Ecology and Environment

The UN Water Decade Programme on Capacity Development recognizes that the challenges inherent to the global water crisis can’t be met by governments alone. All key sectors of society have to be engaged and mobilized to collectively address the problem. Dr. Reza Ardakanian says the media can play an important role in mobilizing different players to respond to the water crisis.

Shek Kwu Chau is a restricted access island near Cheung Chau Island, off Hong Kong, reserved for volunteer drug rehabilitation affairs, but now figuring in a government zoning plan that would have a massive incinerator built 10 metres from its wonderful rocky shores to the destruction of its special wildlife features and in-shore fishing. Nearby islanders are protesting.

Bolivian lawmakers on June 18 approved new legislation aimed at protecting food for the country, but critics argue it will lead to an influx of genetically-modified seeds because it would give power to the multinational genetically-modified seed and fertilizer companies to overrun indigenous communities with their products.

“How to get each one of us or as many as possible to start thinking and doing Green? As a start we have our Green Ambassador project to form people with a Green Heart to bring into birth a green culture where people can rethink everything and come to understand what being Green is all about,” Albert Oung, Green Institute Hong Kong.

Apparently every body is keen to save the planet Earth. But hardly a few ever think of changing lifestyle which is too heavily based on an over-consumption of energy and so many other things.

New method of rice cultivation doubles harvests with less water and less seeds.

It sounds too good to be true. Lalku Katharia, a farmer in Lalbojhi of Kailali has doubled his rice harvest from half the seeds he used last year. He did this without even needing to flood his fields with scarce irrigation water.

Japanese children have been shown to be contaminated with radioactive caesium just weeks after the government raised the acceptable level of contamination in schools which provoked angry responses from parents. At the same time it is revealed that the UK government attempted to minimise the importance of the accident in order to prevent a backlash against nuclear energy.

We go on with the publication of Ivo Ghignoli’s Chronicles from the garrison of Maddalena, where NO TAV militants are peacefully protesting against the construction of the Turin-Lyon high-speed railway line; the line will pierce a mountain and disrupt the entire hydro-geological structure of Val di Susa, near Turin.

Ivo Ghignoli, NO-TAV militant, humanist, regional leader of ARCI, reports on the brutal actions of the police at the nonviolent barricade, put in place to defend the sacrosanct right of people to self-determination of their destiny. It’s been years that in Val di Susa, north-west of Italy, the NO-TAV movement asks that the works for High-speed trains not be carried out.

A Nuclear Weapons Lab in New Mexico and a Nuclear Power Plant in Nebraska continue to show the on going safety issues and the consequent threats posed by these high risk technologies as these articles from Democracy Now show.