Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

This isn’t an entry about linking the three (although you can) but to highlight 3 news stories worthy of attention:

Ice Mass Snaps Free From Canada’s Arctic
Scientists are pointing at climate change and are alarmed at its unexpected speed.

Making Carbon Trading a Fair Trade
How does carbon trading/offsetting work, and is it really sustainable? It’s a piece discussing monoculture tree plantations (and it sounds like they’re using species which are genetically modified and/or non-native to the area).

More Dangerous than Smoking? Death by Soda
OK, ignore the over-scary title, although the article has some surprising facts (I had had no idea that half of US woman between the ages of 20-39 were overweight or obese). It’s been said before that a can of soda contains sweeteners the equivalent of at least 10 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup. (If you make your own coffee in the mornings, think of putting that in your cup everyday!) Running to artificial sweeteners isn’t the answer either, as those bring another area of health concern.

Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

Received an electronic gadget for Christmas? This sobering ABC story on electronic waste will make your toes curl:

315 million to 600 million desktop and laptop computers in the U.S. will become obsolete over the next 18 months. That’s the equivalent of a 22-story pile of e-waste covering the entire city of Los Angeles.

Read more: One Man’s Trash Doesn’t Necessarily Become Another Man’s Treasure

Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

Received an electronic gadget for Christmas? This sobering ABC story on electronic waste will make your toes curl:

315 million to 600 million desktop and laptop computers in the U.S. will become obsolete over the next 18 months. That’s the equivalent of a 22-story pile of e-waste covering the entire city of Los Angeles.

Read more: One Man’s Trash Doesn’t Necessarily Become Another Man’s Treasure

Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

They are not at all at odds - but it requires some learning and serious thinking to realize that one’s health is directly related to the health of the environment. Alternet currently has a brilliant article: Six Ways That Changing Your Life Can Change Global Warming.
What prevents people from doing more and paying attention to environmental topics? Peter Michaelson thinks it boils down to fear: Fear of insignificance, powerlessness and hopelessness, fear of rejection and mockery of the things we care about. Blasé is in; passionate is out. Trivia and consumerism rules our lives, and the culture of the US has been anti-intellectual and anti-education for a long time.

Francis Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet lamented that in the US, people are put down as naive for thinking they can change the world. In Argentina, she pointed out, people tell their children that they are naive if they think they cannot.

Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

BlueGreenPlanet’s Links are slowly but surely being expanded all the time. I want to highlight Climate Crisis Coalition’s blog whose News category is a wonderful archive of climate related stories - I wish I could find the RSS feed!

Link: Climate Crisis Coalition News

And here’s another link to a sobering story actually on CNN (sustainability - no longer a subject confined to treehugging websites!): Report: Humans stripping away earth’s resources

Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets’ worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

It would be wonderful if environmentalists, politicians, economists and urban planners could talk with one another more - but unfortunately it doesn’t seem so in most parts of the world. The affluence and conspicuous consumption of the First World, alas, is held as the ideal that the rest of the world must try to achieve - and no one is thinking of the large-scale consequences and the sustainability of this pursuit. By no means should anyone advocate that the Third World should continue suffering squalid conditions and exploitation by the more affluent countries - but it is within the power of the more fortunate to question the exploitative system in which they are complicit.