Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[TIOTIT]

THOUSANDS of birds have fallen from the skies over Esperance and no one knows why.

Is it an illness, toxins or a natural phenomenon? A string of autopsies in Perth have shed no light on the mystery.

All the residents of flood-devastated Esperance know is that their "dawn chorus" of singing birds is missing.

The main casualties are wattle birds, yellow-throated miners, new holland honeyeaters and singing honeyeaters, although some dead crows, hawks and pigeons have also been found.

Wildlife officers are baffled by the "catastrophic" event, which the Department of Environment and Conservation said began well before last week's freak storm.

On Monday, Esperance, 725km southeast of Perth, was declared a natural disaster zone.

District nature conservation co-ordinator Mike Fitzgerald said the first reports of birds dropping dead in people's yards came in three weeks ago. More than 500 deaths had since been notified. But the calls stopped suddenly last week, reportedly because no birds were left.

"It's very substantial. We estimate several thousand birds are dead, although we don't have a clear number because of the large areas of bushland," Mr Fitzgerald said.

Birds Australia, the nation's main bird conservation group, said it had not heard of a similar occurrence. "Not on that scale, and all at the same time, and also the fact that it's several different species," chief executive Graeme Hamilton said. "You'd have to call that a most unusual event and one that we'd all have to be concerned about."

He expected birds would return to the area once the problem - natural or man-made phenomenon - was fixed but said it was vital the cause was identified.

The Department of Agriculture and Food, which conducted the autopsies, has almost ruled out an infectious process.

Acting chief veterinary officer Fiona Sunderman said toxins were the most likely cause but the deaths could be due to anything from toxic algae to chemicals and pesticides.

Dr Sunderman said there were no leads yet on which of potentially hundreds of toxins might be responsible. Some birds were seen convulsing as they died.

Michelle Crisp was one of the first to contact the DEC after finding dozens of dead birds on her property one morning.

She told The Australian she normally had hundreds of birds in her yard, but that she and a neighbour counted 80 dead birds in one day.

"It went to the point where we had nothing, not a bird," she said.

"It was like a moonscape, just horrible. But the frightening thing for us, we didn't find any more birds after that. We literally didn't have any birds left to die."

[nichi]

What a nightmare!

 

[Muffin]

Europe, Italy

The latest pull from the authorities.
All the provinces in north of Italy, almost half the country declared a day without cars. This Sunday in all the cities that adhere to this initiative cars are not allowed in.
The main reason is (they say) is reducing the smog over the cities. It is not new here.
Here in Rome, last summer we had a whole lot of "Ecological Sundays" and occasionally traffic on Thursday was limited to odd/even plate numbers. 
It is growing, now half of the country adhered to this: while the decision was left to the cities, almost all of them adhered - and that's a good sign.

The best thing in it that I still have to find someone who is against this. Some are annoyed by this, some are skeptic, but everyone agrees that it can't be a bad thing. For some it's just a small nuisance, for others it's a way to take action.

[Muffin]

Friday I passed the exam for the driving license. I bought the car some months ago, but I had to follow this driving school and do two exams - theory and practice. 
It's Sunday and I just came back from driving alone in the city. We don't have the block today, and the traffic early in the morning is minimal. I practiced a bit more.
I had a lot of fun. 

[Jahn]

Friday I passed the exam for the driving license. I bought the car some months ago, but I had to follow this driving school and do two exams - theory and practice. 
It's Sunday and I just came back from driving alone in the city. We don't have the block today, and the traffic early in the morning is minimal. I practiced a bit more.
I had a lot of fun. 

Hey - that's great news R!

I have just returned from a driving lesson that I have for my son. So I am kind of into that theory and practice stuff too. Found a schedule on Internet where there are 16 different exercises that we try to follow.

[tommy2]

Jahn, what are the "exercises" for, losing weight or driving?

Ha

[nichi]

Friday I passed the exam for the driving license. I bought the car some months ago, but I had to follow this driving school and do two exams - theory and practice. 
It's Sunday and I just came back from driving alone in the city. We don't have the block today, and the traffic early in the morning is minimal. I practiced a bit more.
I had a lot of fun. 

Go Rudi, yay!

[erik]

Purple Haze
by Joshua Kurlantzick  

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040830&s=kurlantzick083004

he Grand Hotel offers some of the finest accommodations in Urumqi, the frontier capital of Xinjiang, the vast western province of China bordering Central Asia. A swanky first-floor bar swarms with Chinese businessmen dressed in expensive suits, sipping Johnnie Walker. A twentieth-floor fitness club caters to Chinese yuppies trying out gleaming new Nikes but never working hard enough to sweat out their hair gel. But there is one thing the Grand Hotel doesn't offer: a view. When I got to my eighteenth-floor suite, the bellboy showed me the room's amenities--satellite television, a plethora of little liquors--and proudly pulled back the drapes so I could get a good look at downtown Urumqi, a beautiful city. Unfortunately, I could see little through the gray air. Few buildings were visible, though I knew they were there, just outside my window. The bellboy smiled. "Nice view," he said.  

Sad to say, he was right. Of the several weeks I have spent in Urumqi, that day was one of the clearest. Later that afternoon, some of the smog lifted, and I could see the stunning mountains surrounding the city, a rarity. Meanwhile, on the road outside Kashgar, a city southwest of Urumqi, mines and construction outfits belched smoke into the broad desert sky, making the air a thick particulate soup; when I ran a wet cloth over my face, it turned black, as if I'd been in a West Virginia mineshaft. My driver, and everyone else in a taxi with me, incessantly coughed and spit soot and phlegm on the car floor. And Xinjiang is hardly unique. For years, Western observers and some Chinese have worried about China's enormous problems: a sclerotic economy clogged by mountains of nonperforming loans; a rapacious gerontocracy allowing its people slightly more freedom while simultaneously cracking down on groups that organize against the state. But largely ignored has been perhaps China's biggest looming disaster: The Middle Kingdom is hurtling toward environmental catastrophe--and perhaps an ensuing political upheaval.
 
Already, most Chinese cities make Los Angeles look like a Swiss village. In Beijing last week, I choked on hot, dust-filled air--a normal occurrence in summer, when plague-like sandstorms from China's expanding deserts wash over the capital. In Guiyu, a city in southern China known for its electronics-recycling industry, the Los Angeles Times reports that peasants work atop mountain-sized piles of toxic refuse. Even in Shanghai, one of China's most progressive cities, I have passed water systems full of trash, oil, and feces, and many days the acrid, gray air has stung my eyes. The numbers are even more depressing. Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China. Two-thirds of China's cities don't meet World Health Organization air-quality standards. Reports released by Chinese health experts have suggested that just living in these places is like smoking two packs of cigarettes per day and that, in some cities, 80 percent of children may suffer from lead poisoning--80 percent! Beijing's air has more carbon monoxide than Los Angeles and Tokyo combined. By 2020, 550,000 Chinese will be dying prematurely of chronic bronchitis caused by airborne pollution.  

Rural areas are in trouble, too. Between 1994 and 1999, China's Gobi Desert expanded by more than 20,000 square miles, moving within 150 miles of Beijing, reducing groundwater supplies--and causing brutal dust storms that often spread over much of Asia. "No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, a leading international environmental group, has said. According to The River Runs Black, an outstanding new book by Elizabeth Economy, a China scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, five of China's biggest rivers are "not suitable for human contact." China's wastewater pollution may increase as much as 290 percent by 2020.

In a country historically viewed in the West as attuned to the Earth--American acolytes of Buddhism often cite its respect for nature--how have things gone so wrong? Contrary to common belief, even traditional Confucian scholars saw nature as a force to be tamed, not preserved; and Mao famously pooh-poohed environmental problems, so Chinese leaders never built strong environmental institutions. And, over the past two decades, the country has gone through history's most rapid industrialization with virtually no controls; China's equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency has a staff of only 300, one-fiftieth that of its American counterpart. Coal powers nearly 70 percent of Chinese industry, compared with less than 25 percent in the United States, and Chinese consumers are feverishly buying cars with lax emissions controls--the number of cars on the road is doubling every four years, creating unchecked congestion. Corrupt Communist Party officials profit from unregulated construction, China's tissue-thin legal system barely constrains developers, and the massive construction that results is destroying forests and contributing to desertification. In Kashgar, Chinese firms are madly tearing down old, eco-friendly mud-brick homes built around airy courtyards to build acres of flashy new glass and steel shopping centers. Kashgar contractors strew trash everywhere.

What's more, as unemployment has risen, Beijing has tried to keep the economy moving with a series of massive--and massively destructive--infrastructure projects, including the world's biggest dam and its longest bridge. (In 2002, state investment in the economy rose 25 percent even as foreign economists touted the liberalization of Chinese private business.) In Xinjiang, China has built an unnecessary railroad across the lightly populated province, as well as an economically unviable oil pipeline.

But the ecological destruction is spawning a grassroots environmental movement that might have a positive impact. Ecological destruction in Poland, the Soviet Union, and other countries in communist Eastern Europe helped spark political change. Economy notes how, in Krakow in the 1980s, Polish intellectuals, trade-union members, and environmentalists banded together to push the government to upgrade local factories that were heavy polluters--the same coalition of activists that later took on the state directly. In the ussr, meanwhile, huge protests developed in 1986 over a project to divert the Siberian River--a project that was causing massive pollution.  

Similar things may be happening in China. Already tens of millions of farmers in the central provinces, sites of the worst desertification, stand to lose their farms. But, as the U.S. Embassy in Beijing notes in a report titled "The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia" (Inner Mongolia is a Chinese province), "China's 21st-century 'Okies' have no California to escape to." Without an unpopulated frontier for the migrants, they are coming to provincial capitals and to Beijing, where, like Poles and Russians in the '80s, they vent their anger at the government. China's Ministry of Public Security has admitted that the number of large protests in China almost tripled between 1993 and 1999 (the most recent statistics available), with many taking place in cities where workers fired from state industries are joining forces with migrating farmers who lost their fields. Similarly, recent battles between farmers and industry over water scarcity have led to large, often violent, antigovernment protests.

And, unlike religious groups like Falun Gong or small political organizations like the China Democracy Party that have challenged Beijing, the environmental movement is relatively well-organized. Though security forces harass anyone who might threaten the Communist Party, they have not cracked down as hard on the greens because, until recently, China's leadership did not consider environmental groups "political" organizations. "The environmental NGO definitely gets more space," Yi Wen, a program officer for the activist group Green River, told reporters last year. Taking advantage of this permissive attitude, more than 2,000 environmental NGOs have organized in China. These dynamic green groups, legal aid centers, and crusading media outlets have energized grassroots activism and suggested to ordinary Chinese that, ultimately, only democracy will bring down corrupt officials and solve environmental problems. Their message is getting through: According to Economy, Li Xiaoping, executive producer of "Focus," a Chinese investigative news program, says peasants now come to the "Focus" studios to beg them to investigate environmental problems caused by local officials. And one day, perhaps, a massive environmental meltdown will empower these green groups, as Chernobyl catalyzed Soviets. Maybe then I will be able to see out the window at the Grand.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a special correspondent for The New Republic.

[Jahn]

Jahn, what are the "exercises" for, losing weight or driving?

Ha

Ok some other translation joke I suppose  . In the military we do "exercises",  that is supposed to be "training", sometimes the military year is even called "the Exercise". We train different in traffic situations of course. Thanks T I shall check that word.

[tommy2]

Yeh, the U.S. military uses exercises and maneuvers for such operations.  Kinda loke practice for the potential real thing. 

Besides, I was just messing with you.  Weather here is rough all around with more to come.  Ice, heavy snow, below freezing, still.  Reminds me of the winters when I was a kid, or maybe it just seemed worse back then.

I love it, actually.  t

[erik]

He bravely fought for environment and our better future...
An example why democracy does not stand a chance.

Gore faces up to inconvenient truth over his electricity bill

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2311302.ece

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 28 February 2007

Al Gore - Oscar winner and the world's best-known anti-global warming warrior - has been accused of not living up to his lofty standards when it comes to his own opulent mansion in his home state, Tennessee.

According to the right-wing Tennessee Centrer for Policy Research, the former vice-president "deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy". Mr Gore's 20-room mansion in Nashville, it says, consumes more electricity in a month than the average American household in a whole year.

The attack comes amid fevered speculation about a possible Gore run for the White House next year, with even former President Jimmy Carter urging him to enter the race. As his supporters argue, Mr Gore has been emphatically "on the right side" of the two biggest issues of the day in the US, the war in Iraq and the climate change crisis. But his personal domestic environmental record leaves much to be desired, TCPR claims.

In his award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the Mr Gore calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home, it notes. But while the average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy, the Gore home used nearly 221,000 kWh, more than 20 times the national average.

Since the film's release, his home's energy consumption has increased from about 16,200 kWh per month in 2005 to 18,400 kWh per month last year.

"As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk," Drew Johnson, the Centre's president, declared. Mr Gore paid almost $30,000 (£15,300) for gas and electricity at his Nashville home last year.

[Gunslinger]

He bravely fought for environment and our better future...
An example why democracy does not stand a chance.

This is not the time or the place, Eric, for me to debate this issue with you.  I have some beliefs to which I strongly hold about this issue, and Mr. Gore, and democracy.  They differ from yours, it seems.

Mr. Gore is not what he seems, and he has a similar odor about him as the methane flatulence from a bovine digestive system, which scientists have also shown has a greater effect than man on causing global warming.

Hollywood gloms on like it always does to emotional issues, to sell movies.  The emotional side of politics gloms right back for its own publicity and famous faces.  Incestuous is a kind euphamism.

[nichi]

Here's how I see it...While "factions" attempt to make this a political game, there is huge denial afoot about what is happening. So "Gore" is not the point, "Bush" is not the point.

I only hope the sun has a sense of humor as it keeps trying to taste us with its tongues. I'll bet you anything Sun couldn't care less who is Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal, Muslim, Christian, etc etc, and when the time comes, will lick a whole stream of all of the above up and then spit it out. When it happens, it won't matter much to which camp belongs whom. We will be forced at that point, for our own survival, to work together.

And maybe that's the lesson.

I only hope the means by which we can have cross-global communication will still be viable at that time.

[erik]

Unfortunately, so far we have only been wallowing in self-deception and illusions. Politicians are good at selling them and we won't buy anything else except the one about bright future and the great possibilities and expectations we have. 

[Muffin]

I only hope the sun has a sense of humor as it keeps trying to taste us with its tongues.

toast, not taste; or toast and taste