Health
Why Climate Change Will Hit Women Hardest
Published November 11, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
I wrote the other day over on Change.org's sustainable food blog about the fact that women produce the lion’s share of the world’s food but own only 2 percent of the Earth’s tillable land. Considering that climate change is going to present special challenges to farmers, who depend on abundant resources and stable weather patterns, women are, as they say, in for it. And I haven't even mentioned disease or disappearing drinking water yet.
A new “Gender and Climate Change Manual” from the Global Gender and Climate Alliance rightly states that “the poor, the majority of whom are women living in developing countries, will be disproportionately affected. Yet most of the debate on climate so far has been gender-blind.”
This topic is remarkably important and almost entirely ignored. The issue pops up infrequently and peripherally, as when the 52nd session of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women last year took “gender perspectives on climate change” as its “emerging issue.” It's only "emerging" now because no one was paying attention before, but this should have been part of the debate since the beginning.
Banishing Cars From Broadway Revives Midtown Manhattan
Published August 26, 2009 @ 05:46PM PT
How do you make cities safer for pedestrians, more pleasant for cyclists, and more conducive to healthy civic life? And cut greenhouse gas emissions in the process?
Just break the grip of "Carmageddon" and let a few streets live free of cars.
This video from Streetfilms takes you on a tour of New York City's newly car-free blocks of Broadway. Far from creating a traffic nightmare as predicted by naysayers, the city's move to close sections of Broadway to traffic has succeeded wildly.
Even businesses, which hated the idea, are benefitting, now that delivery trucks can actually do deliveries, instead of sitting mired in traffic.
Fatalistic Friday: Storms, heat, drought and double-dealing
Published August 21, 2009 @ 08:14PM PT
Another week's end brings us to another concentrated, hurts-less-this-way burst of the worst of the week's global warming news:
Storm Fells Hundreds of Trees in NY's Central Park: Hundreds of trees in Central Park were damaged and destroyed by severe thunderstorm winds as high as 80 mph. "I've never seen a wind of that velocity in New York City," Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said. "It looks like pictures that I've seen of war zones where artillery shells have shredded trees." (The New York Times)
In hot water: World sets ocean temperature record: The ocean is 72 degrees F in Maine, 88 in Ocean City, Maryland. And all around the world, July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of keeping records. "The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. That was 1.1 degree higher than the 20th century average." (Associated Press)
Mexico Hit By Lowest Rainfall In 68 Years: It's killing cattle, threatening millions of tons of crops, and reducing the supply of water to Mexico City. (Reuters)
ConocoPhillips works to undermine climate bill, despite pledge to support climate action: Despite being a member of the pro-business US Climate Action Partnership, ConocoPhillips is now putting its weight behind opposition to climate change legislation. (Grist)
Across the Change-i-verse
Published August 09, 2009 @ 07:12PM PT
Just a small sampling of what's been going on this past week on Change.org's blogs:
Friday Futures: Food: How might the combination of population growth, monocrop agriculture, and overfishing affect the future of food. Sustainable Food blog editor Alanna Shaikh isn't optimistic: "We'll continue to grow enough food in aggregate to support the weight of the world's population. In terms of the variety of our food, however, we're on the verge of a major contraction. Variety will shrink, and prices of food will go up enough that the even the middle class will see their food options substantially limited by price."
Also at Sustainable Food, editor Natasha Chart covers one of the major underreported natural resource stories, the growing shortage of phosphorous for fertilizer.
Twitter, Facebook Shut Down in Attempt to Silence Activist: "On Thursday and Friday millions of social media users found themselves frustrated and without access to services like Twitter and Facebook," writes Social Entrepreneurship editor Nathaniel Whittemore. "News reports soon came in that the outages were being caused by an ongoing and coordinated hacker attack. Just today, the story got even more interesting, with the New York Times reporting that the target of the attack appears to have been a single person, a 34 year old economics professor and refugee activist from the Republic of Georgia."
Fear, Sex, and Pandemic - Horrible Outcomes Don't Change Behavior: Global health equivalent of global warming's To Scare or Not To Scare? "Only a small percentage of the public will respond to the ‘useful parts' of the message and change habits," says Global Health guest blogger Carol Dunn, "All ‘call to action' messages that trigger our fear response-are not sustainable, healthy, or useful..." and several more interesting points.
Does "Cash for Clunkers" Hurt the Homeless? "In addition to stimulating the economy and promoting fuel efficiency, the "Cash for Clunkers" program may be having another unintentional effect: hurting the poor and homeless," suggests End Homelessness editor Shannon Moriarty. Vehicle donation programs, such as Mission Solano in Fairfield, California, rely on vehicle donations (in return for a tax write-off) to raise funds to serve the area's homeless."
Friday Food: Fresh and Light Pastas, Zucchini Love, Filled Pancakes, and More: Another great roundup of vegan recipes from Animal Rights editor Stephanie Ernst. And Because Sometimes We All Need a Little Bit of Adorable, she posted this cheering video as well.
Find My Happy Place (Or, Music for a Bad Day): We certainly don't have the corner on bad news here at Stop Global Warming. But it's important to re-energize. Genocide blog editor, Michelle shares a selection of music to cheer up by from her personal "Find My Happy Place" i-Pod playlist.
Across the Change-i-verse
Published July 19, 2009 @ 06:04PM PT
Above: President Obama speaks in Accra, Ghana, on July 11, 2009. Via whitehouse.gov blog.
No summer vacations so far here at Change.org, where my fellow editors are keeping up the heat on their beats:
Sudan Is Number One*: "The most recent World Bank report on climate change - Convenient Solutions to an Inconvenient Truth - lists the countries most at risk for a range of climate change-related threats," blogs Humanitarian Relief editor Michael Bear, "including drought (Malawi), flooding (Bangladesh), increased storms (Philippines), rising sea levels (all low-lying island states), and greater agricultural uncertainty (Sudan)...Africa as a whole is particularly at risk."
Social Media and Obama's Ghana Speech: Nathaniel Whittemore, editor of the Social Entrepreneurship blog, takes a look at how the "bottom-up" approach to economic development articulated by President Obama's speech in Ghana has resonated -- and how the White House itself used social media to be sure its messages got out.
Living the Animal Life: "There's a bill that's been introduced in Congress that would put sharp limits on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Obama supports it. I'm fairly amazed and impressed, which I was getting worried that I'd gotten to cynical to even beIt won't pass," writes Sustainable Food editor Natasha Chart. "Even that's okay I suppose, considering how the discussion is off to such a good start...If you couldn't prevent the conditions of feedlot life itself from killing cattle, they'd have to be raised in lower concentrations, under cleaner conditions, and given a much healthier diet out of sheer necessity...As it is now, most cattle are raised in lots packed deep with nothing but each other's waste. The health hazards of this are, one would think, obvious."
Expect More Katrina Scale Displacement: Despite what would seem to be hard lessons learned on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, the federal government is still not ready to provide emergency housing if there's a repeat disaster on the same scale. And the poor will be the hardest hit, writes US Poverty editor Leigh Graham. "If you weren't yet building your social movement for tenant rights or racial justice or economic equity, I suggest you start now."
What Not to Blog: Alanna Shaikh posts some prudent suggestions for how undergraduates hoping for careers in global health should conduct themselves online. They probably apply to students with earth science or environmental politics aspirations as well.
It's Not About the Stuff: On product placement & blogging: "The Federal Trade Commission is looking closely at "product placement" on blogs and online more generally. Eager to get the word out, companies are only too glad to send out samples of their products to bloggers," writes Kristina, an editor of the Autism blog. She gets a lot of offers, including some from manufacturers of devices to "help" autistic kids, she says, and accepts only books by and large. This is an issue in the world of "green" blogging as well.
Suggest a story to Stop Global Warming
Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:01AM PT
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Across the Change-i-verse
Published July 06, 2009 @ 03:56PM PT
Just got home from my holiday weekend away, and easing back into the blogging routine. While I catch up with the news, here's a selection of what some of my fellow Change.org editors have blogged in the past several days:
Climate Change, People and Poverty: Oxfam's new report on climate change and poverty documents how "26 million people have already been displaced because of climate change." -By 2050, Oxfam estimates as many as "200 million people may be on the move each year...because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land." Humanitarian relief editor Michael Kleinman has used the sobering findings to create a good resource page on the humanitarian impacts of global warming. I'll have more to say about this report soon, too.
Goldman Sachs Owns You:: US Poverty editor Leigh Graham links Matt Tabbibi's "frightening" article on the investment bank's massive footprint in our economic system to some of the latest commentary on whether we're on the road to a recovery.
The Growing Threat of Malaria: Global Health editor Alanna Shaikh does a great job covering one of the big risks of global warming: the spread of tropical diseases into formerly temperate regions. "Right now, malaria is a tropical illness. It needs a climate friendly to mosquitoes and the malaria parasite that lives in them. Those parasites cannot survive in temperatures under 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius). That limits where malaria can spread, but global warming is going to bring a lot more of the world into the temperature range where malaria can survive."
Risk, Talent, and Why Some Become Entrepreneurs and Others Don't: Entrepreneurialism is a huge component of the growing clean energy market as well as other forward-thinking overlaps of sustainability, society and environment. So it's always interesting to see what Social Entreneurship editor Nathaniel Whittemore is covering -- here, considering "just how much opportunity there is to invest in the capacity of individuals and communities who, for whatever combination of reasons, have tended not to have access to the ingredients to let those capacities fully flourish."
Buffy vs Edward Cullen: Just like Women's Rights editor Jen N., I'm happy to see the Slayer take on a vampire (and the retrograde gender roles) of the sudsy "Twilight" teen horror-fantasy series.
Natasha Chart posts this amazing-sounding, vegetarian (and so, low on climate impact) recipe for Persian Eggplant Stew on the Sustainable Food blog.
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Image: First photograph made by a human being of the Earth rising over the Moon's horizon, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Dec. 24, 1969. Source: NASA. More about this image on a NASA history page commemorating the 40th anniversary of the image, late last year.
