watertank: (Default)
China is on its way to becoming not only the world’s largest economy, but also its largest polluter. Of the world’s twenty most polluted cities, sixteen are in China. Ninety percent of the country’s cities have contaminated groundwater. The World Bank predicts that in the next fifteen years, China’s shortage of clean water will create 30 million “environmental refugees.”

China’s pollution problems, moreover, are no longer solely its own. Winds that whip up over the Gobi Desert sweep dark clouds of mercury, soot, and carbon monoxide to South Korea and Japan; as much as 40 percent of the air pollution in these countries can be traced to China. The toxic plumes travel further afield, now detected by scientists in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. On bad days, a quarter of Los Angeles’s smog originates in China. Later this year, China is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases; within twenty-five years, its annual contribution to global warming could triple.
...
Not only is China’s emerging environmental movement tolerated by the central government; for the most part, it’s encouraged. More than 3,000 groups like Green Camel Bell currently operate in China, constituting the largest and most developed segment of the country’s budding civil society. Some NGO leaders are even consulted by government officials and praised by the state-controlled media.



Read the whole thing.
watertank: (Default)
Cauvin's central point... is that.. the development of domestication was not a sudden event owing to penury, or some other economic threat. Instead, sedentism long preceded domestication, houses had already changed from the primitive round structures, half underground, to rectangular buildings above ground, and that bricks and symbolic artefacts were already being produced. From this, he says, we may infer that early man, roughly 12,000-10,000 years ago, underwent a profound psychological change, essitially a religious revolution, and that this precided domestication of animals and plants. Ibid. p 60-61.

nb: evolution of food sources; control provides lifestyle continuity within the evolution.
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"We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing, because it's too expensive and it's too risky.

"I think the secret to the future is quantity," Lucas told Daily Variety. "Because that's where it's going to end up."
http://www.variety.com/VR1117951284.html

George Lucas, Oct 4, 2006.
watertank: (Default)
great news! just got an e-mail from mark - he found the word I've been looking for for the last couple of years! Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah!

and the word is ( drum roll please): payload

it's beautiful, isn't it. and it has a meaning in the common language, which is what I've been after all that time.

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

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