Month: March 2008

Into the Future by Using the Past

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

To most people it looks like leaders in North America keep forgetting about global warming, well this isn’t all true. Brush the Bush and Harper conservative agendas aside and you’ll find other political leaders trying to save the planet. In Mexico, aboriginal leaders are looking into the ways of that their ancestors lived to help us slow global warming today.

More than 200 leaders from 71 American Indian nations in Mexico, the United States and Canada came together in this Mexican jungle to find indigenous solutions to pollution and ecological problems threatening the planet.

“Our Mother Earth is being polluted at an alarming rate, and our elders say that she is dying,” said Raymond Sensmeier, a Tlingit leader from Yakutat, Alaska. “The way the weather is around the world … a cleansing is needed.”

The conference began with a pre-dawn ceremony that included fire, copal incense, chants in Lacandon Maya and blasts from a conch shell.

Greenomics

- Adam Clare

The CBC has a feature article on the emerging green economy and it’s a good read to start the week.

At the same time, some leading multinational corporations are taking action to slash their use of fossil fuels. Manufacturer Johnson and Johnson has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by seven per cent while growing its business by 300 per cent in the past eight years, according to Banks.

“They’re saving on average about $40 million a year. So, the rhetoric that this is going to hurt economies, that it’s going to bankrupt companies, is simply not the case,” said Banks.

Canadian entrepreneurs are hoping to take advantage of the growing appetite for clean technologies, which includes everything from efficient lighting to renewable energy. More than 70 Cleantech companies are now listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, including many solar technology firms.

Whisky Cleans Water

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

In what seems like some bizarre twist a byproduct from the production of whisky is being used to clean rivers. I wonder if the byproduct is some form of algae.

Scientists at Aberdeen University have created DRAM – Device for the Remediation and Attenuation of Multiple pollutants – which they claim could revolutionise the cleaning up of old and contaminated industrial sites.

They claim the secret process can remove different types of pollutants including chlorines, heavy metals and pesticides at the same time and is far quicker and more cost effective than current clean up techniques.

Biological Determinism for Happiness

- Adam Clare

This is good news for some people and irrelevant news for others. There is new research coming out that hints that biology plays a significant role in how happy we are.

esearchers from the University of Edinburgh and the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane have found our personalities and happiness are largely hereditary and that genetically determined personality traits affect our happiness.

The research, published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science, rated the personalities of 973 pairs of twins. The twins were rated using the Five Factor Model of personality, which measures neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, openness and agreeableness.

The study shows identical twins have a very similar personality and well-being. But fraternal twins are only around half as similar.

This suggests that genes are responsible for certain personality traits. Those who are conscientious, extroverted and not overly neurotic are more likely to be happy. People with these personality traits also tend to have a happiness buffer to help them through hard times.

Scroll To Top