The Life Slant - Page 2

Natural systems and animals have been inspiring people for ages. Water, wind and worms are teaching us many new lessons to help caretake our ailing planet.

For example, Portland-based InPipe Energy has devised an ingenious micro-hydro system using a pressure recovery value (PRV) to regulate the flow of municipal water. It harnesses the energy within flowing water by spinning a microturbine, which makes electricity.

Sensors within PRVs help municipal agencies to better manage water infrastructures by quickly pinpointing any leakage. In addition, InPipe Energy can erase the carbon footprint of pumping water throughout the system, an energy-rich process that currently relies mostly on the fossil fuel-powered grid.

Laurie David and Heather Reisman have penned a terrific how-to take care guide for individuals, families and ultimately our Mother Earth.

They remind us that, “Our planet, like our bodies, is a system. Everything is interconnected.” Many of us have become disconnected. This book teaches us how to reconnect and nourish our bodies and minds.

To kick-start this process, they ask thought-provoking questions: “Is the amount of news about heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires really beginning to worry you? Do you sometimes feel as though our climate crisis is so big that your individual actions can make much of a difference?”

This concise handbook brings awareness to plastics, food, clothing, chemicals, paper, water and transportation. Each chapter begins with important facts that are followed by an inspiring story. And each one closes with a doable action plan to reduce your individual and family footprints.

Every small step is significant. David and Reisman’s winning formula helps us understand why we must break old habits that are detrimental to both Mother Earth and us.

The human brain is a stupendous three-pound electrically-charged organ that has hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells. Those cells are so miniscule that thousands of them could comfortably fit into the period at the end of this sentence.

The brain is exceptional at both solving problems and making tools. It also constantly seeks to explore. In fact, we are all natural explorers, born to look around.

Why is only one day, each year, set aside to pay homage to our Mother Earth? Is it, so that for 364 other days we can turn a blind eye, or worse, rape her with impunity?

Our kith and kin, the animals, are terrified because ghastly man-made heatwaves, climate fires, climate droughts, climate floods and the GDP-driven Age of Extinction are accelerating at breakneck speed. Ladies and gentlemen, we need all the animals, old-growth rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands, salt marshes, mangroves, peatlands, kelp forests and marine grass meadows in-tact to survive and cohabitate on this hallowed blue planet.

The elephant in the room is human consumption and the insatiable fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion energy required to make more. Do you really need more?

The mysterious oceans occupy 99 percent of the blue planet’s living space (biosphere). The oceans are the cradle of life, climatemakers, oxygenmakers and home to unknown numbers of species.

Today, the oceans are dreadfully ill with vast areas of boneyards. “The oceans are really a mirror of human health, if they are sick and dying then that’s the future of humanity as well,” admonished oceanographer David Baker, University of Hong Kong’s Swire Institute of Marine Science.

We are currently facing massive areas on land and under the sea that are dead. It’s irrefutable and bloody frightening.

Man, the superpredator, is the culprit.

Ten Hiroshima atomic bombs, every second of the year, of fossil fuel heat in the oceans has once again lambasted Australia.  Historic climate floods deluged parts of Queensland and New South Wales.

These god-awful once in 100 years’ floods made the 2011 and 2020 climate floods seem tame. They, too, were deadly.

How much is enough? More. Since 1981, I have witnessed the greatest and most diversified temperate old-growth rainforests in the world, those of British Columbia (BC), being raped and pillaged under the auspice of crown (provincial) forestry management propping up a couple hundred timber-harvesting towns and the opportunistic (and fleeting) multinational corporations that milk the system and taunt the people with jobs.

Today, about a couple dozen old-growth wood-addicted communities with automated state-of-the-art mills remain. It’s a house of cards that over the previous decade has siphoned $3.65 billion from the provincial coffers to stay afloat. Lousy subsidies.

In reality, every day there are less wild rainforests and far less animals. Habitat destruction is horrible in an accelerating man-driven Age of Extinction. Additionally, those cutover forestlands are incapable of decontaminating putrid fossil fuel-tainted rainwater, which runs off into the sea or through your tap.

Fossil fuel stoked global heating has laid waste to the Aussie’s second favorite tree, the wonderful snow gums of the Alps.

Sprawling forest graveyards are strewn across Oz. From the lonely giants of the temperate southwest to the skeletons mangroves of the tropical northeast and along the bare high plains of New South Wales to the boiled ones of northeast Tasmania – it’s bloody grim.

I’ve walked in these eerie, lonesome tree cemeteries and lamented their loss to the nation. How many more millions of acres must we lose of these complex, climate-making, biodiverse hotspots replete with water-rich bastions before governments stop the annual $5.3 trillion in subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest polluters, the fossil fuel industry?

Thirty-nine years ago, the world agreed to end commercial whaling. Only two rogue nations, Japan and Norway, still refuse to abide by the rule of law.

In 2020, Norway’s bloodthirsty whaling armada slaughtered 503 minke whales, 74 more whales than they destroyed in 2019. This year, Norway has issued death warrants for 1,278 minkes. These crazed planet-killers have single-handedly annihilated more than 14,000 wonderful whales over the previous 39 years. What the frack!

Are the Norwegians starving? Is there really a consumer demand to eat our mammalian kith and kin, the whales? No. Instead, these glorious masterpieces are brutally killed and minced into dog food. Wot.