ECOLOGY NEEDS MASSIVE STIMULUS

IT is not difficult to understand why we must preserve our seas and prevent further destruction to the marine environment.

Considering that over 75 percent of the Earth is water, our seas and oceans are the lungs of our planet. They supply us with over 50 percent of our oxygen and absorb over 30 percent of carbon dioxide. Close to two billion people rely on the seas for food and their livelihood.

There is no doubt that our seas play a vital role in our planet’s survival and yet, so little is known about it, hence we continue to destroy her.

The marine environment harbors three main ecosystems, all representing the beginning of the marine food chain. These ecosystem consist of coral reefs, mangrove swamps and estuaries.

All these ecosystems are in dire danger. Our mangrove forests and estuaries are feeling the havoc brought forth by terrestrial activities. Soil erosion continues when the rains come and top soil erodes to the sea. The pollution and climate change continue to take their toll.

Coral reefs are suffering the same fate as ocean acidification, pollution and climate change persist. It has been reported that 85 percent of our coral reefs are dead or dying.

Take note: we are the heart of the Coral Triangle. The benefits provided by these ecosytems have no monetary value. Money and economic stimulus alone cannot save the marine environment.

Mangrove forests, wetlands and estuaries are not spared by pollution as they  continue to degrade due to ocean acidification and the fact that 40 percent of our rivers have been dammed, preventing valuable sediment to reach and replenish these ecosytems.

As the scourging heat continues to bear down on the United States, most of their agricultural produce suffer in what could be the worse drought that has hit the U.S. in the last 50 years. The price and supply of corn, wheat and soy have been affected. Never has it reached such a high cost as the supply will not be able to meet the demand.

The lives of most Americans will be affected as the economy and ecology continue to experience human-induced pressure of pollution and climate change.

While the United States is on fire, Asia is experiencing severe floods and typhoons. Our country has not been spared. This will trigger a food shortage and possible more Arab springs will unfold as the battle for resources is imminent.

Why do we need to reach this stage? Why do we need to mine and follow the old and destructive development model?

Why don’t we do things differently?

We must change our ways and recycle, reuse and maximize renewable energy.

To my surprise, there are multitudes of people who are unaware or don’t care about the sate of our dying planet.

Many of them are still stuck in old, consumptive and wasteful ways. They don’t even know that the air they breathe is toxic and the fish they catch, sell or consume contains high levels of mercury.

The ecology needs a massive stimulus to stop pollution totally and deter the prevalence of climate change.

We need a massive transformation in our ways, and we need it soon.

A stimulus of the environment – that is what we exactly need.

How Is Earth Time Measured ?

Just as we divide human history into periods according to events or the rulers of the time like Pre-Columbian, Ming, victoria and so on, so we divide the vast sweep of geological time into periods and eras based on the kinds of animals and plants that existed during those times.


For about seven-eights of the time that the Earth has been in existence, what life there was left little in the way of fossils. For this reason , this vast period called the Precambrian era, tends to be dismissed. It is divided into two eons: the Archaean, in which there was no life, and the Peroterozoic, in which life of some sort existed.

Then, 570 million years ago, the Palaeozoic Era began. This opened with the Cambrian in which there was a sudden flourishing of animals with hard shells. From then onwards, the rocks are full of fossils. The lower Palaeozoic, consisting of the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian periods, showed a great development of life in the sea and the evolution of the first backbone animals --- the fish. In the Upper Palaeozoic --- the Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian periods --- life colonized the land. Plants left the water first, followed by invertebrates that developed into insects and spiders, then came tha amphibians and these evolved into reptiles.


During the Mesozoic era --- consisting of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods --- the pattern of life changed. At the begining, the primitive reptiles evolved into dinosaurs, that dominated the land thorough out the era, and into the mammals, that were to play a less prominent role for a while. In the sea, too, changes were taking place, with modern-type fish evolving.


A sudden mass extinction that saw brought  the Mesozoic to an end --- an extinction that saw the loss of the dinosaurs and many of the sea  creatures. The Cenozoic era then began, and in this time the mammals radiated to fill all the niches left vacant by the extinction of the great reptiles. The bulk of the Cenozoic is taken up by the Tertiary period. The last silver is known as Quaternary period and this embraced the last Ice Age and modern times in which human beings developed.
       
The rocks that were laid down in these various periods can usually be dated by the types of fossils found in them. That is fine when dealing with sedimentary rocks in which fossils are abundant, but what about metamorphic rocks and igneous rocks, or even unfossiliferous sedimentary roks? Here the principles of cross- cutting relationships is used. If a metamorphic rock has been formed by the alteration of a sedimentary rock containing Silurian fossils, then the ignious rock must have been formed later still. If this whole sequence is then overlain by undisturbed sedimentary rock containing Carboniferous fossils, then we can deduce that the metamorphism and the igneous emplacement took lace between Silurian and Carboniferous times, in the Devonian period.


How Do We Put Dates To All This ?

We can glibly talk about the hundreds of millions of years involved in the geological time scale, but how is such a scale calibrated? The secret lies in the radioactive elements in the Earth's crust. A radioactive element will decay to a non-radioactive form in a particular length of time. For Example, after a mineral containing potassium-40 is formed it will take a a known length of time for half the mass of period of time for half the mass of potassium-40 to decay into argon-40, then the same period of time for half of the remainder to decay, and so on. This period is known as "half life". By finding the proportion of potassium-40 to argon-40 in a mineral we can work out how long ago that mineral formed. Many radioactive elements are used, each with a different half life.

What Was Earth's Early History ?

The oldest known rock lies in Greenland. It is part of a sequence of rocks that is 3,800 million years old.

 On the face of earth this may seem a long time ago but as the earth is some 4,500 million years old, this rock was formed quite a way into the story.The Ancient rocks in the Greenland are examples of gneissic rock and are metamorphic --- that is, they were formed as heat and pressure changed a rock that was already in existence. Previously this rock would have been a sedimentary rock, like sandstone, made up of tiny grains and fragments. These fragments would, in turn have been worn off some other rock that existed even before this. earth history is extremely complex!

Some of the most ancient rocks are sedimentary and have not been metamorphosed. These are known as greenstones and are interesting because they contain iron ore that has not been combined with oxygen, suggesting that there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere at that time. Iron ores that form nowadays tend to be reddish in color as they are combined with oxygen. We are familiar with this effect in the rusting of exposed iron. The red substance known as rust is an oxide of Iron.  

Life Evolves:

At around 3,800 million years ago life got going. The earliest form of life occurred in the sea and was probably no more than a molecule that had the power to reproduce itself by absorbing chemicals in the water round about. Any change to the molecule that made reproduction more efficient would have been passed on to the offspring molecules, and so evolution would have begun. The first living cell were probably cyanobacteria --- sometimes called "blue-green algae" --- similar to those that can form a poisonous scum on modern waterways. Microscopic organisms like these leave no fossils but they can leave signs of their passing. Where mats of cyanobacteria lie on the sea bed, the currents bring sand layer, which will in turn attract more sand. the result is a dome-like structure, called a stromatolite, consisting of alternating sand and bacteria layers. such structures can only form in waters where there are no other living things to disturb them. They have been found in rocks 3,500 million years old.

Some premitive  micro-organisms powered their reproductive cycle by absorbing energy from the sun. We can think of these as the first plants. Other organisms did not use the raw chemical materials but absorbed the ready-made foodstuffs and molecules produced by the early plants. These were the first animals. The chemical process that uses the sun's energy for reproduction produces oxygen as by product, and this was given off and dissolved in the ocean waters or put into the atmosphere. Free oxygen --- oxygen gas that is not combined with any other substance --- was present in the atmosphere by 2,000 million years ago.

The Growth Of Continents

      
While all this was happening in the sea, what was happening on the land? As wall as the metamorphic rocks which formed the cores of the continents, and the sedimentary rocks int the surrounding seas, there is a third type of rock which was produced by volcanic action. This is called igneous rock and was created when molten rock solidified. The continents grew building processes along the edges threw up  chains of sedimentary rock, shot through by igneous rock.
Nowadays, most continents consist of a core of ancient metamorphic rock surrounded by successively younger suites of sedimentary and igneous rocks in the form of mountains.

Green Economy & Its Principles

Green Economy:

★ A Green Economy can be thought of as an alternative vision for growth and development; one that can generate growth and improvements in people’s lives in ways consistent with sustainable development. A Green Economy promotes a triple bottom line: sustaining and advancing economic, environmental and social well-being.


★ The prevailing economic growth model is focused on increasing GDP above all other goals. While this system has improved incomes and reduced poverty for hundreds of millions, it comes with significant and potentially irreversible social, environmental and economic costs. Poverty persists for as many as two and a half billion people, and the natural wealth of the planet is rapidly being drawn down. In a recent global assessment, approximately 60 percent of the world’s ecosystem services were found to be degraded or used unsustainably. The gap between the rich and poor is also increasing – between 1990 and 2005, income inequality (measured by the gap between the highest and lowest income earners) rose in more than two thirds of countries.


★ The persistence of poverty and degradation of the environment can be traced to a series of market and institutional failures that make the prevailing economic model far less effective than it otherwise would be in advancing sustainable development goals.


★ A Green Economy attempts to remedy these problems through a variety of institutional reforms and regulatory, tax, and expenditure-based economic policies and tools.

Principles that cover key dimensions of a green economy:

1. The Primacy of Use-value, Intrinsic Value & Quality:

This is the fundamental principle of the green economy as a service economy, focused on end-use, or human and environment needs. Matter is a means to the end of satisfying real need, and can be radically conserved. 

2. Take economic policy seriously:

A transition to a green economy needs to involve fundamental changes to both macro-economic and micro-economic conditions and institutions. Business as usual with respect to economic policy is not a viable alternative to achieve sustainable development. A central challenge is not only to think creatively about economic policy, but also to engage international economic institutions and make environmental considerations central to global economic decision-making.

3. Following Natural Flows: 
The economy moves like a proverbial sailboat in the wind of natural processes by flowing not only with solar, renewable and "negawatt" energy, but also with natural hydrological cycles, with regional vegetation and food webs, and with local materials. As society becomes more ecological, political and economic boundaries tend to coincide with ecosystem boundaries. That is, it becomes bioregional.


4. Waste Equals Food: 
In nature there is no waste, as every process output is an input for some other process means that outputs and by-products are nutritious and non-toxic enough to be food for something.else.


5. Reduce, reuse and recycle (R3):  
The three essential components of environmentally-responsible consumer behavior. The concept behind the first R, reduce, is that you should limit the number of purchases, The concept behind the second R, reuse, is that you should reuse items as much as possible before replacing them, The concept behind the third R, recycle, is that you should ensure that items or their components are put to some new purpose as much as possible


6. Appropriate Scale: 
This does not simply mean "small is beautiful", but that every regenerative activity has its most appropriate scale of operation. Even the smallest activities have larger impacts, however, and truly ecological activity "integrates design across multiple scales", reflecting influence of larger on smaller and smaller on larger (Van der Ryn and Cowan, 1996).


7. Diversity: 
In a world of constant flux, health and stability seem to depend on diversity. This applies to all levels (diversity of species, of ecosystems, of regions), and to social as well as ecological organization.


8.Cyclic Use of Renewable Resources:
People should use renewable energy because non-renewable energy resources threaten the environment and cause pollution.  Greenhouse gases, which are the production of burning fossil fuels, trap the sun’s heat and lead to global warming.  Consequently, extreme weather conditions, such as floods, heat waves, and droughts, could arise out of this increasing global warming.

World Environment Day 2012

 World Environment Day (WED)

 ★ A day that stimulates awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and public action. 

★ It is held on 5th June every year. 

★ It was the day that United Nations Conference on the Human Environment began. 

★ The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was from 5–16 June 1972. It was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972. 

★ The first World Environment Day was on 1973. 

★ World Environment Day is hosted every year by a different a different theme and is celebrated with honour and solemnity with an international exposition in the week of 5 June.


★ "Stockholm was without doubt the landmark event in the growth of international environmentalism", writes John McCormick in the book Reclaiming Paradise. "It was the first occasion on which the political, social and economic problems of the global environment were discussed at an intergovernmental forum with a view to actually taking corrective action."

Theme 2012

★ The 2012 theme for World Environment Day is Green Economy: Does it include you?


★ Green Economy: The UN Environment Programme defines the Green Economy as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. In its simplest expression, a green economy can be thought of as one which is low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive.


★ But what does all this mean for you? The Green Economy is really something that is applicable all around you and it is easy to imagine how you fit in.
If the Green Economy is about social equity and inclusiveness then technically it is all about you! The question therefore asks you to find out more about the Green Economy and assess whether, in your country, you are being included in it.

Siachen: Pakistan's climate change challenge

Siachen & Pakistan's Environmental Troubles

A Study By Michael Kugelman Wednesday, May 10, 2012 - 11:12 AM

★ Last month, an avalanche (a massive slide of snow) on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable region. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan's environmental insecurity.

★ Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. Pakistan's United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade.

★ It has also been described as "the world's highest waste dump." Much of this waste-generated from soldiers' food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan's chief water source.

★ Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan's environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan's annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt . Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan's land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters. 

★ Sindh's environment minister said that millions of people across the province face "acute environmental threats."

What Is Inside The Earth ?

STRUCTURE OF THE EARTH
 
As far as we can tell, Earth is made up of layers, Geophysical studies have revealed that the Earth has several distinct layers. Each of these layers has its own properties. 

★ The outermost layer of the Earth is the crust. This comprises the continents and ocean basins. The crust has a variable thickness, being 35-70 km thick in the continents and 5-10 km thick in the ocean basins. The crust is composed mainly of alumino-silicates.

★ The next layer is the mantle, which is composed mainly of ferro-magnesium silicates. It is about 2900 km thick, and is separated into the upper and lower mantle. This is where most of the internal heat of the Earth is located. Large convective cells in the mantle circulate heat and may drive plate tectonic processes. 

 ★ At the center is the core, which is separated into the liquid outer core and the solid inner core. The outer core is 2300 km thick and the inner core is 1200 km thick. The outer core is composed mainly of a nickel-iron alloy, while the inner core is almost entirely composed of iron. The inner core heated to such a high temperature and subjected to such a great pressure that it nature can't be imagined. Rules of conventional physics just do not apply to the Earth's core. Earth's magnetic field is believed to be controlled by the liquid outer core.