mr-damon/environment

"The EARTHSHIP summit creates an enromous Global Village, by bringing together an alliance of 300 million schools, NGOs, businesses, governments, leaders, artists & individuals from around the world (young and old) to share ideas, form alliances and take action on saving planet earth & humanity."

The precipitous drop in prices for recyclables makes the stock market's performance seem almost enviable.

On the West Coast, for example, mixed paper is selling for $20 to $25 a ton, down from $105 in October, according to Official Board Markets, a newsletter that tracks paper prices. And recyclers say tin is worth about $5 a ton, down from $327 earlier this year. There is greater domestic demand for glass, so its price has not fallen as much.

This is a cyclical industry that has seen price swings before. The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.

One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China's influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too -- like grocery chains and other retailers -- have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

When animals and plants die, they decompose and become nutrients for new forms of life. Why should we deny ourselves of Mother Earth's beautiful cycle? Modern cemeteries separate the deceased from natural cycles by embalming them in toxic chemicals, boxing them in steel caskets and concrete burial vaults, and drenching the funeral grounds with pesticides.

Natural cemeteries are resisting these modern trends by bringing back simpler and traditional 'dust to dust' burials. These sites do not permit embalming, or caskets made of steel or precious hardwoods like rainforest woods. Instead people are buried closer to the earth, inside shrouds, cardboard or pine coffins. The body's decomposition can therefore nourish the earth, creating nutrient-rich soil for trees, wildflowers, and native vegetation. Instead of large headstones, the graves are marked with small fieldstones or with native trees or bushes. Grave sights are plotted with GPS to make sure loved ones can always find the proper sight if the natural landscape eventually grows to look entirely different.

Around 10 varieties of luminescent mushroom are believed to grow in Japan, and many more exist in other parts of the world. The variety of luminescent fungus that Otsuki studies is called Mycena lux-coeli, or "heavenly light mushrooms," a variety that glows a bright greenish-white. In daylight, the 1- to 2-cm-wide mushrooms resemble Japan's well-known brown enoki mushrooms, and for a long time they were thought to exist only on tiny Hachijo-jima Island 300 km south of Tokyo, where they were known to locals as hato-no-hi, which translates as "pigeon fire" -- as they were officially named in 1954.

Climate models predicted it wouldn't happen until the end of the century.

So a team led by Seattle researchers was stunned to discover that vast swaths of acidified seawater already are showing up along the Pacific Coast as greenhouse-gas emissions upset the oceans' chemical balance.

In surveys from Vancouver Island to the tip of Baja California, reported Thursday in the online journal Science Express, the scientists found the first evidence that large amounts of corrosive water are reaching the continental shelf -- the shallow sea margin where most marine creatures live.

"The Toolbox for Sustainable City Living is a DIY guide for creating locally-based, ecologically sustainable communities in today's cities. Its straightforward text, vibrant illustrations and accessible diagrams explain how urbanites can have local access and control over life's essential resources: food production, water security, waste management, autonomous energy, and bioremediation of toxic soils. Written for people with limited financial means, the book emphasizes building these systems with cheap, salvaged and recycled materials when possible. This book will be an essential tool for transitioning into a sustainable future threatened by the converging trends of global warming and energy depletion."