Home, le film de Yann Arthus-Bertrand, produit par Luc Besson, sera proposé gratuitement sur You tube le 5 juin prochain à l’occasion de la Journée Mondiale de l’Environnement ! De plus, le film sera également proposé le même jour au cinéma, à la télévision, en DVD, en Blu-Ray “Y a pas de droit, y a pas de copyright, montrez-le au maximum de gens“, a plaidé Yann-Arthus Bertrand.
Voici un petit extrait de ce que nous ne devons manquer sous aucun prétexte
Voici un petit site sympa par mon amie Catherine qui a pour but de partager des expériences et des adresses de ceux et celles dans les soins et le bien être
L’association Vallée de l’Aff is combating the Knauff company who appears to be poluting their countryside with Dioxines.
Greenpeace need no publicity, I guess. Thanks to their direct action over the years, they are well known. Despite that, one more link into their site cant hurt. Take a look at Greenpeace International and the Greenpeace blog
Can someone explain why this happens in the Faroe Iles each year? It is the massacre of the Calderon, a type of Dolphin simply it seems for young men to prove their coming of age. It is worth noting that the Faroe Iles are part of Denmark, an EU member ….
Surely the first thing that any government with a real green agenda would do is ban large cars. Do we still need to be asking whether a 3 litre engine consumes more resources than a 1.5? And this is enough reason to ban them. Of course I hear the free-choice lobby up in arms telling me that those who can afford should be able to choose … but this is no longer a question of economics, but of sharing physical resources. For all the inequalities in this world, money is the greatest. But global warming will eventually be a question of life and death not just real estate. So is it just the richest who have the rights?
The conclusion is of course that no government yet has a green agenda. Its all just politics …
World of Nature has taken on a new theme to celebrate the new year and give a little green freshnesh to our look.
Happy New Year 2009
In my article Chemicals and Naturals it was stated “… that a chemical is exactly the same whether it occurs naturally or is produced in a chemical factory.”
For me, the debate is not whether the chemical is the same in nature as it is when produced in the lab but the substance or plant that contains the chemical, the delivery mechanism is different. The failing is the difference of administering chemicals in isolation of the plant from which they came or from which they were copied.
This is an intrinsically human interventionist policy which stems from the postulate that man can do it better, as you say later, “chemical companies improving on nature”. But this is indeed largely to exploit a market. What is the motivation apart from profit?
Is Monsanto ethical in its approach to GM Maize and the dependency that it has built into its contracts by producing plants that are unfertile? It is however of course great business!!
Take for instance: horse manure, a good example. What is better; to build it using a horse or to synthesise it in a lab? Undoubtedly, we can and do isolate the fertilizers (nitrates) but if we used more horses, there would be more fertilizer.
Why synthesis, which is energy consuming instead of growing the item concerned. Synthesis is energy consuming, whereas growing is beneficial and in harmony with nature.
In my article Chemicals and Naturals it was said “… there is no convincing evidence yet that it is in any way more nutritious than food grown by conventional means, i.e., using fertilisers and pesticides, etc. …”
The suggestion is not that there is more nutrition, but that it is nutrition without artificial assistance and without chemicals by principal, since synthesised chemicals are unpredictable in their behaviour.
Take thalidomide. Instead of accepting that as an unfortunate statistic or an inevitable consequence of a world gone mad, perhaps we could refer to new testing requirements which will not only oblige chemical producers to prove that their products are safe when administered in isolation, but that they are safe when administered in the real life multi-dimensional real world of cocktails of different substances.
Second, as a principal, why ingest additional chemicals, when we can do without and when we are already inhaling car fumes, PVC fumes when we get into our car in summer, smoke from factories (much less than in 1920, but much more than in Roman times) and pouring detergents into water courses, destroying fish habitats, altering their fertility, over fishing the seas, throwing nitrates into the sea, landing heavy oil on the coasts of Brittany and altering human male fertility rates.
Third, there is evidence to show that produce grown at the natural rate and not accelerated by chemical fertilizers is better tasting, has a more dense consistency (in the case of vegetables for instance), has a higher vitamin content and a higher fibre content.
For chickens, the 12 week battery chicken has a far higher proportion of water than a free range maize and corn fed chicken and is much smaller, less tasty and less nutritious. While much cheaper, is it not just eating for the sake of saying “I have a chicken and I feel rich” rather than eating the necessary good things needed.
Take papayas and mangoes and bananas for instance. Produced where? Overseas and thus high transport cost, high energy cost. Why do we seek these things at any cost? Because it makes us feel powerful to know that we can bring goods to us from across the world, when we could be quite content with the thousands of varieties of locally grown apples ….
It has been said that “For the foreseeable future, organic food production can make vegetables so expensive that many of the poorer people in society will not be able to afford them so that their diet and health will suffer.” See my article on chemicals and naturals
Which society are we talking about here, because the poorer people in Europe are very different from the poorer people in Africa? The health of Africans is already suffering today and not through lack of chemicals, but lack of management. The oil money in many African states that could be ploughed into irrigation projects tends to buy weapons instead.
In Europe, the obscenity is in the contradiction of saying that we need high productivity to feed the poor but also massive choice to feed the whims of the wealthy. And the choice comes through high energy consuming imports in general, not employment-creating local farming.
Lowering productivity and improving quality, means producing fewer varieties of low meat high fat content sausages and a limited choice of high quality lean nutritious, slow-growing fruits and vegetables.
It appears that bio food is more expensive. But privilege quality and not quantity and you may find that for the same cost, you need less food, since there is indeed more nutrition in it. I suggest some real work is needed here to determine whether bio food is better or not. I have no doubts about that, but what is the battle here? To convince science that it is wrong? No! That is not the aim because, of course, each individual has the freedom to choose his way. But if it were true, we could exit from this consumerism, over -production, hell for leather life.
(I believe that there is a parallel with our fear of death: we produce and cure because we do not accept that as there is life there is also death. We wish to play God. In any case God for me is a human construct as part of a megalomaniac alter-ego. Look just at the way that God and religion has been used far more for domination than for peace!)
But the generalisation of bio methods, through effective communication can reduce the costs, but when in competition with the food distribution system as it has evolved, with individual wrapping and costs going into, not the foodstuff, but the presentation, bio food may not be competitive. But the question is not just economics, it is: what is better? The contradiction between economies of scale and producing just what we need is not negligible. Bio methods and economies of scale are probably contradictions in terms.
