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irispublishersfashion · 4 years ago

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Iris Publishers_Journal of Textile Science & Fashion Technology (JTSFT)

Facing Textile Industry: Why Circular Design Has to Become a BA Fashion Programme and Creativity Alone is not Enough

Authored by Sabine Lettmann

Abstract

It is obvious how far fashion industry still is from being sustainable. Not only as the meaning behind the term sustainability is still discussed rather than systems are radically changed through actions. Furthermore, there still seems a ‘need’ for major incidents costing health and life to awaken the ones who seem to have little or no idea how big fashion industry’s negative impact on our planet and people is. Who only call out for change after this sort of momentum? Now, who is to blame? Companies ask consumers to take over responsibility with their buying decisions, consumers request a change in production and urge companies to amend their workways first. They act like stubborn children, arguing who has to apologize first. Both want to keep up having a right being the last in changing behaviour for the better. An encounter of resistance with no real outcome. Governments juggle in between with an unpromising try to please economy and consumers at the same time. Their actions end up with minor consequences for industry, being closer to window dressing than to influencing urgent matter. And consumers are again left with making choices, mainly driven by costs or brand image. To speed up a global shift in fashion industry and to reduce never ending discussions about accountabilities without little progression, everyone involved in decision making processes has to act now and get into Thunberg mode. As knowledge is key, only by additionally looking into higher education systems can holistically be improved and evoke a major change in mindsets and habits.

Keywords: Fashion education; Circular economy; Joint activism; Academic challenge

Introduction

Being a huge labor market with more than 60 million employees worldwide [1] fashion industry with its current linear system faces the task to not only protect human interests, for example through enforcement of international applicable human rights. Furthermore, the aim has to be a drastic change of production and retail methods and with its implementation the immediate prevention of natural resource’s exploitation. From an ecologic and social perspective, standards have to be redefined in a way that allows space for mindful economy as well. They have to be consequently aspired at interdisciplinary scale and effectuated in all individual parts with the aim of an optimum approach towards a circular fashion system.

Stop Calling It Sustainable

Too many certificates focusing on too many different issues spam the textiles market and irritate consumers. Finding a definition for the term “sustainability” dominates the constant debate in and around fashion industry arguing which amount of sustainability is ��acceptable”. Even Oxford Dictionary leaves it open by defining sustainability as “the property of being environmentally sustainable; the degree to which a process or enterprise is able to be maintained or continued while avoiding the long-term depletion of national resources” [2]. In most discussions the differentiation between either a focus on environment or people included in the production cycle becomes the main point. This makes it easy to lose other aspects out of sight, especially as the structure behind fashion is complex on multiple layers and split into tiniest sections. As past behaviour shows, the impact of changing only individual parameters of the production cycle is not big enough. Rather than healing through this strategy, industry still seems to turn into a massive construct growing exponentially through exploitation, pollution and social imbalance into an uncontrollable monster. But there is hope.

Healthcare App

Sustainable fashion slowly loses its 80s image of eco fashion (“Oekomode”) and receives acceptance as part of the broader luxury fashion scene, as press coverage and special issues of high fashion magazines have shown, like Elle UK in September 2018. Green is the new black and awareness for grievances on consumer side raises. Customers demand changes and use their voice to draw brands into being transparent with their actions, not only through initiatives like Fashion Revolution. Violence of worker’s rights, humiliating its labor force, is known as a result of common fashion practices. Indeed, a deeper reflection of production conditions can lead to rejective buying behaviour when consumers favor other brands with fair attitudes. Individual brands and start-ups question the existing with their approach to design as well as the use of alternative sales strategies through crowdfunding campaigns hoping to finance manufacturing in advance. Design with purpose shines a light on thinking outside the box and places the designer into the centre of being a problem solver rather than simply being a product creator. On top of that, American Vogue dedicated an extensive article to the future of US fashion design graduates within sustainable design [3]. There is a lot of buzz going on.

Fashion research is initiated to build scientific foundation finding potential solutions on a larger scale, as happened earlier this year. Following Fixing Fashion [4] report, British Environmental Audit Committee proposed a 1p charge per garment to secure better clothing collection and sorting. A disappointing antagonistic result, when UK government did not follow their advice and lobby won again. Not realizing there will not be much economy left once all resources have been used and the planet has nothing more to offer. In August 2019, at recent G7 summit, a number of 32 leaders of fashion houses like Burberry, Prada or Inditex came together to unveil their so-called Fashion Pact to attendant heads of state. The Fashion Pact’s objectives are to

• Stop global warming

• Restore biodiversity

• Protect the oceans

Its targets are based on scientific research, which means there is less room for individual interpretation and companies are less likely finding excuses to wriggle themselves out of set aims. The Fashion Pact aspires to be adopted by 20% of the global fashion industry. One might ask what happens with the remaining part of industry? As participant Kering states on their website: “These commitments are designed to be embraced by every company involved and backed by cross-sector initiatives, along with the deployment of innovation accelerators. (…) A collective endeavor by its nature, the Fashion Pact is open to any company that wants to help to fundamentally transform the practices of the fashion and textile industry, and to meet the environmental challenges of our century” [5]. Being a warm welcome to those who are already interested in changing business structures or feel society’s pressure, it is not more than a loose invitation lacking real obligation. Furthermore, some of the objectives reach out an implementation only by 2050, achievement of net-zero carbon emissions for example. Current research on the contrary states there are only a couple of years left to turn climate change around, whether it will be 10, 15 or 20 years. How serious can Fashion Pact be about changing the system in such a toxic slowness?

All these activities are facing the right direction, but it is still not enough as we are running out of time to reduce irreversible damages on various levels. Decision maker’s mindsets have not significantly changed yet, there could be tens of thousands and more following the Fashion Pact commitment. Unless legislation fully embraces their own part in forcing companies to deliver a different outcome, people and environment rely on voluntary, individual activism. If people involved in fashion industry put their animosities aside, collaboration is seen as a benefit of actively finding solutions and humanity becomes the centre of all, mindful design can be created. When good design is automatically defined through its healthy and environmentally friendly background, there is no need to call it sustainable, but norm.

Alternative Approaches as Driver for Change

More and more internationally active brands integrate sustainability on a long-term basis into their brand DNA. In doing so, not only the aim of ethical goals and transparency are taken into account, furthermore a sustainable oriented production can be driven by economic reasons as luxury-goods company Kering exemplarily shows. In 2010 the company created Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) [6], a system to envision the ecological impact of their production chain. Transformed into a monetary equivalent these are evaluable within Kering Group. Decisions for the entire production chain based on economic knowledge can be optimized and used to improve production from a more holistic point of view.

Business profiles like Estonian brand Reet Aus put emphasis on industrial upcycling and draw on existing pre-consumer waste from conventional productions. Costs for material invest stay minimal. At the same time Reet Aus keeps the company’s ecological footprint in relation to usage of energy and water small and reduces with this business model the waste problem within their manufacturing facilities [7]. Their success in using waste as a source indicates how the idea of tackling one problem in fashion industry can bring benefit on an economical level as well.

Another innovative outcome from Dutch biotech company Inspidere BV is the economically viable method to extract raw material from cow manure, which is turned into new biodegradable products on a basis of regenerated cellulose processing. By using dung, methane gas emission is reduced and contamination of water and soil through intensive farming is prevented. Raw material can be used to create fibers or bioplastic for example. These can be woven into fabrics and depict a circular version with same or similar qualities of other cellulose based materials like cotton [8].

Symbiosis of Radical Thinking and Fashion as Manifestation of a New Avant-Garde

Fashion design always had a broader context and has not only been about creating some beautiful shells for a long time. It has history, political and social impact and the potential to tell all kinds of stories linked to its aesthetics. To become a designer in the 21st century means being progressive and visionary, to think critically and holistically as well as to bring in empathy and team spirit to continue good storytelling. The young generation has to take over responsibility not only for their own wellbeing or their direct environment, but also has to cover it initiatively for all people involved in the entire development process. It requires to risk progress in relation to low and high-tech, preservation of textile heritage and building upon both an economic foundation for fashion avant-garde with a new future-oriented meaning, raising niche design to the new status quo. Innovative ideas empower change. Letting these become norm and grow into business is a challenge that requires knowledge and awareness.

The constantly growing market of innovations, wearables and circular systems asks for designers with expert knowhow not limited to aesthetic aspects. They have to understand the symbiosis between all fashion disciplines, their cross over and links to economy. Advancing with their own ideas and preparing them efficiently for a bigger market can only happen where knowledge exists. Cooperation with biologists and chemists have successfully powered sustainable developments like Spider Silk or dyeing processes without polluting water. These alternatives picture only a small section but show the scope for textile innovation and progressive opportunities.

There might never be the 100% perfection of what industry should deliver to people and planet, but the end result should always get as close as possible. Looking into design systems circular economy offers the best possible approach to smart product creation. Its three core columns to

• Design out waste and pollution

• Keep products and materials in use

• Regenerate natural systems

transit a linear economy into structures which build economic, natural, and social capital [9] as Ellen MacArthur Foundation explains. Embedded into the concept of Cradle to Cradle, developed by Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart and William McDonough in the 1990s, it can and should be the starting point of every design work. Each product would then either follow a biological cycle (consumption goods) providing nourishment for nature after use or a technical cycle (services) where components circulate through industrial systems to be recovered, remanufactured or recycled [10].

In terms of fashion this development process can be implemented in various ways. Not only through the use of better materials which have been made with an underlying principle of Cradle to Cradle, but further require the shift from linear retail structures to closed loop offers. Other options are for example zero waste pattern cutting approaches. With this method material waste is designed out in first place, whereas the designer’s affection to a specific aesthetic has to melt with the possibilities in managing pattern cutting. A second option is design for extended usage. Designers are challenged to think beyond point of sales, when consumers enter the stage and garments have to perform. Being able to create an emotional bond between consumer and product, for example through good design and adjustment options of a garment to evolving needs, can help to keep garments in longer use. Above all, the main focus of creating circular structures lies in its holistic approach requesting the designer to think about their garment’s journey and asking what is going to happen with products after consumers decide not to use them anymore. A thought process which is usually taught less at fashion schools.

Fashion Graduates: Only Creative or Already Competitively Viable?

For sure awareness for problems in the textile sector raises with employment. But lack of time, external pressure or disinterest stand against a systematic improvement and solution development. In addition, most companies still do not actively examine the production cycle from a holistic point of view and draw their consequences from their findings. Extensive perspectives and various approaches to sustainable practices lack completely or are for a number of reasons not desirable.

Even though there is an international industry demand within large and smaller companies for a new generation of designers, familiar with sustainable and innovative production, there are still not enough fashion schools existing with an intense focus on these subjects. Only a few of the enormous numbers of institutions worldwide offer a specific education with an eye towards circular economy requirements. Single modules cover material innovation or systems thinking, often only included in general fashion design programmes. Some programmes reach out to MA students or are set up as short courses, both following an already existing interest in sustainable specialization. They rarely come as a full circular design BA course, dedicated to the future of fashion. This represents a gross disbalance between graduate numbers and the demand for progressive change, as education should always be ahead of time instead of shuffling behind. Fashion schools face industry development, they will have to adapt their education content to the requirements of the 21st century as Li Edelkoort already stated in her talk “Anti-Fashion: A Manifesto for the Next Decade” in 2016 [11].

Right from the beginning of their education students should learn how to create biodiverse systems in a way to preserve resources and further limit harming influences on environment and people. Knowledge is key and commonly known as the power for change. If knowledge is not provided – how shall students be able to make healthier choices? Challenging implementation of sustainable, circular practices pushes none more so than student’s creativity and their individual expression. At the same time, students should draw inspiration from restrictions, celebrate innovative solutions and add value to the diverse parts of the production chain rather than diminishing it. How shall educational institutions ever see what these designers are capable of if they do not set the frame for circularity? Students bring in the will and ability to learn. Embracing responsibility and finding the willpower to change the industry, from sourcing raw materials to defining end of life solutions through innovative thinking and collaborative activism helps them to become strong and resilient individuals. Not stagnant in glorious 90s attitudes but fit for a labor market in motion.

Furthermore, international education standards should not only be defined by what industry already has or customers buy. They should be developed from a more cohesive approach tackling urgent ecological matters like climate change or social challenges as roots for future migration movements. Already education has to ignite a consequent durable and progressive approach to design. Only in following the richness of future facing strategies a young generation of designers will satisfy the increasing demands of fashion industry and respect the world we live in. When entering life after university, they will bring enough knowledge to radically rethink the system and raise their chances for employment. The better they are educated and the higher their qualification in interdisciplinary knowledge is, the earlier they find answers to pressing questions on a global scale and influence their environment for good. A win-win situation for students, the wider industry and at last fashion schools, having satisfied alumni.

For More Open Access Journals in Iris Publishers Please click on: https://irispublishers.com/ For More Articles in Journal of Textile Science & Fashion Technology https://irispublishers.com/jtsft/

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dailynewswebsite · 5 years ago

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Vaccine hesitancy is not new – history tells us we should listen, not condemn

Following the excellent news from three separate COVID-19 vaccine trials, optimism that life could be “again to regular by spring” is operating excessive.

There are numerous causes to mood this optimism as there’s a lot we don’t know in regards to the security and long-term efficacy of those vaccines, as many have identified.

There are different considerations about vaccine take-up, as raised by information retailers and Twitter customers, specializing in the 14% who would refuse a COVID vaccine outright and a further 14% who would hesitate to take the vaccine. Protection has been fast to conflate people who find themselves “vaccine hesitant” with conspiracy theorists – drawing comparisons between these cautious of the newly developed vaccines and the gullible fools or corrosive mythmakers who reject sound science.

We needs to be cautious about portray all those that are not sure about new medical know-how and coverings with the identical broad brush. This sort of scepticism has an extended historical past, which ought to nudge us in direction of a extra considerate and productive dialog about vaccines as a substitute of the polarising imaginative and prescient of evil or silly anti-vaxxers versus good, accountable residents.

For one factor, not all hesitancy is identical. There’s a spectrum that ranges from hardcore anti-vaxxers to these with affordable considerations about security or animal welfare. Additionally it is value mentioning that whereas anti-vaxx actions and people could be newsworthy, their affect on vaccination charges is usually overstated and the help for COVID-19 vaccines is definitely excessive (72%).

The teachings of historical past

Extra importantly, historical past tells us that widespread scepticism about vaccination is usually a product of residents’ relationship with the state. That is straightforward to see within the historical past of American healthcare, the place state-sanctioned medical experiments typically undermined the belief between 20th-century sufferers and their medical doctors. The notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Examine, for instance, ran for 40 years. It was 1972 earlier than anybody thought to query whether or not deliberately withholding therapy from poor black sufferers with syphilis (even after antibiotic remedy turned out there) to be able to research the “pure historical past” of the illness was an affordable factor for a state to do to its residents.

A participant within the notorious Tuskegee Examine having blood drawn. Nationwide Archives and Information Administration/Wikimedia Commons

The historical past of this type of medical distrust dates again to the origins of vaccination itself. Within the late 19th century, when the English authorities tried to make smallpox vaccinations obligatory, they had been met with protest. Vaccines had shoddy security data in Victorian England and sometimes got here with debilitating and even lethal side-effects. However obligatory vaccination was additionally understood as a device of an more and more interventionist authorities that had fallen into the behavior of utilizing their authorized powers to focus on varied weak teams of individuals, together with intercourse staff and migrants.

As a result of vaccination was additionally intently linked to the Poor Regulation laws that pressured staff and their households into the brutalising regime of the workhouse, its new obligatory standing appeared an try to increase this identical punitive consideration to the working courses.

An anti-vaccination caricature by James Gillray, The Cow-Pock—or—The Great Results of the New Inoculation! (1802) Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons

These protests weren’t the results of irrational conspiracy theories. No matter good vaccination might need finished in controlling the ravages of smallpox, which certainly ran wild by the crowded, insufficient dwellings of the labouring poor, worry that vaccination would possibly result in additional marginalisation was robust and, given the context, affordable. In selecting between illness or subjugation, the working poor of the Victorian period selected what they perceived to be – and would possibly effectively have been – the lesser of two evils.

The previous is just not behind us

Although these occasions are actually part of historical past, they aren’t behind us. Their legacies are handed from technology to technology, generally explicitly within the collective reminiscence of a inhabitants, and different instances extra quietly within the type of persistent disenfranchisement. Certainly, the discouraging COVID-19 incidence and mortality charges now we have witnessed amongst minority ethnic teams level towards the identical systemic racism that occasions like Tuskegee solely extra explicitly conveyed.

These seeds of mistrust have been planted across the globe. The CIA’s marketing campaign to search out Osama bin Laden concerned a pretend hepatitis B vaccination challenge, that understandably eroded public belief in world well being programmes in Pakistan.

Pharmaceutical firms habitually check out their wares on nations within the world south earlier than advertising them to their richer, whiter neighbours within the north. That rumours fly in consequence can’t be pinned on rabble-rousing conspiracy theorists. Hesitancy in these contexts is on the very least comprehensible. Merely put, there’s a world scarcity of belief. And belief is what we sorely want for vaccination uptake and success.

Given this, the extra stunning reality could be that the overwhelming majority of individuals are keen to belief that their authorities will do proper by its residents. This tells us one thing encouraging in regards to the religion folks now have in medication and scientific analysis. However this could not cease us from having vital conversations about why some folks would possibly pause within the face of a brand new vaccine.

Within the wake of this good vaccine information, it might appear a small matter that we relegate vaccine hesitators to the scrap heap of conspiracy theorists. However this rhetoric issues: it obscures the much more nuanced set of causes folks hesitate, and it prevents us from considering rigorously about why we belief and why others won’t.

Caitjan Gainty's work is funded by her Wellcome Belief "Wholesome Scepticism" challenge.

Agnes Arnold-Forster doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/vaccine-hesitancy-is-not-new-history-tells-us-we-should-listen-not-condemn/ via https://growthnews.in

#Growth News

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handdesigns · 5 years ago

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So what is Veganism?

Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose. - https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism

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Some very interesting facts I took from this website.

https://www.vegansociety.com/news/media/statistics (Statistics )

-If the world went vegan, it could save 8 million human lives by 2050, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds and lead to healthcare-related savings and avoided climate damages of $1.5 trillion.

- Vegan trends quadrupled in the 5 years between 2012 and 2017, according to Google search. It now gets almost 3 times more interest than vegetarian and gluten free searches.

- In 2018, the UK launched more vegan products than any nation.

- Orders of vegan meals grew 388% between 2016 and 2018 and they are now the UK’s fastest growing takeaway choice.

- Demand for meat-free food in the UK increased by 987% in 2017 and going vegan was predicted to be the biggest food trend in 2018.

- Bristol was the most popular British city for veganism in 2018, according to Google Trends, followed by Edinburgh, Manchester and London.

- A 2018 Oxford University study – which is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet – found that ‘avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth’ as animal farming provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of our farmland.

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Oxford Martin School

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201603-plant-based-diets/

- A global switch to diets that rely less on meat and more on fruit and vegetables could save up to 8 million lives by 2050, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds, and lead to healthcare-related savings and avoided climate damages of $1.5 trillion (US) , Oxford Martin School researchers have found.

- “What we eat greatly influences our personal health and the global environment,” says Dr Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, who led the study.

- The study projects that by 2050, food-related greenhouse gas emissions could account for half of the emissions the world can afford if global warming is to be limited to less than 2°C. Adopting global dietary guidelines would cut food-related emissions by 29%, vegetarian diets by 63%, and vegan diets by 70%.

- “We do not expect everybody to become vegan, but climate change impacts of the food system will be hard to tackle and likely require more than just technological changes. Adopting healthier and more environmentally sustainable diets can be a large step in the right direction. The size of the projected benefits should encourage individuals, industry, and policy makers to act decisively to make sure that what we eat preserves our environment and our health" – Dr Marco Springmann

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Is Veganism becoming more popular in the UK?

The Independent:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/vegans-uk-rise-popularity-plant-based-diets-veganism-figures-survey-compare-market-a8286471.html

- Veganism has skyrocketed in recent years, with more people than ever before choosing to enjoy a plant-based life.

- The research means that seven per cent of Great Britain’s population are now shunning animal products altogether for life less meaty – and cheesy.

- Supported by Gresham College professor Carolyn Roberts, the research suggests that environmental concerns are largely responsible for edging people towards a vegan diet, as people strive to reduce their carbon footprint. Prof Roberts believes that a shift in diet might even be more environmentally beneficial than other eco-friendly measures, such as reducing petrol and diesel car usage.

The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/01/third-of-britons-have-stopped-or-reduced-meat-eating-vegan-vegetarian-report

- Vegan dining out is also booming, the report notes, with the Good Food Guide highlighting restaurants with dedicated vegan menus for the first time this year after many high street chains and pubs increased their non-meat-and-dairy options.

- One in eight Britons are now vegetarian or vegan, according to a report on food shopping that underlines a revolution in the UK’s eating habits. A further 21% claim to be flexitarian, where a largely vegetable-based diet is supplemented occasionally with meat, which means a third of UK consumers have deliberately reduced the amount of meat they eat or removed it from their diet entirely.

- “It��s extremely encouraging to learn how many Britons are choosing to reduce their consumption of animal products” said Nick Palmer, the head of Compassion in World Farming UK. “Science proves that the healthiest diet is one that is plant-heavy. By eating less meat, fish, eggs and dairy and choosing higher welfare when we do, we can all help animals, people and the planet.”

- Waitrose was the first UK supermarket to install dedicated vegan sections in 134 of its stores in May. It has also launched a range of more than 40 vegan and vegetarian ready meals.

Mintel:

https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/food-and-drink/veganuary-uk-overtakes-germany-as-worlds-leader-for-vegan-food-launches

- In 2018, the UK was the nation with the highest number of new vegan food products launched, toppling Germany from its number one spot.

- 1 in 3 British meat eaters reduced their meat consumption in the six months leading to July 2018 following a flexitarian approach.

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Overall you can see that veganism is becoming much more popular in the UK. I believe each trend effects another. For example, if someone does not eat meat then why would they want a leather sofa that is made from cow skin? I think interior design needs to keep inline with current social trends as at the end of the day it is what people want. As designers we have to meet the needs of our clients.

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Opposing arguments to Veganism

Good Morning Britain - Piers Morgan’s arguments against veganism - he is against the protesting.

youtube

On the flip side I can see the argument Piers Morgan addresses. I would apply this argument when/if I work on vegan design once I graduate. I will not enforce it upon people but talk about it when clients ask.

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Why are more people eating vegan food?

The BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44488051

- Supermarkets chains in the UK are stocking more vegan options to keep up with the consumers’ food choices.

- Waitrose recently launched a dedicated vegan section in more than 130 shops.

- Social media has had a big part to play in the rise of the plant-based lifestyle. Celebrities like Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus are some of the well-known figures who don’t eat animal products.

- #vegan has more than 61 million posts listed on Instagram.

BBC Radio 4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5PBX369GxWfBHFHFRrkCvCl/seven-reasons-why-people-are-going-vegan

1. ANIMAL CRUELTY OR THE ETHICAL ARGUMENT

2. GOING GREEN

- Vast swathes of land are required to support and feed livestock, making it a significant contributor to deforestation.

- The water used by animal agriculture, mostly ass irrigation for feed crops, accounts for around 8% of global human water use.

- Farm animals generate waste and pollution. Animal agriculture is responsible for around 14 to 18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions - higher than transportation!

3. HEALTH

4. PERSONAL AUTONOMY AND CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

5. SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VEGAN REVOLUTION

- Grace Dent believes that, “Social media has set light to the vegan movement” and that before the internet, “to be vegan was largely to be alone.”

- Social media has made sharing recipes much easier.

6. CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS

7. GREATER OPPORTUNITIES TO CHOOSE VEGAN

The Independent - Is Instagram the reason for the increase in veganism?

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/veganism-rise-uk-why-instagram-mainstream-plant-based-diet-vegans-popularity-a8296426.html

- According to Google trends, searchers for “veganism” have been rising steadily since 2012 in a similar trajectory to “Instagram”.

- Instagram has over 800 million users.

- Instagram is a visual-first platform and is therefore the easiest one on which to share aspirational lifestyle habits.

- It’s the go-to place for food inspiration and lots of plant-based foods look very appealing, which makes the images popular among users” Simon Winch, chief executive at Veganuary.

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This shows that Instagram has been a huge influence to why people have become vegan. This tells me that it will be an important platform to use to get vegan interior design more known. People use Instagram every day and it is so essential to getting your views and ideas out in the world.

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#301

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inspiruseducation · 5 years ago

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Study Abroad & Your Career Will Thank You

In November 2010, on a cold wintry morning I was standing on an anchorage on the Magellan Strait in Punta Arenas about to board a German research vessel. There was nervous excitement in the air as I walked towards the ship. The heavy gusts of wind, the overcast sky, the smell of the briny strait and the stench of decaying seaweed brought about an uneasy calm in me, much like before a storm. Among all the thoughts running through my head of what the next three months will bring forth, I was most excited of the icebergs that my colleagues and I will encounter on my way to Antarctica passing through the stormy Southern Ocean on the R/V Polarstern.

I had felt the same nervous excitement, in August 2004, waiting to board my Lufthansa flight from Delhi that will take to study abroad in for Germany at the Jacobs University Bremen. The anxious tinge on my face and the edgy beating of my heart was not because this would be my first time traveling abroad, but rather I was traveling alone without my family members accompanying me. All the communications with the university was through email. My host family, who I have never had a word before or even know their name or what they look like, would have received me at the airport in Bremen. All the arrangements seem very un-Indian and yet I was excited to experience something new.

As soon as I got my visa and passport checked, passed the airport security protocols of an international traveler, I sat on the airplane wishing myself to sleep to be fresh for all the things to come. I landed in Frankfurt and at once, I noticed the alien weather, odd language, tall, fair and big people, somber food, pink money, green and yellow direction signs and funky electronic billboard advertisements. I decided to explore the airport as I had a few hours before my next flight and got on the sky train. I noticed very soon that the flight gate numbers reached triple figures and it was getting difficult to find my way around. To put it plainly, I got lost.

Fast forward to a frantic run at pace and illegible spurts of huffs of broken German asking for directions, I did manage to board my connecting flight to Bremen, much to the chagrin and amusement of the Lufthansa flight host. As I sat on my seat and broke in to a sigh of relief, little did I know that it was the start of multiple such assays, prepared to test the core of the international student characteristics in me!

I landed at the airport in Bremen, but there was no sign or presence of my host family.

The bag handle broke somewhere midair, I presume for forcefully stuffing 30 kilos of my belongings. The orientation emails from the university were very organized and told me how to reach the university from the airport in such a situation, but being in a foreign land and in that jiffy I was unsure of how to read the metro and train maps to reach Jacobs University Bremen. I made some enquiries but it was too complicated, which I later found out it indeed was! It required me to take 2 metros, a 20-minute train ride, a bus trot and short 10 minute walk.

Instead, I started profiling prospective international students who might have landed at Bremen airport to study at Jacobs, and therefore maybe find a way to hitch a ride with their host family. On my third conversation with strangers, much to my relief, I did find one student from Ghana in Africa, who was heading the same way.

I landed on a Sunday when university officials were mostly away and offices were closed, except for a few student volunteers and the university guards. I was given my room key and the guards showed the direction towards my accommodation. My transponder key read D-211 at the Mercator Building, which I later discovered was recently erected, and was the root cause of further stress for the day. Even with the help of the student volunteer, I could not find Block D in the building. After searching for about an hour in the stinging rain, and coming up trumps with Block A, B, and C the umpteenth time, we decided to go back to the main gate to complain about its inexistence. Luckily, a Masters’ student from China showed us that Block-D is very much an integral part of Mercator; and is the connecting blocks of A, B, and C, (duh!!) and are usually reserved for the Master’s students. I had no complaints, as the room was bigger than the rooms given to Bachelors’ students and was single occupancy.

The next day, during the academic orientation with my academic advisor, I discovered that I was registered for the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Major and not my preferred Earth and Space Sciences. It did not however take long to change my Major and my international student journey was finally underway. Or so it seemed! Whether good or bad, ups or downs, I have never had an uninteresting day in my time as a student globetrotter.

From my orientation week at the Jacobs University until the day in 2010 on the anchorage, it had been a learning experience like never before. I was able to travel to 30+ countries, interact with people from 150+ nationalities, learn a new language, try multiple different cuisines, research about Earth’s past and its climate, explore the cold ocean in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and achieve a UG degree.

Most importantly, I failed multiple times at things that I tried and classes that I took, but I passed even more times.

I also learnt to teach English as TESL / TEFL and learnt how to mix drinks professionally, to earn my pocket money.

I also lied in my CV that I know programming to get that summer job at the university to make ends meet, and crammed learning programming late into the night while I was impersonating an expert programmer during the day at the job.

I took classes in Renaissance Art and Architecture, Victorian Poetry, studied about Biochemical Engineering, Drugs and Naturopathy, Astrobiology, as well as Psychology of our Senses and Perceptions and Decision-Making, along with my core courses in Earth and Space Sciences.

I learnt how to drive a boat, use a crane on a liner and swim with Jellyfishes and Seals without incurring their wrath.

I learnt that during long sea expeditions, you could get fresh food for only about 2 weeks, and live the rest on meat, pasta and cold cuts.

Through my friends from the humanities majors and social outreach work with the UNICEF, I also learnt how the United Nation works and how countries such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries plan their budgeting and investment in education research programs, which the whole world is trying to emulate.

I heard lectures and talks from Nobel Laureates and other famous people and I watched the Champions League and World Cup football games live.

I was also penniless many a times and sometimes survived on eating just rice, onions and tomato puree for whole weeks on end.

I learnt the value of banking and financial security, as much as, the pitfalls of spending too much money through credit cards.

I learnt about student loans and about how to pay them back, slowly but securely.

I learnt that it is important to keep up and find time with your hobbies and passions, whether it is chess, theater or cricket.

I learnt that good research is gold and written communication is diamond.

Even more so, speaking articulately and networking is platinum.

I learnt that human emotions are fickle and true friends are hard to find.

I learnt about various religions and about atheism through the perspective of friends and acquaintances who follow them.

I played cricket with my other South Asian friends, from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

I learnt that living away from home for a long period would make you question your own families’ beliefs and culture.

But no matter, how far you are, I also learnt that your family will always remain your biggest and most important support.

I learnt that honesty is strength.

I also achieved an MS degree from the public University of Bremen in Germany, where education was free of cost.

Earlier in 2012, again and for the third time, I was feeling the same nervous excitement, as I stood at the Guwahati airport, having returned from Germany to India for an indefinite period. I was unhappy because the PhD program that I wanted to embark on, did not work out for political reasons, and I sought time in the security of home. The warm and humid breeze, the thundering sky, the smell of the wet earth and the stench of spices and cow-dung brought about an apprehension of whether I will succeed, having come back to Assam after 12 years away. Among all the thoughts running through my head of what the next few months’ sabbatical will bring forth, I was encouraged and comforted by the thought that among all the skills I have learnt in my time away from India, adaptability and flexibility has been the foundation of them all. I was thus prepared to face all challenges head-on through an international perspective.

Eight years have passed since my study abroad in Germany experience, and I have only stopped to reflect on what I should be doing to find solutions to my challenges at hand rather than rummage deeper on my problems. This philosophy has helped me stabilize my journey in exploring my pedigree in education and counseling. In my time as an international student, I have always learnt that today I should be a better version of myself from yesterday. Therefore, one must always think big and create a dream big enough that your community can thank you for it. My dream is to bring such worldly awareness of opportunities through education and counseling to not just the North-East of India but the entire South-Asian region. This steadfast philosophy has catapulted me straight from being a teacher, to a counselor, and now to an Entrepreneur of sorts. I can only thank my international student experience that gave me the belief and foundational support.

Should I have studied abroad in Germany? Unapologetically, a definite Yes!

– @Abhinav B Gogoi

Vice President – Eastern India | Inspirus Education

Email – [email protected]

#StudyAbroad StudyinGermany UGinGermany MSinGermany

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premayogan · 6 years ago

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10 Business Books You Need to Read in 2019

When it comes to most-anticipated business books, Win or Die: Leadership Secrets From Game of Thrones is the one to beat, if endless Quora debates are anything to go by. We don't know much about that entry, which comes out in March. But here are 10 other titles that have us intrigued. They include new offerings from business celebrities Clayton Christensen, Simon Sinek, and Marcus Buckingham--and one from Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer, who wants to look deep into your eyes.

January

1. The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, by Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, and Karen Dillon Poverty is arguably mankind's most intractable problem. Christensen, a Harvard professor and originator of the concept of disruptive innovation, here argues for a new focus: not on eliminating poverty but rather on creating lasting prosperity. He urges entrepreneurs to pursue the transformative power of "market-creating innovations" that spawn jobs, profits (which can be reinvested in infrastructure and public services), and cultural change, often through democratizing consumer access. Such innovations, en masse, create the foundation beneath many wealthy economies, Christensen says. They can lift up developing nations as well.

February

2. Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, by John Brockman (editor) At the highest level, the debate about artificial intelligence often devolves into scenarios utopian or dystopian. Will machines make human beings the best they can be, or render them obsolete? Should we trust something potentially smarter than us? What is humanity's role in a world ruled by algorithms? Brockman, the founder of the online salon Edge.org, corrals 25 big brains--ranging from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek to roboticist extraordinaire Rodney Brooks--to opine on this exhilarating, terrifying future.

3. Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It), by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic Women generally outperform men as leaders, research shows. So how come there aren't more of them? One reason is our association of leadership with such undesirable, traditionally masculine qualities as self-absorption and overconfidence, which somehow translate as strength and charisma. Organizations are wrongheaded when they worry about lowering standards to advance more women, argues Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology. Instead, they should focus on raising standards for men.

4. Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, watched with horror the relentless revelations of how Russia and other bad actors manipulated the social network to cause vast societal harm. Disillusionment followed as the company's leaders downplayed the problem. Thwarted in attempts to persuade Facebook's leadership to mount a meaningful response, McNamee has become a vocal critic of the business model, the culture, the technology, and the attitudes that created the crisis. Zucked is an angry-sad insider's account and meditation on what it will take to protect democracy.

March

5. Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, by Safi Bahcall Big breakthroughs require two things. First, an idea so audacious it is widely dismissed. Second, a large group of people capable of transforming that idea from impossible to inevitable. The success of that journey depends on "phase transitions": the scientific principle whereby small changes in structure--comparable to changes in temperature that cause water to freeze or become liquid--make people more or less open to disruptive thinking. Bahcall, a physicist, and entrepreneur, explains how to optimize organizations so they don't kill their most disruptive darlings.

6. Coders: The Making of a New Art and the Remaking of the World, by Clive Thompson Most of us don't go an hour without using software. So those who create it are of intrinsic interest. Thompson, a writer for The New York Times Magazine and Wired, presents a historical, psychological, and cultural investigation of programmers in all their optimization-obsessive, bug-battling glory. (Thompson himself does some programming in the course of the book.) The word "art" in the title isn't incidental: The book considers what beautiful coding looks like and what it can achieve, as well as the moral quandaries posed by tech titans' escalating growth and power.

April

7. Eye Contact: The Power of Personal Connection, by Brian Grazer Grazer is the co-founder, with Ron Howard, of Imagine Entertainment and an Oscar winner for the film A Beautiful Mind. So when he proclaims that something as simple as eye contact has a profound effect on relationships and the outcomes of interactions, you want to know more. The producer bemoans the power of screens to draw eyes downward and urges readers to seek intimacy and connection in conversations--and not just those for which they have agendas. Grazer's star quotient means he's gazed into some formidable peepers. The book describes encounters with, among others, Bill Gates, Eminem, George W. Bush, and Kate Moss.

8. Jumpstarting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson As Amazon expands into two regions already teeming with jobs and economic activity, this book examines the lopsided prosperity that leaves some parts of the country struggling while others--typically crowded enclaves on the coasts--thrive. Things were different in 1940, when government investment in R&D began producing breakthroughs in science and technology, from jet engines to life-saving medicines, to benefit everyone. MIT economists Gruber and Johnson think it's time to revisit that playbook.

9. Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley GoodallConventional management wisdom exists to reinforce the organization's control over individuals, writes Buckingham, widely popular for his look-to-your-strengths approach to personal development. Among the "lies" he debunks are some sacred cows. For example, people crave feedback; people have potential; work/life balance is something we should all aspire to, and leadership is a "thing." (Some of us have been questioning that last one for years.) Buckingham urges freethinking leaders to toss off the straitjacket of dogma in favor of "the glorious messiness" of individuals working together.

June

10. The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek A checkers match and the Super Bowl are finite games. Someone wins. Someone doesn't. Business, by contrast, is a ceaseless endeavor in which playing field, players, and rules change constantly. Leaders require not just the resources but also the will to win such contests, organizational expert Sinek explains. That means the courage to stand up to short-term thinkers (Wall Street, popular sentiment) in defense of your just cause, an open-playbook strategy visible to all and the understanding that, ultimately, we are competing against the best version of ourselves. Read the full article

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pekorosu · 8 years ago

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sticking all my rambly notes about the wu xia bits under the cut.

warning for spoilers and all.

- they spent 3 months filming in tengchong, yunnan province. it's a highland area, about 2000 metres above sea level. kenji initially expressed some doubt at whether they could even pull off action scenes in such a place (bc breathing became quicker than usual).

- the movie was originally titled "同謀者" (the accomplice?)

(※ i think it refers to the conversation between liu jinxi and xu baijiu... "when one man sins, we all share his sin. we are all accomplices"? maybe that would've been too on the nose haha)

- the most consistent keywords in the early stages were [kung fu], [rashomon] and [discovery channel]

- they used shaw brothers movies as reference, with the intention of reviving "kung fu movies" in a way that would suit the 21st century.

- he talks a bit about the research that went into developing the action. stuff like how it wasn’t possible to half-ass the fight scenes when it comes to Real Kung Fu Movies(tm) unlike modern action flicks. so they drew inspiration from lau kar-leung's "classic, old school" kung fu. they watched his movies, copied the moves + camera angles exactly and studied them to figure out how to capture the right look and all.

- there's a lot of specifics re: martial arts styles that i don't know how to translate, but anyway donnie uses hung ga kuen for this movie.

(※ there are actually some videos on youtube breaking down his moves. it's p cool haha).

- kenji thinks it doesn’t feel right to call the movie "wu xia" bc everything that goes into the action speaks more of a "kung fu movie" as opposed to a "wu xia movie"

- he also jokes that they probably couldn’t name the movie "kung fu" since there's already a "kung fu hustle" out there.

(※ that movie's actually named "功夫 (kung fu)" in chinese lmao i totally didn't know that)

- [rashomon] refers to how they wanted to infuse a similar concept of "the truth will look different from different POVs" into the action scenes. it was difficult to work out but kenji feels like they’ve achieved something fresh and new from an action perspective.

- [discovery channel] refers to how director peter chan came across a programme, smth like "the science of martial arts" on discovery channel, which led to the idea of showing viewers through CGI what goes on inside the body.

- kenji had been assigned the role of action choreographer** for this movie. he also had a minor acting role. additionally, he had no stunt double so he p much had to do everything by himself. donnie, who knew exactly where kenji’s limits were, would push him to the very edge. kenji mentions that he'd get minor injuries almost every day just trying to meet such high demands. he’d often catch himself thinking (jokingly) "i'm gonna murder this guy" lmao...

(※ here’s a video of him doing the same stunt 13 times.)

**specifically [ 動作指導 ]. donnie’s the action director [ 動作導演 ] and action designer [ 動作設計 ]. tbh they all sound the same to me but i think the choreographer does more... guiding? on a smaller scale? while donnie’s job is more in terms of the bigger picture? IDEK i’m just guessing.

- he also goes "it's difficult to breathe even when we’re just walking! i swear, at this rate, i'll be able to run a full marathon when i get back to japan..."

- kenji thinks kara hui (plays the badass murder lady) is scary bc when he tried giving her some direction, she retorted rather curtly with "i know that!" x_x

- there were plans to cast older, more nostalgic (male) martial arts stars for kara hui's part but someone (probably donnie?) suggested "a woman would be good" and so it ended up being kara.

- kenji tho. “why did it have to be this scary lady...”

- at some point while they were location scouting by a cliff, kenji slipped and fell about 8 metres into the river! his life was seriously on the line there bc RAPID CURRENTS but luckily he’d managed to grab onto a protruding boulder and climb out somehow.

it was a pretty rocky area so he was grazed all over. literally no one knew where he had disappeared to so when he showed up covered in blood, everyone started freaking out. in the middle of all that, donnie just pulled out his personal phone and took pictures lol.

(※ documented in this bts clip)

- the scenery on the way to the hospital was so beautiful that at one point kenji wondered "what if... i'm actually dead right now??"

- when kaneshiro takeshi got a look at his injury-covered back, for some reason he yelled "unbelieeevaablllee!!" in osaka-ben and asked, "hey hey kenji, can i take a picture? i wanna send it to my mom, scare her a little by making it seem like i was the one who got injured."

- kenji: “i laughed because it was pretty much the same reaction as donnie.”

- he mentions that the staff gathered on set were of various nationalities so you would hear a mix of mandarin, cantonese, english, thai and japanese being spoken.

- because there were multilingual ppl on set (ESP takeshi), kenji couldn't carelessly curse in japanese anymore. usually when he's feeling extremely stressed out he'd be yelling things like "just die everyone!" in jp lmao

- he says takeshi is a rly interesting person. talks about how he went around suggesting eccentric ideas and asking people "hey, wouldn't it be more interesting if i did this?"

- the sichuanese thing was takeshi’s idea.

- the little finger swipe here was also an ad lib lol

- those cows in the scene where kara hui's character gets stampeded on? there were stunt people inside the cows moving them manually!

- they didn't want to resort to CGI, thinking there would be a risk of it coming across as fake. like even if just ONE small part looked fake, the audience will start wondering if the rest of the fight scene they'd painstakingly worked on was fake too and they didn't want that.

- "no! cows don't run like that!!" - donnie, taking his job directing stuntmen in extremely realistic cow costumes /very/ seriously.

- meanwhile kenji: “the situation was too surreal. how a cow runs... we never learned that in stunt school!”

"please observe this enthusiastic performance of a cow by a team of two stuntmen!"

- director peter chan never really meddled with the action parts of the movie. when asked for his opinion, he'd just say "i don't know anything about that. i'd be satisfied with the first take itself. after that, i'd just look at everything as a whole." so they were kinda given free rein to film whatever they wanted and edit the scenes however they wanted.

- tsui hark once visited the set. tang wei (plays ayu, jinxi’s wife) who already wasn’t familiar with many of the hong kong cast and crew, had asked innocently "who was that old man?" lol

- the arm-cutting scene wasn’t in the original plans, it was more of a final resort. they actually planned to have jinxi be attacked by those goons when he got "revived" and he'd escape into a small cramped space where they'd do a 1 vs 5 fight scene. but it would've taken them another month to shoot that, so they had to scrap it. after some brainstorming they decided to replace it with "jinxi cuts off his arm!" this was decided like the day before they had to start shooting it (ﾟｰﾟ;;

- they had to decide which arm to "cut off" and thought it would be cool to have it be the same as jimmy wang's one-armed swordsman. so they asked jimmy which arm it was and he told them it was the left arm. so they went with that.

...turned out when they checked the original it was actually the right arm.

(※ truth is, in the original one-armed swordsman series, it'd switch between the two arms and wasn't consistent lmfao)

- kenji really liked the final product, but it didn't do so well in china and hong kong. kenji wonders if it's bc of the discrepancy between what people expected from the title "wu xia" and the actual content of the movie. apparently people were also really disappointed by the ending.

- eventually the movie started getting attention at film festivals and stuff in the west. but director peter chan just said pessimistically, "that's precisely why there's no changing the fact that this movie is a failure, entertainment-wise."

- kenji kinda wishes people would give this movie a second chance.

#wu xia #tanigaki kenji #donnie yen #action book liveblogging #peko tls #congrats if u actually manage to finish reading this mess #this is like a summarised ver. but it's still so damn long #why do i ramble so much #i just love bts stories cries

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kathleenseiber · 5 years ago

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Methane emissions hit record-breaking levels

Global emissions of methane have reached the highest levels on record, research shows.

Growth of emissions from coal mining, oil and natural gas production, cattle and sheep ranching, and landfills are primarily driving the increases.

Between 2000 and 2017, levels of the potent greenhouse gas barreled up toward pathways that climate models suggest will lead to 3-4 degrees Celsius of warming before the end of this century.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/temp/d05978755/MethaneNarrationSM.mp4

This 3D volumetric visualization shows the emission and transport of atmospheric methane around the globe between December 9, 2017 and December 1, 2018.

This is a dangerous temperature threshold at which scientists warn that natural disasters, including wildfires, droughts, and floods, and social disruptions such as famines and mass migrations become almost commonplace.

The findings appear in two papers in Earth System Science Data and Environmental Research Letters.

In 2017, the last year when complete global methane data are available, Earth’s atmosphere absorbed nearly 600 million tons of the colorless, odorless gas that is 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 100-year span.

“People joke about burping cows without realizing how big the source really is.”

More than half of all methane emissions now come from human activities. Annual methane emissions are up 9%, or 50 million tons per year, from the early 2000s, when methane concentrations in the atmosphere were relatively stable.

In terms of warming potential, adding this much extra methane to the atmosphere since 2000 is akin to putting 350 million more cars on the world’s roads or doubling the total emissions of Germany or France.

“We still haven’t turned the corner on methane,” says Rob Jackson., a professor of earth system science in Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) as well as leader of the Global Carbon Project.

More methane

Globally, fossil fuel sources and cows are twin engines powering methane’s upward climb.

“Emissions from cattle and other ruminants are almost as large as those from the fossil fuel industry for methane,” Jackson says. “People joke about burping cows without realizing how big the source really is.”

Throughout the study period, agriculture accounted for roughly two-thirds of all methane emissions related to human activities; fossil fuels contributed most of the remaining third. However, those two sources have contributed in roughly equal measure to the increases seen since the early 2000s.

A visualization of global methane on January 26, 2018. Red shows areas with higher concentrations of methane in the atmosphere. (Credit: Cindy Starr, Kel Elkins, Greg Shirah, and Trent L. Schindler/NASA Scientific Visualization Studio)

Methane emissions from agriculture rose to 227 million tons of methane in 2017, up nearly 11% from the 2000–2006 average. Methane from fossil fuel production and use reached 108 million tons in 2017, up nearly 15% from the earlier period.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, carbon emissions plummeted as manufacturing and transportation ground to a halt. “There’s no chance that methane emissions dropped as much as carbon dioxide emissions because of the virus,” Jackson says. “We’re still heating our homes and buildings, and agriculture keeps growing.”

Emissions worldwide

Methane emissions rose most sharply in Africa and the Middle East; China; and South Asia and Oceania, which includes Australia and many Pacific islands. Each of these three regions increased emissions by an estimated 10 to 15 million tons per year during the study period. The United States followed close behind, increasing methane emissions by 4.5 million tons, mostly due to more natural gas drilling, distribution, and consumption.

“We’ll need to eat less meat and reduce emissions associated with cattle and rice farming, and replace oil and natural gas in our cars and homes.”

“Natural gas use is rising quickly here in the US and globally,” Jackson says. “It’s offsetting coal in the electricity sector and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but increasing methane emissions in that sector.”

The US and Canada are also producing more natural gas. “As a result, we’re emitting more methane from oil and gas wells and leaky pipelines,” says Jackson, who is also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy.

Europe stands out as the only region where methane emissions have decreased over the last two decades, in part by tamping down emissions from chemical manufacturing and growing food more efficiently.

“Policies and better management have reduced emissions from landfills, manure, and other sources here in Europe. People are also eating less beef and more poultry and fish,” says Marielle Saunois of the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin in France, lead author of the paper in Earth System Science Data.

What can the world do?

Tropical and temperate regions have seen the biggest jump in methane emissions. Boreal and polar systems have played a lesser role. Despite fears that melting in the Arctic may unlock a burst of methane from thawing permafrost, the researchers found no evidence for increasing methane emissions in the Arctic—at least through 2017.

Human driven emissions are in many ways easier to pin down than those from natural sources. “We have a surprisingly difficult time identifying where methane is emitted in the tropics and elsewhere because of daily to seasonal changes in how waterlogged soils are,” says Jackson.

According to the researchers, curbing methane emissions will require reducing fossil fuel use and controlling fugitive emissions such as leaks from pipelines and wells, as well as changes to the way we feed cattle, grow rice, and eat.

“We’ll need to eat less meat and reduce emissions associated with cattle and rice farming,” Jackson says, “and replace oil and natural gas in our cars and homes.”

Feed supplements such as algae may help to reduce methane burps from cows, and rice farming can transition away from permanent waterlogging that maximizes methane production in low-oxygen environments. Aircraft, drones, and satellites show promise for monitoring methane from oil and gas wells.

Jackson says, “I’m optimistic that, in the next five years, we’ll make real progress in that area.”

Additional coauthors of the paper in Environmental Research Letters are from Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement at Université Paris-Saclay; the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia; the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; the European Commission Joint Research Centre; the Center for Global Environmental Research at the National Institute for Environmental Studies and the Meteorological Research Institute in Ibaraki, Japan; the TNO Department of Climate Air & Sustainability in Utrecht, The Netherlands; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, Finland.

Support for the research came from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Stanford University, the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Programme’s Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub (JGC), and Future Earth.

Source: Stanford University

The post Methane emissions hit record-breaking levels appeared first on Futurity.

Methane emissions hit record-breaking levels published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

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tagamark · 6 years ago

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Living in harmony with lions

New Post has been published on https://tagasafarisafrica.com/africa-travel-news/living-in-harmony-with-lions/

Living in harmony with lions

Peaceful human-lion coexistence is crucial for the survival of these threatened big cats… by Claire Trickett

As the beloved Simba finally returns to big screens around the world, we’ll all be grabbing some popcorn (and tissues) for the long-awaited, and no doubt emotive, debut. To celebrate Simba’s triumphant return, we have tailormade the ultimate East African adventure. Our 10-day Meet the Powerful Kings of the Jungle safari introduces wildlife lovers to the likes of Simba, Nala and Mufasa, (to name a few) in their revered homeland, the vast and infinitely beautiful Serengeti/Mara ecosystem.

Of course, a production of such magnitude as The Lion King will generate a tremendous amount of worldwide hype, and thankfully Disney and the Lion Recovery Fund (LRF) are putting this widespread media attention to fantastic use with their global #ProtectThePride campaign in support of lion conservation.

Did you know that since the original release of The Lion King, Africa has lost half of its wild lion population? That is a sobering statistic and one that needs to be acted on. Fast. Which is why Disney has thrown its support behind the LRF, an initiative that aims to double the amount of lions by 2050. &Beyond has also joined forces with the LRF (along with likeminded ecotourism operators and partners: Conservation Travel Foundation by Ultimate Safaris, Singita and Wilderness Safaris) to launch the Lionscape Coalition, which supports the LRF and contributes to important projects such the KOPE Lion Project, a beneficiary of the LRF (more on that below).

So, as the Circle of Life plays out in cinemas, so too does the real-life and often vicious circle of life play out on the mighty plains of East Africa. Sadly, lions face many threats, the main one being conflict from the many rural communities that live alongside them. However, to truly understand this conflict, it is crucial to spend time with the Maasai tribes to promote understanding for the hardships they face.

Meeting the Maasai

One grey and particularly wet evening last June, I was on my way to what I thought was a bush sleepout in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Instead, we arrived unexpectedly at a traditional Maasai village. As we pulled up to the kraal (a collection of African huts enclosed by a rustic fence made of sticks), we were greeted warmly by the haunting chants of the fearsome warriors, fully kitted out in their iconic Maasai attire.

“Karibu sana (welcome) to our home,” they flashed big smiles as we climbed out of our safari vehicles, all looking visibly confused. The big reveal was that this was to be our sleepout. Many of the mud huts had been vacated and ever so proudly prepped for our arrival and there was an air of pride as our new Maasai friends welcomed us into their homes and traditional way of life.

Our experience merits an entire story to itself, but suffice it to say that this was a once-in-a-lifetime bucket list moment that I’ll never forget. It was as exciting, educational and eye opening, as it was uncomfortable and uncertain. All night, around a blazing fire, we ate, drank, mingled, danced and laughed with the Maasai. We learned first-hand how they live in harmony with the wildlife. As the sun set, we watched a large herd of zebra grazing just beyond the fence line and at night, as we slept in the rustic mud and stick huts, we heard the distant cries of hyena.

Perhaps most importantly, we witnessed just how important livestock are to the Maasai people. The amount of cows and goats that each household possesses is a determination of Maasai wealth and status. Each day, young male herders from each family take the prized cows and goats out into the Mara to graze and drink, and at night, they return to the homestead. The livestock sleep in and around the huts, not outside the fence, but rather in the very heart of the homestead where they are considered ‘safe’ from nearby predators (namely the lion) seeking an easy meal.

A species under threat

The sobering reality is that Africa’s lion population has halved in the last 25 years. According to the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), the continent’s lions are currently classified as ‘vulnerable’ to ‘critically endangered’ and the implications of this are dire. As an ‘umbrella’ species, a thriving lion population is a direct indicator of the health and ecological wellbeing of an ecosystem. Without these apex predators, the ecosystem suffers from an unhealthy imbalance.

Lions across Africa are currently threatened by habitat loss, illegal poaching/wildlife trade, as well as human-lion conflict. These big cats require expansive, well-balanced landscapes to ensure their long-term survival, however rising demands from increasing human populations are encroaching on this space, and ultimately, their survival.

Heading across the border from where we were in Kenya and into neighbouring Tanzania, the world-famous Ngorongoro Crater and surrounding conservation area is celebrated for being one of Africa’s longest-standing experiments in multiple land use, whereby pastoral communities actually live in and amongst the conserved land and protected wildlife of a national park. Here, the Maasai people coexist, for the most part, in harmony with the wildlife, including lions. This coexistence, however, is greatly challenged by the ever presence of opportunistic predators that prey on their valuable livestock.

The good news is that lions are a resilient species. They still stand a chance, but the time to act is now. There are an estimated 20 000 wild lions roaming the earth and this number can increase if large tracts of land are created where lion populations can recover and local communities can flourish alongside them. Thankfully, to help combat this human/predator conflict in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) specifically, the KopeLion Project was developed by Swedish conservationist and biologist, Ingela Jansson.

Mama Simba

Affectionately known in the NCA by her Maasai nickname, ‘Mama Simba’ (simba being the Swahili word for lion), Ingela’s journey from young, impressionable backpacker to well-respected lion researcher is a story of determination. At the age of 20, Ingela travelled to Africa and the journey changed the way she saw the world.

Inspired to work with wildlife, Ingela returned to Sweden with what she refers to as a “naïve dream to become a biologist and find a job on the wild savanna in Africa.” She pursued a degree in biology, researching brown bear ecology and, armed with a degree but no actual referrals in Africa, she returned in search of her dream.

It was now 2005 and Ingela joined a friend for the East Africa leg of his Cape to Cape cycling tour, all the while searching for a job, but coming up empty handed. Eventually putting the cycling on hold, Ingela was offered a job with the Serengeti Lion Project, which was established in 1966 and is one of the world’s longest standing research projects on one animal population. Her new role as research assistant would involve the long-term monitoring of the lions in the area. Her dream had finally come true.

A life with lions

After three years assisting with lion research in the Serengeti and NCA, Ingela craved a more hands-on approach to lion conservation and decided to base herself in the NCA. Inspired by the vision and impact of the Lion Guardians in Kenya, Ingela launched KopeLion.

To give some background, the highly successful Lion Guardian model was developed in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, which at the time, was experiencing a plummeting lion population due to human conflict. Lions were preying on the Maasai livestock and, in turn, the Maasai warriors were killing the lions, mainly to protect their bovine livelihoods, but also as an age-old cultural ritual that demonstrates bravery and elevates young Maasai boys into manhood.

Applying this proven model to her own work in Tanzania, Ingela’s vision for KopeLion was born. KopeLion aims to promote successful and locally-driven coexistence in conservation. By communicating directly with the Maasai people, Ingela and her team discovered that the warriors didn’t actually intend to rid the area of lions, rather they just wanted to protect that which is most valuable to them, their cows and goats.

By implementing the successful Lion Guardian model, KopeLion seeks to inspire and enable local action, using both science and traditional knowledge, for the management and ongoing monitoring of sustainable human-lion coexistence in the NCA’s multiple-use landscape. The warriors revealed that they both admire and fear these powerful big cats, and they also expressed a need for employment, income and education. KopeLion was therefore designed to meet both needs, by providing long-term employment for the Maasai in the NCA by converting the lion hunters into dedicated lion protectors employed by KopeLion.

Corridor of tolerance

To ensure long-term viability and improved genetics of the NCA lion population, KopeLion expanded their team and area of work to act as a ‘corridor of tolerance’ between the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. Well known and respected warriors from the nearby villages were carefully selected and employed to act as ‘Ilchokuti’ (meaning guardian in the local Maa language). These 18 Ilchokuti are responsible for protecting any lions that enter their dedicated zones (50 to 100 km2 each) and ensuring that the predators can roam with greater safety from human conflicts and intervention between the Serengeti and the Crater.

Of course there was heavy scepticism among the Maasai when this programme was first introduced. “It was a real eye opener,” Mama Simba explains, “I had zero experience working with communities. All of my experience had been working directly with wildlife and I was totally unprepared for the challenges of working with people. Due to a troubled past between the communities, authorities and outsiders, it took many years for us to build up trust and develop lasting relationships with the Maasai communities, whose buy-in was crucial to the success of the project.” She admits, “One of the most encouraging discoveries was that it was incredibly easy to shift the mind-set from killing to protecting; protecting a lion is far more difficult, and ultimately braver, than simply killing it.”

A voice for the voiceless

Handpicked for their intimate knowledge of the landscape, their enthusiasm for lions, the trust and respect they have earned within their community, as well as their commitment and trustworthiness, the role of an Ilchokuti is no mean feat. They are responsible for mitigating all human-predator conflict on the ground and helping to monitor and protect lions in the area. First to leave the kraal each morning, they scour the area for any signs (spoor, scat, audio or visual) of a predator in the area. If a lion has in fact entered the Ilchokuti’s zone, he must immediately warn the herders and follow up on the tracks to identify exactly where the lion is. The Ilchokuti then positions himself between the lion and the livestock to ensure the safety of both.

As one experienced Ilchokuti, describes, “If there are any predations or conflicts in the area, the Ilchokuti is responsible for managing the dispute. The group is usually excited and angry because the lion has taken the most valuable thing in their culture, so if it becomes difficult for the Ilchokuti to manage the people, he will call for backup from the Ilchokuti in neighbouring zones, as well as the KopeLion team.” The Ilchokuti also help treat wounded livestock, mend and reinforce kraal fences, search for missing livestock, and help return grazing herds to the kraal should a herder become sick while out in the plains.

The success of this project relies ultimately on the ongoing partnership, collaboration and trust among the communities living in the NCA. Both the Maasai and the lions live off this land, so harmony among them is vital. However, conservation is not achievable unless the local people have a stake in it and can reap some of the rewards. The NCA therefore channels tourism funds into these communities to supply much-needed water, medical/veterinary assistance, schools, infrastructure, etc. and, in turn, the Maasai understand and acknowledge that, without the healthy presence of the mighty African lion, tourism would no longer thrive in their beloved homeland.

How our guests make a difference

&Beyond has a longstanding partnership with Ingela and the KopeLion project to help ensure that the Crater lion population will survive for future generations to admire. This partnership for coexistence in conservation is enabled simply by guests visiting &Beyond Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. Their travel spend helps to provide much-needed financial support and in-kind services, such as vehicle repair, to KopeLion, and in return, KopeLion is working to ensure the long-term viability of the Crater lion population.

Guests also have the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with Ingela and her researchers/Ilchokuti to gain a deeper understanding of their day-to-day operations. This involves checking up on the camera traps, remote tracking of the lions, and learning how to identify individual lions. And perhaps most importantly, they can observe first-hand how the Maasai and predators are living in harmony, just as we did back in June.

Did you know?

To help further protect and bolster Africa’s threatened lion populations, our aforementioned Lionscape Coalition aims to support lion conservation projects through the renowned LRF, as well as to promote awareness for the protection of lions and foster much-needed support and donations.

We have aligned our combined efforts towards the protection of lions in the areas in which we each already operate and have a direct influence over (almost 7.5 million hectares in 10 African countries). Our objective is to improve the management of lion habitats across Africa and increase the amount of funding for lion conservation. Half of each member’s annual contribution goes to projects in countries where we already operate and the other half goes to lion conservation projects where tourism is not well developed and where lions receive far less protection. Our goal is to double the number of lions in Africa, thereby reversing the negative effects of the past quarter century. Together, we can help leave our world a better place and save the lion from extinction.

Visit &Beyond Ngorongoro Crater Lodge and meet Mama Simba in person.

Post courtesy of AndBeyond

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cashcounts · 7 years ago

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Vapers in India are facing the fight of their lives

I am here to tell you about the befuddling case of India, where conventional wisdom meets the brick wall of staggering numbers and skewed tobacco policy. The country is the second largest consumer of tobacco in the world: India spends $22 billion a year on tobacco-related illnesses, 120 million Indians smoke, and 900,000 die from tobacco use each year. Surely, nearly a million annual deaths should spur the state to seriously consider preventive measures through harm reduction.

Quite the opposite is happening though. Five Indian states have banned vaping, some others are leaning towards it, and a few days ago Union health minister JP Nadda stated in Parliament that the government is considering a national ban on electronic cigarettes. Why is this happening? Why is a country that hasn’t shied away from embracing technology trying to stub out a technological solution that can save millions of lives?

A key reason, not surprisingly, is economic. According to the latest GATS survey, although 29 percent of Indians use tobacco in some form, only four percent of them smoke cigarettes, comprising barely 11 percent of the total tobacco consumption. The other 89 percent is made up of a large portfolio of smokeless products, along with a hand-rolled cigarette known as ‘bidi’. This is unlike most parts of the world where cigarettes account for over 90 percent of tobacco consumption.

One would expect tobacco tax to be distributed through the segment, but wrong again. Smokers, who make up such a tiny portion of total tobacco users, pay 87 percent of the $5.3 billion annual tobacco tax, making cigarettes in India among the costliest in the world. As a percentage of per capita GDP, cigarette taxes in India are almost 14 times higher than in the USA, nine times higher than Japan and almost seven times more than China. Cigarette smokers are thus India’s cash cow despite being proportionately small in number, and anything that risks upsetting this apple cart invites resistance.

CRS PHOTO / Shutterstock.com

Then there is the issue of livelihoods. Farmers form the core of India’s still largely agrarian economy, and India is the second largest producer of tobacco in the world. The industry sustains 45 million livelihoods and the tobacco crop yields among the richest dividends. No surprise then that Karnataka, the state which produces the most flue-cured tobacco, the variety used in cigarettes, was the first to impose an outright ban on vaping.

None of this, however, is an excuse to continue letting millions die. It is unconscionable, and also bad economics. Instead of relying on cigarette smokers to subsidise the habit for other tobacco users and denying them access to safer products, the state should be looking at spreading out the tax burden so the benefits of prohibitionary pricing (if it works) are felt by all, exploring harm reduction avenues for all the categories, snus included, and figuring out ways to transition tobacco farmers and the industry to other sources of income.

But this requires political will and recognising that options exist. Which is where the World Health Organisation (WHO) crash lands onto the scene with a planeload of ‘the evidence is not clear’ mistruths and ‘Big Tobacco is evil’ agenda, cheered on by public health officials who rely on the WHO for funds and validation, and a government reluctant to let go of its golden goose.

The WHO owns health policy in this part of the world by paying for a whole lot of welfare programmes, while remaining curiously unmindful of the elephants in the room – state-owned tobacco companies (the Indian government owns a 32 percent stake in the country’s largest tobacco firm, ITC). India holds the chair at the WHO’s Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC), whose notorious “countries that have not yet banned ENDS” prodding at its last Conference of the Parties (COP7) held in New Delhi in 2016 has sent the harm reduction ship hurtling towards the precipice.

#vapefam our health minister is mulling whether to regulate or ban vaping. Please join us in requesting him (@JPNadda) to #RegulateDontBan http://pic.twitter.com/jbJ4amTeqo

— #IndiaAlsoVapes (@SamratTHR) December 21, 2017

Parroting this misguided sentiment, the Indian Medical Association pronounced electronic cigarettes are like any other tobacco product and just as harmful, while the anti-tobacco lobby, a section of which was caught red-handed accepting illegal funds from Bloomberg Charities, got into the act by clamoring for vape bans. Media has played a role too, publishing anti-vaping propaganda and jumping on every half-baked study they can find, driven by a moralistic urge to oppose Big Tobacco while wholly discounting the fact that vaping is still largely a people-led, grassroots movement.

The effect of this squeezing from all sides has been that vaping is yet to really take off in India, with not more than 200,000 vapers at present. These are not a cohesive lot either, most purchasing gear and e-liquids from sites abroad or from street side tobacconists who sell juices of dubious quality. Organizing a resistance in this environment has thus been an uphill task. But organize we did, and some serious work has taken place in this regard.

In June 2016 after the Karnataka ban, a few vapers got together to form an advocacy platform, Association of Vapers India (AVI), to fight back against the bans and create awareness about this safer alternative. We have since mounted a legal challenge to the vape bans in Karnataka and Jammu & Kashmir states, and are planning to intervene in a case on vaping filed in New Delhi which involves the central government. The hope is to make lawmakers aware through the judiciary that limiting choices — safer choices — impinges on the rights of citizens, especially when they are faced with dire consequences in their absence.

This will be a make or break year for India’s vapers: the central government will pronounce its verdict, and the WHO’s COP8 meeting will signal the treatment vaping is met with globally.

What India needs right now is intervention on a global scale, mostly from governments that have recognized that the problem is the nicotine delivery mechanism, but also from researchers, advocates, manufacturers and vapers who, whether they realise or not, all have a stake in the direction this country takes. We also need credible local research, effective awareness programs and strident PR to make our case. And the need for industry standards that keep these new nicotine products out of the hands of children and ensure they are safe for use cannot be overstated.

This will be a make or break year for India’s vapers: the central government will pronounce its verdict, and the WHO’s COP8 meeting will signal the treatment vaping is met with globally. Also for most Asian countries, whose vape association representatives I met recently in Bangkok as part of the INNCO (International Network of Nicotine Consumer Organisations) Asia Pacific initiative. There are peculiarities between these countries, but also a common thread of governments considering bans and intense WHO pressure, which necessitates collective pushback.

This region has the highest number of smokers in the world and needs safer alternatives the most, but it’s also where the science deniers have dug in their heels the deepest, making it ground zero for the battle to save vaping. Let us do all we can to win it.

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animalistauntamedblog · 8 years ago

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“As a Livestock Policy Officer working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, I have been asked many times by the press to report on the negative environmental impacts of livestock.” Anne Mottet, PhD.

“Doing so, I came to realize that people are continually exposed to incorrect information that is repeated without being challenged, in particular about livestock feed. This study [will] better inform policy makers and the public.”

Anne Mottet’s study concludes that farming livestock is “a much smaller challenge to global food security than often reported.” I remain unconvinced.

Dr Mottet is an enthusiast for livestock farming Here are her reasons:

Meat makes up 18% of global calories and 25% of global protein consumption and provides essential micro-nutrients, such as vitamin B12, iron, and calcium

Livestock use large areas of pastures where nothing else could be produced

Animals add to agricultural production through manure production and draught power

Tending livestock provides income for people in rural areas

Because cattle graze and forage, they only need 0.6kg of protein from human food to produce 1kg of protein in milk and meat

Milk and meat are of “higher nutritional quality”. Livestock “turn edible crops into highly nutritious, protein-rich food.”

Dr Mottet’s points suggest livestock farming is an efficient use of resources

But is it? Critics of livestock farming say, because the animals consume food that could be eaten directly by humans, and need a lot of it to turn it into comparatively small quantities of meat or dairy, it’s a hugely inefficient food system. For example, it takes 7 kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef.

Not true, says Dr Mottet. Her study appears to show that only 3kg of cereals are needed to produce 1 kg of meat. To me that still sounds wasteful, just not quite so wasteful. In any case the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) does not agree with her figure:

“The production of meat, milk and eggs leads to an enormous loss of calories grown in fields, since cereals and oil seeds have to be cultivated to feed to animals. According to calculations of the UNEP, the calories that are lost by feeding cereals to animals, instead of using them directly as human food, could theoretically feed an extra 3.5 billion people. Feed conversion rates from plant-based calories into animal-based calories vary; in the ideal case it takes two kilograms of grain to produce one kilo of chicken, four kilos for one kilogram of pork and seven kilos for one kilogram of beef.”

And according to the Union of Concerned Scientists “Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2% of the calories that are consumed throughout the world.”

If we are left in any doubt about livestock farming’s wastefulness, how about this? Thousands upon thousands of indoor cows – not outdoors grazing and foraging – dutifully turning food humans could eat themselves like grain, into human food of “higher nutritional quality” (we’re talking the cows’ milk Nature intended for their own cow babies, so ‘human food’?) – Only then for niagaras of the stuff to be tipped straight out into fields or dumped in manure lagoons. Because that’s where 43 million gallons of US milk got jettisoned in the first 8 months of 2016. 43 million gallons surplus to requirements – not needed as ‘higher nutritional quality’ food for humans, but simply wasted. Efficient? Not so much.

Grazing and Foraging – The CAFO

The trouble with Dr Mottet’s ‘grazing and foraging’ point is, the vast majority of farmed cattle in the world never get the chance to graze and forage. Modern day cattle and dairy farming have given us the prison that is the CAFO.

“In the United States and other parts of the world, livestock production is becoming increasingly dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In a CAFO, animals are crammed by the thousands or tens of thousands, often unable to breathe fresh air, see the light of day, walk outside, peck at plants or insects, scratch the earth, or eat a blade of grass.”

“With the rise of factory farming, milk is now a most unnatural operation. The modern dairy farm can have hundreds, even thousands of cows. The animals spend their lives being fed in an indoor stall or a crowded feedlot. One of the largest dairy farms in the world is under construction in Vietnam and is slated to hold 32,000 cows.”

Healthy food?

As for the “higher nutritional quality”, you certainly get plenty of extras in your milk: the hormones and growth factors produced in the cow’s own body, and with them synthetic hormones such as recombinant bovine growth hormone, used to increase milk productivity. Perfect to knock your own delicately balanced hormone systems out of whack. Then there are the antibiotics. And the poisons: pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, melamine, and carcinogenic aflatoxins. So the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine tells us, based on a multitude of reliable research studies.

What about the cattle’s flesh. How many warnings have there been in the last few years about the risks of meat consumption, especially red meat? For trustworthy mortality risk statistics, check out Harvard Health Publications from Harvard Medical School, Cutting red meat for a longer life.

Dr Mottet’s cattle feed piechart

Unusable for human food?

Dr Mottet’s pie chart suggests that only 14% of crops fed to cattle would be suitable as human food. But statistics from her own employer, the FAO would appear to tell another story altogether: “Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with pasture and land dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80% of the total agricultural land.”

Of the 330 million acres of agricultural land in the U.S., 260 million acres are used to grow fodder crops. That is 78.78% of all land in the States available to grow food, that is at present growing food to be fed to animals so they can be turned into food for humans. Are all of those crops unsuitable for humans? And is all of that land unsuitable for growing food for humans?

Globally, 33% of the Earth’s arable land is growing fodder crops for livestock. 40% of the world cereal production goes into their stomachs. Fodder crops are commonly alfalfa, barley, soy, kale, canola, swede, turnip, maize and millet – all of which can be eaten directly by humans. Dr Mottet’s figure of 14% doesn’t seem to tally with the statistics from her own organization of crops taken to feed farmed animals which could go straight to our kitchens instead.

Livestock farming’s environmental impact

Dr Mottet’s focus is on the sustainability of farming livestock, but apart from the briefest reference in her opening sentence, she does not mention the damage livestock farming wreaks on the environment. Yet environmental degradation inevitably impacts the very global food security she says farming livestock provides, because it impacts the health and viability of the planet itself. Are any of these aspects addressed in this study?

Fertilizer Growing crops to feed livestock in itself causes a massive amount of pollution. Take for example this year’s ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico spreading over an area bigger than the size of Wales – de-oxygenated sea, death to all the marine life in it. “The environmental campaign group Mighty Earth has blamed the meat industry for the dead zone, claiming much of the nitrate and phosphorous pollution came from fertilizer used in producing vast quantities of corn and soy to feed meat animals.” And incidentally naming as the main culprit Tyson, America’s biggest meat producer.

Manure Is the animals’ manure a valuable commodity boosting agricultural productivity? Its disposal is in reality often problematic: “Algae blooms, salmonella and E. Coli, groundwater contamination, and bad smells are just a few of the problems animal manure can cause. In small doses, it’s the stuff of life—the fertilizer plants need to grow. Mishandled, it’s an environmental disaster in waiting. Each year, farm animals in the United States produce over 335 million tons of manure. That’s roughly the weight of 1000 Empire State Buildings.” Modern Farmer

Meat processing plants “There is no question that industrial agriculture is polluting the nation’s waterways, but huge factory farms are not the only culprits: processing plants also dump millions of pounds of toxic waste into rivers, lakes, and streams” Read more – USA: Meat is Murdering American Rivers

Water “The production of one kilogram of beef requires 15,414 litres of water on average. The water footprint of meat from sheep and goat (8,763 litres) is larger than that of pork (5,988 litres) or chicken (4,325 litres). The production of one kilogram of vegetables, on the contrary, requires 322 litres of water.” (A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products)

Extinctions Think Amazonian rainforest.“Diets rich in beef and other red meat can be bad for a person’s health. And the practice is equally bad for Earth’s biodiversity, according to a team of scientists who have fingered human carnivory—and its impact on land use—as the single biggest threat to much of the world’s flora and fauna. Already a major cause of extinction, our meat habit will take a growing toll as people clear more land for livestock and crops to feed these animals, a study in the current issue of Science of the Total Environment predicts.” Science Magazine. Read more

Greenhouse gases “Total emissions from global livestock: 7.1 Gigatonnes of Co2-equiv per year, representing 14.5 percent of all GHG emissions” produced by human activity.

And this from ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ 2006: “A 2,000 kcal high meat diet produces 2.5 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as a vegan diet, and twice as many as a vegetarian diet. Moving from a high meat to a low meat diet would reduce a person’s carbon footprint by 920kg CO2e every year – equivalent to a return flight from London to New York. Moving from a high meat diet to a vegetarian diet would save 1,230kg CO2e per year.”

Both reports from the UN Food & Agriculture Organization – interestingly, Dr Mottet’s own organization.

“According to a recent analysis, just a single dietary change — substituting beans for beef — could nearly satisfy the United States’ emissions reduction goals under the Paris Agreement.”

To be fair, Dr Mottet does say, “certain [livestock] production systems contribute directly to global food security”, and her points do make some sense if she’s talking about rural economies in less developed countries. Then the animals may be ‘useful’ to pull carts and carry loads and their manure may be beneficial to the land. And the animals may graze pasture unsuitable to grow food for humans. But in those places livestock numbers are minuscule in comparison with the numbers in the biggest livestock farming nations such as India, Brazil, China and the USA, where none of these things is true. Quite the opposite:

“The present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unprecedented level of risk to the public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise as food.” Robert Martin, Director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. And the same is just as true of all other major meat and dairy producing countries too.

Only last year the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (Dr Mottet’s own employer) promoted the vision of plant food, not livestock as the future for global food security, and designated 2016 ‘The International Year of the Pulse’

“Pulses are economically accessible and contribute to food security at all levels [They] are an inexpensive source of protein – a crucial component of any healthy diet, but especially in poorer areas where meat, dairy and fish are economically inaccessible. Pulses can also serve as a source of income, as smallholder farmers who grow pulses can sell them at markets,” and turn them into added value products for additional income.

“FAO also added that as an affordable alternative to more expensive animal-based protein, pulses are ideal for improving diets in poorer parts of the world, where protein sources from milk if often five time more expensive than protein sourced from pulses.” UN News Centre

The FAO specifically recommends the farming of peas, beans and lentils, not cattle, in those rural economies where Dr Mottet wishes us to believe farming livestock makes such an important contribution.

But still, Dr Mottet’s conclusion is:

“Animal production, in its many forms, plays an integral role in the food system.”

She ends her report with the FAO’s estimate that given the ever-increasing global demand, 70% more animal products will be needed to feed the world by 2050 – and that will of course require still more land. Yet already, with 50 billion food animals being raised and slaughtered each year, “the Earth is being overwhelmed by food animals that consume massive quantities of energy and resources, whose wastes foul waterways and farmlands, and when eaten excessively, degrade our health.” CAFO the book

But Dr Mottet places her faith in science to provide ever-improving FCRs – feed conversion ratios. “FCR is a ratio measuring the efficiency with which the bodies of livestock convert animal feed into the desired output.” Or, as I prefer to put it, it’s the science of bleeding ever more out of the farmed animals (genetically engineered to maximize their ‘productivity’) while feeding ever less in (in terms of resources).

It doesn’t add up

As we have seen, Dr Mottet study appears to directly contradict other United Nations’ reports, some emanating from different branches of the UN, and some from her own, the FAO.

A report from United Nations Environment Programme’s International panel of sustainable resource management 2010 reported in The Guardian “A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.”

Another report, this time from the UN’s International Research Panel (IRP) August 2016. Technocracy News’ headline ran: “The United Nations would like to remove every meat animal from the face of the planet if it could, and especially cattle.”

And then of course, there is the United Nations’ “International Year of the Pulse”, for which they produced an altogether wonderful book (pdf here) – so much more fascinating, appealing, and colourful than the humble bean and lentil might lead you to imagine. I would urge everyone to take a look.

“Thanks to their high levels of protein, fiber, and other nutrients; low requirements for water and other agricultural inputs; long shelf life; and cultural and culinary relevance around the globe, [pulses are] an uncompromising enemy of hunger and malnutrition worldwide and a genuine superfood for the future.”

The future is beans, Dr Mottet. Not beef. Even the FAO says so.

Help yourself, help the planet Go vegan

Disclaimer

I am no match for Dr Mottet either in terms of qualifications or access to the data. However, it seemed important to draw attention to other statistics and expert opinions, with which her arguments and conclusions appear to be in conflict.

PS There are 58 varieties of pulses around the world. I counted them!

Sources

Livestock production, a much smaller challenge to global food security than often reported

Agriculture at a Crossroads – Global Agriculture Org.

Welcome to the World of CAFO Farms become factories. Rivers of waste. Communities under siege. Declining health.

America’s mega dairy farms

The Wall Street Journal

Scientists find polluted sea ‘dead zone’ that is bigger than Wales – The Independent

What to do with all the poo? – Modern Farmer

Sustainability heavyweights take aim at environmental impacts of soy, beef, palm oil – Conservation International

UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet – The Guardian

Tax Meat Until It’s Too Expensive To Eat, New UN Report Suggests – Technocracy News

FCR – Wiki

When Everyone is Telling You Meat is the Bad Guy Revisited

Don’t Care About Animals? Meat & Dairy Are Poisoning Your Land Air & Water

Another Nation Trims Meat From Diet Advice

If everyone on Earth ate a Western diet, we would need two Planet Earths to feed us. We’ve only got one and she’s dying

The Living Planet Report: Our Dinner Plates are Destroying Life on Earth

Which is Your Burger of Choice for the Future of Food?

Favourite Food for Cows?

Are Meat & Dairy Really Bad for Sustainability & the Planet? UN Scientist Says Not "As a Livestock Policy Officer working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, I have been asked many times by the press to report on the negative environmental impacts of livestock."

#Animals #Conservation #Cows #Dairy #Diet&Lifestyle #Environment #Extinction #FactoryFarming #FarmedAnimals #FoodSecurity #Greenhousegases #Health&Medicine #Meat #PlanetEarth #Sustainability #TheLivingPlanetReport #Vegan #VeganFood #Wildlife

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handdesigns · 5 years ago

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So what is Veganism?

______________________________________________________________________

Some very interesting facts I took from this website.

https://www.vegansociety.com/news/media/statistics (Statistics )

- Vegan trends quadrupled in the 5 years between 2012 and 2017, according to Google search. It now gets almost 3 times more interest than vegetarian and gluten free searches.

- In 2018, the UK launched more vegan products than any nation.

- Orders of vegan meals grew 388% between 2016 and 2018 and they are now the UK’s fastest growing takeaway choice.

- Demand for meat-free food in the UK increased by 987% in 2017 and going vegan was predicted to be the biggest food trend in 2018.

- Bristol was the most popular British city for veganism in 2018, according to Google Trends, followed by Edinburgh, Manchester and London.

______________________________________________________________________

Oxford Martin School

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201603-plant-based-diets/

- “What we eat greatly influences our personal health and the global environment,” says Dr Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, who led the study.

_______________________________________________________________________

Is Veganism becoming more popular in the UK?

The Independent:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/vegans-uk-rise-popularity-plant-based-diets-veganism-figures-survey-compare-market-a8286471.html

- Veganism has skyrocketed in recent years, with more people than ever before choosing to enjoy a plant-based life.

- The research means that seven per cent of Great Britain’s population are now shunning animal products altogether for life less meaty – and cheesy.

The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/01/third-of-britons-have-stopped-or-reduced-meat-eating-vegan-vegetarian-report

- “It’s extremely encouraging to learn how many Britons are choosing to reduce their consumption of animal products” said Nick Palmer, the head of Compassion in World Farming UK. “Science proves that the healthiest diet is one that is plant-heavy. By eating less meat, fish, eggs and dairy and choosing higher welfare when we do, we can all help animals, people and the planet.”

- Waitrose was the first UK supermarket to install dedicated vegan sections in 134 of its stores in May. It has also launched a range of more than 40 vegan and vegetarian ready meals.

Mintel:

https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/food-and-drink/veganuary-uk-overtakes-germany-as-worlds-leader-for-vegan-food-launches

- In 2018, the UK was the nation with the highest number of new vegan food products launched, toppling Germany from its number one spot.

- 1 in 3 British meat eaters reduced their meat consumption in the six months leading to July 2018 following a flexitarian approach.

______________________________________________________________________

Opposing arguments to Veganism

Good Morning Britain - Piers Morgan’s arguments against veganism - he is against the protesting.

youtube

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On the flip side I can see the argument Piers Morgan addresses. To address this debate within my dissertation I think it is important that vegan design becomes a well-know option between many others. People should always have a choice.

______________________________________________________________________

Why are more people eating vegan food?

The BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44488051

- Supermarkets chains in the UK are stocking more vegan options to keep up with the consumers’ food choices.

- Waitrose recently launched a dedicated vegan section in more than 130 shops.

- Social media has had a big part to play in the rise of the plant-based lifestyle. Celebrities like Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus are some of the well-known figures who don’t eat animal products.

- #vegan has more than 61 million posts listed on Instagram.

BBC Radio 4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5PBX369GxWfBHFHFRrkCvCl/seven-reasons-why-people-are-going-vegan

1. ANIMAL CRUELTY OR THE ETHICAL ARGUMENT

2. GOING GREEN

- Vast swathes of land are required to support and feed livestock, making it a significant contributor to deforestation.

- The water used by animal agriculture, mostly ass irrigation for feed crops, accounts for around 8% of global human water use.

- Farm animals generate waste and pollution. Animal agriculture is responsible for around 14 to 18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions - higher than transportation!

3. HEALTH

4. PERSONAL AUTONOMY AND CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

5. SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE VEGAN REVOLUTION

- Grace Dent believes that, “Social media has set light to the vegan movement” and that before the internet, “to be vegan was largely to be alone.”

- Social media has made sharing recipes much easier.

6. CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS

7. GREATER OPPORTUNITIES TO CHOOSE VEGAN

The Independent - Is Instagram the reason for the increase in veganism?

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/veganism-rise-uk-why-instagram-mainstream-plant-based-diet-vegans-popularity-a8296426.html

- According to Google trends, searchers for “veganism” have been rising steadily since 2012 in a similar trajectory to “Instagram”.

- Instagram has over 800 million users.

- Instagram is a visual-first platform and is therefore the easiest one on which to share aspirational lifestyle habits.

- It’s the go-to place for food inspiration and lots of plant-based foods look very appealing, which makes the images popular among users” Simon Winch, chief executive at Veganuary.

______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

#304

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rhetoricandlogic · 8 years ago

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NIGERIANS IN SPACE BY DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN

reviewed by AISHWARYA SUBRAMANIAN

“Yeah, but what does that snowglobe mean?”

Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space begins in 1990s America, where Wale Olufunmi, a lunar geologist, is attempting to steal a sample of moon rock from the NASA laboratory where he works. The sample is insurance, proof of his commitment to “brain gain” (the return of Nigerian academics to their home country as a corrective to the intellectual exodus to the West colloquially termed “brain drain,” about which so many countries worried during those years), and to a Nigerian space programme organised by the politician Nurudeen Bello to achieve it. Wale steals the rock—a contingency sample collected during the first moon landing, scientifically worthless but symbolically valuable—and smuggles it out of the country in the base of a snow globe. His plans rapidly fall apart, however, and Bello is mysteriously uncontactable. He finds himself stuck in limbo with his family, neither able to return to his American job, nor to enter Nigeria without a visa, witness to a murder, and in danger of arrest.

The bulk of the novel’s action takes place twenty years later. Wale, with his now-grown son Dayo, has settled in South Africa, where he runs a bamboo business out of his home, gives tours at the Royal Observatory, and has developed an obsession with finding Bello. Dayo has taken his father’s snow globe as the inspiration for a lamp which recreates natural moonlight. The two men’s lives intersect at various points with those of Thursday, a hapless abalone poacher of Malaysian descent, and Melissa, later Melle, a Zimbabwean girl with an unusual form of vitiligo that makes her skin glow with moonlight. Melle’s father is another of Bello’s victims and it is through her attempts to find out what has happened to him that we learn that most of those associated with the Brain Gain project have mysteriously died.

If all of this makes Nigerians in Space sound more like a thriller, all secret societies and high body counts, than a work of SF, that is probably accurate. None of its Nigerian characters gets to go into space. Within this sprawling, international, pan-African plot, few of them seem even to make it to Nigeria. And yet.

In September of last year, India (and if this feels like a bit of a geographical detour, such a thing is entirely in keeping with the events of this book) successfully sent a probe into orbit around Mars. The New York Times responded with a cartoon of a skinny man in a dhoti and turban, leading a cow, knocking on the door of a building marked “Elite Space Club,” with large, tuxedoed men seated inside. The paper later apologised for the offense caused, and offered a more flattering interpretation of this cartoon, but even here the humour was supposed to come from the incongruity of it all—the notion that a nation that could be represented by underfed farmers might have any place in what had been “the domain of rich, Western countries.”[1]

It’s an incongruity of which Nigerians in Space is well aware. The title is deliberately ludicrous (that “ . . . in SPAAAACE!” is what does it), and this is the book’s big challenge to the reader. What is being raised here, in the title as well as the text itself, is the whole question of who gets to imagine space, who gets to imagine themselves in space. In reality Nigeria does have a space programme, and has done for some years now (as do Egypt, Tunisia, and South Africa, among others). Olukotun, who is Nigerian-American, has claimed that one reason he did not know this when he started writing the book was that “it seemed too ridiculous to even be worth researching—I had made the idea up!”[2]

In late 2014 Africa2Moon, a crowdfunding campaign, was set up to facilitate the first phase of a pan-African mission to the moon. The campaign faced some criticism online over whether this should be a priority at all—surely there were other, more immediately useful things that such money could be spent on. But, in addition to the practical uses of a space programme that might be trotted out to counter this argument, explained the project manager, Jonathan Weltman, the moon had tremendous symbolic value. “You can walk outside and there it is [. . .] Kids across Africa can pull out a telescope and see it.”[3]

Wale also has to justify his interest in space travel in general, even to his wife. “It’s not the moon that’s important: it’s what that trip to the moon will produce. We’ll have communications satellites, improved crop yields, accurate population censuses. Nigeria doesn’t need weapons. We need innovation.” But it is the moon that is important (you can walk outside and there it is)—and it’s no accident that Dayo’s invention later in the book is tied more closely to the idea of the moon in its abstract form than to the space programme that, in the world of the book, seems not to have happened after all. This sense of the moon as a concretised symbol for a larger ideal (or several ideals) is one that recurs throughout Nigerians in Space. In Wale’s first conversations with Bello, the possibility of a Nigerian mission to the moon is presented as a form of reverse colonisation—both a satisfying response to the historical fact of colonialism and a kind of perpetuation of it.

“He said [the moon rock] didn’t belong to America but all humanity. He said we would return it to the moon when we landed our first mission as a symbol of ‘the colonized returning the cultural patrimony of all mankind.’ He wants us to plant a Nigerian flag.”

Science and symbol, science and story. In an episode later in the book, Dayo reports yet another failure to sell his lamps. “What story do you tell them about the lamp?” asks Wale:

Dayo went through his routine, trying to emphasize the technical parts. He used the words “luminosity” and “umbra” and “aqueous medium” with what he hoped was familiarity.

Wale then shows his son a part of the observatory where he works as a tour guide—a manhole once partly filled with mercury, used as a mirror to observe the sky.

“Can you imagine looking into a pool of mercury? Gauging the stars in a pool of quicksilver like an alchemist? It would be like floating in space [. . .] This is a popular part of my full-moon tour. It has nothing to do with selenometry anymore. No practical value. But this is where I get my repeat customers [. . .] You’ve got to come up with a story. Put some tension in it.”

You’ve got to come up with a story, and Nigerians in Space contains several. There’s the thriller plot, the SF plot. There’s a novel of exile and loss set in a fundamentally diasporic world (“No one knows what happened and I can’t go to Nigeria anymore . . . Because I’m a refugee”). There’s also an entire reading of the novel, one that appeals to me very much, which ignores all else and focuses on Wale’s personal relationship with the moon; his movement from scientist to priest (though even at the beginning of the book he “couldn’t defile a piece of the moon”). Wale becomes the moon’s chief storyteller, simultaneously narrating humankind’s historical relationship with it and inviting tourists to “look into the telescope and see your future.” If you (the reader) could fish around in the thick soup of meanings Wale ascribes to the moon and pick one, could make the moon a single, stable symbol to build on, perhaps the whole thing would begin to make sense.

Because the moon is what ties together the various strands of Nigerians in Space, Thursday’s abalone and Dayo’s lamp both feed off it, in different ways—as does the luminescence in Melissa’s skin. But is it the physical moon or the symbolic? What is the quality that the abalone (surely among the most SFnal of earthly creatures) recognise in Dayo’s lamps? Are we to read the “purity” of the light from the lamps as scientific innovation or as being somehow connected to the moon rock, on whose hiding place their design is based? Is Melle’s condition a biological one? Science or symbol: it’s partly in these questions that the novel’s claims to being science fictional, rather than science fiction-adjacent or even fantastic, rest. Unusual skin conditions and superior forms of solar energy may be less spectacular than the space travel promised by the title, but they deserve some attention.

In a different (and far more trite) book this constant referral back to the moon could work as a sort of levelling force—characters of Malaysian and Nigerian and Zimbabwean descent living in South Africa and France, and America, all seeing the same moon. Late in the novel, in what would in other circumstances be a climactic scene, Dayo’s lamps are strung up in the streets and they work, and the soft light from the lamps briefly erases all difference. But it’s not allowed to be a triumphant moment.

You’ve got to come up with a story, and Nigerians in Space, frustratingly, won’t let you. There’s no neat tying up of ends here. The mystery is unsolved, the thriller plot peters out. There’s so much meaning here and stories are, after all, only stories. If the novel does have a climactic scene it’s a confrontation between two of its protagonists, fittingly in the observatory, that ends in tragedy and leaves both with all their questions left unanswered. It’s a powerful scene, and a moving one, and it tells us nothing.

And of all the stories the book doesn’t tell, perhaps the most important is the one in which Nigerians go into space. In an article in Slate the author speaks about travelling to Nigeria and meeting a scientist at the National Space Research and Development Agency, whose real endeavours and successes are so easily erased by this book’s narrative of failure. “I had also learned the perverse burden of responsibility placed on an author who writes speculative fiction,” says Olukotun, but also: “Would you have read that story?”[2] I return to that title, and the story it tells about science and science fiction and who they’re for and whose triumphant journeys into the cosmos our collective imaginations allow. How much easier to imagine Nigerians on earth.

Endnotes

Source: "India Mars Mission: New York Times Apologises for Cartoon", BBC News, 6 October 2014 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

Source: "Meeting My Protagonist" by Deji Bryce Olukotun, Slate, September 2014 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

Source: "Africans Urged to Back Continent's First Moon Mission", The Guardian, 5 January 2015 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

#Deji Bryce Olukotun #Nigerians in Space #mahreviews

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akachukwu-blog · 8 years ago

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Harnessing Nigeria’s untapped enormous energy from waste potential

I recall an encounter on 23rd December 2011 in Westfield, London with a sales man of some luxury skincare products who urged me to buy a set of his products (less than 75ml) for over £1,000. Not only was it unaffordable at the time, but what he told me next, which could be interpreted as “this product is not for you.” Thinking that I was a Londoner, he said, “You know London is polluted, you need this product.” I smiled, wondering what Lagos will be called, if London is polluted and whether this product will be potent in Lagos state. Since my flight to Lagos was the next day, I smiled to the sales man and said, “see you tomorrow.” I hardly look forward to being in Lagos. The traffic, the pollution – fumes from cars, dirt and floods have kept me away from the city which once I called home. The air pollution in Lagos is still yet to lessen, obviously due to increased use of dirty fuel from Europe as a recent BBC article* reported. This story also follows from a report in September 2016 by Public Eye, a Switzerland based environmental and economic group, accusing most Swiss based commodity traders of exploiting weak regulations to export toxic diesel and gasoline laden with sulphur, 200 times more than the limit accepted in Europe, into West Africa including Nigeria. While government has given importers a six-month grace period to comply with new regulations, I am looking forward to action that will enhance the enforcement of our environmental laws on waste management and new regulations and policies to curb the growing pollution from waste in our cities and utilize them for power generation purposes.

Recently it was reported that Sweden has run out of waste to burn for electricity generation and had to rely on imports from the United Kingdom and other countries to keep the plants running. The question is why can’t Nigeria turn the waste that are taking over its roads, fields and street corners into energy – electricity and heat for industrial use? The key answers are: 1.) Lack of right policies – leaders and policy makers do not have adequate knowledge on the potential in waste management which could lead to policy enforcement, revising regulations and formulation of new ones, if necessary. 2.) Lack of institutional capacity to effectively engage with international mechanisms on sound environmental management 3.) Wrong sociocultural interpretations and understanding of waste and waste management.

I worked on a policy proposal that would help improve the efficiency of UK’s energy from waste sector to comply with European Union Waste Directives, in my graduate programme. What I realised was that everything starts with and must continue with policy, directives, legislations, rules and definitions, even of the simplest of things. What this means is that the government has to define in detail what waste is and what waste is not; how best to manage waste based on categorizations or hierarchy for different sections of the economy – home, office, hospitality, agriculture and manufacturing and so on. In a nutshell, the waste hierarchy starts from: waste prevention, reuse, waste recycle/compost, waste recovery (to generate electricity and heat) and finally waste disposal if the waste cannot be managed at any of the points in this hierarchy. Interestingly, waste prevention and reuse are entirely dependent on individuals to adopt or enforce based on their knowledge. This knowledge can be learned, depending on sociocultural understanding and effective practice of waste disposal. These are areas where policies are very helpful.

For instance, the waste – slurry and manure generated in agricultural farms (pigs, cows, poultry) can be turned biogas to sustainably power facilities in the farm and households around the farm facility. That is part of how Feldhiem, a small German town known for its energy independence and self-sufficiency on renewable energy (which the Senate President recently visited) generates its electricity. Also, other agricultural biomass waste products which have high calorific value can be used as fuel in biomass gasifiers to generate electricity and heat. While there are funds for Nigeria to harness energy potentials in waste, records indicate that over 40% of agricultural waste in Nigeria are not converted into useful purposes. Nigeria is lagging in accessing CDM funds compared to other African countries and there is need for the use of these funds in Nigeria. Nigeria with 4.9% is trailing behind Brazil - South Africa – 27.6%, Kenya – 8.9%, Uganda – 8.1%, Morocco 7.3% in the number of CDM projects registered in the continent. This is more of a wide institutional lack of capacity which government needs to address. My observations from studying Nigeria’s use of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funds revealed that out of 16 submitted projects, 6 located in Lagos state, 5 in Delta state, 1 each for Niger and Ogun, only 11 were registered with Delta having 4 registered projects, Lagos had 2 registered projects, the other 4 projects were rejected, with terminated validation or were negative. Of all the registered projects only one was a landfill gas project for Ikorodu (Lagos) composting facility which was a waste to energy project. Why did other highly populated states with waste management challenges not develop CDM waste management projects? How come all projects located in Delta state were registered after submission and validation while only 2 out of 6 projects located in Lagos were registered? What is different from the projects proposed to be sited in Delta state and Lagos state? What were the levels organizational and institutional partnership between the state government agencies and the project developers? These are a few questions that can help in the development of bankable and viable CDM and climate funded projects especially in waste management/low carbon energy generation in Nigeria. Nigeria would have gotten more landfill gas projects registered if state governments were interested and sought partnership with parties to the Kyoto protocol that are eligible to sponsor these projects.

In 2014, I stumbled on an ongoing €2.2M research work called Dirtpol. Dirtpol was an interdisciplinary and international research to understand the cultural politics of dirt in Africa from 1880 – Present, led by researchers at the University of Sussex and partners at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and Kenyatta University, Nairobi. One of the research themes involved a “comparative examination of the cultures and economies of recycling, consumption and waste disposal.” The findings of this research would help to understand how we perceive waste, value and manage waste which is socio-culturally ingrained depending on different cultures, environment, experience and practice. In essence, research work like this could help government and private businesses involved in waste business to develop effective waste handling and disposal programs that would change poor cultural behaviour with waste. This will mean that more people will get to use dustbins, separate waste into different forms - organic, degradable and undegradable and turn waste to wealth. This is when waste can effectively be collected, recycled or processed for energy and heat generated purposes. For those that find their way to landfills, the methane gas can be harnessed for electricity generation purposes. Incidentally the methane that many landfills in Nigeria generate are yet to be harnessed due to low capacity of Nigeria’s institutions to engage with international mechanisms and programs that will help harness our waste to energy potentials.

Solid waste pollution and lack of action of governments and private businesses to address the challenges can be quelled when there is a realization of the enormous potential to generate electricity and heat from waste in Nigeria. The value chain benefits of recycling and proper waste management to employment and wealth creation is significant and who knows we may join Sweden as a waste importing nation if we realize the wasting potential in waste.

Okafor Akachukwu is the Energy and Environment Editor, The Initiative for Policy Research and Analysis (InPRA) and a Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex trained Energy Policy, Innovation and Sustainability Expert. Email: [email protected]

#Waste #Waste Management #Recycling #Sweden #CDM #UNFCCC #Lagos #Delta State

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kathleenseiber · 5 years ago

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Methane emissions hit record-breaking levels

Global emissions of methane have reached the highest levels on record, research shows.

Growth of emissions from coal mining, oil and natural gas production, cattle and sheep ranching, and landfills are primarily driving the increases.

Between 2000 and 2017, levels of the potent greenhouse gas barreled up toward pathways that climate models suggest will lead to 3-4 degrees Celsius of warming before the end of this century.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/temp/d05978755/MethaneNarrationSM.mp4

This 3D volumetric visualization shows the emission and transport of atmospheric methane around the globe between December 9, 2017 and December 1, 2018.

The findings appear in two papers in Earth System Science Data and Environmental Research Letters.

“People joke about burping cows without realizing how big the source really is.”

More methane

Globally, fossil fuel sources and cows are twin engines powering methane’s upward climb.

Emissions worldwide

“We’ll need to eat less meat and reduce emissions associated with cattle and rice farming, and replace oil and natural gas in our cars and homes.”

Europe stands out as the only region where methane emissions have decreased over the last two decades, in part by tamping down emissions from chemical manufacturing and growing food more efficiently.

What can the world do?

“We’ll need to eat less meat and reduce emissions associated with cattle and rice farming,” Jackson says, “and replace oil and natural gas in our cars and homes.”

Jackson says, “I’m optimistic that, in the next five years, we’ll make real progress in that area.”

Source: Stanford University

The post Methane emissions hit record-breaking levels appeared first on Futurity.

Methane emissions hit record-breaking levels published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

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