LifeItself

The Amazon forest is burning. If you look at the satellite map in Figure 1, you will see that Brazil's tropical forest is being methodically plundered and destroyed by people who mean business. That Brazilian   "friend" of our own destroyer of the world is doing his best to encourage the burning and empower his criminal supporters. But on the multiple aerial photos of the forest, I also see drought. Parts of the rain forest are dry and ready to be burned. Global climate change is likely a contributing factor. In summary,  a brutal liquidation of the priceless rain forest by the criminal farmers and ranchers running amok + climate change and drying of the forest = a global-scale calamity. From Mike Haywood's collection of course. And so that you have a clearer concept of what is happening here, president Trump is directly and personally implicated in the big Amazon burn. By blocking the Midwestern farmers from selling soybeans to China and US ranchers from sellin...

In 2015, about 100,000 forest and peat fires were started in Indonesia to clear land for oil palm plantations. Palm oil is a valuable commodity used as an automotive fuel, for cooking, in shampoos, creams, lipsticks, mascaras, ice cream, chocolate, and so on.  We consume ever more palm oil. The Indonesian fires blanketed the entire region with haze and emitted more carbon dioxide than the U.S. Here is a good summary .  I know you are busy and you probably will not devote 31 minutes of your time to watching something that might impact negatively your country and you. Please look at least at the first 10 minutes of this hard-hitting Coconut TV program.  At nine minutes and 41 seconds you will hear about personal threats and thugs sent to dissuade activists from ever mentioning the criminals who run the largest Indonesian racket and pay off the government officials. These criminals work for several large corporations controlled by other nations, mostly rich Western democr...

Angela Kelechi Eluwa   is a graduate of Geology from Nigeria, and is currently a Master of Science Student in the Energy and Earth Resources Department at UT Austin. The human species has been growing exponentially since the World War II. Any population of living creatures is constrained by the availability of food, water, land, or other important resources. Once those resources are depleted, a population won't continue to grow exponentially. It will plateau, or decline, as a result of disease or malnutrition. The major driver of technology is fossil power (energy/over time) . The accumulation of fossil fuels is a slow process that took hundreds of millions of years, yet in just the last few hundred years we have depleted a large percentage of their total accessible endowment. It can be argued that technological advancement has made a major positive impact on our living conditions like access to clean drinking water, toilet systems, antibiotics, etc. However, technology cann...