idea is that boys without dads eventually come to make up about 80% of the population of kids in prison. Boys without dads become oppressor, and girls without dads become victims. So solve the boy problem & you solve it all.

Often all it takes is for a guy to start playing baseball with the kid.

He explains what they’re doing about this in this great interview.

What’s Wrong With What We Eat (part 2)

In my previous post, I mentioned the bio-industry as one of the major players contributing to global warming. However, this is not the only problem with what we eat.

Many of the products we buy, especially those made in Asia, Africa and South America, are made by abusing the labour force used to grow & harvest the crops.  One of these crops is cocoa. Almost half of the world’s supply of cocoa is grown in Cote d’Ivoire, a country in Western Africa. It is estimated that 12.000 children are trafficked into forced labour on these cocoa-plantations, and that approximatlye 153.000 children are working in what is commonly know as the ‘worst forms of child labour’.

What’s Wrong With What We Eat (part 1)

I really love the TED video’s. If you’ve never heard of them, go there NOW! Tons of fantastic speakers from the top of their field. Talking about design, storytelling, the glories of nature, issues facing the world, faith, or just plain cool gadgets. New video’s are available every week.

But that’s not the reason I’m writing this blogpost. One of their video’s is called ‘What’s wrong with what we eat’. In it, Mark Britmann tells us about the bio-industry. About being healthy. But also about the way the bio-industry is killing our planet.

We Do Not Pay For What We Buy

Elsewhere on this blog I mention that a quest for higher profits causes large companies to squeeze out their suppliers. Now, I could spend 6 pages trying to explain that, but Annie Leonard has already done a fantastic job of it. Here’s a short YouTube video explaining how it works.

The Man takes The Lead

Generally, I’m not a big fan of right-wing political parties, but the following is a good idea by one. The VVD, one of Holland’s major right-wings parties, today suggested that the Dutch government should lead the way by making government employees drive electrical powered cars.

Everything that has a beginning has an end

I just came across this infographic, which shows how finite our natural resources actually are. Though many of us are aware of the fact that our natural resources are being used up rapidly, we often don’t realise how quickly we are using up all of our resources.

Going the Way of the Buffalo

Just a few hundred years ago, vast herds of American Buffalo roamed the Great Plains of the United States of America. These herds could contain up to a few million of these magnificent animals. By the 1880’s, there were only a few thousand left. Massive hunting throughout the 19th century had almost entirely decimated this once seemingly innumerable population.

Sadly, the world seems to be ‘going the way of the buffalo’.