EnviroLink Forum

I have been at a loss to find interest or actions on the many environmental issues that were important before Al Gore started taking the center stage. This thread will hopefully be free of AGW (man-made global warming) discussion but concentrate on the other issues. Many of the issues still involve the changing climate so we can mention global warming but solutions have to stick to the assumption that we cannot change the weather or prevent it's change (and even if it is CO2, changing the world's habits quickly is not happening).

1) Remember "pollution"? Recently Lake Winnipeg, one of the ten biggest inland bodies of water, has had extreme algae blooms due to high phosphorous levels. Phosphorous comes from agriculture and soaps about 40% each and the remaining 20% is manufacturing. This is just one of many modern pollutants with a significant portion sourced from residential sewage.

2) Floors for new houses require large-dimension lumber which requires old-growth forests. New methods use wood-chip OSB boards to form I-beams. Wood chips are formed from aspen and poplar forests (fast growing) causing deforestation of the last remaining old growth to plant more wood-chip trees. Beetle infestations have also wiped out many of the traditional forest tree species leading to an even faster transition to wood-chip species. Just like the transition to spruce and pine of a few decades back, having lots of a few related species is just asking for a future infestation of some disease or pest to wipe out the forests again. On the environmental side, forest animals and plants do require the different environments created by different types of trees and specifically the presence of older trees and dead-fall trees. How can we reduce our use of wood and save the diversity of species and age of the forests?

3) The source of radioactive material at the top of the list is not nuclear plants or industrial waste but rather the burning of coal. Coal is primarily used for electricity production as it requires a large facility to make steam-generated energy efficiently. Being the cheapest fuel for the past few decades and foreseeable future, coal burning facilities are being built and rebuilt a lot around the globe. One solution is to buy "green" electricity and hope the energy companies are honest in their sources of energy. Lead and other heavy metals, acid-rain-causing sulfur, and carcinogenic particles are also primarily sourced from coal burning.

4) Many species of animals and plants are being threatened by the remaining populations being isolated from each other by highways, pipelines, agriculture, and urban sprawl. Some efforts at making land bridges or subway animal crossings help some species and some migration routes or bridges between separated areas have been purchased and turned into parks. The real problem though is just more people moving out of cities or leaving cities to find recreation. I love nature as much as the rest but we need to figure out how to visit nature without being seen by nature.

(edit... I numbered the problems to detail solutions and refer to them by number)

I have been speaking out about overpopulation and its dangers since 1967. Negative Population Growth started in 1972, and I have been one of its 30,000+ members since 1993.
I spoke out about stopping immigration and extreme border enforcement since 1980. People thought I was a racist kook or a Nazi, because I did not like what was happening to the quality of my country. Wilderness areas I used to backpack were already getting to be not wilderness but crowds. Wages were already being affected by all the immigrants, legal and illegal, and it was costing ME.
Places I went to in the deserts, mountains, and forests, from Arizona to Washington State were getting trashed out badly.
Bad water and superfund sites to clean up after some corporations made big money and split, with taxpayers to foot the cleanup bill, were in areas I did not go to, but I knew of them. I remember when the entire southern part of Minnesota's lakes were all fished out in the early 1970s. I left, then found my old state inundated with moslems and Mexicans, instead of the high Nordic amount of people that had pioneered the state.
When I was born, there was less than half as many people in the USA, and it was a world leader (now dumbed down 5 IQ points at least). The world population has tripled since I was born, and 90 of the last 100 million of added people to my country have not been Americans or the demography of when I was born.
Overpopulation has been the elephant in the room since before Love Canal, the ozone hole, or AGW. The root cause no one wants to deal with, but we can still find humor:
http://worldpopulationday.org/

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"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

Dave Gardner is from Colorado Springs and tried to get the city council from its growth madness. Stuff like allowing profiteering of land into too small of lots and building too close to each other, out of flammable materials like Masonite siding, and too close to steep terrain wooded areas. Shoebox pastel subdivisions endless, with McMansions on the hills, as forests were cut down by subsidized logging companies, and tree farms produced chipwood substitutes. A coal fired power plant in the middle of town, in a place that gets plenty of sun for pure solar power.
I had recommended to the CO of Ft. Carson nearby, to build base housing using soldier PT for packing tires all over the county to self heated bunker style Earthships. But NOOOOO, they have to conventionally build with taxpayer money to profiteers.
They thought 20% growth in 10 years was good. When I wrote to the local Focus on the Family about the death of future kids caused by overpopulation, they sent me a book about how there wasn't enough people, with the old stupid Simon argument that the more people the more resources there would be. That was ten years ago.
I doubt if the recent fire disaster will change the way they think..........

_________________
"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

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TANG SOO!

Overpopulation and climate change are not the only issues. we need to preserve the quality of life but with less resources, make communities where it's not necessary to own a car for example. I managed to get rid of mine and that's a few thousand quid in my back pocket every year thank you.

I think that AGW has been taking away attention from genuine environmental concerns, so I thank you for bringing up pollution, deforestation etc.

You infer that AGW is not a "genuine" environmental concern. Only a hockey puck would not realize that overpopulation is the root cause and AGW the biggest environmental concern. Various critical resource depletion, and a variety of pollution are valid environmental concerns sprouting from the roots of overpopulation. Trimming the leaves and stems of the tree of problems growing from overpopulation is overcome with population increase.
The most critical of depleting resources are aquifers, ocean harvest, and good agricultural soil. Pollution, besides HGHGs and attendant malevolent climate fluctuation and heat, includes the 100 estuary dead zones and 6 huge trash gyres in the oceans. Running out of places to put trash is also a looming problem. Crowding and all it brings, including psychological effects such as hostility and anxiety. Surface water is depleting and being polluted with hormones, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, and farm chemicals that are hard for municipal systems to remove, in addition, especially in 2nd and 3rd world countries, fecal pollution with diseases. Soot settling out in the Arctic from cook fires and coal plants in India is accelerating Greenland glacier melting. Glacier melt throughout the world is affecting pure water futures for many areas. Ocean acidification from excessive CO2 is a major problem. Mercury fallout from coal plants is also a concern, especially in fish. Increasing wildfires are a concern in many places, along with habitat losses and changes including pest infestation (both animal and plant) increases. Some is introduced from foreign areas, like our Asian carp infestation, while others are from malevolent climate change from HGHGs and forest clearing/burning creating desertification.
Think of the many ways we are losing soil. Organics are depleted from over a third because people do not compost and fallow anymore, or enough. Herbicides, insecticides and years of deep plowing have sterilized large sections of once good farm land. Expanding cities have paved over and covered a lot of good soil. Years of using river water for irrigation has salinized a large amount of soil to uselessness. Deforestation yielded soil that lasted a decade and gave out, to be replaced with more slash and burn, resulting in Amazonian desertification. Long droughts induced by AGW have desertified more. When irrigation aquifer water runs out, more land is desertified. When storms do hit, the land erodes faster, losing more soil. The higher trace heavy metals allowed in petro-chemical fertilizers along with the chemical fallout from coal fired power plants has increased these poisons to harmful levels, with the excess fertilizer from diminishing returns ending up causing estuary dead zones. Harvests are of less nutritional value and often weakened for easier prey from pest and diseases. Leading to more use of good and bad GMOs.
What is happening to underground water is another, similar story. Increase water efficiency 10% and it is wiped out by population growth, and the aquifers decline like clockwork, still. People drinking water they think is fine, but it is changing fish sex, and giving us three legged frogs. Places like Calcutta where over 200,000 residents, in their entire life, never use a bathroom, and the run-off is full of fecal matter with disease. My story of the Black River of Saigon was from 1970! It has gotten worse and spread. People in the US, strapped for money from overpopulation's wage suppression, are buying their "Swai" fish cheaper, with no label on how much mercury and other toxins are in it.
Overpopulation, the multiplier of everything else, and AGW the worst pollution problem. We can nip at the rest and be half green, but in the end the primary two cause mass death and extinction.

_________________
"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

And the only way you could do this acceptably is to educate people so they have manageable sized families. otherwise your talking about enforced abortions, sterilizations or down an even darker path, death camps.

I don't think that will sell.

Don't forget the flush and forget society, or the preserve and bury your dead in refined sealed metal boxes society. The natural system has been disrupted with lack of organics in the soils, from not composting scraps, excrement wastes and the dead.
I want a natural burial, and compost in our Biolet, large outdoor composter, and red worm/earthworm gardens.
I use Neem Oil for garden pests.
All the things wrong with various societies has increased since Earth Day One. From a fourfold increase in people living at the Mexico City dump, to many more excreting into drinking water rivers, to more power plants by the thousands and cars by the millions.
Thousands of leaves and branches growing from the roots of overpopulation and non-green living. The blue planet has turned more brown and the night sky from orbit has turned into a cancer X-ray of Earth.

_________________
"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein