Dia de Muertos – Day of the Dead

OVERVIEW Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de Muertos) is a Mexican National Holiday that is also observed in other cultures around the world. Festivals take place from October 31 to November 02, 2014 in connection with All Saints/Souls’ Day and Hallowmas. Traditions connected with the holiday include building private altars honoring the deceased using sugar skulls, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed and visiting graves with these as gifts.

ORIGINS Scholars trace the origins of the modern Mexican holiday to indigenous observances dating back hundreds of years and to an Aztec festival dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl. 
During the rule of the Aztecs, Day of the Dead was celebrated in August, with a month of festivities. The Aztec tradition centered on the goddess Mictecacihuatl, known as the Lady of the Dead. coque iphone soldes Early cultures often kept the skulls of their ancestors and displayed them during special ceremonies to honor death and rebirth. It originally fell around August, but the Christian conquistadors, hoping to assimilate the heathen holiday through the tactic of cultural mixing, moved it to the day after All Saints’ Day. After Spain conquered Mexico, many indigenous communities converted to Catholicism. coque iphone However, the Day of the Dead celebration remained part of the culture and was incorporated into All Saints’ Day festivities. BELIEFS In the tradition of Day of the Dead, celebrants believe that the dead return to delight in the earthly pleasures they enjoyed while still alive. coque iphone pas cher Dead relatives return in spirit form to visit with living family members for a few hours and then go back to their eternal world. coque iphone pas cher Many cultures believe that the spirits of dead children return before adults. For this reason, deceased children are often honored on November 1 and adults are celebrated on November 2. THE CELEBRATION Certain items, including candles, incense and marigolds are believed to encourage the dead to return for a visit. coque iphone x Families make preparations to help the spirits find their way home and to make them feel welcome, often starting with an arch made of bright-yellow marigolds – a symbolic doorway from the underworld. Altars are created and piled high with offerings of flowers, ribbons, colored candles, sugar skulls and the favorite foods of the deceased. Two important items are a container of water, because the spirits arrive thirsty after their journey, and pan de muertos (bread of the dead). The loaf is made with egg yolks, fruits and tequila or mezcal, and is deocrated with, or shaped as, a symbol of death. Graves are visited, maintained and adorned with candles, flowers and favorite foods. coque iphone x The first day Dia de Angelitos (Day of the Little Angels) on November 1st, is dedicated to children who have died.Toys are placed on their altars. The atmosphere of Day of the Dead is one of celebration and rejoicing in the memories of loved ones. It is accompanied by music, picnics, storytelling, dancing, papier maché skeletons, vendors selling jewelry and other artifacts, costumes, an overindulgence in sweets and lots of love and laughter! “Dia De Los Muertos” from WHoo Kazoo – A beautifully animated, and heart felt, short film about a little girl who visits the land of the dead, where she learns the true meaning of the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos. Student Academy Award Gold Medal winner, 2013.
Find a Celebration near you http://travelblog.viator.com/how-and-where-to-celebrate-the-day-of-the-dead/ http://listverse.com/2013/01/19/10-festivals-that-honor-the-dead/ http://gomexico.about.com/od/dayofthedead/tp/dd_destinations.htm Day of the Dead 2013 – Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles, CA
,
Sources: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travel-tips-and-articles/9222 http://www.celebrate-day-of-the-dead.com/ http://www.inside-mexico.com/featuredead.htm http://www.mexicansugarskull.com/support/events.html Image: Richard Cawood – Dia de Los Muertos Dancing, From the Dia de Los Muertos Celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Blue Is The New Green: Future Power

By Ari Phillips In February, a natural gas power plant along the Central California coast closed after operating for more than 50 years, thus ending an era that saw the surrounding community of Morro Bay grow up around it. In an unlikely partnership, the shuttering may also help usher in a new era of energy generation — this one reliant on power from the waves that undulate through the bay before crashing up against the nearby shoreline. The antiquated Morro Bay plant is part of a pattern of seaside plants closing due to a combination of stricter environmental regulations coupled with California’s requirement that 33 percent of electricity in the state come from renewable sources by 2020. Two companies have filed preliminary permits with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to test wave energy projects off the coast of Morro Bay, a town of about 10,000 people north of Los Angeles. Both projects would use the defunct plant as a much-needed transmission hub to push energy to the grid and from there to consumers throughout the region. “If we aren’t able to use Morro Bay, there are other shore-based power plants shutting down along the coastline,” said Paul Grist, president and chairman of Archon Energy, one of the companies applying for a FERC permit. “They can’t meet the Renewable Portfolio Standard and they suck in and spew out millions of gallons of water.” Dynegy, the owner of the power plant, is the other company that applied for a FERC permit. A Houston-based utility company with around 13,000 megawatts (MW) of nationwide power generation capacity, their February 6 application with FERC came several months after Archon’s. If their project tests successfully and goes on to get the two dozen or so licenses and permits that would be needed, it would eventually generate 650 MW of power and cost more than $1 billion to build. “Dynegy filed their permit many months after we did,” Grist said. “Our goal was to use that transmission corridor to the coast and Dynegy basically followed. Their application is further towards land than ours. I’ve talked with them and we’re going to try to work together and help each other out as much as we can.” Wave energy will be coming of age in the immediate future. Archon Energy, co-founded by Grist in 1999 when he was 20 years old, is a small, independent power producer focusing on next generation technologies with minimal environmental impacts. In the fall of 2013, the company filed for a FERC permit to pursue testing on a one-by-fifteen mile site several miles offshore that would cost about $1 million. Grist said they are waiting for preliminary permits to start investing significant capital and holding consultations with stakeholders, including local community members and environmental groups. coque iphone 8 However, he’s had his eye on hydrokinetics — the production of energy from the flow of moving water — for a decade. coque iphone xs “There’s a lot of technology happening in wave energy conversion,” Grist said. “Wave energy will be coming of age in the immediate future.” Ocean-Powered Future A spate of recent developments would seem to support Grist’s prediction. In March, Lockheed Martin, a global defense, security and technology company, signed on to help build what will be the world’s largest wave energy project — a 62.5 MW project several miles off Australia’s southern coast that will have the capacity to power 10,000 homes. Across several oceans, a 320 MW tidal project, another world’s largest, is under consideration off the coast of Wales. Ideally, it will lay the groundwork for similar installations around the U.K. The first FERC-licensed, grid-connected tidal project was approved in 2012 off the coast of Maine for the Portland-based Ocean Renewable Power Company. Having invested over $20 million dollars in the project, no major negative environmental impacts have been observed thus far and the company plans to expand the installation this year, deploying several additional devices and greatly increasing the amount of tidal power they are capturing. On March 20, in an indication of FERC’s willingness to support such technologies, the agency approved a ten-year pilot license for the 600 KW Admiralty Inlet Pilot Tidal Project to be located in Puget Sound off Washington state. The project will be grid-connected and, as the first U.S. undertaking at such a scale, is leading an effort to better understand how wave and tidal energy projects interact with local environments, numerous stakeholders ranging from tribal groups to business organizations, and the electric grid. “Anyone who has spent time on the waters of Puget Sound understands the power inherent in the tides,” Steve Klein, Snohomish Public Utility District (PUD) General Manager, told the local news. “In granting this license, the FERC acknowledges the vigilant efforts of the PUD and its partners to test the viability of a new reliable source of clean energy while at the same time ensuring the protection of the environment and existing uses.” Ocean current resources are about 800 times denser than wind currents … meaning a 12-mph marine current generates the equivalent amount of force as a 110-mph wind gust. Wave and tidal power are both hydrokinetic sources of energy. Wave power harnesses the energy of surface waves through a number of different mechanisms, many still in early stages of development. Currently the primary method involves floating buoys the size of lighthouses that are moored to the ocean floor. In another example, a group of researchers at UC-Berkeley have developed what they call a “seafloor carpet” that absorbs the impact of ocean waves much as muddy seabeds do. Tidal power uses the flow of ocean currents, tides or inland waterways to capture the potential energy between high and low tides as they occur every 12 hours. “The rotation of the earth creates wind on the ocean surface that forms waves, while the gravitational pull of the moon creates coastal tides and currents,” the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) explains. As the search for new forms of clean, sustainable energy persists, the global potential of wave and tidal power represents an untested but immensely promising frontier. Oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface — and they do so densely. Ocean current resources are about 800 times denser than wind currents, according to NREL, meaning a 12-mph marine current generates the equivalent amount of force as a 110-mph wind gust. With more than half of all Americans living near the coastline, wave and tidal power is also appealing for its proximity to electricity demand centers, whereas the many of the best wind and solar sites are hundreds of miles from population hubs. A 2012 report prepared by RE Vision Consulting for the Department of Energy found that the theoretical ocean wave energy resource potential in the U.S. is more than 50 percent of the annual domestic demand of the entire country. The World Energy Council has estimated that approximately 2 terawatts — 2 million megawatts or double current world electricity production — could be produced from the oceans via wave power. Testing Waves Up And Down The Coast But even in the small nook of ocean lapping into Morro Bay, an impressive amount of energy is being devoted to the development of wave, and possibly tidal, power generation. Just about a dozen miles inland from the Bay, research into setting up a National Wave Energy Test Facility in California (CalWave) is underway at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. As part of the newly formed Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy, the facility has been selected by DOE to determine which location along California’s coast has the best potential to accelerate the development of a commercial ocean renewable energy industry. IATPP, formed in 2012, is the brainchild of former California State Senator Sam Blakeslee, who has been running it since its inception on a pro-bono basis. Blakeslee has a Ph.D. in geophysics from nearby UC-Santa Barbara and also worked as a strategic planner for Exxon before entering state politics in 2005. He left politics just over a year ago after leading the GOP State Assembly and helping craft California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, among other things. “I have no plans to return to politics,” Blakeslee told ThinkProgress. “The best place to drive policy right now is in some of these think tanks working on exciting new ideas, and not in state houses or on the Hill where people can’t seem to agree on anything.” Blakeslee wants to help develop and spread the potential transformative benefits of emerging technologies rather than get bogged down by laws, regulations, and standards that can actually impede the application of such innovations. acheter coque iphone en ligne And after signaling its interest in giving up to $40 million to the expansion of wave energy technologies — pending Congressional approval — its seems DOE is pursuing the same type of paradigm-shifting innovation. Blakeslee likens the prospect of a national wave testing facility to the public-private partnership that led to the proliferation of satellites. In that case, satellite owners and operators share in the common technology and infrastructure provided by the government which would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to development. “The Obama administration is looking to develop the test facility so companies can test equipment and compare results in a facility that would otherwise be unavailable to them individually,” Blakeslee said. coque iphone 8 “Down the road as the technology develops there will be wave farms, and this is one of the major steps towards that. By having this facility in the U.S. the likelihood that the country will be a big commercial player in the industry greatly increases.” By having this facility in the U.S. coque iphone 8 the likelihood that the country will be a big commercial player in the industry greatly increases. Blakeslee has had conversations with Grist about the type of research that needs to occur off Morro Bay before any siting decisions are made. He and Grist both expressed concern for marine life, especially migratory mammals such as blue whales, gray whales, and humpback whales, as well as fishing communities that could be impacted by the projects. These concerns will need to be addressed up and down California’s 750-mile coastline and the rest of the West Coast if wave and tidal power are to proliferate. The closing of the Morro Bay Power Plant is not a one-time, serendipitous occasion, but part of a trend of coastal power facilities closing due to old age and new regulations aimed at protecting sea life being negatively impacted by the facilities’ cooling systems. In fact, the plant is just one of 19 gas-fired power plants along the coast of California to be phased out of operation in order to project marine life from being sucked through their cooling systems or impacted by the hot water released back into the ocean. This will open up 5,500 MW of transmission lines and a similar amount of energy demand — although many would like to see some of that demand reduced through efficiency and conservation measures rather than replaced, even by sustainable sources. Farther down the coast, the recent closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station has opened up not only hundreds of megawatts of transmission lines, but also a power supply void that will need to be filled. The California Public Utilities Commission recently directed Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric to secure up to 1,500 MW of new energy by 2022, with at least 600 MW coming from renewable energy sources or energy efficiency measures. Having available transmission lines is critical for a nascent technology like wave power. “Building transmission lines in California can take up to a decade,” Blakeslee said. “The availability of transmission lines and to have a prescribed amount of power brought into the system through Independent System Operators are big considerations for any energy project in the state.” Transmission is far from the only challenge wave and tidal power will have to overcome on the path to becoming major energy providers. New Jersey-based Ocean Power Technologies encapsulates the ups-and-downs of the early days of the industry. In February, Ocean Power Technologies signed on to provide buoys for the Lockheed Martin project off the coast of Australia, a major deal that sent the company’s stock soaring. The company has spent millions of dollars developing a PowerBuoy that converts ocean wave energy into commercial scale electricity. Standing 140 feet tall, it resembles a giant metal detector and when submerged in the ocean, only the handle remains above water. The tip-of-the-iceberg effect in the form of wave energy. Then in March, Ocean Power Technologies shelved its much-hyped plans to develop the country’s first large-scale wave energy project off the coast of Oregon, which would have employed a flotilla of up to 100 buoys. A key challenge is that all new technologies are initially uncompetitive. Kevin Watkins, the Pacific Northwest representative for Ocean Power Technologies, told the Oregonian that implementing the wave energy technology on a large scale became too expensive and complicated. The cumbersome regulatory process and concern from fishing and crabbing communities about ecological and economic impacts caused unanticipated delays. Peter Fraenkel, co-founder of U.K.-based Marine Current Turbines Limited and a pioneer in the field of wave and tidal energy, thinks that the bottom-line concern is really cost. coque iphone en ligne “A key challenge is that all new technologies are initially uncompetitive,” he told ThinkProgress via email. “Conventional generation using steam turbines, gas turbines or nuclear for example were originally developed on an almost cost-no-object basis mainly for military purposes. Sadly there seems to be no military application for wave or tidal energy so it will need subsidies in some shape or form for early projects.” Fraenkel also acknowledges the challenges of grid connectivity, saying that in the U.K., unlike along California’s coastline, promising tidal and wave resources lack easy transmission options. “So we have a ‘Catch 22′ situation where nobody wants to invest in grid extension until the technology to generate into the grid extension is ready and nobody wants to invest in projects where there is no certainty of having a grid connection.” While oceans may cover more than two-thirds of the planet, wave and tidal power require concentrated energy locations with strong currents or consistently large waves. This limits the opportunities to a tiny percentage of the ocean, according to Fraenkel. So on top of technological advances and economic favorability, siting, natural resources availability, and transmission access must all align for a successful wave or tidal power project. Even so, Fraenkel views the challenges as not only worth overcoming, but necessary to overcome. “The oceans contain a huge amount of energy so logic dictates that we need to learn to extract energy where possible bearing in mind that future use of fossil fuel is going to be inhibited both by the effects of pollution induced climate change and by resource depletion,” he said.

This Is What A Green NYC Could Look Like

The Huffington Post | by Kevin Short Posted: 03/24/2014 New York City is many things, but sustainable it is not. coque iphone The people of New York City require some 4 million acres of food-producing land — roughly the size of the entire state of Connecticut — just to produce all the food they eat annually, according to Terreform Research Group, a sustainable architecture firm. soldes coque iphone That’s a problem, especially since the energy used to transport foods from around the globe to American dinner plate is a significant contributor to climate change. Even food grown within North America travels more than 1,200 miles on average from where it was grown. Those so-called “food-miles” are why researchers at Terreform set out to determine what the biggest city in the U.S. vente de coque iphone would look like if it could produce all the food and energy needed to power itself. And in a city with so little available space, it’s no surprise that figuring out how to pack all that food production within the city limits proved quite a challenge. What they developed was the New York (Steady) State project, a self-described “thought-experiment” that envisions a wholly self-sufficient New York. In this dream scenario, the city meets the needs of its citizens by repurposing structures into food-producing towers. coque iphone 7 Their architectural renderings reflect a New York that produces all that food within the five boroughs using a “cradle-to-cradle” system with minimal pollution. coque iphone 2019 (The team assumed that New York’s 8.5 million residents each require 2,500 calories per day.) For now, the tremendously ambitious plan remains a pipe dream. But the design firm’s president, Michael Sorkin, said it provides the city with an “encyclopedic” roadmap to a more sustainable future. “[The New York (Steady) State project] allows us to truly test the limits of the possibility for direct action to save the planet,” Sorkin wrote in an email to HuffPost. “Our investigation takes place at every scale, from the window box to the apartment, to the building, block, neighborhood, and city.” Here’s some of what they envision: Green roofs would cover nearly every Manhattan building.

Five Signs Solar Power is Taking Over the World

This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s Web page. Burning fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and oil) is putting 32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually into the atmosphere. coque iphone xr Since CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps heat from the sun on earth and prevents it radiating back out to space, this unprecedented human output is causing climate disruption, a process that will accelerate over the next few decades and will prove extremely costly to human society (if the latter can even survive). The only energy source that has a hope of fixing this problem and of resolving the coming energy crisis is solar. The cost of solar panels is falling rapidly, raising the hope that we can put in enough panels quickly enough to avoid the very worst scenario of carbon-induced climate disruption. (I put in 16 Enphase microinverter panels at my place this winter and they generated 120 kilowatt hours in the past week; my house and electric car averaged 150 kilowatt hours usage per week last month; and that is in Michigan at the tail end of winter). coqueiphone Join NationofChange today by making a generous tax-deductible contribution and take a stand against the status quo. Here are some promising signs with regard to solar power that have recently been in the news: 1. coque iphone 2019 Cheaper solar panels and more efficient wind turbines now produce so much energy that they pay for themselves quickly even if you add the cost of storage into the mix, and they also pay for the cost of adding more wind and solar. The Scientific American writes that Charles Banhart, a post-doc at Stanford’s Global Clmate and Energy Project, told them: “What we’re saying is that theoretically, it is now theoretically possible to have this perfect world that’s just based on wind and solar.” It adds, “Rather than using existing “stock” fuels like fossil fuels, he said, renewables put out enough excess energy to fuel their own expansion.” 2. coque iphone The price of electricity generated by solar panels in India has fallen so much that solar is now competitive with coal. India wants to add 22 gigawatts of solar by 2022, but is already looking like it will do at least 3 times that because of falling costs. In twenty years, India will be the country generating the most new demand for electricity in the world, surpassing China. 3. Ghana has started work on a $400 million, 155 megawatt solar utility plant, the largest so far in Africa and the 6th largest in the world. It will be completed in 2015. 4. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe introduced a feed-in tariff 18 months ago, with dramatic results. Installed solar capacity in the past year and a half has gone from about 2 and a half gigawatts to a whopping 7.5 GW. In an encouraging sign for the Japanese economy, nearly half the photovoltaic panels shipped were manufactured in Japan. Since the tsunami disaster at the Daichi Fukushima nuclear complex, Japan has scrambled to replace the electricity generating capacity of its nuclear reactors. acheter coque iphone A majority of days in the year are sunny in Japan, but the solar panels generate at least some electricity even when it is overcast. soldes coque iphone pas cher The number of sunny days each year in Japan is comparable to that in Germany, where solar now accounts for 5 percent of German electricity production, a proportion expected to increase rapidly over the next decade. coque iphone 5. American hip-hop artist Akon (who grew up in Senegal) is promoting affordable solar energy kits for African villagers that are cheaper than kerosene. He aims to bring power to a million Africans this year.

How NASA Can Save Us Billions of Gallons of Water

A $1.5 million machine, a small aircraft, and a bunch of ex–ski bums traipsing about in the woods could be the key to a well-irrigated future.

March 21, 2014 By Vince Beiser Vince Beiser has reported from more than two dozen countries for publications including ‘Wired,’ ‘Harper’s,’ ‘The Atlantic,’ and ‘Rolling Stone.’ He is the winner of the 2014 Media for Liberty Award. ___ Here’s something to add to your doomsday list of natural resources that people need to survive but are threatened by climate change: snow. coque iphone 8 It’s a key source of freshwater for more than 1 billion people across the globe, slaking thirst, irrigating croplands, and driving turbines that generate electricity. Conveniently, in much of the world, snow also acts as a natural reservoir, storing water during wet seasons, then rationing it out slowly during drier summer months. But today, growing populations, warming temperatures, and changing weather patterns are straining that supply like never before. “June is the new July,” says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company in Colorado. “Snowmelt comes earlier than it used to, and it all happens in one big flood.” Which means that knowing exactly how much snow is in the highlands—and when it’s coming down to lower elevations to feed rivers, aqueducts, and irrigation channels—is ever more important. outlet coque iphone But how do you measure something that’s spread over thousands of miles of steep, rugged, alpine terrain? Tom Painter, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has an answer: by measuring snow from thousands of feet in the air. Using sophisticated, aircraft-borne sensors that gauge snow’s depth and the amount of light it reflects, Painter and his team are assembling the most accurate measurement ever made of just how much water the mountains hold. This is welcome news in California, where the water content of accumulated snow is at historically low levels. Runoff from the Sierra Nevada mountains provides about a third of the entire state’s water, and up to 80 percent in some areas, supplying tens of millions of people and almost 1 million acres of farmland. Painter can’t make it snow, but he can provide more and better data to water managers, who need to plan how to most efficiently fill their reservoirs; farmers deciding which crops to plant and when; and cities trying to figure out if they’ll have enough water to supply their residents—or will need to start rationing. “The demand for knowledge about water resources is at an all-time high,” says Painter, a gregarious, athletically built 46-year-old. For decades, state water officials have estimated the snowpack’s water content by a straightforward method that will appeal to steampunk aficionados: They clamber into the mountains on snowshoes and stick aluminum tubes into the snow. The tubes indicate depth while collecting a sample revealing water volume. More recently, California has added a network of tabletop-size scales scattered through the mountains that electronically transmit the weight of snow that has fallen on them. coque iphone xs max Both systems yield reliable measurements but only of the snow where the measurement is taken; extrapolating out from that to a whole basin, or a whole mountain range, is better than guesswork but less than precise. What’s more, both the scales and the human surveyors are concentrated at lower elevations, leaving scientists to wonder what lies farther uphill. “The old system worked OK historically because there was always enough water,” says Painter. “But now it’s all been allocated out, and demand is starting to exceed supply.” With a wide, toothy smile, an open-collared shirt, and stylishly-frayed-at-the-cuffs jeans, Painter comes across more like an enthusiastic backcountry guide than a Ph.D. who’s been published in top research journals. There’s a reason for that: Growing up in Fort Collins, Colo., he says, he always felt at home in the mountains—so much so that he dropped out of college twice to be a ski bum. “The problem was that I had to be in the mountains, but I also had to use my brain,” he says. “I’m so lucky to have found this job.” (Many on Painter’s team tell similar stories of finding a way to turn a passion for wilderness into a respectable profession.) Painter’s project, dubbed the Airborne Snow Observatory, is a three-year, $4 million trial funded by JPL and California’s Department of Water Resources. On a recent morning at JPL’s tree-lined campus northeast of downtown Los Angeles, the project’s white-walled lab was strewn with gear being readied for the next batch of flights: two-way radios, boxes of tools, and a desk-size metal frame that will be attached to a little Twin Otter plane to house the project’s two key remote sensing instruments. The first is a lidar system—a gizmo similar to radar that uses light instead of sound, shooting out as many as 800,000 pulses a second to measure the elevation of the terrain beneath the plane. Those readings are then compared with lidar measurements taken of the same area during the snow-free summer to figure out the snow’s current depth. The second is a spectrometer, which measures the snow’s reflectivity, or albedo, to gauge how much sunlight the snow is absorbing, a key indicator of how fast it will melt. coque iphone soldes In flight, the plane is tracked by GPS and an accelerometer to align its measurements precisely with a geographical position. “We get about a terabyte of data from each flight,” says Painter. coque iphone 8 Painter’s team is focusing on Colorado’s Uncompahgre River Basin, part of the huge Colorado River Basin that supplies water to much of the Western United States, and California’s Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada, which feeds the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the primary water supply for 2.6 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Unexpected Way Beer Is Helping a Calif. soldes coque iphone Town Get Through a Historic Drought

NASA is calling the results the most accurate measurements ever of the water content of snowpack. Last spring, managers of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir used Painter’s data to help figure out optimal flows for generating the hydroelectric power that runs much of San Francisco’s public transportation system, and for keeping the reservoir filled. The ASO, says Jeff Dozier, the founding dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara, where Painter got his Ph.D., “gives us a very good measurement of the properties of snow. It’s a really systematic set of observations that are not easy to measure over the spatial scales of mountain ranges. Everybody is pretty excited about it.” Measuring snow from the air isn’t an entirely new concept. The National Weather Service has been doing it for some 30 years, using airplane-mounted sensors that record gamma radiation levels emitted from a given piece of ground when it’s clear and when it’s covered in snow, a difference that can be used to calculate the snow’s depth with great accuracy. That works well in the eastern part of the U.S., says Andrew Rost, director of the NWS’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, but not in high mountains like the Rockies or the Sierra. “Out West, the snow is so deep that it blocks the gamma radiation completely,” Rost says. coque iphone xr “And our planes need to fly just 500 feet above the ground. You can’t do that in steep mountains.” If the ASO proves reliable, Rost says, “it would be a huge step forward.” One of the project’s most important findings is the crucial role of dust. Mountain bikes, ATVs, resource extraction, road building—all that and more across the West and as far away as China has contributed to the atmosphere in the Rockies containing seven times more dust than when settlers arrived from the East Coast in the 19th century. “Until recently we assumed the albedo of snow stayed constant,” says Painter. “But now we’re learning there’s a huge range.” Concentrations of factories and highways near mountains can have a major impact on the timing of snowmelt. That’s why half of Painter’s lab is taken up with a walk-in freezer full of ice and snow samples from around the world, and machines for measuring the concentrations of particulates they hold. The American West is hardly the only place facing serious water worries. A 2012 report by the National Intelligence Council warns that “during the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems—shortages, poor water quality, or floods—that will risk instability and state failure [and] increase regional tensions.” Tens of millions of people depend on meltwater from the Andes, as do hundreds of millions on waters flowing from the Himalayas. Nuclear-armed archrivals India and Pakistan are quarreling over rights to the waters of the Indus River, which is seeing reduced flows thanks in part to declining snowmelts. Meanwhile, tensions run high among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran over the snowpack-fed Tigris and Euphrates rivers. “If we can put together the remote sensing infrastructure that tells us what’s going on with snowmelt in the Western U.S.,” Painter says, “we can migrate the technology around the globe, because the regions of water stress—the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, the Kazakhstan-China border, the Andes—are all at the intersection of mountains and desert, just like here in the U.S.” Painter says he’s been contacted by water officials in several foreign countries interested in trying out his technology, and he hopes to start a pilot project in one of them soon—he won’t say where. In the meantime, he’s aiming to expand beyond the Tuolumne basin to cover the entire Sierra Nevada. “The information we have on our snowpack here is the envy of the world, but it’s actually pretty sparse,” says Painter.

Global Tipping Point Crisis – Vive la Révolution

(Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Recently, I posted an exclusive report about a new NASA-backed scientific research project at the US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (Sesync) to model the risks of civilisational collapse, based on analysis of the key factors involved in the rise and fall of past civilisations. The story went viral and was quickly picked up by other news outlets around the world which, however, often offered rather misleading headlines. ‘Nasa-backed study says humanity is pretty much screwed’, said Gizmodo. ‘Nasa-funded study says modern society doomed, like the dodo’, said the Washington Times. Are we doomed? Doom is not the import of this study, nor of my own original research on these issues as encapsulated in my book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It. Rather what we are seeing, as I’ve argued in detail before, are escalating, interconnected symptoms of the unsustainability of the global system in its current form. While the available evidence suggests that business-as-usual is likely to guarantee worst-case scenarios, simultaneously humanity faces an unprecedented opportunity to create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves. Of course, there are those who go so far as to argue that humanity is heading for extinction by 2030, and that it’s too late to do anything about it. But as other scientists have pointed out, while the number of positive-feedbacks that could go into ‘runaway’ on a business-as-usual scenario appears overwhelming, whether they have yet is at best unclear from the numbers – and at worst, we find that proponents of fatalism are actually systematically misrepresenting and obfuscating the science to justify hopelessness. Neoliberal-ostrichism Then there are those on the opposite end of the spectrum who have taken up the personal crusade of spreading joy and happiness by pretending that everything’s going to be just fine – all the while ignoring the fact that our leading lights of science such as the US National Academy of Sciences, Nature and the Royal Society are pointing to the convergence of environmental, agricultural and energy challenges in coming decades without some sort of major change. What the cross-disciplinary study I wrote about last week suggests – like previous research – is that our current trajectory is unsustainable because our demand for ecological resources and services is increasingly going beyond what the planet is able to provide. This ‘overshoot’ is already responsible for a range of overlapping crises – the financial crash, the food crisis, intensifying civil unrest to name just a few – and is likely to worsen without meaningful action. Overshoot and inequality are part of the same failing system Why is this happening? The Sesync study lends credence to an argument I’ve also made frequently – that at the core of our current civilisational model is a dramatic inequality in access to the Earth’s resources, coupled with an ideology which sees those resources as nothing more than a playing field for a minority of members of the human species to accumulate material wealth without limits. The vast majority of the world’s resources – not just monetary wealth, but land, resources and raw materials – is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of states, monarchs, aristocratic families, banks and corporations. It is no accident that the Queen of Great Britain – arguably the harbinger of contemporary global capitalism before its supercession by the United States – is the world’s largest landlord, owning about 6.6 billion acres of land. That is one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface. It gets worse. 1,318 corporations own 80 per cent of the world’s wealth, and out of that, a tiny interlocking nexus of 147 ‘super corporations’ own half of that. But across the board, as an extensive Chatham House report showed presciently two years ago, resources are depleting, scarcity is increasing, and prices are rising according to the best data available. This is happening, Chatham House argued, due to a combination of stagnating economic growth, continued demographic expansion, intensifying demand, and increasing costs of resource extraction. The party’s over… welcome to the after-party Since 2005, the world food price index has doubled, remaining at record levels. Simultaneously, dramatic oil price rises have not helped the energy industry sustain profits. Instead, even as investment in oil field development and extraction has increased by 200-300% since 2000, this has translated into a tepid oil supply increase of just 12%. All the best evidence indicates that the dawn of fracking represents not a new revolution for fossil fuels, but rather a “retirement party“, to quote US energy analyst Chris Nelder. Faced with the overwhelming scale of the multiplicity of global challenges we now face, a sense of disempowerment is understandable. However, as I’ve argued before, it is unnecessary and self-defeating. Indeed, what we are facing is something far more complex than an ‘end-is-nigh’ scenario: not the end of the world, but the end of the old industrial paradigm of endless growth premised on practically endless oil, that is increasingly breaching its own biophysical limits; and the emergence of an emerging paradigm of civilisation based on a vision of a global commons for all. Death throes of fossil fuels As Nelder writes in his latest column, we find ourselves at a potentially exciting crossroads: the literal death throes of the fossil fuel industry, amidst the inexorable, sporadic rise of a new renewable energy system. Renewable sceptics are simply wrong, obsessed with the slow, centralised economic dynamics of fossil fuels rather than understanding the unique, distributed dynamics of the new. In Nelder’s words: “Underlying the abundance hype over tight oil, tar sands and other ‘unconventional’ sources of liquid fuel has been a dirty little secret: They’re expensive. The soaring cost of producing oil has far outpaced the rise in oil prices as the world has relied on these marginal sources to keep production growing since conventional oil production peaked in 2005… The toxic combination of rising production costs, the rapid decline rates of the wells, diminishing prospects for drilling new wells, and a drilling program so out of control that it caused a glut and destroyed profitability, have finally taken their toll.” And it’s not just the oil companies enduring “major write-downs against reserves” (Nelder points to… Chesapeake Energy, Encana, Apache, Anadarko Petroleum, BP, and BHP Billiton). Coal-fired power capacity will be slashed by 60 gigawatts (GW) by 2016, “more than double” 2012 predictions, while last year nuclear plants were being retired at an “unprecedented rate” with “more on the way” – largely due to issues with “profitability.” The core driver behind this fossil fuel death-spiral is: “… competition from lower-cost wind, solar, and natural gas generators, and by rising operational and maintenance costs. As more renewable power is added to the grid, the economics continue to worsen for utilities clinging to old fossil-fuel generating assets.” In Germany, for instance, where 25% of the grid is powered by decentralised renewables (over 50% of which is owned by citizens), the three largest utilities, E.ON, RWE, and EnBW “are struggling with what the CEO of RWE called ‘the worst structural crisis in the history of energy supply.'” As Nelder explains, the one-way shift to solar and storage systems constitutes a “real, near and present” threat to centralised utilities: “Falling consumption and growing renewable power have cut the wholesale price of electricity by 60 percent since 2008, making it unprofitable to continue operating coal, gas and oil-fired plants. Renewable energy now supplies 23 percent of global electricity generation, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with capacity having doubled from 2000 to 2012. coque iphone 2019 If that growth rate continues, it could become the dominant source of electricity by the next decade.” A new report by Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that if renewables continue to be adopted this aggressively, “off-grid systems” will prove “cheaper than all utility-sold electricity in the region just a decade out from today.” A Deutsch Bank report late last year confirmed much the same, predicting that solar and renewables are “just at the beginning of the grid parity era.” The rise of the new clean, decentralised energy system is happening faster than anyone anticipated, and in spite of huge government subsidies for the old fossil fuel industry. But it is merely one step on the ladder to a new post-carbon paradigm. As energy is the underpinning of a society, the unravelling of the fossil fuel system signifies the demise of the old paradigm. By the end of this century, one way or another, this paradigm will be obsolete. It’s up to us what will take its place – and as the death-spiral of the old paradigm accelerates, so do the opportunities to explore viable alternatives. The rise of the new paradigm The new emerging paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human – values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment. In this model, households, communities and towns become producers and consumers of clean energy – and the same could apply to food. On the one hand, we need to put an end to the wasteful practices of the existing industrial food system, by which one third of global food production is lost or wasted every year. On the other, we must shift away from resource-intensive forms of traditional corporate-dominated agriculture. In some cases, given that at least 70% of global food production comes from small-farmers, we will find that shifting to agro-ecological farming could dramatically increase sustainability and yields. coque iphone Communal organic farming offers immense potential not only for employment, but also for households to become local owners and producers in the existing food supply chain, particularly in poorer countries – and an increasing shift to agro-ecology could meet the challenges faced by the existing global food system. This verdict is not being promoted by organic zealots, but by the world’s leading food scientists convened by the UN Commission on Trade & Development (UNCTAD) and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). This new paradigm of distributed clean energy production, decentralised farming, and participatory economic cooperation, offers a model of development free from the imperative of endless growth for its own sake; and it leads us directly to a new model of democracy, based not on large-scale, hierarchical-control, but on the wholesale decentralisation of power, towards smaller, local ownership and decision-making. In the new paradigm, households and communities become owners of capital, in their increasing appropriation of the means to produce energy, food and water at a local level. Economic democratisation drives political empowerment, by ensuring that critical decisions about production and distribution of wealth take place in communities, by communities. But participatory enterprise requires commensurate mechanisms of monetary exchange which are equitable and transparent, free from the fantasies and injustices of the conventional model. In the new paradigm, neither money nor credit will be tied to the generation of debt. Banks will be community-owned institutions fully accountable to their depositors; and whirlwind speculation on financial fictions will be replaced by equitable investment schemes in which banks share risks with their customers, and divide returns fairly. coque iphone The new currency will not be a form of debt-money, but, if anything, will be linked more closely to real-world assets. But equally, the very notions of growth, progress, and happiness will be redefined. We now know, thanks to research by the likes of psychologist Oliver James and epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, that material prosperity in the West has not only failed to make us happy, it has proliferated mental illnesses, and widened social inequalities, which are scientifically linked to a prevalence of crime, violence, drug abuse, teenage births, obesity, and other symptoms of social malaise. coque iphone 2019 This doesn’t mean that material progress is irrelevant – but that when it becomes the overriding force of society, it is dysfunctional. So arguably we must accept that the old paradigm of unlimited material acquisition is in its death throes – and that the new paradigm of community cooperation is far more in tune with both human nature, and the natural order. This new paradigm may well still be nascent, like small seeds, planted in disparate places. But as the Crisis of Civilization accelerates over the next decades, communities everywhere will become increasingly angry and disillusioned with what went before. soldes coque iphone And in that disillusionment with the old paradigm, the seeds we’re planting today will blossom and offer a vision of hope that will be irresistible tomorrow. The Crisis of Civilization – Documentary Film Click here to view this video on YouTube. As I wrote four years ago: “Any vision for ‘another world’, if it is to overcome the deep-rooted structural failures of our current business-as-usual model, will need to explore how we can develop new social, political and economic structures which encourage the following: 1. Widespread distribution of ownership of productive resources so that all members of society have a stake in agricultural, industrial and commercial productive enterprises, rather than a tiny minority monopolising resources for their own interests. 2. More decentralised politico-economic participation through self-managerial producer and consumer councils to facilitate participatory decision-making in economic enterprises. 3. coque iphone 6 Re-defining the meaning of economic growth to focus less on materially-focused GDP, and more on the capacity to deliver values such as health, education, well-being, longevity, political and cultural freedom. 4. Fostering a new, distributed renewable energy infrastructure based on successful models. 5. coque iphone 2019 Structural reform of the monetary, banking and financial system including abolition of interest, in particular the cessation of money-creation through government borrowing on compound interest. 6. Elimination of unrestricted lending system based on faulty quantitative risk-assessment models, with mechanisms to facilitate greater regulation of lending practices by bank depositors themselves. 7. Development of parallel grassroots participatory political structures that are both transnational and community-oriented, by which to facilitate community governance as well as greater popular involvement in mainstream political institutions. 8. Development of parallel grassroots participatory economic institutions that are both transnational and community-oriented, to facilitate emergence of alternative equitable media of exchange and loans between North and South. 9. Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ scientific paradigm and worldview which recognizes that the cutting-edge insights of physics and biology undermine traditional, mechanistic conceptions of the natural order, pointing to a more holistic understanding of life and nature. 10. Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ ethic recognising that progressive values and ideals such as justice, compassion, and generosity are more conducive to the survival of the human species, and thus more in harmony with the natural order, than the conventional ‘materialistic’ behaviours associated with neoliberal consumerism.” And as I wrote last year: “We do not have the option of pessimism and fatalism. There’s enough of that to go around. Our task is to work together to co-create viable visions for what could be, and to start building those visions now, from the ground up.” Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books.

Ethnocide- A Homogenous World?

An Except by Wade Davis Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is in many quarters sanctioned and endorsed as appropriate development policy. Modernity provides the rationale for disenfranchisement, with the real goal too often being the extraction of natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves to be an inconvenience. Before she died, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her singular fear that, as we drift toward a more homogenous world, we are laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that will have no rivals. The entire imagination of humanity, she feared, might be confined within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost. Our species has been around for some 200,000 years. The Neolithic Revolution, which gave us agriculture, and with it surplus, hierarchy, specialization, and sedentary life, occurred only ten to twelve thousand years ago. coque iphone pas cher Modern industrial society as we know it is scarcely 300 years old. This shallow history should not suggest to any of us that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia. The goal of anthropology is not to freeze people in time. One cannot make a rainforest park of the mind. coque iphone pas cher Cultures are not museum pieces; they are communities of real people with real needs. The question is not the traditional versus the modern, but the right of free peoples to choose the components of their lives. The point is not to deny access, but rather to ensure that all peoples are able to benefit from the genius of modernity on their own terms, and without that engagement demanding the death of their ethnicity. Our way of life, inspired in so many ways, is not the paragon of humanity’s potential. We do not represent some absolute wave of history but merely a world view, and that modernity — whether you identify it by the monikers westernization, globalization, capitalism, democracy, or free trade — is but an expression of our cultural values. coque iphone 2019 It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it is certainly not the true and only pulse of history. It is merely a constellation of beliefs, convictions, economic paradigms that represent one way of doing things, of going about the complex process of organizing human activities. coque iphone xs max Our achievements to be sure have been stunning, our technological innovations dazzling. The development within the last century of a modern, scientific system of medicine alone represents one of the greatest episodes in human endeavor. Sever a limb in a car accident and you won’t want to be taken to an herbalist. But these accomplishments do not make the Western paradigm exceptional or suggest in any way that it has or ought to have a monopoly on the path to the future. An anthropologist from a distant planet landing in the United States would see many wondrous things. But he or she or it would also encounter a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half of its marriages to end in divorce; that admires its elderly, yet has grandparents living with grandchildren in only 6 percent of its house- holds; that loves its children, yet embraces a slogan — “twenty-four/seven” — that implies total devotion to the workplace at the expense of family. By the age of eighteen, the average American youth has spent two years watching television. soldes coque iphone pas cher One in five Americans is clinically obese and 60 percent are overweight, in part because 20 percent of all meals are consumed in automobiles and a third of children eat fast food every day. The country manufactures 200 million tons of industrial chemicals each year, while its people consume two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The nation spends more money on armaments and war than the collective military budgets of its seventeen closest rivals. The state of California spends more money on prisons than on universities. Technological wizardry is balanced by the embrace of an economic model of production and consumption that compromises the life supports of the planet. Extreme would be one word for a civilization that contaminates with its waste the air, water, and soil; that drives plants and animals to extinction on a scale not seen on earth since the disappearance of the dinosaurs; that dams the rivers, tears down the ancient forests, empties the seas of fish, and does little to curtail industrial processes that threaten to transform the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere. There are today some 7000 languages spoken on Earth. More than just words or grammatical expressions, each is a flash of the human spirit, the means by which the soul of a culture comes into the world. Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of social and spiritual possibilities. Each represents a different way of being, an unique vision of life itself. Why do these voices matter? There are scores of reasons, but two words will do. Climate change. There is no serious scientist alive who questions the severity and implications of this crisis, or the factors, decisions, and priorities that caused it to occur. It has come about because of the consequences of a particular world view. We have for three centuries now, as Thom Hartmann has written, consumed the ancient sunlight of the world. Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion. These voices matter because they can still be heard to remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual, and ecological space. coque iphone x This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. A climbing friend of mine once told me that the most amazing thing about summiting Everest was the realization that there was a place on earth where you could get up in the morning, tie on your boots, and under your own power walk in a single day into a zone where the air was so thin that humans could not survive.