BBC News – Can eating meat be eco-friendly?

19 August 2014 Last updated at 22:51 ET
By Dr Michael Mosley BBC Horizon

The problem lies with what cows eat, says Dr Mosley
Related Stories

• How safe is eating meat?
• Changing world of meat eaters
• Creating new life – and other ways to feed the world

Every year we raise and eat 65 billion animals, that’s nine animals for every person on the globe, and it’s having a major impact on our planet. So what meat should we eat if we want to be eco-friendly carnivores? Is it better to buy beef or chicken, free range or factory farmed? As Dr Michael Mosley discovers for BBC Horizon, the answers are far from obvious.

I like eating meat but I know that my food preferences, and those of a few billion fellow carnivores, comes at a cost.

Nearly a third of the Earth’s ice-free land surface is already devoted to raising the animals we either eat or milk.

Roughly 30% of the crops we grow are fed to animals. The latest UN Food and Agriculture Organisation reports suggest livestock are responsible for 14.5% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions – the same amount produced by all the world’s cars, planes, boats and trains.

If that wasn’t scary enough, meat consumption is predicted to double in the next 40 years as people globally get wealthier. So how will the world cope?

Greenhouse gas

In search of answers I went to the US, one of the world’s largest consumers of meat, and travelled to the wide-open prairies of the Flint Hills in Kansas.

….(read more).

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Hungry for Justice: Spotlight on the South

https://vimeo.com/94461946

from Little Bean Productions Plus 3 months ago / Creative Commons License:

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Food Justice Certified

Social Justice Labeling from Farm to Table

“Eating is an agricultural act.”
– Wendell Berry

Food Justice Certified is a label based on high-bar social justice standards for farms, processors, and retailers, including every link in the food chain from farm to table. Our approach is holistic; we ensure fair treatment of workers, fair pricing for farmers, and fair business practices. FJC is designed for all agricultural production systems, fiber and cosmetics as well as food.

Why Certification?

In 1999, disappointed that the U.S. National Organic Program’s standards did not address the people involved in organic agriculture, Michael Sligh of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI – USA), Richard Mandelbaum of Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas/Farmworker Support Committee (CATA), Marty Mesh of Florida Organic Growers (FOG), and Elizabeth Henderson of Peacework Organic Farm began a stakeholder process to develop standards for the fair and just treatment of the people involved in organic and sustainable agriculture.

While their experience was in North America, they set out to create standards that could be adapted for use anywhere in the world. They began with a review of existing social standards and then assembled a first draft of what became “Toward Social Justice and Economic Equity in the Food System: A Call for Social Stewardship Standards in Sustainable and Organic Agriculture.”

They circulated this draft to organic farmers and organic farming associations, non-profits, certification programs, eco-labeling experts, and labor and farm labor organizations. CATA also engaged in an internal process through which the organization’s farmworker members provided input to the worker standards. For two years, AJP circulated successive drafts of their standards to stakeholders in the US and abroad and received comments from around the world. To make the document accessible to a wider audience, they arranged for translations into Spanish and French. With each major revision of the document they circulated the new draft to those who had commented on previous drafts, as well as to people new to the project.

…(read more).

 

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BBC News – Iceland raises Bardarbunga volcano alert to orange

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28843968
18 August 2014 Last updated at 15:06 ET

Seismic activity has been detected at Bardarbunga, including a strong earthquake
Related Stories

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The risk of an eruption at Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano has increased, with signs of “ongoing magma movement”, Iceland’s meteorological office says.

The risk level to the aviation industry has been raised to orange, the second-highest level, the met office said.

Any eruption could potentially lead to flooding or an emission of gas, the office added in a statement.

The Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in 2010, producing an ash cloud that severely disrupted European airspace.

The Bardarbunga volcanic system is located under the north-west region of Iceland’s Vatnajokull glacier.

‘Strongest earthquake’

“Intense seismic activity” began at the volcano on 16 August, and there was a strong earthquake in the region early on Monday, the met office said.

“This is the strongest earthquake measured in the region since 1996.

“Presently there are no signs of eruption, but it cannot be excluded that the current activity will result in an explosive subglacial eruption, leading to an outburst flood and ash emission,” the met office said, adding that the situation was being monitored.

The aviation colour codes are used to indicate the level of risk a volcano poses to air travel.

An orange alert indicates that a volcano is showing “escalating unrest with increased potential of eruption”, or is erupting without any major volcanic ash emissions.

…(read more)

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BBC News – Ebola crisis: Liberia orders curfew and quarantine

19 August 2014 Last updated at 23:44 ET

Liberia is already under a state of emergency
Ebola outbreak

• Why so dangerous?
• Mapping the outbreak
• The ethics dilemma
• Fear factor

Liberia has imposed a night-time curfew and has quarantined an area of the capital Monrovia in a bid to halt the deadly Ebola outbreak.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said the curfew would be from 21:00 local time to 06:00 (21:00-06:00 GMT).

She said all movement would be blocked in and out of the West Point area.

Meanwhile, three doctors with Ebola who started taking an experimental drug last week showed remarkable signs of improvement, a Liberian minister said.

Information Minister Lewis Brown said the drug was given to one Nigerian and two Liberian doctors who had caught Ebola while helping to save the lives of other victims of the virus.

See further BBC coverage: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28754546

…(read more).

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Quest for the Lost civilization – Graham Hancock

cambodiachannel

Uploaded on Feb 9, 2012

What are the connection between Angkor Wat in the Jungle of Cambodia, the Pyramid in the desert of Egyptian desert, and monuments on Easter Island and in Micronesia? What is the under water mystery in Japan, the last time it above water was 10,000 years ago? Our ancestors are highly intelligent people, thousand years ago they precisely predicted the solar eclipse over Mexico in 1991.

In this set of three videotapes, writer Graham Hancock traverses the world and explains his controversial theory that an ancient civilization, highly intelligent people who sailed the planet as early as 10,500 B.C., spread advanced astronomical knowledge and built ancient observatories.

Skeptics may scoff, but Hancock earnestly points out similarities in giant stone structures in the Egyptian desert and Cambodian jungles, and on Easter Island and in Micronesia, he points out what he considers evidence of an ancient society of seafarers. His ideas may seem utterly bizarre at first, but Hancock presents them in an understated and good-natured manner, and he also makes clever use of computer graphics and aerial photography to illustrate the startling similarities in ancient structures found from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific.

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Gobekli Tepe

Vahe Hambardzumyan

Published on Sep 12, 2013

Global Climate Change
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Robert Schoch – Forgotten Civilization

LegaliseFreedom1

Published on May 1, 2013

First published October 28, 2012

Geologist Robert Schoch on his recent book Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future.

Building upon Schoch’s revolutionary theory that the Sphinx dates back much further than 2500 BCE, Forgotten Civilization reveals scientific evidence of advanced civilization predating ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and Greece, as well as the catastrophe that destroyed it nearly 12,000 years ago and what its legacy can teach us about our own future.

Weaving together a new view of the origins of civilization, the truths behind ancient wisdom, and the dynamics of the planet we live on, Schoch maintains we must heed the megalithic warning of the past and collectively prepare for future events.

Topics discussed include: global warming and climate change, the ice age, evolution, astronomy, cosmoclimatology, solar and plasma outbursts, ancient Egypt, Easter Island, Göbekli Tepe, megalithic monuments, the Biblical flood, Atlantis and lost civilizations, apocalyptic myths and legends, Quantum physics, and 2012.

http://www.robertschoch.com/

Many more interviews at http://www.legalise-freedom.com

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Solar Outbursts Could Wreck Civilization

ThunderboltsProject

Published on May 26, 2013

Thunderbolts colleague Michael Armstrong, the manager of Mikamar Publishing, discusses the potential threat a powerful solar storm might pose to modern civilization. A frightening historical precedent for such a potential disaster can be found in the Carrington event of 1859.

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1859 Carrington Event – The biggest Solar Storm in history

raiderski1’s channel

Uploaded on Feb 9, 2010

The Carrington Event
On the morning of September 1, 1859, amateur astrologer Richard Carrington ascended into the private observatory attached to his country estate outside of London. After cranking open the dome’s shutter to reveal the clear blue sky, he pointed his brass telescope toward the sun and began to sketch a cluster of enormous dark spots that freckled its surface. Suddenly, Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches of intensely bright and white light” erupting from the sunspots. Five minutes later the fireballs vanished, but within hours their impact would be felt across the globe.
That night, telegraph communications around the world began to fail; there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. All over the planet, colorful auroras illuminated the nighttime skies, glowing so brightly that birds began to chirp and laborers started their daily chores, believing the sun had begun rising. Some thought the end of the world was at hand, but Carrington’s naked eyes had spotted the true cause for the bizarre happenings: a massive solar flare with the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs. The flare spewed electrified gas and subatomic particles toward Earth, and the resulting geomagnetic storm—dubbed the “Carrington Event”—was the largest on record to have struck the planet. Ice core samples have determined that the Carrington Event was twice as big as any other solar storm in the last 500 years.
What would be the impact of a similar storm today? According to a 2008 report from the National Academy of Sciences, it could cause “extensive social and economic disruptions” due to its impact on power grids, satellite communications and GPS systems. The potential price tag? Between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

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