Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts

September 08, 2009

10 Easy Ways to Go Green!

Nice to post something on my blog again. What a scorching day I'm having! The sun's shining brightly and my lips begin to chap. The weather is unpleasantly hot so I decided to hibernate, a.k.a. stay at home instead. Whenever I sweat, I always remember what  Al Gore has been always buzzing around the globe, "global warming". Don't say it's a cliche, a hackneyed topic we must discard in each of our chats.
I'm not a Green Peace activist, so i'm not doing this for the sake of the organization. Rather, I intend to remind me and anyone who reads this post of the dangerous and prevalent catastrophic impacts the global warming may cause on the entire humanity.
I won't preach here like those experts but I'm about to show you how to get actively involved in this war against global warming. You don't have to be a Green Peace  fervent enthusiast or staunch supporter to go green and live in a greener way. Make haste, let's take a look at the tips below:
  1.  use fluorescent light bulb or any energy saving light: because regular light bulbs spend more energy
  2. drive less: reduce your frequency of driving motorbikes and any engine-powered means of transportation, mass transit is better. Or hitchhike!
  3. recycle more: Some people find household waste useful and becomes their source of extra income.
  4. keep your tires inflated:  as we can save gasoline and reduce CO2 emission.
  5. use less warm water: Thank God, we're living in Indonesia, where we always feel hot even at night!
  6. avoid packaging: I hate some products which are wrapped in a multi-layered wrapper. Such a waste of money and negligence of environmental awaraness.
  7. adjust thermostat: Once again, thanks to the warm tropical climate we have got here, you don't even have to buy thermostat.
  8. plant tress: the more trees you plant, the better it is for our earth.
  9. turn off electronic devices: It may sound trivial, but is proven to save more electricity, which means we save moe money and energy!
  10. Last but not the least, Spread the word!: Inform as many people as you can about this!
Visit another Al Gore's site containing many resources on how to preserve this ailing planet.

August 11, 2009

INDONESIA,KEEP IT UP!!!

Hopefully it comes as no great surprise to you that deforestation is a major problem in many areas of the world, both it terms of preserving biodiversity and preventing climate change — some countries are chopping down their forests at astonishing rates. But what you may not know is which nations really have the highest rates of deforestation, so here they are:
When considering all these, for sake of comparison, even though Brazil gets a lot of the heat for Amazonian deforestation — and rightly so, considering the total area of land cleared — as a percentage of landmass cleared it isn’t even in the the top twenty. Over the past twenty years or so the deforestation rate has been 8% and over 70% of historic forest cover remains.
NOTE: All the data in this post has been derived from the truly informative and well presented Google Earth layer on deforestation, created by David Tryse, which draws its data from the World Resources Institute and Greenpeace. All percentages refer to the years 1990-2005.
1) Honduras: -37%Historically Honduras was pretty much entirely covered by trees, with half a percent of the land not forested. Today about half of that remains (52%), with just about 16% existing in a frontier forest state. Between 1990-2005, Honduras saw a decline of 37% in its forest cover.
2) Nigeria: -36%About half the land in Nigeria used to be covered in trees. Today all but about 10% of those have been chopped down, and less than one percent exist as frontier forest. Nigeria has removed 36% of its trees in the past two decades.
3) The Philippines: -32%The islands that make up the Philippines used to be all forested. Today only 35% of those forests remain; the only (slightly) good news in that is about 28% remain as frontier forest. But with a deforestation rate over the past twenty or so years of 26%, the future isn’t so bright.
) Benin: -31%Benin didn’t start out with great amounts of forest cover — only about 16% of the land used to be forested — and a high deforestation rate of 31% doesn’t help preserve what remains. Less than 4% of those original forests remain, and none in a frontier forest state.
5) Ghana: -28%At one point about two-thirds of Ghana was covered with forest; now, less than 10% of that forest cover remains and none as frontier forest. At a rate of decline since 1990 of 28%, that remaining forest doesn’t stand a chance without better forestry practices.
6) Indonesia: -26%Indonesia is a strange case. Like much of Southeast Asia it was historically entirely covered in forest, and over the whole nation some 65% of that forest cover remains, with about 29% in a frontier forest condition. But it’s seen a serious decline in that forest cover over the past two decades which doesn’t show signs of letting up.
It’s also an amazingly large country, and there are local conditions that get minimized in the stats. For example, on Borneo (the world’s third largest island) between 1985-2000 more logs were felled than in all of South America and Africa combined. Half of the lowland forest is currently gone and that could increase to two-thirds in just ten years.
7) Nepal & North Korea: -25%Nepal has about 22% of its original forest cover remaining, non of which is considered frontier forest — the past two decades saw a 25% decline in forest cover.
At one point nearly all of North Korea was forested, but today about 61% of that has been cleared — the change in forest cover since 1990 has been a decline of about 25%.
9) Ecuador & Haiti: -22%Rounding out the bottom of the top, as it were, are Ecuador, Liberia, and Haiti, all of which have witnessed 22% declines in forest cover since 1990.
Ecuador was originally largely forested, but today has about two-thirds of that forest cover remaining. The comparatively good news is that about 37% of that is frontier forest.
The bad news about Haiti is that it has had a 22% decline in forest cover in the past twenty years. The even worse news is that Haiti has already cleared all but a fraction of a percent of it’s original forest, 99.2% to be exact. Here’s the symbol par excellence of what happens when you have horrendous forestry practice.