Lester Brown | Rescuing a Planet Under Stress
Energy consultant Harry Braun points out that, since wind turbines are similar to automobiles in the sense that each has an electrical generator, a gearbox, an electronic control system, and a brake, they can be mass-produced on assembly lines. Indeed, the slack in the US automobile industry is sufficient to produce a million wind turbines per year. The lower cost associated with mass production could drop the cost of wind-generated electricity below 2� per kilowatt-hour. Assembly-line production of wind turbines at “wartime” speed would quickly lower urban air pollution, carbon emissions, and the prospect of oil wars.
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Bad news for us Desert dwellers
June 6, 2006
Desert Cities Are Living on Borrowed Time, UN Warns
Desert Cities Are Living on Borrowed Time, UN Warns
By John Vidal
The Guardian UKMonday 05 June 2006
Climate change threatens conditions for 500 million. But report points to huge solar energy potential.
The 500 million people who live in the world’s desert regions can expect to find life increasingly unbearable as already high temperatures soar and the available water is used up or turns salty, according to the United Nations.
Desert cities in the US and Middle East, such as Phoenix and Riyadh, may be living on borrowed time as water tables drop and supplies become undrinkable, says a report coinciding with today’s world environment day.
Twentieth-century modernist dreams of greening deserts by diverting rivers and mining underground water are wholly unrealistic, it warns.
But the report also proposes that deserts become the powerhouses of the next century, capturing the world’s solar energy and potentially exporting electricity across continents. For instance, a 310-square mile area of the Sahara could, with today’s technology, generate enough electricity for the whole world.
The problem now facing many communities on the fringes of deserts, says the UN environment programme report, is not the physical growth of deserts but that rising water tables beneath irrigated soils are leading to more salinisation – a phenomenon already taking place across large tracts of China, India, Pakistan and Australia. The Tarm river basin in China, it says, has lost more than 5,000 square miles of farmland to salinisation in a period of 30 years.
The report suggests that Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia have used water from the desert very unwisely. Rather than growing staple crops such as wheat or tomatoes, it suggests that precious water should be used only for high value crops such as dates and fish farming.
The mining “fossil” water, laid down many millions of years ago, was once believed to have the potential to green deserts, but is now not thought to be a solution – except in Libya, where opinion is divided as to whether supplies may last 100 or 500 years.
But the greatest threat to people and wildlife living anywhere near deserts is climate change, which is already having a greater impact on desert regions than elsewhere. The Dashti Kbir desert in Iran has seen a 16% drop in rainfall in the past 25 years, the Kalahari a 12% decline and Chile’s Atacama desert an 8% drop.
Most deserts, says the report, will see temperatures rise by 5-7C by the end of the century and rainfall drop 10-20%. This will greatly increase evaporation and dust storms, and will move deserts closer to communities living on their edges.
The problems of more heat and lower rainfall are being compounded by the melting of glaciers in mountainous regions. These waters sustain life in deserts but would be perilously close to drying up if global warming continued as expected.
The glaciers in the mountains of south Asia are expected to decline by 40% to 80% in the next century with profound effects on large populations in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and China.
Much of the water used for farming the south-west US, central Asia and around the Andes is drawn from rivers that originate in snow-covered mountains, says the report.
Development in the next 100 years is largely contingent on what happens to the climate. However, the report envisages that deserts will become more popular tourist destinations and that some of the plants that grow there could be “crops of the future”.
“Deserts are threatened as never before by climate change, overexploitation of water and salinisation,” said Professor Andrew Warren of University College London, one of the report’s authors.
“We risk losing not only astounding landscapes and ancient cultures but also wild species that may hold keys to our survival.”
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New – Sacred Food Project
April 6, 2006
I want to draw attention to Aleph’s Sacred Food Project:Welcome to Sacred Foods Project
By linking faith and business in practical ways, Sacred Foods is working to return robust health to our soil, air and water, ensure decent working conditions, increase access to affordable and culturally appropriate foods and protect the welfare of animals.
Even those of us who eat meat need to recognize that kashrut is not just about opening another market – but about right livelyhood…
The Dartmouth Green Magazine � Green Shalom: The New Kibbutz Movement
There is a Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, which means the perfecting or the healing of the world. Translated into action, this Jewish concept is essential to the environmentalist cause; as human beings continually evolve, the earth turns on its axis and resonates with conscious energy.
Thanks for the promo, Lil! Now let’s get all the students hitting the website and clicking on the Arava program link, and we’ll be all set! C’mon kids, sign up now, you’ll have a great year!
Shabbat Tezave
March 11, 2006
I walked into shul last night, a few minutes late, and there was a big crowd, a JNF college tour group. My wife was busy finding seats for her guests, the kids stayed outside to play football, and there was only one seat left – the one I usually sit in when I lead the service. Everyone was singing ‘Yedid Nefesh’. I had begun singing the moment I walked in, and noticed that I brought the kahal into tune. Nothing new here. After sitting down, I looked around, to see who was leading. No one from the community was in the front row, except two who aren’t yet at the stage of being shatz. I mouthed to one of them, who? and she mouthed back, pointing at me ‘you’. I shook my head, she nodded. I took over.Usually, when there’s a big group of guests, like this weeks’ JNF group, Dafna, the manager of our guest facilities, gives me the nod in advance, so I show up on time.
So I led the service, and tried to tie in some Purim themes as I went. Suddenly all these images tied together for me – Psalm 93 is about HaShem putting on a costume: �’ ��� ���� ��� ! wow! I tied it in! The week’s parsha is all about dressing up – in this case, Aaron and his son’s – is Purim always the week after Tezave? I tied it in. I tried to talk to these JNF college kids about the costumes we try on and off – I talked about Purim as the time when we actually take OFF our mask…
It was a great service – I love it when we have a crowd!
velveteen rabbi in one of her posts this week, mentioned New Orleans, Mardi Gras, and Katrina. Above I mention Psalm 93. I keep meaning to work Psalm 93 into a diatribe about Katrina. Eliyahu taught us long ago that HaShem isn’t in the storm, but in the still small voice that can only be heard after the storm…
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Amazing!
February 28, 2006
one story: as above so below
Rabbi Jill Hammer’s site is really beautiful! She makes a great effort connecting the Jewish Calendar with the cycles of Earth. I like it!
Still, I’m concerned about two seemingly missing holidays in our cycle: �� �����, the olive harvest and �� �����, the grape harvest. It seems to me that these might even be the most important of the holidays, for a Land-of-Israel based people. But for a slave people, having just come out of Egypt, there is sense in �� ����� the feast of unleavened bread, when the last of the winter wheat storage is almost gone, and the new barley ��� is only just ripening. There is sense in any agricultural people for �� ����� the feast of harvest, at the end of a long summer of harvesting, but it doesn’t really fit the weather patterns of ��� ����� The Land, where it is really in the beginning of the fruit harvesting, which lasts much of the winter. The feast of the firstlings �� ��������, recognized as �� ��� the festival of the shearing, becomes the ultimate festival, when the greatest gift is given, the Law of life, and so it becomes �� ��� ����, though we might see the ultimate gift being the life of the lamb, and you can see where that might lead…
It being early in the morning, I will not tarry here. I really just wanted to note Jill’s site, and consider the oil ���� and the wine �����, the two important crops of the Bible. Jill sets up a very nice symmetry in her material, one, two, four, eight, but perhaps the eightfold symmetry of the Celtic calendar is not so applicable to the Jewish calendar. The rhythms of the Land of Israel are not the same as those of the British Isles, nor of the Northeastern USA.
�� �����, we can’t all live in the promised land.
Count the Stars
February 26, 2006
The past few weeks, we have forgotten to do Havdalah. Last night, we were on the way to an event, and left the kids with a babysitter. The week before, we had some other excuse.In the winter, it’s easy, Havdalah is before supper. But once the hour moves back, as the days get longer, the motivation is different, supper gets longer, until, by the middle of the summer, Havdalah is the kids’ way of stalling bedtime. There is a middle ground, there’s always a middle ground, somewhere, but we haven’t found it yet.
Howard Smith has a lovely piece at Shma, that can give a little more motivation. He says that counting the stars before Havdalah connects us to Avraham Avinu:
Each Saturday night before Havdalah, the ritual that ends Shabbat, we are
told to go outside and count the stars � observe the majesty of the night�s sky. Okay, we only count up to three stars, but the idea is the same: as Shabbat fades and we face the impending trials of a new week, we should drop preconceptions, open our eyes, and consider. But why the stars?
What a challenge! Count them! One, two, three…
Another late TuBishvat post
February 26, 2006
Even in chilly North America, the sap is rising!Velveteen Rabbi: Happy (belated) New Year, trees!
As it turns out, one of my favorite seasonal markers coincided with Tu BiShvat this year: Ioka Valley Farm, the sugar shack nearest to our house, started to offer maple breakfasts again, as they do each year during sugaring season. I doubt they had any idea last weekend was the Jewish New Year of the Trees, but the synchronicity of it makes me smile. Today may be cold and windy, but in some deep way we’ve turned a corner toward the eventual coming of spring.
Although I doubt our Rabbis were in touch with the ancestors of the Iroquois nations, the fact that the sap rises with second moon after the solstice was known to them. Recently, it seemed to me that the argument between Bet Hillel (who favored the full moon) and Bet Shammai (who favored the previous new moon) was one of difference in climate between their locations. Now that I think about it, that’s a little weak. More likely, the date fluctuates between the two, according to the lunar cycle.
More Tu BiShvat
February 26, 2006
I know, I know, Wednesday is Rosh Hodesh Adar, and Purim is just around the corner. But as far as I am concerned, you can’t have too much Tu BiShvat. Since Ellen Bernstein’s amazing Tu Bishvat Seder in one of the Boathouses on Philadelphia’s Lincoln Drive in 1988, was it? I have had a love affair with this holiday. A little late for this year, I discovered that my friend Bill Slott, from Kibbutz Ketura wrote a moving piece about Tu Bishvat on Jewish Family.com:JewishFamily.com || Jewish Celebrations
Last year, I was guiding a three-generation American family around the country on Tu B’Svhat, and we stopped to plant trees in the Upper Galilee. Tromping through the mud with our saplings in a light but persistent drizzle, I wondered whether this little exercise was worth it. The grandfather leaned over to help his grandson plant the tree, while the father took pictures and the mother beamed. The 11-year-old looked up and asked me if I could come back and take pictures of the tree every year and send them to him. Not wanting to deceive him, I gently explained that there are simply too many trees in the forest for me to reliably keep track. “Oh well,” he sighed. “It’s not about the tree anyway, it’s about the planting.” No childhood confusion for him. I knew then that the planting was worth it. Every time.
Here in the desert, the spring really begins at Tu BiShvat and by Purim we are out and about in T shirts (there’s always, but always, a sandstorm on Purim). This year was no exception. But our seder at Lotan was weak. That’s because we do it together with dinner.
Really, as we learned from our teacher Yossele Bar Tziyon, the roots of the seder are in the Sabbatean tradition, and it would be held late at night, so that the fourth cup of wine would be drunk at midnite exactly.
Its all about sweets, about dessert. Strawberries dipped in chocolate. Dates stuffed with marzipan. That kind of thing.
Perhaps next year, I’ll run another seder, after dinner. In the meantime, I need to swot up on my Megilla reading. Purim, here we come…
I missed a flood
February 3, 2006
There was a fantastic flood in Eilat this morning.
Click for Pictures
here.
The floods have lifted up, Hashem, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring. Above the voices of many waters, the mighty breakers of the sea, Hashem on high is mighty.
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