Planetsave

The Obama administration’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, announced today that he won’t be changing George W. Bush’s rule that global factors, such as climate change, cannot be considered in analyzing the polar bear’s survival.

The rule, instituted in the last months of Bush’s presidency, prohibit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries services from considering whether practices outside the polar bear’s territory are affecting its chances for survival.

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If you have a dog who likes to run, taking him along for a bike ride isn’t a bad idea. But when a man in Oklahoma decided to drag his pit bull behind the bike, after a while the dog didn’t want to run along.

Instead of stopping, the man continued to pedal his bike with the dog dragging on his stomach for nearly half a mile. Residents of Ardmore, Oklahoma noticed the blodied dog and notified authorities.

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A study released Wednesday shows that there are far fewer animals living in the area around Chernobyl and that animals living there are much more likely to be deformed.

“Usually (deformed) animals get eaten quickly, as it’s hard to escape if your wings are not the same length. In this case we found a high incidence of deformed animals,” said Anders Moller, a researcher working at Chernobyl since 1991.

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Cruelty against cats is increasing in Guangdong, China, where over 10,000 domesticated cats are eaten daily. The cats, some of which are apparently being stolen from people’s houses, are transported in small cages to restaurants in the town where they are then cooked, often while they are still alive.

Activists in China are taking a stronger stance against this cruelty, and have begun demonstrating in Beijing against the treatment of cats used for food. 40 people, many of them elders who care for orphaned cats, protested outside of the Guangdong office in Beijing.

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This holiday season, you can save a cloud forest, adopt a tiger and remove 1 ton of CO2.  Although none of it will fit in a box or under the tree, Changing the Present makes all these things possible by giving consumers access to a variety of charitable initiatives so that they can give the gift of hope, health and happiness for a world in need.

Some perks include not having to go near a crowded mall, finding something for everyone on your list, and no lines, returns or exchanges.  Best of all, you’ll be making a tangible difference in the world with the cause of your choice, and it’s something that will last long after the latest retail trends fizzle out.

Changing the Present features more than 1,500 meaningful charitable gifts that users can browse by cause or nonprofit to find the perfect gift for friends or their own charitable giving.

Building on a commitment to changing the social norm when it comes to gift giving, and seeking to spark positive change in the world, Robert Tolmach, CEO of WellGood LLC, spearheaded the team that implemented this important effort, and was kind enough to share more details about the program with me in a one-on-one chat about the future of giving.

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Isn’t it just so convenient that we flush our poop away, down the toilet, never to return? I mean, literally speaking, but metaphorically, too. We flush away our poop, like it’s a problem that we don’t want to deal with. But little do we realize, there’s value in everything, even that which might stink, and which we’d rather send away down a porcelain bowl.

Pooping is a natural process, and doing it in a bowl of drinking water (which must only later be treated with nasty chemicals so that we can reuse this same water) is a horrific waste, and polluting, too. That’s where the humanure system comes in.

The term “humanure” refers to human waste which is recycled by methods of composting, and which can later be used for gardening or agricultural purposes. Before you think: “I don’t want dookie on my daisies!”, remember that everything (everything natural, that is) breaks down in due time. So let’s talk about humanure, and how human waste can be more effectively recycled and reused, instead of letting it continue to pollute ever-precious drinking water supplies. Perhaps by the end of this post, you too will think that flushing your crap away is just as crazy as any other form of pollution.

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Across the country, cities are passing new laws to allow backyard chickens.

Cities across the country have shown new leniency in the urban chicken arena.  Ann Arbor, Michigan, South Portland, Maine and Fort Collins Colorado, have all voted in the past year to allow backyard chickens.  They join the growing number of U.S. cities to make legal the raising of poultry in the backyard.

Illegal or not, city chicken flocks are more popular than ever.

“It’s no longer something kinky or interesting,” said Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network. “The ‘chicken underground’ has really spread so widely and has so much support.”

Though some worry that backyard chickens might carry and transmit avian flu, advocates of urban chicken farming claim that farming poultry on a small scale presents less of a risk of disease than large-scale production.

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A comprehensive, international survey released today, showed that half of all 5,487 mammal populations are declining.

Just today, data from a global survey was revealed at a meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Barcelona, Spain.  1,700 researchers took part in the survey and named habitat loss and hunting as the major causes of the current, mass extinction.

Jan Schipper, who led the team, said: “Mammals are declining faster than we thought — one in four species is threatened with extinction worldwide.”

He said that land animals in Asia have been the hardest hit, where almost 80% of the primates are at risk.  Other mammals at risk across the globe include the blue whale, the bumblebee bat, the Caspian seal and the Tasmanian Devil.

Scientists currently have data for 4,651 species of mammals.  According to this study, 1,139 of these species face the threat of extinction. Read the rest of this entry »

“Required reading” gets thrown out a lot in environmental circles—in all reading circles for that matter. Any time anyone reads a book that moves them they declare to the world (read: anyone who will listen) that book X “should be required reading”. The problem is, if you do it too often people stop listening, ie.“The Boy Who Cried Wolf (should be required reading).

So I am here to clean my slate of the books I have declared in the past that should be required reading. Wipe “Rule of the Bone”, “The Lorax”, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”, “Black Elk Speaks”, “In Defense of Food”, and “A Walk in the Woods” off the list. And replace them with the book that won the Independent Publishers Award for the book “Most Likely to Save the Planet”…

…BLUE PLANET RUN: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World

In order for a book to appeal to the masses (as “required reading” should) I feel it should:
a) move you
b) change your lifestyle—for the better of course
c) be visually appealing (the masses like pictures)
d) and most importantly, make you want to share it with others while causing you to deal with the inner turmoil of not wanting to share it with anyone because you want it forever in your presence (maybe I just have sharing issues).

Blue Planet Run is all that–and much more…

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Hurricane Ike has been harshly degraded to a “tropical depression” after his failure to deliver to the greater southern area. Colleagues say that they could see it coming.

“I think that he just felt a lot of pressure in this system” says Katrina. “This is a dog-eat-dog business and only the great are remembered. He had all the makings of an epic storm, but just didn’t have that, what we like to call, ‘Storm Sparkle.’ Sure, 29 counties were declared ‘disaster areas,’ but a Category Two? He just wasn’t living up to standard.”

Friends report that Ike has TIVO-d every episode of Project Runway and refuses to change his sweatpants.

“I think he was just trying to impress Josephine, who is next up,” says Gustav. “That just made the situation sadder. This is even worse than the time he found Hanna going down on that guy in the elevator. Poor guy has lost all hope in women.”

There are reports that things have gotten so out of hand that Ike has actually befriended Lindsay Lohan. He is also trying to start a reality TV show just to pay the bills. It’s going to be called ‘Guy of the Storm’ and delve into Ike’s “normal” home life.

Although things are looking bad, Fay thinks that the clouds will break soon. “He has already started taking antidepressants and seeing a therapist. He told me that that he and Lindsay might even check into the Le Cirque Lodge together for some TLC. I just hope he doesn’t become a Scientologist.”