Environment – Page 62 – Things Are Good

What’s That? Use Your Phone to Identify Plants

Pl@ntNet is an app that can identify plants using the camera on your mobile. Presently, it’s limited primarily to Western Europe (since it was in France),Indian Ocean, and parts of South America. The technology behind it can be used to extend it elsewhere and let’s hope it gets more global support.

â€œWhat makes the project unique and innovative is that it is based on data collected through a large and dynamic social network that regularly collects field data, that shares this data, meaning that this knowledge is constantly updated which also allows the use of a certain number of visual patterns expressed by plantsâ€.

Al Gore is an Optimist About Climate Change

In 2006 Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth which was a film that changed the discourse around climate change by bringing knowledge to those who were ignorant about basic environmental knowledge. In the last two years there has been positive movement towards making the human-built world more eco-conscious but we do have a lot further to go. In this TED talk Al Gore goes into why he’s optimistic about the next ten years.

Al Gore has three questions about climate change and our future. First: Do we have to change? Each day, global-warming pollution traps as much heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs. This trapped heat is leading to stronger storms and more extreme floods, he says: “Every night on the TV news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” Second question: Can we change? We’ve already started. So then, the big question: Will we change? In this challenging, inspiring talk, Gore says yes. “When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is foreordained because of who we are as human beings,” he says. “That is why we’re going to win this.”

China to Close 1,000 Coal Plants

China was building coal power plants at an alarming rate over the last couple of decades and the repercussions of that policy have been felt. Pollution throughout the country kills thousands and has gotten so bad at times that parts of the country essentially close. Coal is largely to blame.

The pollution released by those plants is massive compared to alternatives like natural gas (still gross) and renewables (the best!). Indeed, China is cashing in on the global trend towards renewable energy by increasing their domestic production of wind turbines and solar voltaic plants. Finally they will benefit from this internally by closing 1,000 coal plants and replacing it with alternatives.

Thanks to this effort from China we will breath a little better in the years to come.

The news was confirmed on Monday by China’s National Energy Administration, and first reported by Xinhua, the state-run outlet, after detailed plans to slash coal consumption were issued earlier this month by the country’s powerful executive body, the State Council. The move will accelerate China’s well-documented shift away from coal.

The news comes as a Chinese firm topped a reputable global ranking for wind energy production for the first time, besting US giant General Electric. Chinese companies already lead the world in solar energy production.

Rain Gardens to Feature in Canada Blooms Competition

Canada Blooms is a competition to demonstrate one’s ability to display flowers. In the past it was based on the look of the arrangement done in a garden, now they are expanding how they think about flowers. This year they want people to submit rain gardens to the competition.

Rain gardens are preferred because they use water that falls from he sky instead of draining local aquifers or other finite sources. It’s good to see a Canada Blooms caring about the environment and hopefully they will become more conscious of nature with every year.

“Rain gardens are a brilliant concept,” says Terry Caddo, General Manager of Canada Blooms. “By creating some small adjustments in your home garden you can not only create a fuller, lush garden, but you will also help improve water quality in nearby bodies of water and ease the strain on our environment.”

Rain gardens are natural or man-made rainwater runoffs that allow storm water to be soaked into the ground and plants rather than flowing into storm drains. By diverting the water that would eventually drain out to local rivers, lakes or to the sea, rain gardens help prevent erosion, water pollution and flooding.

It’s Not Environment Versus Economic Prosperity

Amazingly, there are people who think that environmental protection will cause economic calamity (bankers seem to be good at causing economic collapse all on their own). This old way of thinking still impacts policy and other decisions made around the world. In order to put this archaic notion away, the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation’s latest initiative is a year of blogging about how economic and environmental success go hand in hand.

Their first post on the matter is about how the perception of the environment as an asset to economic prosperity.

People often talk about â€œeconomic value,â€ â€œecological value,â€ and â€œsocial valueâ€ as if they were separate things. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As the discussion above makes clear, the â€œvalueâ€ or â€œbenefitâ€ we are talking about here is the contribution to sustainable human well-being. None of these elements (ecological, social/cultural, economic) are mutually exclusive; that is, none can make a contribution to that goal without interacting with the others.

What we can ask is: what is the relative contribution of, for example, natural capital to sustainable human well-being, in combination with other forms of capital (built, human, social), in a particular context?

We have to look at these things in context and as part of an integrated, whole system of humans embedded in cultures, which are, in turn, embedded in the rest of nature.