Ecological Footprint Quiz

Ecological footprints measure humanity's demands on nature. Everything we do has consequences...

Ever wondered how much “nature” your lifestyle requires?

You’re about to find out.

The Ecological Footprint Quiz estimates the amount of land and ocean area required to sustain your consumption patterns and absorb your wastes on an annual basis. After answering 27 easy questions you’ll be able to compare your Ecological Footprint to others’ and learn how to reduce your impact on the Earth.

What the future of our environment holds

Jalil Boston
7th Grade
Slauson Middle School

Twenty years from now, I’ll be 32 years old, forced to raise kids where they can’t play outside, where they can’t even stand in the sunlight without worrying about skin cancer, and can’t make a simple trip to the grocery store without having to be concerned about acid rain.

The constant fear of super tornadoes, flash floods and season long droughts because of global warming will be yearly occurrences (the Winter temperatures average record highs, while the summers are dry and the heat index averages 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the Midwest states).

What can we do to prevent this from happening? Here’s my idea…my parents have taught me a lot about accountability. For instance, take my room. If it is messy with clothes and trash everywhere, I’m unable to be comfortable, I can’t invite my friends over and every thing is just a big mess. It soon becomes embarrassing for anyone to see, even me. I couldn’t just leave my room messy like that because I didn’t feel like cleaning it up. Eventually, my parents would punish me for having such a dirty and unkempt room.

With natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes and wild fires we should have learned one thing: The way we treat the earth is exactly the way it will treat us. The earth, just like my room, it is not enough to mess it up and then clean it up, we have to prevent the mess from happening and be held accountable. If we continue on our current environmental path, we have yet to see the worst of mother nature.

I do things for the environment like recycle newspapers, bottles, old computers, cell phones, soda cans, and liquid containers. My family and I do things like reduce the amount of gas use, air-conditioning, burning oil and reduce the amount of times we use aerosol cans. My family doesn’t smoke, we have plants all over our house, we car pool when it’s necessary and take the city bus when it is accessible.

Each year, global warming will continue to get worse if we are effortlessly making the little progress we are now. While recycling and reducing the usage of our natural resources helps me do my part, I feel the biggest thing I could do is ask our government to require that more individuals, families, cities and states be held accountable for the poor care of the environment.

I feel that children and adults alike have a voice in this matter, as this planet is something that we all inherit from one generation and pass on to the next.

http://www.theride.org/pdf/BugWinningEssay.pdf (abridged)

Students of 11 teachers from seven Ann Arbor Public Schools participated in the essay contest. From more than 200 entries, a group of 13 finalists was selected .

Slauson Middle School seventh-grader Jalil Boston (second from left) receives congratulations from his teacher, Teresa Schneider (far right) and his father, Heath Boston, after learning from AATA Manager of Community Relations Mary Stasiak (left) that his essay on environmental stewardship was chosen for top honors in AATA's recent competition.

Humans! (cartoon)

"Humans! - A Green Natural Funny Cartoon by Reza Rasoli"

WASTE LAND (official trailer)

WASTE LAND Official Trailer from Almega Projects on Vimeo.

Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of "catadores" -- self-designated pickers of recyclable materials.

Muniz's initial objective was to "paint" the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) has great access to the entire process and, in the end, offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.

Deforestation in the Amazon

By Rhett A Butler

Between May 2000 and August 2006, Brazil lost nearly 150,000 square kilometers of forest—an area larger than Greece—and since 1970, over 600,000 square kilometers (232,000 square miles) of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. Why is Brazil losing so much forest? What can be done to slow deforestation?

Why is the Brazilian Amazon being Destroyed?

In many tropical countries, the majority of deforestation results from the actions of poor subsistence cultivators. However, in Brazil only about one-third of recent deforestation can be linked to "shifted" cultivators. Historically a large portion of deforestation in Brazil can be attributed to land clearing for pastureland by commercial and speculative interests, misguided government policies, inappropriate World Bank projects, and commercial exploitation of forest resources. For effective action it is imperative that these issues be addressed. Focusing solely on the promotion of sustainable use by local people would neglect the most important forces behind deforestation in Brazil.

Brazilian deforestation is strongly correlated to the economic health of the country: the decline in deforestation from 1988-1991 nicely matched the economic slowdown during the same period, while the rocketing rate of deforestation from 1993-1998 paralleled Brazil's period of rapid economic growth. During lean times, ranchers and developers do not have the cash to rapidly expand their pasturelands and operations, while the government lacks funds to sponsor highways and colonization programs and grant tax breaks and subsidies to forest exploiters.

A relatively small percentage of large landowners clear vast sections of the Amazon for cattle pastureland. Large tracts of forest are cleared and sometimes planted with African savanna grasses for cattle feeding. In many cases, especially during periods of high inflation, land is simply cleared for investment purposes. When pastureland prices exceed forest land prices (a condition made possible by tax incentives that favor pastureland over natural forest), forest clearing is a good hedge against inflation.

Such favorable taxation policies, combined with government subsidized agriculture and colonization programs, encourage the destruction of the Amazon. The practice of low taxes on income derived from agriculture and tax rates that favor pasture over forest overvalues agriculture and pastureland and makes it profitable to convert natural forest for these purposes when it normally would not be so.


A Closer Look at Brazilian Deforestation

Today deforestation in the Amazon is the result of several activities, the foremost of which include:

1. Clearing for cattle pasture
2. Colonization and subsequent subsistence agriculture
3. Infrastructure improvements
4. Commercial agriculture
5. Logging

Severn Suzuki speaking at UN Earth Summit 1992

Raised in Vancouver and Toronto, Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been camping and hiking all her life. When she was 9 she started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They were successful in many projects before 1992, when they raised enough money to go to the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Their aim was to remind the decision-makers of who their actions or inactions would ultimately affect. The goal was reached when 12 yr old Severn closed a Plenary Session with a powerful speech that received a standing ovation.

Where most of us are happy to do lip service, she went onto study Ecology and Evolutionary Biology – and today, is an Environmental Activist, Television Host and Author, all in the name of preserving the environment.

On the 10th anniversary of this speech in 2002, she wrote a wonderful piece for TIME Magazine titled, ‘The Young Can’t Wait.’

You can read it here.

HOME

A film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Short version: 92’

2009, France, digital

Film company: Elzevir Films – EuropaCorp

Distributor in France: EuropaCorp Distribution

SYNOPSIS

The appearance of life on Earth was the result of a balance between elements that took billions of years to stabilize. Humans have profited from the lavish resources of the Earth, but have changed the face of the world by the use they have made of it. The harnessing of petroleum and its subsequent over-exploitation are having dramatic consequences for our planet. Human beings must change their behaviour and their way of life before it is too late for them, their descendants and life on Earth.

"We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.

HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet."

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

HOME official website

http://www.home-2009.com

PPR is proud to support HOME
http://www.ppr.com

HOME is a carbon offset movie
http://www.actioncarbone.org

More information about the Planet
http://www.goodplanet.info

Climate change

Climate change

View more presentations from jardimsara.

Check what you know about environmental threats and disasters

1. Review the common terms and expressions that refer to the environmental threats and disasters.

2. Check what you have learned so far by choosing the term or expression corresponding to each definition in the form below.

3. Once you have finished, you can submit/send your form.

Why the Ocean Matters

A Way Forward: Facing Climate Change

Global Warming

Why care about water?

What on EARTH are we doing?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.

 Ecclesiastes

No, not forever. At the outside limit, the earth will probably last another 4 billion to 5 billion years. By that time, scientists predict, the sun will have burned up so much of its own hydrogen fuel that it will expand and incinerate the surrounding planets, including the earth. A nuclear cataclysm, on the other hand, could destroy the earth tomorrow. Somewhere within those extremes lies the life expectancy of this wondrous, swirling globe. How long it endures and the quality of life it can support do not depend alone on the immutable laws of physics. For man has reached a point in his evolution where he has the power to affect, for better or worse, the present and future state of the planet.

Through most of his 2 million years or so of existence, man has thrived in earth's environment -- perhaps too well. By 1800 there were 1 billion human beings bestriding the planet. That number had doubled by 1930 and doubled again by 1975. If current birthrates hold, the world's present population of 5.1 billion will double again in 40 more years.

The reason is not so much the sheer numbers, though 40,000 babies die of starvation each day in Third World countries, but the reckless way in which humanity has treated its planetary host.

A stubborn seven-week heat wave drove temperatures above 100 degrees F across much of the country, raising fears that the dreaded "greenhouse effect" -- global warming as a result of the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere -- might already be under way. Parched by the lack of rain, the Western forests of the U.S. went up in flames. And on many of the country's beaches, garbage, raw sewage and medical wastes washed up to spoil the fun of bathers and confront them personally with the growing despoliation of the oceans.

Similar pollution closed beaches on the Mediterranean, the North Sea and the English Channel. Killer hurricanes ripped through the Caribbean and floods devastated Bangladesh, reminders of nature's raw power. In Soviet Armenia a monstrous earthquake killed some 55,000 people. That too was a natural disaster, but its high casualty count, owing largely to the construction of cheap high-rise apartment blocks over a well-known fault area, illustrated the carelessness that has become humanity's habit in dealing with nature.

 
The further depletion of the atmosphere's ozone layer, which helps block cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, testified to the continued overuse of atmosphere-destroying chlorofluorocarbons emanating from such sources as spray cans and air- conditioners. Perhaps most ominous of all, the destruction of the tropical forests, home to at least half the earth's plant and animal species, continued at a rate equal to one football field a second.

What would happen if nothing were done about the earth's imperiled state? According to computer projections, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere could drive up the planet's average temperature 3 degrees F to 9 degrees F by the middle of the next century. That could cause the oceans to rise by several feet, flooding coastal areas and ruining huge tracts of farmland through salinization. Changing weather patterns could make huge areas infertile or uninhabitable, touching off refugee movements unprecedented in history.

Toxic waste and radioactive contamination could lead to shortages of safe drinking water, the sine qua non of human existence. And in a world that could house between 8 billion and 14 billion people by the mid-21st century, there is a strong likelihood of mass starvation.

Let there be no illusions. Taking effective action to halt the massive injury to the earth's environment will require a mobilization of political will, international cooperation and sacrifice

We owe this not only to ourselves and our children but also to the unborn generations who will one day inherit the earth.

Source: Online Time Magazine (abridged)