Archive for August, 2013

Check out the website for this annual event in the Nevada desert.

http://www.burningman.com/

The following message has been received from Greenpeace:

Imagine a deafening sound bomb going off in your home, so loud it causes you unbearable pain and destroys your hearing.As oil companies race to drill in Arctic waters, they carry out deadly seismic tests that force nearby whales and dolphins to flee the noise – or die trying. Almost 4 million people have joined our movement to save the Arctic. Please add your voice to help us get there.

Click here to sign the petition to create a global sanctuary in the Arctic, protected from offshore drilling and destructive industry.

http://vimeo.com/44317362

Underwater sound levels over 180-190 decibels are extremely dangerous for marine mammals: if they are within 450-500 metres they will lose their hearing permanently. If they get within 150 metres where the sound reaches 245 decibels, the animals will die.

On top of the lethal risks it poses to wildlife, seismic testing is yet another step in the direction of reckless Arctic drilling, drilling we know will never be safe. We’re doing everything we can to protect the Arctic from the ravages of oil companies’ greed, but we won’t succeed without you on board. 

Please, take a moment to join the call for Arctic protection. With your help, we could reach 4 million by next month.

With sincere thanks,

Christy Ferguson
Greenpeace
Arctic Campaigner

Oxfam America is using solar power to provide light for at Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp.

Photo:Karl Schembri/Oxfam

Read full story here. 

Picture credit: Gregg Fleishman ‘Temple of Whollyness’

Burning Man will be held in the Black Rock Desert, 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada from 26 August to 2 September 2013.  Burning Man started on a small beach in San Francisco and is now a city of some 48,000+ people who journey to the Black Rock Desert for one week out of the year to be part of an experimental community, which challenges its members to express themselves and rely on themselves to a degree that is not normally encountered in one’s day-to-day life.  By the time the event is completed and the volunteers leave, sometimes nearly a month after the event has ended, there will be no trace of the city that was, for a short time, the most populous town in the entire county.  Burning Man is the largest Leave No Trace event in the world.

Learn more here

Greenpeace invites you to join an epic parade through central London – on 15 September they will haul a giant people-powered polar bear through the capital and want you to walk with them.

Click here to find out more and sign up for the Ice Ride

The Guardian reports on a Barter Market in Mexico where, in return for donating plastic bottles for recycling, people receive tomatoes, onions and a cabbage, for example.

“The objective is that people learn to separate, store and value the waste they produce,” said Liliana Balcazar of the city’s environment ministry, which runs the market, usually in a central park, although it moves to different locations around the capital every other month. She said the market received about 12 tonnes of rubbish each time. “It was always popular,” she said, “but now it is overflowing.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/18/recycling-popular-mexicans-food-vouchers