4 posts tagged “environment”

Hello People,

Today is WEDding day....well, i'm not talking about either my wedding or somebody's BUT  World Environment Day….let’s sign the petition saying we do our best to save our mother planetJ

Here's my deal...

Its my Deal!

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For larger view click on the picture…

Here you can sign your deal...click

DURING World War II, a future Nobel laureate as a starving, homeless fouryear-old is forced to survive on the streets of Italy. The kid, Mario Capecchi, and his band of urchins eventually land up in a hospital, where the authorities’ most-effective recipe of keeping the feral kids off the mean streets involves taking away all their clothes!
   Here the lad is forced to live on a daily ration of single piece of bread and some chicory coffee, until the end of the war. That’s when American GIs rescue the lad’s mother, an expat American poet, from the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. She spends more than a year poring over hospital records before tracking down her son.
   On his ninth birthday, the boy barely recognises his mother when she arrives at the hospital. She takes him to Rome, where he has the first bath in six years and eventually they set sail for America, to settle in a Quaker commune outside Philadelphia. The boy who’d never set foot in a school and speaks no English has problems galore adjusting to life in the New World.
   But like Oliver Twist in his post-Fagin phase of life, Capecchi, the great survivor, finds the way to the top of the pyramid: he goes to Harvard in the early, heady days of molecular biology. Thereafter, seeking greater elbow room away from the rat race, the budding scientist moves to the more collegial climes of University of Utah.
   Here he helps develop one of the most important tools of modern biology — the knockout mouse. Capecchi’s work together with other advances enables the elimination of one gene at a time from the genetic make-up of a mouse. This allows mouse models of human genetic disease to be made, a breakthrough for which he wins a share of this year’s Nobel Prize for medicine.
   Reporters charmed by this modern day fable of survival against seemingly insuperable odds are simply told, “I never felt sorry for myself.” Children are remarkably adaptable, he adds, put them in a situation, and they simply will do whatever it is they need to do. Even without the Nobel, just surviving, with a smile on your face, can count as a major coup under such circumstances.
   Reggio Emilia, where Capechi spent his early years, is also world-renowned for a philosophy of learning that empowers children by respecting their experiences and relationships, where the environment is respected as the ‘third teacher’. What a brand ambassador to have!  

Today is Blog Action Day!  Take action by posting about the environment in your own way.

HENRY David Thoreau, the 19th century American transcendentalist famously embarked on a two-year course in simple living when he moved to a small self-built cabin in a forest. Thoreau regarded this sojourn as a noble experiment with a threefold purpose. First, he was escaping the dehumanising effects of the Industrial Revolution by returning to an earlier, agrarian lifestyle. Second, he had more leisure and recreational time. Third, and most important, he was putting into practice the transcendentalist belief that one can best transcend normality and experience the Ideal, or the Divine, through environment. It’s hardly surprising therefore that Thoreau quickly became an icon for everybody who wanted “to get in touch” or “commune with environment.”
   But what is it about environment that makes it more “natural” than, say, a city? If by environment we mean the material world along with the forces and processes that produce and control all its phenomenon — the laws of environment as it were — then surely a city also qualifies since it doesn’t fall outside any of these laws. If by environment we mean just the world of living things, then too cities qualify. No, it’s actually a third definition of environment — namely, a primitive state of existence, untouched and uninfluenced by civilisation — that people like to apply when they mean environment to be somehow qualitatively “better” than a city. Unfortunately, this definition comes into being only because civilisation has come into being. Otherwise, there’s absolutely nothing primitive about it.
   Or, if there is, then every caved welling ancestor of ours would have to be transcending normality and experiencing the Ideal, or the Divine, all the time. So would those diminishing pockets of humanity which have largely remained cut off from civilisation and even today live in Stone Age conditions.
   Humans make cities like corals make reefs. For their purpose, neither is more — or less — elegant or functional than the other. The amazingly intricate arbour the bower bird makes to attract a mate is not greater or smaller in creative architecture than the extraordinary complex circuitry built inside a microprocessor.
   Therefore, why should any Ideal or Divine choose to be rapped with, only in the ambience of one set of artefacts and not the other? Especially if it created both in the first place? Or is it simply we who wield the knife of discrimination and do the choosing on absolutely arbitrary grounds? How humanising is that?

‘THE END OF NATURE’ says...Bill McKibben who is renowned Author, Educator & Environmentalist.

 NATURE, we believe, takes forever. It moves with infinite slowness throughout the many periods of its history, whose names we dimly recall from high school biology — the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene. This idea about time is essentially mistaken. For the world as we know it is of quite comprehensible duration. People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some ten or twelve thousand years ago.  Using thirty years as a generation, that is three hundred and thirty to four hundred generations ago. Or look at it this way: There are plants on this earth as old as civilisation. Not species — individual plants.

The General Sherman tree in California’s Sequoia National Park may be a third as old, about four thousand years. Certain Antarctic lichens date back ten thousand years. A specific creosote plant in the Southwestern desert was estimated recently to be 11,700 years of age. In other words, our reassuring sense of a timeless future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion. Events, enormous events, can happen quickly... In the last three decades, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than 10%, from about 315 to more than 350 parts per million.