Water and Timing

Posted on 01. Aug, 2010 by Howard Salus in Education, Healthy Foods

By Rodi Alexander

Drinking water at the correct time maximizes its effectiveness on the human body:

2 glasses of water after waking up helps activate internal organs

1 glass of water  30 minutes before a meal – helps digestion

1 glass of water before taking a bath – helps lower blood pressure

1 glass of water before going to bed – avoids stroke or heart attack

As Oil Gushes in the Gulf, Frustrations Rise in Florida

Posted on 26. May, 2010 by Howard Salus in Eco Tourism, Environment, Everglades

By LLOYD DUNKELBERGER H-T Capital Bureau

Published: Wednesday, May 26, 2010

TALLAHASSEE – With the Gulf oil spill some 55 miles from Pensacola, state officials on Tuesday vented their frustration over BP’s failure to staunch the flow and ease its impact on Florida’s vital summer tourist trade.

Gov. Charlie Crist

“We’re doing everything humanly possible to make sure that people throughout the country understand our beaches are clean, that the water is clean, that the charter boats are open for business.”
Gov. Charlie Crist

Gov. Charlie Crist said he does not want to see the video images of oil-soaked birds and wildlife in the Louisiana marshes replicated on the beaches of the Sunshine State.

“That would be a nightmare,” Crist said.

Read More

We are the World . . . and We are What’s Wrong with It!!

Posted on 24. May, 2010 by Howard Salus in Environment

By Grant Campbell

The population on Earth today is growing at an unprecedented rate and will reach 9 billion people by the end of this century. There are those who say it is of no concern, because, if the world’s population today were placed in Texas, the density would still be lower than in our largest cities.

However, these people overlook the fact that there will not be enough water to supply the increased population, the air quality will not be able to sustain the population increase and there will not be enough food to feed 9 billion people if today’s parameters are not changed drastically.

The water on Earth at any given moment is all that we have ever had or will ever have; it is distributed and redistributed around the Earth according to a millennia old hydrologic cycle. We cook with it, we drink it, we irrigate with it, we wash our clothing, our bodies and our vehicles with it and we are using it faster than the aquifers we draw it from can be recharged.

Deforestation and vegetation loss to provide land for crops and living space has led to mass erosion in our farm fields and impervious surfaces in our cities have both, in turn, led to faster runoff, so the water we waste runs into our waterways and into our oceans before it can penetrate the ground.

This runoff takes with it the nutrients from the soil making fertilization necessary and the irrigation processes we use cause more runoff and more nutrient loss, compounding the errors. Fertilization of individual plants is out of the question, so over-fertilization is the rule.

The nutrients that end up in our watebodies lead to algal blooms which lead to hypoxia which is smothering coral reefs and seagrass beds and causing dead zones where no aquatic life can exist.

The early 1900’s invention of Bakelite has led to a plastics industry that is probably the largest industry in the world. Plastic lasts for millennia in our landfills before breaking down and it is too toxic to be incinerated. Since plastic has only been around for 100 years, and only a very small percentage has ever been incinerated, it follows that every atom ever produced is still on the Earth somewhere.

It is filling our landfills to overfull, and improper recycling and disposal has led to a build up of plastic debris in our waterways that is filling up the gyres in our oceans. The North Pacific and the North Atlantic gyres both have massive floating islands of plastic debris. The island in the Pacific is larger than the State of Texas, and the Atlantic island is growing steadily.

Plastic breaks down in our oceans at a much faster rate than it does in the landfills, through the combined effects of the sun and saltwater; however, it doesn’t decompose entirely. It just keeps breaking down into smaller particles that absorb toxins from the sea. These particles then float with the plankton in the ocean, and as they are indistinguishable from the plankton, this toxic soup is ingested by the plankton feeders and thereby introduced to the entire aquatic food chain, and eventually to humans.

Terrestrial and avian animals that feed on aquatic life are becoming contaminated, further introducing plastic into the food chain consumed by humans. Add to this the other contaminants that we routinely introduce into our waterways, and soon life on Earth will be very different.

The burning of fossil fuels has led to drastic changes in the appearance of our world from mountaintop removal coal mining and from the filling of adjacent valleys with the mining debris. This debris and the chemicals used in the mining operations choke out or contaminate the streams that the mountain people rely on for their water supply. The blasting to get at the coal veins cracks the foundations and wells of neighboring homes.

Coal sludge and ash is stored in impoundments that often leak or the impoundments fail altogether flooding homes, streams and sometimes entire villages with millions of gallons of toxic waste, all in the name of profit.

Oil and chemical spills, both on land and at sea, leave behind a toxic mess that takes decades to clean up. We are still suffering effects from the Exxon Valdez spill, and we now have to deal with three recent spills; one in the Timor Sea in early 2010, a pipeline leak in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, and now, the BP/Deepwater Horizon explosion that is turning out to be the largest oil-related disaster in the history of oil production.

Couple this with the fact that the Gulf of Mexico contains one of the world’s largest dead zones extending into the Gulf from the mouth of the Mississippi River, again, caused by runoff from the largest farm belt in the US, and the Gulf of Mexico may never recover.

The burning of fossil fuels, both in production of heat and energy and its use in the transportation sector, is filling our atmosphere with chemicals and particulate matter that poisons the air we breathe and adds to the ever-growing atmospheric blanket that surrounds the Earth and keeps the heat from the sun from escaping the atmosphere at night preventing cooling. This is the primary cause of man-induced global warming that is largely responsible for glacial and polar ice-sheet melt. The glaciers of the world and the polar ice caps hold two-thirds of the world’s fresh water, and it is steadily running into our oceans.

This will not only cause the sea level rise that will eventually inundate the low-lying coastal areas worldwide that contain some of the world’s largest population centers, but will also further exhaust our fresh water supply and decrease the salinity of the oceans which will wreak havoc in the salt-water ecosystems.

If this isn’t enough to worry about, the world happens to be somewhere in the midst of a 25,800 year cycle that has the Polar Regions tipping more and more towards the sun.
The gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon on Earth’s equatorial bulge, causes the poles to slowly wobble. Over 25,800 years, the polar axis traces out a circle with respect to the stars.
Astronomers 6000 years ago noted that the axis pointed to the star Vega in the Big Dipper, not Polaris, which is the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. That means that in roughly 19,000 years, the North Pole will again point to Vega, but until we reach the point in the circle where the distance between the Sun and the Earth begins to increase again, we will continue to experience a global warming that is exacerbated by man’s contributions.
Whether or not we survive is up to us. We can’t do anything about the natural cyclical changes, nor should we try to, but we can and we must do something about the mess we are creating for ourselves, or the whole world will be a dead zone by the end of this millennium.

Everglades Foundation Increases Board

Posted on 07. May, 2010 by Howard Salus in Everglades, Florida News

Everglades Foundation Names Four New Members to its Growing Board of Directors

The Everglades Foundation recently appointed four new members to its board of directors to help the organization advance its mission of Everglades restoration.

“We are pleased to have identified such top-notch board members who have the time and energy to dedicate to ensuring the success of the world’s largest ecosystem restoration project,” said Kirk Fordham, CEO, Everglades Foundation. “These new board members all bring new energy, ideas and a personal network of contacts that aid our cause.”

Christopher H. Buckley, a resident of Islamorada, Fla., was formerly a partner at Washington, D.C.-based Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in the United States. He served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Law Institute. Buckley also was president of the Barker Foundation, a non-profit adoption agency in Washington, D. C. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Salmon Federation where he represented the organization in its successful petition to have the Atlantic salmon listed as an endangered species. Buckley graduated from Harvard Law School and is a member of the Ristigouche Salmon Club.

Barbara Whitney Carr, a resident of Hobe Sound, Fla., and Lake Forest, Ill., co-chairs the Everglades Foundation’s advisory board committee and has extensive leadership with several non-profit organizations. Carr has served as president of the Chicago Botanic Garden and Lincoln Park Zoological Society. She helped create the Academic Affairs Program at the Botanic Garden and teamed with Northwestern University, the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois to develop several outstanding academic programs. Carr earned a degree from Denison University in Ohio, an M.A. from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Landscape Architecture and an M.S. from Northwestern University in Plant Biology and Conservation.

David Lawrence, Jr., is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and a resident of Coral Gables, Fla. In addition to his position on the Everglades Foundation board, he currently serves as president of The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation and “University Scholar for Early Childhood Development and Readiness,” at the University of Florida. He is also a board member of the Foundation for Child Development in New York and the Executive Advisory Board for the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In addition, he is a board member and former chair of the Early Learning Coalition of Miami-Dade and Monroe. In 2002, he led the campaign for The Children’s Trust, a dedicated source of early intervention care funding for children in Miami-Dade County. Governor Charlie Crist named him to the Children’s Cabinet in 2007. His many honors include: “Humanitarian of the Year,” from both the American Red Cross and the Beacon Council; “Family of the Year,” from Family Counseling Services; “Father of the Year,” by the South Florida Father’s Day Council and the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Advocacy Award. He and his wife Roberta who has a master’s degree in social work from Barry University in Miami, have three daughters, two sons and four grandchildren.

Nicholas G. Penniman IV, a resident of Naples, Fla., and Baltimore, Md., is the former publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Penniman has been deeply involved in environmental advocacy work. He was past chair of American Rivers in Washington, D.C., and was the immediate past board chair of The Conservancy of Southwest Florida in Naples. He was formerly chairman of the Washington University Interdisciplinary Environmental Law Clinic and Forest Park Forever. He served a four-year term as a member of the Collier County Environmental Advisory Council and is a registered Florida Master Naturalist. Penniman is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion), and did graduate work at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania (Finance) and at Washington University in St. Louis where he received an M.A. in American Culture Studies in 1999. Penniman and his wife, Linda, have two children and five grandchildren.

The Foundation’s position is that the health of the Everglades is not only vital to the environment, but also to the economy and quality of life in South Florida. The organization has assembled a team of scientists, policy experts and communications professionals and works with partners on several fronts to educate, advocate and litigate–when necessary– to advance Everglades restoration. In addition, the Foundation provides grants to like-minded local, national and international organizations and collaborates with other business, civic and environmental groups to form coalitions and set priorities to move restoration initiatives forward.

About Florida’s Relationship with the Everglades

More than seven million people live in the Everglades watershed and depend on its natural systems for their livelihood, food, and drinking water. Florida’s agriculture, boating, tourism, real estate, recreational and commercial fishing industries all depend on a healthy Everglades ecosystem, supporting tens of thousands of jobs and contributing billions to our economy. Its waters flow through Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Biscayne National Park and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. Together, these parks draw several million visitors each year, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to Florida’s tourism economy.

About the Everglades Foundation Mission

The Everglades Foundation, Inc. is a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit, charitable organization dedicated to protecting and restoring one of the world’s unique natural ecosystems that provides economic, recreational and life-sustaining benefits to the millions of people who depend on its future health. Since 1993, the Everglades Foundation has played a leadership role in advancing Everglades restoration through the advancement of scientifically sound and achievable solutions. The Foundation seeks to reverse the damage inflicted on the ecosystem and provides policymakers and the public with an honest and credible resource to help guide decision-making on complex restoration issues. For more information, please visit www.evergladesfoundation.org.

Oil spill may put Florida wildlife at risk

Posted on 29. Apr, 2010 by Howard Salus in Environment, Everglades, Florida News