We’re Helping the NotFound Project

Sadly, even in these modern times, children go missing and finding them can be difficult. The NotFound Project hopes to help find missing children by making use of 404 pages online. 404 pages refer to pages on a website that cannot be found, so it makes thematic sense to use that classification of page to find people.

You can see an example of this by clicking here.

If you have a website then you can help the project too!

The NotFound Project.

Victory for Chickens in Europe

Being a chicken who’s sole purpose is egg-laying can be hard because of the horrible living conditions. Too many animals, in this case chickens, are held in enclosures that don’t allow for movement. This is starting to change for chickens in Europe as they have now been granted better enclosures thanks to some ethical activists!

On the first day of 2012, keeping hens in such cages became illegal, in all 27 countries of the European Union. Hens can still be kept in cages, but they must have more space, and the cages must have nest boxes and a scratching post. Last month, members of the British Hen Welfare Trust provided a new home for a hen they named “Liberty”. She was, they said, among the last hens in Britain still living in the type of cages we had opposed.

In the early 1970s, when the modern animal-liberation movement began, no major organisation was campaigning against the battery cage. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the mother of all animal-protection organisations, had lost its early radicalism long before. It focused on isolated cases of abuse, and failed to challenge well-established ways of mistreating animals on farms or in laboratories. It took a concerted effort by the new animal radicals of the 1970s to stir the RSPCA from its complacency towards the battery cage and other forms of intensive animal rearing.

Read Europe’s ethical eggs-ample.

A Look at European Transit Planning

The New York Times has a good article about the differences between traffic planning in the USA and Europe. The article shows ways that European cities move people more efficiently by supporting mass transit and sustainable transit solutions like bicycles rather than supporting a car culture.

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.

Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation

Read more here.

Iceland Thinking of Electrifying Europe

Iceland uses sustainable geothermal energy production to provide power and hot water to its people and now they are thinking of exporting surplus power to Europe. They are wrapping up their research into the feasibility of running so much electricity underwater to Europe and if it’s completed even more people can benefit from renewable energy.

Plus, just imagine how rich Iceland can become from supplying cheap renewable energy to the rest of Europe.

The project aims for the exportation of some five terawatt-hours (or five billion kilowatt-hours) each year, Jonsdottir said.
At current power prices in Europe, that corresponds to between 250 and 320 million euros ($350-448 million) in exports annually, and is enough to cover the average annual consumption of 1.25 million European households.
“The idea is to meet demand during peak hours in Europe, as well as some base load,” Jonsdottir said, refusing to estimate how much the project might cost to implement.
Landsvirkjun, which is state-owned, produces about 75 percent of all electricity in Iceland

Read the rest of the article.

Car Free Cities are Always an Option

Today I’ll cut right to the chase: car free cities are thriving in Europe. Awesome.

A quarter of households in Britain – more in the larger cities, and a majority in some inner cities – live without a car. Imagine how quality of life would improve for cyclists and everyone else if traffic were removed from areas where people could practically choose to live without cars. Does this sound unrealistic, utopian? Did you know many European cities are already doing it?

Vauban in Germany is one of the largest car-free neighbourhoods in Europe, home to more than 5,000 people. If you live in the district, you are required to confirm once a year that you do not own a car – or, if you do own one, you must buy a space in a multi-storey car park on the edge of the district. One space was initially provided for every two households, but car ownership has fallen over time, and many of these spaces are now empty.

Vehicles are allowed down the residential streets at walking pace to pick up and deliver, but not to park. In practice, vehicles are rarely seen moving here. It has been taken over by kids as young as four or five, playing, skating and unicycling without direct supervision. The adults, too, tend to socialise outdoors far more than they would on conventional streets open to traffic (behaviour that’s echoed in the UK, too).

Read the full article at the Guardian.

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