Distant-Help

PRESS/SOCIAL MEDIA RELEASE

- Media releases and feature articles on the Earth’s behalf, reporting upon the magnitude of global ecological crises and sufficient responses to achieve global ecological sustainability

September 8, 2008 (embargoed)
By Earth’s Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet (EI)
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, +1 (920) 776-1075

(Earth) — A new type of environmental news service launches this week, as “Earth’s Newsdesk” will report upon ecological science, policy and advocacy from the Earth’s perspective. Ecological Internet will begin regularly providing biocentric media releases and feature articles for publication elsewhere. This continues a long list of firsts from EI and its predecessors, including the web’s first blog and environmental search engine.

The free service will build upon Ecological Internet’s constant tracking of environmental science, policy and advocacy — and years of deep green analysis and action — and will report upon major threats and opportunities facing forests, climate, water and oceans. It will focus upon environmental sustainability and the needs of the biosphere, and her ability to continue maintaining a habitable Earth for all life.

Leading climate science Dr. James Hansen [search], who heads NASA’s noted Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has called for an immediate halt in the construction of coal-fired power stations [ark] | more\ark. This is something Ecological Internet has strongly supported for years, and this political ecology represents climate science that matters.

Dr Hansen is in England as a defense witness in the trial of six Greenpeace activists charged with damaging the Kingsnorth coal power plant in October last year. Energy giant E.on wants to build UK’s first coal-fired plant for more than 30 years, and there have been major protest and direct action against Kingsnorth this summer. The trial’s defense strategy seeks to establish the important and worthy precedent that direct action climate protests are justified [ark] to prevent ‘much larger crimes’ being committed against the Earth. Shall we all sit by peacefully as creation is destroyed, or will we do what we know is necessary to maintain being?

Gunns of Australia’s controversial plans to build a huge pulp mill to make disposable consumer items largely from clearfelling ancients forests is close to failing, let us together make a final decisive push to warn off potential investors and environmental approvals and achieve its permanent withdrawal

TAKE ACTION! Plans by Australian woodchip giant Gunns Ltd., to continue clearcutting of Tasmania’s ancient forests to feed a massive new paper pulp mill [search], appear to be near final collapse [ark]. Gunns is scrambling to raise the cash needed to build the AU$2 billion pulp mill and to meet a looming federal government environmental approval deadline. Chief executive of Leighton Holdings, the proposed builder of the mill, has even stated the project is dead. Join us in supporting massive local protests, and calling upon Australia’s Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett to not extend the environmental approval process, and for the several European pulp interests to steer clear of funding the project or risk years of protest and conflict. Let’s join together with local protests and ensure the Gunns pulp mill proposal is permanently withdrawn from consideration. TAKE ACTION!

Press/Social Media Release

Rainforest Action Network greenwashes destruction of half of Ontario, Canada’s boreal forests; despite lack of any detail regarding vague promised protections, and without scientific findings that doing so is ecologically sufficient

By Earth’s Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet
Dr. Glen Barry, +1 (920) 776-1075

(Earth) — Rainforest Action Network (RAN) of San Francisco has long been one of America’s leading rainforest campaign organizations. Yet in July their campaign to protect Ontario, Canada’s boreal forests [search] doomed half this vital global ecological system to industrial destruction. In return, RAN and other proponents received vague promises of protections over a decade from now, but no protected area boundaries or protection plans.

Canada’s boreal forests are home to hundreds of sensitive species of animals including polar bears, caribou and wolverines. Boreal forests are some of the world’s largest carbon storehouses, with holdings equal to decades of global emissions from fossil fuels, while continually absorbing new emissions. The boreal region is also the world’s largest reservoir of clean fresh water.

The interesting and potentially life-defining question of “what if global warming is non-linear” [ark] is worthy of consideration. That is, if we continue to increase carbon emissions, global warming may increase exponentially — ever resulting in more change per unit of pollution — and causing crises much more rapidly. Such abrupt climate change is a rapid change in climate — perhaps in a decade or less — over a widespread area to which human and natural systems have difficulty adapting. In other words, death and destruction result.

The question of how quickly climate will change is of great interest to the Climate Change Blog as we are committed to emphasizing the potential for worst case climate change and other ecosystem collapse scenarios. There are many ways that this can happen, which we feel are as or more likely than other scenarios. Abrupt climate change can result from numerous positive feedbacks such as permafrost melt, Arctic albedo change and rainforest dieback; and/or in conjunction with land degradation, water scarcity, ocean decline and persistent toxics. These positive feedbacks and synergies with other elements of global change continue to be given short thrift, and this is worrying.