Because it’s both a blogging phenomenon and a topic which interests me, and I hope, some of the readers of my bog who may also wish to subscribe to my RSS feed and read other other related topics during the rest of the year. I just wrote about taking Paris breaks by Eurostar, for example, which is surely better than flying.

Same goes for theatre breaks in London.

Could you tell me why you did this in the first place?…

Unfortunately, I did not participate.

However, I wrote a belated post about deforestation in Brazil. As a real estate agent in Minneapolis, I see a lot of people using a product in luxury homes that is very destructive to rainforests, and causes untold human suffering. Check out this post, please:

Brazilian Teak, Slave Labor, Luxury Homes, and the Destruction of the Rainforest.

You can find this post at:
http://www.realestatetwincities.net/brazilian-hardwood-floors-can-you-say-slave-labor/

I realize I made this url too long. If it got cut off in the comment form, you can easily find it at:
http://www.realestatetwincities.net/blog/

Anything you can do to share this link or help promote awareness of this issue will be greatly appreciated. Most luxury home owners in Minnesota are unaware of the environmental and human cost of these products. Most Brazilian teak found in Minneapolis homes did not come from legal sources. I feel sort of ill every time I walk into a home that has Brazilian teak floors.

Vested interests exist at all levels blocking progress. We often think of these interests only at the higher echelons of power, but there are enough vested interests at the individual level, mainly that of maintianing the status quo — anything else would be unpleasant and so unthinkable.

The environemntal movement as it stands is mostly reduced to ritual rather than real change. This and similar thoughts I put down in a series of articles I wrote to lead up to Blog Action Day:
The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working

Samir

Our present political and business elites are one of the most fundamental stumbling blocks to effecting meaningful change to the way we live and interact with each other and the environment. It’s no longer enough to simply change political parties every few years - they are all made up of the same people who owe the same favours to the same rich and powerful backers.

So, here’s my question. How do we bring about that regime change and is it possible to affect change within current political and governmental systems?

I had a similar idea a few weeks ago. I thought it would be great if we had a website where a bunch of people gathered to discuss one important topic (like the environment, or human rights abuses in some part of the world that no one would otherwise hear about).

My idea was to have bloggers blog (as in Blog Action Day) but also have banner ads for all different types of popular sites to link back to a main article. It’d be great if you could get all kinds of activists, lawyers, letter writers etc. to congregate on one site and concentrate on one issue at a time. Maybe changing topics monthly?

It’s just kind of inefficient for people to hear about an issue such as deforestation or poaching by themselves. Either they’re a single activist, one lawyer who can’t change anything, or an angry citizen. By the time someone else who cares finds out about the issue the first person has given up already. If you had a bunch of passionate people who actually had experience in making things happen it could be really worthwhile.

But anyway, it’s pretty idealist. Having an effective swarm of people could turn out to be more like a mob.

For an issue like the environment I think it’s great that we have Blog Action Day though. So many people seem to be thinking that if the world’s not going to end tomorrow then why should we bother. But that’s not the world that I want to live in - Of course humans could survive wearing gas masks and filtering all our water. I just prefer to be able to go outside and see some trees and animals - actually live instead of surviving. And people seem to think that technology is going to save us, but don’t realise we don’t just make technology and medicine, we discover it in plants, animals, rocks and metals. See your iPhone? That came from the ground. And your cancer medication? Probably from what’s left of the Amazon. We just can’t do much of that if there isn’t a rich and diverse environment. And that’s another thing it’s not ‘the environment’, it’s OUR environment. If we mess it up, there’s nowhere else for us to live, to kill each other or complain about taxes.

Our environment is the most important thing in the world because it is our world.

Can’t we all just get along, and make this a health place to be?

xoxo

We have a governor everyone else seems to appreciate (i.e., a newcomer) but one who has chosen to ignore the biggest threat to Alaska and its peoples in the past 15 years, just like the previous governors, senators, and federal agencies. Erosion isn’t insurmountable, but does take unselfish thought.

Polar bears are merely the tip of the iceberg, folks. More charismatic than sediments, but I think the devastation of the peopled environment is greater, particularly when deliberately ignored or actively countered.

Chris

“Our aim is to get people thinking, discussing, questioning and talking about the environment, from every angle, niche, viewpoint and personality.”

So no particular point of view is being pushed here, it’s a kind of mass collaboration for the sake of mass collaboration. The interesting thing for me will be to find out how it gets decided what’s going to be the topic for next year.

Is the assumption that if someone writes about the environment, they’ll support similar views as you express?

Should they post if they don’t share the same opinions? E.g., if they believe global warming isn’t man-made? If they think the whole thing is largely a hoax?

How much DDT would we need to stamp out the midges which carry blue tongue disease?