All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Simplemente, una invitación

Santiago Galicia Rojon Serrallonga

SANTIAGO GALICIA ROJON SERRALLONGA

Derechos reservados conforme a la ley/ Copyright

Sí, simplemente es una invitación a usted

¿Y si hoy, antes de la lluvia del atardecer y de los arcoíris que el sol y las gotas suelen pintar entre el cielo y el mundo -acaso para unir la esencia con la arcilla, quizá con la intención de regalarnos momentos fugaces y eternidad, tal vez con el objetivo de recordar que estamos aquí y allá-, usted y yo arrullamos las letras, con sus acentos y sus signos, para descifrar sus sentidos y mecernos suavemente en los columpios de nuestros días y de los años temporales y dentro del palpitar del infinito que canta incesante? ¿Y si, juntos, colocamos las palabras en un remanso apacible y desentrañamos y vivimos sus significados? ¿Y si desprendemos del poemario sus sentidos, sus detalles, sus motivos, para deleite nuestro? ¿Y si este día, previo al…

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Shea trees are falling fast across Africa, victims of new pressures (commentary)

Across the African savanna belt from Senegal to Ethiopia, threats to shea trees (Vitellaria paradoxa) — the source of shea butter — have become a regional environmental concern.  At the local level, land struggles disrupt social ties that have historically determined access to natural resources like shea trees, forests, and arable land.  Poor farmers urgently in need of cash are cutting shea trees and reducing the fallow fields where shea regenerates.  With the proliferation of shea butter products on beauty aisles globally, the growing threat to shea trees remains little known.

Cooking oil, skin moistener, hair conditioner, soap, medicine, and edible fruit are among the many uses of shea (also called karité) in the savanna belt.  Rural women collect its nuts and process them to make shea butter, a significant source of income where there are few other options. The shea tree shares field space with staple food crops, providing ecosystem services of erosion control, groundwater recharge, and leaf mulch.

Standing over a recently cut shea tree in a village west of Bamako, Mali, Musa Jara responds to my questioning look by saying that in cutting the shea he is asserting his right to the land on which it grows. Cutting (or planting) a tree is a statement of secure land tenure.  Yes—It’s against the traditional values and his wives are not happy with the fallen tree. His action, though, is in response to an opportunity to help his family with a one-time sale of land. The scene represents one of several threats to a savanna tree species deeply embedded in local cultures, ecologies, and economies.  Pressures to sell their inherited assets — notably natural resources — force poor rural savanna residents to make decisions that threaten the trees and disrupt their social ties.

Source: Shea trees are falling fast across Africa, victims of new pressures (commentary)

As únicas pessoas responsáveis pela própria paz, somos nós

The only people responsible for peace itself are us

Pensamentos.me/VEM comigo!

“Faça o que for preciso para alcançar a si mesmo, dentro de si”. Eu sei que pode ser estranho o que estou falando, mas isso faz despertar a consciência de quem somos ou do que gostaríamos de nos tornar. Faz também olhar para as outras pessoas, projetos, situações, ou seja, tudo que transmite a ideia de valor, benefícios, dentre eles, a paz que o maior bem desejo.

O ser humano deseja ter um bom resultado em tudo. Ele fala muito de si, e oculta muito de si também. Costuma fingir-se de forte para construir a própria fortaleza. Viver é saber suportar as coisas de modo que, se possa crescer em meios aos desafios, e no final de tudo ter paz, sossego e um pouco de felicidade.

Situações promissoras podem contribuir para o meu bem-estar pessoal.Ter atitudes que reforça a nossa autoestima, o nosso progresso pessoal, diria que até a autoconfiança…

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Florida’s new surgeon general skeptical of vaccines, opposes masks | Ars Technica (Me: Death cult now Florida state policy?)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that the state’s new surgeon general will be Joseph Ladapo, a UCLA researcher known for opposing evidence-based mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns.

Instead, Dr. Ladapo advocates for the controversial idea of embracing “the reality of viral spread” to achieve herd immunity.

“Florida will completely reject fear as a way of making policies in public health,” Ladapo said in a press conference Tuesday after DeSantis announced his appointment. Fear, he said, has “been unfortunately a centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic and it’s over here. Expiration date: it’s done.”

Source: Florida’s new surgeon general skeptical of vaccines, opposes masks | Ars Technica

COVID-19: Quebec nurse taken to hospital after assault at pharmacy, police say | Globalnews.ca

Sherbrooke police are asking the public for help in their search for a suspect who assaulted a nurse.

Police say the man in question showed up at a pharmacy on 12th Avenue, where the nurse is administering the COVID-19 vaccine.

“He was angry and aggressive,” said police spokesperson Martin Carrier.

The suspect accused the nurse of having “vaccinated his wife without her consent” before “punching her several times in the face” and leaving the scene, according to Carrier.

READ MORE: Quebec won’t rule out law to ban anti-vaccine protests outside schools, hospitals

Police say the nurse was taken to a hospital with “serious facial injuries.”

Investigators are looking for a man who is between 30 and 45 years old. He is described as having an “average build.”

Source: COVID-19: Quebec nurse taken to hospital after assault at pharmacy, police say | Globalnews.ca

Brazilian minister tests positive for Covid after meeting maskless Johnson | Coronavirus | The Guardian (Me: Karma?)

Brazil’s health minister, Marcelo Queiroga, has tested positive for Covid and gone into isolation, 24 hours after meeting a maskless Boris Johnson and other British officials in New York.

Queiroga, who sat close to Johnson and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, on Monday during their meeting with Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, announced his positive test on Twitter on Tuesday night.

Soon after, the Brazilian news website Metrópoles reported that Brazil had decided to abort its participation in the UN general assembly as a result of what was the second confirmed case of Covid in its delegation.

Queiroga, 55, a cardiologist, was filmed shaking hands with Johnson and patting the prime minister on the arm during Monday’s gathering at the consulate general’s house in New York.

Source: Brazilian minister tests positive for Covid after meeting maskless Johnson | Coronavirus | The Guardian

Climate change: How to plant trillions of trees without hurting people and the planet – Vox

“By planting millions of young trees, the nation is working to foster a new, lush green Turkey,” Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said when he kicked off the project in Ankara.

Less than three months later, up to 90 percent of the saplings were dead, the Guardian reported. The trees were planted at the wrong time and there wasn’t enough rainfall to support the saplings, the head of the country’s agriculture and forestry trade union told the paper…

One of the most stunning examples of these failures comes from Fleischman’s research in northern India. If there’s a place where tree-planting projects might work, it’s in the state of Himachal Pradesh, said Fleischman, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who led the recent Nature study…

An analysis of satellite imagery and interviews with hundreds of households, however, revealed that decades of planting by the government — amounting to hundreds of millions of seedlings — “had almost no impact on forest canopy cover,” Fleischman wrote on Twitter. The researchers also measured a shift in the type of trees within the ecosystem, away from species that locals prefer for firewood and animal fodder. In other words, residents of Himachal Pradesh actually had fewer useful forest resources.

What went wrong? Some of the trees may have died quickly because they were planted in poor-quality habitat, Fleischman suspects. Farm animals could have also destroyed the saplings if they were planted in former grazing lands, he said. “Well-resourced forest restoration programs can fail to achieve their goals,” he added. “We need to be more skeptical of big claims.”

Researchers have also blamed large tree-planting efforts in China and Brazil for degrading grassland ecosystems. As I’ve previously reported, grasslands store vast amounts of carbon — most of which is below ground — and provide homes for countless species. Yet these ecosystems are sometimes considered degraded and are targeted for forest restoration campaigns…

Over the last 35 years, a nonprofit called Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas has worked with local communities to plant some 2.7 million native trees, as Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough reports. The trees provide useful products that locals want, such as fruit to eat and wood for building, and a new revenue stream from selling seedlings. At the same time, the new trees create a network of forest corridors that has helped populations of the tamarin recover. In this case, it really does seem to be a win-win-win.

At the center of successful tree-planting campaigns like this are people, said Chazdon, who is compiling examples of effective restoration projects for a new mapping platform called Restor. As it happens, the platform is led by Thomas Crowther, an author of the controversial 2019 study in Science, which helped fuel the forest restoration frenzy.

 

 

Source: Climate change: How to plant trillions of trees without hurting people and the planet – Vox