The treacherous world of modern scientific practice and its industrial use

Here is a piece from an essay that relates the experience of a scientist within the industrial scientific complex.  Science has evolved to a tool that is isolated from society to have value only to large scale private industrial institutions.  Its funding comes from public taxation and "humanitarian" organizations, but its product is funneled to private industry.  This is an example of how those from above load the burden of their cost to further develop their machines of exploitation, on those from below who are ultimately the objects of exploitation.

Urban Farm Collective Grand Dekum Garden

Urban Farm Collective Grand Dekum Garden

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    The Burnside Arts Trust recently partnered with Portland’s Urban Farm Collective to sow good seeds in the Grand Dekum Garden. Resident artists
CircleFace and N.O. Bonzo spent a week in the sun painting a small garage located on the property with a mural to celebrate the joyous growth in the garden around them. We were fortunate enough to have local artist Dhestoe come to contribute his phenomenal talent. Each artist dedicated time and energy to the project to actively promote Green Spaces within our city. We all believe in the power of community gardens to build neighborhood relationships, beautify developed areas, and promote positive environmental use of space.

Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy

The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community

           

FRED TURNER

           

Published in Technology and Culture, July 2005, Vol 46 Pages 485-512

           

                                

In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth  Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL s text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained, computer networks like the WELL allowed us  to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. 2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and  rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion. 3

               

Land Degradation

Author: Dr Eureta Rosenberg

What is it?

The experts disagree on how to define land degradation and associated processes such as desertification, but as an issue it is not difficult to understand. Land degradation occurs when the economic and biological productivity of land is lost, primarily through human activities. This can happen, for example, when:

• Fertile soils erode away,
• Indigenous trees are removed,
• Alien plants invade an area,
• Farm land is used for housing,
• Soils become salty through poor irrigation, or
• Soils are degraded by acid pollution and heavy metal contamination.

The loss of productive land obviously affects farming and rural communities. As the land degrades, more fertiliser, machinery and supplementary feeds are needed and the cost of production increases. Small-scale, subsistence farmers are often unable to meet extra costs and even large-scale, commercial farmers can find that farming becomes impossible. As a result, farm workers and others may be forced to move to towns and cities, only to face unemployment and poverty.

Principles of Water Management for People and the Environment

Michael Acreman, Freshwater Management Adviser to the IUCN, Institute of Hydrology, United Kingdom

Water, the Environment, and Population

Water is the lifeblood of our planet. It is fundamental to the biochemistry of all living organisms. The planet's ecosystems are linked and maintained by water, and it drives plant growth, provides a permanent habitat for many species (such as 8,500 species of fish), and is a breeding ground or temporary home for others, including most of the worlds 4,200 species of amphibians and reptiles described so far. Water is also a universal solvent and provides the major pathway for the flow of sediment, nutrients and pollutants. Through erosion, transportation and deposition by rivers, glaciers, and icesheets, water shapes the landscape and through evaporation it drives the energy exchange between land and the atmosphere, thus controlling the Earth's climate.

Apart from a few minor chemical processes, water is neither created nor destroyed, it only moves from place to place and changes in quality. The total amount of water on Earth is 1.4 billion cubic kilometers (km3), but only around 41,000 km3 circulates through the hydrological cycle, the remaining being stored for long periods in the oceans, ice caps and aquifers. Furthermore, the renewal rate provided by rainfall varies around the world. In the Atacama desert in southern Peru it almost never rains, whilst 6,000 millimeters (mm) of rain per year is not uncommon in parts of New Zealand. In any one place rainfall also varies from year to year.

Lou Reed gone

A very sad Sunday this Oct. 27th 2013, our beloved Lou is gone!

R.I.P. Lou Reed, Velvet Underground founder, dead at 71

Lou Reed, the founder of Velvet Underground who later embarked on a successful solo career, has died, according to Rolling Stone. He was 71 years old.

Update: Reed’s physician, Dr. Charles Miller, told The New York Times that he died from liver disease. Reed received a liver transplant in May 2013 and had been receiving treatment up until a few days ago. When doctors told him his condition was no longer treatable, Reed returned home to New York City, where “he died peacefully, with his loved ones around him,” Miller added.

In the days following his surgery, Reed’s wife, Laurie Anderson, revealed the severity of his condition in an interview with The London Times. “It’s as serious as it gets. He was dying. You don’t get it for fun,” Anderson explained. “I don’t think he’ll ever totally recover from this, but he’ll certainly be back to doing [things] in a few months. He’s already working and doing t’ai chi. I’m very happy. It’s a new life for him.”