“We Are the Land” will follow Pauline Matt’s fight to stop gas fracking on her ancestral homeland – the Blackfeet Reservation of northern Montana. It will premiere this April.
We Are the Land Trailer from Drew Heskett on Vimeo.
topernic
I wonder a lot.
Category Archives: Civilization
Get Ready for Drones in your Neighborhood
While proponents tout the many benefits of drone technology, not everyone thinks they are as cool as they may look at first glance. Civil liberties groups and anti-drone activists note that having thousands of all-seeing-eyes in the skies over America watching our every move, listening to our conversations and even using thermal imaging to see what we’re doing in our homesposes a serious risk to personal freedoms and privacy.
Civilization Creates It’s Own Problems
Study: Toxins reaching N.C. lakes, rivers
Duke University researchers have found high levels of arsenic, selenium and other toxic elements in coal ash effluents and in North Carolina lakes and rivers downstream from the settling ponds of coal-fired power plants.
“In several cases, we found contamination levels that far exceeded U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyguidelines for safe drinking water and aquatic life,” Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a news release about the results of a study into the issue.
The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal. The Duke University team collected and analyzed more than 300 water samples from 11 lakes and rivers for the study.
Researchers found some of the highest levels in coal ash pond effluents flowing to Mountain Island Lake, a primary drinking water source for Charlotte, and also to the French Broad River in Asheville. The study also found high contaminant levels in Hyco and Mayo lakes, two popular recreational lakes in the northern part of the state.
One of the most striking findings of the study was that arsenic, a highly toxic chemical, is accumulating in the lake systems through retention in lake sediments. “In spite of efforts by some coal-fired power plants to reduce arsenic disposal, even a small quantity of arsenic release could result in long-time accumulation,” said lead author Laura Ruhl, who completed her Ph.D. in Vengosh’s lab this summer and is now an assistant professor at theUniversity of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Science Run Amok
I can not believe the arrogance of science and civilization. Geoengineering. Yeah, more solutions from the same mindset that created the problem.
Yellow and brown colours show relatively high concentrations of chlorophyll in August 2012, after iron sulphate was dumped into the Pacific Ocean as part of a controversial geoengineering scheme. Photograph: Giovanni/Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center/NASAA controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.
Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a “blatant violation” of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week.
Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.
George is the former chief executive of Planktos Inc, whose previous failed efforts to conduct large-scale commercial dumps near the Galapagos and Canary Islands led to his vessels being barred from ports by the Spanish and Ecuadorean governments. The US Environmental Protection Agency warned him that flying a US flag for his Galapagos project would violate US laws, and his activities are credited in part to the passing of international moratoria at the United Nations limiting ocean fertilisation experiments
Scientists are debating whether iron fertilisation can lock carbon into the deep ocean over the long term, and have raised concerns that it can irreparably harm ocean ecosystems, produce toxic tides and lifeless waters, and worsen ocean acidification and global warming.
“It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later,” said John Cullen , an oceanographer at Dalhousie University. “Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation. History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.”
LOWKEY – HAND ON YOUR GUN (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
Elites Know Better Than You
It’s the latest thing. Psychiatrists are now giving children in poor neighborhoods Adderall, a dangerous stimulant, by making false diagnoses of ADHD, or no diagnoses at all. Their aim? To “promote social justice,” to improve academic performance in school.
The rationale is, the drugged kids will now be able to compete with children from wealthier families who attend better schools.
Leading the way is Dr. Michael Anderson, a pediatrician in the Atlanta area. Incredibly, Anderson told the New York Times his diagnoses of ADHD are “made up,” “an excuse” to hand out the drugs.
“We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid,” Anderson said.
It would be hard to find a clearer mission statement from a psychiatrist: mind control.
A researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, goes even further with this chilling comment: “We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal [to “level the playing field” in low-income neighborhoods], which is psychotropic medicine.”
So pressure is being brought to bear on psychiatrists to launch a heinous behavior modification program, using drugs, against children in inner cities.
It’s important to realize that all psychotropic stimulants, like Adderal and Ritalin, can cause aggressive behavior, violent behavior.
War Machine Keeps on Killing After Fighting
Iraq records huge rise in birth defects
New study links increase with military action by Western forcesIt played unwilling host to one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war. Fallujah’s homes and businesses were left shattered; hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed. Its residents changed the name of their “City of Mosques” to “the polluted city” after the United States launched two massive military campaigns eight years ago. Now, one month before the World Health Organisation reveals its view on the legacy of the two battles for the town, a new study reports a “staggering rise” in birth defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war.
High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiralling numbers of birth defects ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs have been recorded. Even more disturbingly, they appear to be occurring at an increasing rate in children born in Fallujah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad.
There is “compelling evidence” to link the increased numbers of defects and miscarriages to military assaults, says Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the lead authors of the report and an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Similar defects have been found among children born in Basra after British troops invaded, according to the new research.
US marines first bombarded Fallujah in April 2004 after four employees from the American security company Blackwater were killed, their bodies burned and dragged through the street, with two of the corpses left hanging from a bridge. Seven months later, the marines stormed the city for a second time, using some of the heaviest US air strikes deployed in Iraq. American forces later admitted that they had used white phosphorus shells, although they never admitted to using depleted uranium, which has been linked to high rates of cancer and birth defects.
The new findings, published in the Environmental Contamination and Toxicology bulletin, will bolster claims that US and Nato munitions used in the conflict led to a widespread health crisis in Iraq. They are the latest in a series of studies that have suggested a link between bombardment and a rise in birth defects. Their preliminary findings, in 2010, prompted a World Health Organisation inquiry into the prevalence of birth defects in the area. The WHO’s report, out next month, is widely expected to show an increase in birth defects after the conflict. It has looked at nine “high-risk” areas in Iraq, including Fallujah and Basra. Where high prevalence is found, the WHO is expected to call for additional studies to pinpoint precise causes.
The latest study found that in Fallujah, more than half of all babies surveyed were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010. Before the siege, this figure was more like one in 10. Prior to the turn of the millennium, fewer than 2 per cent of babies were born with a defect. More than 45 per cent of all pregnancies surveyed ended in miscarriage in the two years after 2004, up from only 10 per cent before the bombing. Between 2007 and 2010, one in six of all pregnancies ended in miscarriage.
