Solar System and Us

Modern Art....or Io?

Yes, this is a NASA photo of Io, apparently the fourth largest moon in our solar system, an inner moon of the gas giant Jupiter.  Why am I placing an image of another planet’s many moons on a blog about Earth and us?  Because this moon with its hidden beauty apparently is part of the whole outside our planet that is affecting our planet’s…..climate!  Yes, there could be things beyond our control affecting the storm that just upturned your prized oak tree.

I am not posting this to demonstrate which side of the fence I sit.  It’s probably clear already that I am on the side that says “let’s take care and start cleaning house.”  I think we all can conceptualize that if a moon-sized chunk of flying rock from space slammed into our planet, our weather would be forever changed (and we’d be gone from it!).  I am simply posting this to remind us to have our eyes wide open, realizing we are a part of something so vast, so giant, so mind-boggling big that we cannot even comprehend its effect upon us, and we therefore usually just shut it out.  We are in a quark-tight bubble, right?  Most assuredly not.

Jerry Mitrovica and Allessandro Forte of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris published an article quite a while ago, and perhaps more since, that enlightens us on a bit of what might be happening here.  They write about the connection between Earth’s changing shape and the gravitational effects of other bodies in the Solar System, how the other bodies literally change our shape, and our changing shape has effect upon our weather. 

“We’re showing for the first time that changes in the Earth’s shape, when coupled with the gravitational effects from other planets, can produce large changes in the Earth’s climate,” Mitrovica comments.  The article, from way back in 1997 (an eon in climate-gate) can be seen in archive here: http://bit.ly/dT8Lyy . 

This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.  Firstly the obvious, it reminds me to look beyond the earth-bound for our weather patterns, to the not-just-big-but-ginormous perspective.  Secondly, from an artistic perspective (being incredibly picky, I know, many won’t see it, and yes I realize this is not a “full earth” but a bit gibbous), it tells me I’m not just seeing things when I look at this photo below shot by Apollo 16.  The Earth really isn’t perfectly round!  Try explaining this to your kids!

Coming next…..what is a Geoid?  How does it relate?

Apollo 16 Earth Image....Our Not Perfectly Round Home

Our Planet’s Lungs

Plant a Million

I love highlighting where people are planting trees, adding to the lungs of our planet.  We can all do this!  Start a neighborhood project, make it a fundraiser for a school or charity somehow… instead of running or walking for your cause and paying by the mile, pledge for every tree planted.  Let’s all get out planting trees!

Where I reside there used to be much greater forest cover.  I recently discovered an ancestor of mine made the trek in a covered wagon to near where I reside, and I thought I was the only one of extended family ever in my region for hundreds of miles.  He and his family came before me, and viewed a paradise.   Turns out I actually previously lived on land he owned, as he owned much of what is today an entire city.  This ancestor saw thick forests vast and wide where there is now a scattering of trees and brush.  Over a century ago, those forests were logged by my ancestor and his colleagues and friends, to build cities and workplaces, and thus those forests have disappeared, with only a tiny region replanted at that time over one hundred years passed.    I don’t begrudge anyone in the 1800’s taking what they thought was aplenty upon the planet, but I mourn what left us in those years.  What existed before for thousands of years was gone in a few years time, and the green spot that would have existed in satellite photos today is today mainly brown, especially when not in the rainy winter season.  Spot by spot, the earth changes….

And spot by spot we can change it back.  We can begin to replant as some already are doing, and the enormity of the replanting needed should not paralyze us from action.   There are probably about 310 million of us in the US, and if only 10% of us could plant a tree a year, that would be 31 million trees planted!  The whole of Russia to Europe may be approaching a population of one billion….and if only 5% of those could plant a tree, that would be about 50 million trees planted.  What if a greater percentage was in a position to afford a single seedling tree and plant it and watch it take hold over a few years time?  What if more than 100 million trees could be planted?  What if many people planted a hundred over the course of a year or two….What if a billion trees could be planted?

What changes we can make upon the planet simply by planting a tree!  Let’s start a trend….it is now vogue to say you’ve planted a tree, in a park (with your city OK), in a yard, in a school, in a forest land with official reforestry effort, for a neighbor, with a child, on a reality show.  Better yet, make it one likely to survive on natural regional rainfall.  Go plant a tree!

Here’s another “Million Trees” effort, in Indiana, US of all places, someplace many of us might think of as quite green, yet intent on becoming greener still:  www.plantamillion.org

Biodiversity and the Rainforests

Rainforest

Involve the people.  We are still learning what balance is possible, and what balance is already occurring in our rainforests.  When local villagers are allowed to contribute to forest management and decisions, the you’d-think-it-would-be-obvious happens:  the forests surrounding them show greater biodiversity and health.  This is the resulting conclusion of a study from the University of Michigan.  Locations of study numbered 84, with the amount of tree species seen as the indicator of health.  And the benefit to the local people was an increased number and quantity of resources needed for food and building, among other things.

“There are substantial disagreements among scientists about whether it’s possible to achieve both economic and ecological benefits together from forests, but little work to understand conditions that might lead to this,” comments Lauren Persha, one of the study’s authors.  “Our study is one of very few that has been able to do this kind of analysis in a systematic way across a large number of cases and countries.”

I am struck by a couple of things…Firstly, that using the rainforest actually increased biodiversity!   The Earth’s forests are responding to the wide culling of resources in a local area by generating more quantity and diversity….a less-extreme and more in-balance example of what happens after forest fire.  And secondly, giving power to the people is a great thing, no matter the location on the planet.  When directed and encouraged to self manage, just as we lead our children, people the world over tend to do the right thing.  And the planet responds in kind.

There is hope yet.

Biodiversity and sustainable resource use may co-exist in tropical forests.

iTunes…& How Connected Are We Really?

Are We Connected Yet?

I know, what has iTunes got to do with a blog on Earth ponderings and success stories.  I’ll get to that.

My best friend died, and I was devastated.

 

She was beautiful, an amazingly gifted prolific artist, and I would often say I could hand her a hammer and she’d build a house overnight, so driven she was to create.  If she wanted something done, nothing on Earth could stop her.  She was born in Sweden.   I am from the States.

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When someone so close to you dies, the world seems vast and tiny all at once.  So strange.  Months later and I am still mucking my way through all the grief, the what-if’s, the what’s-it-mean, the what-should-I-do-now’s….perhaps partly responsible for this blog actually.  So deciding to finally listen to the music she’d gifted me oh-so-long-ago, I was dumbfounded at the symbolism in the music she’d chosen.  It was almost a goodbye, a music list crafted ahead with such haunting choices in title and lyric that it nearly seemed a premonition.

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Wanting to give the music to her family half a world away, I did what many (or at least some) would do today …I turned to iTunes, clicked on my playlist and the option to gift that playlist, clicked Pay, and confidently thought I’d just sent the music to her family, for them to have at hand when they were ready to hear, when they were ready perhaps a few months or maybe a year from now to pour through her chosen lyrics and notes. And then I discovered that our world is not as connected as I’d imagined.  Because apparently we cannot gift a playlist of music to another country.  What?!?

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Fine, being business minded, I understood iTunes explanation that licensing differed from country to country, that even if I wanted to pay whatever it would be in Sweden, I could not because there is no “translation of purchase” available.  Ok, fine, I’ll just gift them a virtual gift card or gift certificate, covering the amount it might be to buy that playlist, and I’ll publish the playlist so that they can click on it and purchase with the gift card.  What?  Can’t be done?  iTunes doesn’t allow this?  No gift card option?  I cannot gift money from iTunes to a person in another country at all?

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I know this backward-ness will be solved.  I have faith in humanity.  And in music licensing.  And in iTunes.  I realize I can put some cd’s in the mail, a huge waste of our energy and transport fuel and capabilities if you ask me.   Why mail cd’s half a globe away when I should be able to click and send?  The carbon footprint to send cd’s round the world when we should just be able to send via bits and bytes is, well,  a bit ridiculous…..We have electrical signal connection and internet connection to the other side of the world, I can send email and files and I can video conference and phone,  I can watch news live (ok, delayed a few seconds) a half a world away, yet I cannot yet send a gift of music.  If someone knows a way, please comment, because I am floored that this has not yet been solved.  We have computers the size of our hands, and yet I sit not-so-patiently waiting….waiting….and waiting to give the simple gift of music to the other side of the planet.  I guess I could do some sort of giant file-share dropbox thing, but I fear it might be, well, lost in translation.

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Meanwhile, back to my eternal looking for the vision habit, I am left appreciating how far we’ve come, that the world is so connected that I even expected that this could be done, that in my mind it was already a possibility, that I’m actually shocked.  I am left appreciating the internet, computers, phones, electricity, amazing software programs and ever-tinier hardware, how small the world is now, how much alike we all are, how connected I feel to a family on the other side of the globe.   I appreciate giant bridges, both literal and figurative.  I appreciate the bridging to come, the success of our connections made and connections to yet be strengthened.  And I appreciate the connection of  friendship, and my beautiful strong artistic shy-yet-bold Swedish friend, who has given me a lesson in appreciation this day, a seeming-eternity after she left me.

Earth Hour Is Coming…

And perhaps it has already hit your spot on the planet….are your lights out?

World Night Lights….and Population

Where Do We Go From Here?

Wow, do we cover the globe now.  Billions of us are in evidence here, and the lights tell the story.  There are not many places we’ve left unlit, and enlarging the map tells the story even better.  Giant veins run across Europe through Asia, a highway of lights I did not conceptualize until I really studied this photo.  Lights are even seen in the heart of the Amazon, in the middle of the African heartlands, the center of the Australian bush, obliterating views of islands around the world’s seas.  Where do we go from here?  Do we build up, and learn how to be constant recyclers in our city centers?  Do we build in the sky and sea?  Where do we encourage our children’s vision? 

One direction we are headed is towards creativity unrivaled in man’s history.  A simple web search turns up fantastical images, not just fiction, but ideas by engineers and dreamers and builders, contests entered and publicity gained.  Some of those images can be seen here http://bit.ly/gEeVg5 .  Dreamers are dreaming big, from lilypad cities with shapes that look as if they’ll take flight, to sunken float-pads seemingly screaming defiance to potential rogue waves.   It will take vision of these magnitudes to give us the solutions to our population sprawl.  We are going to have to start engineering a world-within-a-world, mini-worlds floating above or upon our ever-smaller planet, fantasy images come-to-life….it must be so grand, until we can soar beyond our atmosphere to planets beyond with relative ease and minimal risk.

And that is a long way off.  The nearest habitable planet maybe a few light-years away, or it may be hundreds of light-years away, but it remains to be found.    Engineering that travel is beyond our fathoming…we cannot yet travel near the speed of light to even think of getting there within a lifetime.   For those not science minded, a lightyear is the distance covered by light traveling through space for an entire year.    Our fastest travel currently might be exemplified by NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Mission ( http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ )which reached the moon in slightly over eight and a half hours, a far cry from the speed of light which moves from moon to our Earth in less than a couple of seconds (!).  Our future, if we don’t join forces to manage the Earth’s resources, may be as space nomads if we could engineer that mammoth idea.   So until we can engineer that fantasy, we must join to build the fantastical upon the Earth.

The world of our children’s future is nothing like our past.  It will be a fantasy world come to life…and if not, there will not be room.  So it must be.   A quote from NASA’s Archive: “A manned rocket reaches the Moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England” ( http://1.usa.gov/b3ZRE ).  Now certainly that rocket flight seemed more fantasy to the stagecoach driver of yesterday than does our current foggy ideas of our future.  It is our responsibility to not give up, but to turn to our children with encouraging and believing eyes, is it not?  New creation is only born of belief.   

What will this map look like in one hundred years?  In 500 years?  Will there be such a map to ponder?

Supermoon

Supermoon over the Lincoln Memorial

Just wow.  It circles us daily, we hardly give it much thought, and every once in a while it screams at us.  Dear Moon, you are bald but beautiful, iridescent when you choose, assuredly awe-inspiring the world over, responsible for our tides and axis tilt and apparently a necessity to life here on Earth.  An interesting bit of research here ( http://bit.ly/g37Y6Q Comins, University of Maine) attests to it, in addition to numerous educational shows these days.  Dear Moon…..Thank You for being.

Teaching Our Children

Climbing the Planet's Truths vs Seeking Vision

I am surrounded by healthy, playing children in my neighborhood, tens of them on my block alone.  I have my own child and my own nieces and nephews, and their hopes and dreams and joys fill their eyes and overflow to touch my heart.  At what point do we burden them with the heaviness of our planet’s challenges?  At what point do we begin to lessen our censorship of what they hear, lessen our re-wording of what they experience?  At what point do we let them make their own conclusions?

My daughter sees a quick flash of Japan’s devastation, and I quickly temper that with “people are now rebuilding, it will be rebuilt, don’t worry.  Yes, sometimes there are earthquakes and tsunamis, and we just pay attention to make sure we keep safe.  We also send Japan food and help to rebuild, just as they would do for us if we needed.”    Right or wrong coaching?  She knows our general earthquake plan, but I shield her still from the blood and gore of what has happened.  I am definitely not explaining to her yet that the earth has shifted on its axis, and in trying to explain that Japan moved several inches I only baffled her.  The world is so solid to her still.  Am I wrong to censor her at age six?  Would it be wrong at age seven?  Eight?  Ten?

I have seen the value in my own life of belief.  When we believe, the world responds to our belief, and by that we usually mean people, and perhaps our pets.   People respond to our confidence by following, evidenced by the hoards of celebrities owning confidence and thus owning millions of followers, talent or no talent.  Belief seems their greatest asset and is responsible for their fame and fortune.   And people respond to our expressed fears or outward cowardice by either seeing us as weak or even outright attack.  There exists quasi-science (and perhaps now real reproducible science, haven’t checked lately) that shows that even plants may be reacting to our general vibe, our attitude, our intentions.  If people, pets, and perhaps plants react to our inner vibe, can the rest of the world, our natural world, begin to respond to our desires and visions of it being in balance and whole?  If we confidently envision the world healed and a working ecosystem, will it respond?  And if it does, will it respond in a timeline that includes us?

Australia’s Zero Carbon Plan

Australia is setting out to be a trailblazer, a worldwide leader in renewable energy, and what a plan they have designed!  With a combination of wind, solar and hydro power, the plan takes into account times when one type is not as fruitful, and they’ve also taken into account re-employing their nation’s coal workers into the new future.  For this effort, they were awarded the Mercedes Benz Australian Environmental Research Award:

May the world be so inspired as Australia seeks to be a “first mover” !

www.zerocarbonplan.org

International Year of Forests and Rwanda

The world over we are starting to see more care of forest and habitat, more programs of sustainability brought to the local people of various parts of the world, good that is growing and spreading and propagating.  Around the planet I stand in awe at various million-tree planting efforts, a beautiful example of human desire to effect change and get an amazing act accomplished.  Here I now highlight the effort taking place in connection with the International Year of Forests, bringing people into reverence for the forest wealth that surrounds  them, re-establishing damaged forest, and ensuring their future protection of that forest, a bit of our planet’s lungs.

Here we look at Rwanda, a beautiful place saddled with so much history, political and natural.  This is a country rising from its ashes, and the latest example is brought to us by Dan Rugabira.  Mr Rugabira, Programme Coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation’s Forestry Department, states “Our most important partner are the population, the people who are living in the forest.”  He highlights the relationship held by Rwanda’s population with the rainforest.   Mr Rugabira is helping in the effort for the people of Rwanda to understand their connection to the forest, how it sustains them, the reasons for them to feel pride for it and to work to sustain it.  “The forest is really in their daily life, from morning to evening. For today’s use but also for the generations to come.”  Rwanda has had much forest damage from various avenues including its civil war, and now its people can be seen taking ownership of their forest, actually growing the seedlings themselves and taking charge of reforestation one village at a time.  Here in this video can be noted this growing and enduring relationship between the people and their forest, understanding they must preserve and not destroy, the sense of growing pride, literally and figuratively.  The International Year of Forests 2011 is changing the planet, one village at a time: