Gareth Porter – LIVE at bambuser.com/v/3303694
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Email @TheJusticeDept today – urge them to hold @BP_America fully accountable for the Gulf Oil Spill. bit.ly/Qqi7MU #makeBPpay
Governor Fallin declared Oklahoma to be in a state of emergency due to the drought. It was 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Shawnee today. There were 600 million people without power in India today. Our cable internet was down all afternoon, and the provider did not answer my repeated calls. After cable service was restored, my router went out. Consequently, donaldwinslow.info and associated domains had significant down time today. But we’re up now, thanks to a very patient technician who, judging by his accent, may have lost power today. And if I can’t blame all that on the full moon, perhaps Luna was responsible for Forest‘s wakefulness. My 17-month did not nap at all today.Hopefully he’ll sleep well tonight!
Another earthquake tonight at 2256. This was the strongest one I’ve ever felt. The whole house shook. I don’t see any damage, but it did knock over a steel water bottle. The three of us ran out in the front yard where it was windy. By then the ground had stopped moving.
The global human population reached 7 billion today, according to the UNFPA’s 2011 State of the World Population.
An article in the Shawnee News-Star tells us that free books can now be downloaded on your Kindle at the public library. Thank you to librarians across the country for convincing Amazon to loosen their license to allow this!
At the Catalpa Cottage we have partial water pressure. We are conserving water, cognizant that some households in Shawnee have none. A good excuse to blog instead of wash dishes!
There have been multiple water main breaks. The city crews have been working to repair eight or more breaks, plus there is hypothesized to be a big break as yet unlocated. I understand the hot, dry weather causes the earth to shift and lines to break. In Shawnee the temperature exceeded 110 Fahrenheit today. It’s forecast to be warmer tomorrow!
We had to have a new sewer line put in at the Catalpa Cottage. It took out my row of cucumbers, but they weren’t weathering the drought very well anyway. Hopefully some of the bean plants will survive. We should have gone for a composting toilet and a washboard, but maybe next time.
Swiss Chard at the Community Garden
I visited the Shawnee Community Garden this morning. I thought it was supposed to be a work day. There was no one there, but obviously someone’s been tending it! My own backyard garden has been struggling with the heat. I’ve been watering it by bucket; we finally hooked up a hose today.
Zheng and coworkers (2011) report that rates of deforestation currently exceed rates of afforestation in all regions of the continuous United States of America (USA). Their analysis indicates that forest disturbance is associated with reductions in carbon sinks. Thus we may conclude that forest policy in the USA is exacerbating anthropogenic climate change. Climate change, in turn, feeds back to affect the frequency and scale of forest disturbances that contribute to deforestation and destabilize forestry-dependent economies (Keskitalo et al.,2011).
Keskitalo and coworkers (2011) argue that forestry sectors need to adapt to environmental change and economic change concurrently. We need to recognize that these changes are aspects of the same phenomenon, the inherently unsustainable nature of expanding economies.
Literature cited
Keskitalo, E. Carina H.; Nicole Klenk; Ryan Bullock; Andrea L. Smith; and Dawn R. Bazely 2011. Preparing for and responding to disturbance: Examples from the forest sector in Sweden and Canada. Forests 2:505-524, doi: 10.3390/f2020505
Zheng, Daolan; Linda S. Heath; Mark J. Ducey; and James E. Smith 2011. Carbon changes in conterminous US forests associated with growth and major disturbances: 1992-2001. Environmental Research Letters 6:1 014012 doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014012, http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/1/014012/, accessed 3 April 2011.
