Author of stories for children, Scientist and Philosopher organic cotton products, comments on life, the universe and everything, photography. Conservationist, Environmentalist. Lives on the pale blue dot. Humanity must tread more lightly on the world
Even though we humans cover the land with our bricks, concrete and tarmac nature always finds a way to break through. And once we have gone it will reclaim everywhere that we temporarily covered up
This is a Scientist and Philosopher organic cotton bag that we have created using a Teemill base design. In the UK, in many cases, a garden is a very neatly arranged place and sometimes just a sterile lawn surrounded by 6 foot fences. Since gardens have replaced what were once wild places they need to be let go a bit and have at least an “untidy” corner. All sorts of wildlife will really appreciate it. Fences need to have holes cut in the bottom of them to let hedgehogs and other creatures through creating super hedgehog highways. You don’t need chemicals to get rid of your snails and slugs you need a hedgehog. We all need to start living more within the environment and not on top of it.
Check out how these products are made using organic cotton. We need to live in not just a sustainable way but one that causes the least environmental loading on the planet. You can even send these items back to be made into new things when you have finished with them. (S&P)
Our Teemill organic cotton products are ethically, environmentally and ecologically produced. They are recyclable, sustainable, stylish, high quality fashion items.
The Chinese paddlefish had lived as a species for 200,000,000 years, long before nations such as China or any other human named piece of the planet’s surface existed, but that was before this last interglacial period in which the human primate population went through the roof and they invented agriculture, the wheel, dams etc and with them caused the demise of so many species. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chinese-paddlefish-one-of-largest-fish-extinct
So all you fellow Earthlings happily beavering away in your small life bubbles with their narrow views of the world, the link below is a view of the state of the real world, the one that keeps our convenient life bubbles functioning, written from the viewpoint of some leading scientists working at Imperial College in London.
So what’s it got to do with that life bubble of yours based on entrepreneurs, technologists, economists, leading business people, consultants, experts, financiers, wealthy individuals, greedy corporations, spreadsheet warriors and other leaders of the human primate species? Movers and shakers making all that progress happen, the detached house, the next BMW, that cruise on a luxury liner that you so deserve. Well outside of your little world the real world is both changing and dying, not that you would notice. That’s because we are Homo sapiens and we have limited understanding of how everything works but a combination of human primate numbers and that our species are fossil fuel drug addicts, only we don’t realise we are drug addicts, has caused massive changes to the systems that govern our limited life bubbles. If you have an interest in a viable future for the species beyond your life bubble read this informative, easily understandable and visually stunning piece. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/stories/importance-of-biodiversity/?mc_cid=7841e5c7f4&mc_eid=ba8991c2a5
First posted 20th January 2021. The situation has not got any better since then.
A computer scientist at The University of Bath in the UK has come up with a way of counting elephants using satellite data, https://phys.org/news/2021-01-elephants-space.html. The sad part of this story is that because of poaching and habitat fragmentation there are only between 40 and 50,000 African elephants left. Habitat fragmentation is down to the number of humans because as I have mentioned before in the 366 days of 2020 the human population increased by 80,000,000, the increase on its own being perhaps 1600 times the entire elephant population in Africa. As we know many countries in Africa have populations in which 50% or approaching 50% are 18 or under years of age. Humanity is not sustainable, we are too many and we take too much.
This is a Scientist and Philosopher organic cotton bag that we have created using a Teemill base design. In the UK, in many cases, a garden is a very neatly arranged place and sometimes just a sterile lawn surrounded by 6 foot fences. Since gardens have replaced what were once wild places they need to be let go a bit and have at least an “untidy” corner. All sorts of wildlife will really appreciate it. Fences need to have holes cut in the bottom of them to let hedgehogs and other creatures through creating super hedgehog highways. You don’t need chemicals to get rid of your snails and slugs you need a hedgehog. We all need to start living more within the environment and not on top of it.
Check out how these products are made using organic cotton. We need to live in not just a sustainable way but one that causes the least environmental loading on the planet. You can even send these items back to be made into new things when you have finished with them.
Our Teemill organic cotton products are ethically, environmentally and ecologically produced. They are recyclable, sustainable, stylish, high quality fashion items.
So what will you do with that dying, pesticide covered, monoculture tree after Capitalistmas is over? Next year let’s get living trees planted in our streets, roads, roundabouts etc. We can remove parking spaces and instead of a parklet like below, grow a communal tree that we can all decorate. Where we can come together to celebrate life and not death and our local community.
Another post from the middle of 2020 but we are still carting lots of bottled water around and polluting the planet in so many ways by doing so.
There is a lot wrong with western first world economics but apart from individuals aware of the environmental issues that unfettered growth causes and a few rather left wing economists, the majority of humanity gives what is wrong little thought. After all there are few if any immediate consequences. So ask yourself what do you see wrong with this partly drunk bottle of water?
To start with it is bottled water hauled all over the planet using vasts amounts of fossil fuels and thereby causing additional CO2 emissions that would not be released if everyone drank tap. Now people might say that they don’t trust tap but how do you know the bottled water is any better than what comes out of the tap or worse? Maybe it’s all down to believing a brand and a dubious corporation over your local tap water utility company. So maybe a branding makeover might change some people’s minds.
Here however we see this expensive, in terms of financial but more importantly environmental cost water, about to be tipped down the drain because the customer has enough money and no thought about its real costs and so hasn’t finished it. The customer almost certainly didn’t think about the 800,000,000 people who cannot drink clean water each and every day. The customer probably didn’t even think about the nearby homeless people that are stepped over each day and how they get enough clean water to drink, let alone that huge number of people in far away lands.
Then of course there is the glass bottle, the raw materials, probably not locally sourced but imported, that have been turned into a container to take this very expensive water all the way from A to B. Much energy went into producing the bottle but it will be smashed and if lucky enough, using a lot more energy turned into another glass container. That energy use and the processes to make the glass almost certainly cause pollution of one sort or another so why wasn’t the bottle returned and reused instead of being broken?
It’s this misuse of raw materials and energy that recently saw a CO2 reading of 418ppm at the Mauna Loa research station. This is the highest level of CO2 since before this last series of ice ages start some 2.58 million years ago and the atmosphere is gaining CO2 at a rate not seen for 50 to 60 million years. If you are a climate change denier then you clearly live in some fantasy land.
I wrote and published this blog below almost a year ago now and in a month’s time it will be Christmas again. Since then we’ve had COP26 (and COP27 and very soon COPout28) take place in Glasgow warning us that devastating climate change could arrive much more quickly than first envisaged. If we want to tackle climate change then one way to do so would be for communities to come together to plant Christmas trees in their villages, town and cites. That way they can be decorated each year reducing CO2 emissions, plastic pollution, energy use and excessive consumption on a finite planet.
Many of us have enjoyed them in the past. It seems a perfectly natural thing to do but buying one of the trees in this photo means bringing a dying thing into our houses. We rarely think about the fact that where these trees are grown was perhaps a natural woodland or forest before but that it has now become a mono culture for a human tradition. The original land cleared and nature disrupted with many living creatures killed or chased away before this one species planted. By removing what was there before CO2 was released adding to our greenhouse gas emissions. Then the growing of these trees starts and they take a number of years to grow before they can be harvested for the single Christmas season. In that time in the majority of cases large amounts of pesticides will be used to ensure that the Christmas trees we buy are bug free and look good. When they are harvested and in the US alone that’s between 25 and 30 million each Christmas, https://www.beyondpesticides.org/programs/center-for-community-pesticide-and-alternatives-information/pesticide-free-holidays/christmas#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Center%20for,carbaryl%2C%20chlorpyrifos%2C%20and%20dimethoate., the fossil fuel chain saw massacre begins. At that time all the birds, animals and insects that have survived the chemical onslaught either die or are chased away. Harvesting Christmas trees makes a lot of creatures homeless. Then there’s all the fossil fuel used getting them from where they grew to our houses and after Christmas all the CO2 released when they decompose or worse still are burnt. That’s not to forget that if they were still growing they would still be soaking up CO2 and as a generalisation older trees soak up more CO2. So overall buying a dying tree is not very environmentally friendly so why not celebrate this Christmas by decorating or just giving a hug to a local tree. They are all working damn hard to fix the damage that us humans are doing to the planet.
I posted this a few times now. I don’t suppose things have changed much in that time.
25th February 2021
Ouch! That hurt didn’t it? We are all part of the human species and therefore we have some responsibility for its actions on the planet. No other species possesses the level of consciousness that Homo sapiens does at this present time.
If you are fortunate enough to go on a climate change causing holiday once the corona virus pandemic clears if you have any sense of duty to the natural world then you should boycott these four countries and in addition try to avoid buying any goods from them. They are China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. What we do to intensively farmed animals like cattle is bad enough but this is just depraved.
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