John Mortell’s blog

I hope this ad isn’t real, I really do. Because if it is true the people running the WWF are a bad combination of incredibly stupid and insane:

Al Gore speaking in DC at an environment conference 7.17.08:

Man, I hadn’t heard this before but it’s great… A remix of the Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ …

German born polar bear cub ‘snow flake’.. Been kinda sick the last few days and I have to admit that this did cheer me up somewhat.

Very interesting article from the Economist as to why the world is getting better:

In China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.

Poverty alleviation has gone hand in hand with improvements in basic services. Digging canals and building water-treatment plants has increased the number of people with access to safe water: in South Asia, for instance, the number of those without clean water has been nearly halved since 1990. Thanks to this, and to better public-health provision, the rate at which people die from infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is falling in most poor countries, Africa excepted.

That in turn has cut child mortality. In 2007 Unicef, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That is still an awful lot but it represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Life expectancy has increased a bit in low- and middle-income countries. The long march to literacy is nearing an end: three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

One of the most entertaining things I’ve read in the economist in a while…

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density. Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.

Interesting stuff:

Interesting article here from Mark Mardell on the BBC Website, on Romania and problems regarding development versus conservationism/environmentalism – while its not the main thrust of the article these few paragraphs made me pause;

It’s a bit passé to call environmentalists “conservationists” but it’s a good word. Many do want to conserve the status quo. All three of the special habitats I looked at were, to a greater or lesser extent, created by man. Most of the environment in Europe is made what it is by farming. But at what point do we shout: “Freeze!”

Doubtless, environmentalists would have wanted to stop the British enclosure system which gave us the hedgerows and their birds. No doubt much was lost even earlier, when grasslands were ploughed up for farm land. What marine species were lost when Holland was rescued from the sea?

On my visit to Andalucia I asked Guido Schmidt of WWF whether in 50 years’ time his successors would be arguing to save the strawberry farms because a rare sort of butterfly had learnt to thrive on them. He laughed, and said that technology had reached such a pitch, and such fundamental changes could be made by man, that what was left untouched had to be saved.

I’m doing a course on Enviornmental Politics (least I think that’s its title) and given that I came across this Penn & Teller episode I decided I’d have a look. As usual with ‘Bullshit!’ you do feel that they may be going a bit OTT but its still interesting watching….

Some great lines in this – ‘those that oppose Globablisation use the tools of it to organise’ and ‘we’re not sure exactly of the numbers of species that go extinct’ (and its great who says that line) being my two personal favourites.

Also, its weird to see people like Bjorn Lomborg who I have already come across in this course. It does point out that plenty of Lomborg’s figure’s are … questionable. Anyway, its worth a look.