Deforestation-the tragic aftermath

Hi,


Listen to these songs and watch the videos on the impact of man on the environment. Big animals like the Sumatran tiger of which only about 10 are left in the wild will not take long to go extinct. Small animals like frogs and fresh water organisms, and plants big and small are all in danger when their habitats disappear.

These haunting images of the near extinct magnificent fauna and flora are seldom in the radar of our everyday experiences but they are all treasures which we must be taught to treasure and preserve for our future generations. They are not only beautiful, but their demise will decrease the biodiversity of organisms on the planet. They are important in economic crop plant and animal breeding and as sources of new pharmaceutical products.














For more songs on the environment, click on the link below to listen to Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil.

http://asal-sakti.blogspot.com/search/label/Peter%20Garrett



Cheers

Heavy metal poisoning, Minamata disaster

Hi,

Watch this disturbing video of what happened in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s at Minamata Bay area. Students, this topic is found in your syllabus on water pollution and bioaccumulation.






Mercury compounds in organic forms are very poisonous to the body. It was first noticed in the pet cats in the village. It was initially called the "Cats Dance Disease". Mercury compounds accumulates in cells causing central nervous system disorders, epilepsy-like symptoms and loss of sense of balance in man. In the 1960's children were born in the Minamata area with congenital brain damage and severe physical disabilities. Finally it was traced to the contamination of fish and other sea-foods with organic mercury compounds.

To listen to some songs on the environment by Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, click on the link below;

http://asal-sakti.blogspot.com/search/label/Peter%20Garrett


Cheers

The earth is all we have

Hi,

On June 3, I was at Commonwealth Secondary School for the "Just One Earth Environmental Seminar 2009".

The first half of the seminar consisted of presentation by various speakers on importance of maintaining a green environment and sustainability of our resources. the second half of the seminar consisted of visits to various places related to the sustainable energy and waste management. I chose to visit the Poh Ern Shih Buddhist Temple for the excursion.

Mr Derrick Ho from MEWR (Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources) spoke on Sustainable Development Blueprint for Singapore and its Implications for Schools. It can be viewed in detail by clicking this link. Here is a more direct link to a list of actions that individuals can take in support of sustainable development.

You can see the pictures I took below.

Mr Edwin Khew, CEO of IUT Global Pte Ltd, a global environmental waste technology company taking us through how organic wastes are treated in his Tuas Factory, methane gas is collected, and the then the wastes are incinerated into ash and sent to Pulau Semakau for landfill	Sec. One students of Commonwealth Sec. Sch. explain their project on sustainability
Cattails, sedge, reeds, bladderwort growing in clean water from the school's washbasins	Pandanus growing luxuriantly in the marsh garden created with waste water from the school toilets

At the Poh Ern Shih Buddhist Temple,you can meet volunteer Mr Lee Boon Siong. He is very committed to greening the temple. Many of his technologies are applicable to residential buildings too. You may want to read about the temple at the Poh Ern Shih Buddhist Temple website before visiting it yourself.

Cheers

Poh Ern Shih Buddhist Temple, off Pasir Panjang Road, is the "temple of the future". It is designed to harness solar, hydro and wind energy for its energy needs	Mr Lee Boon Siong, a volunteer at Poh Ern Shih Buddhist Temple, explaining how even diffused light in the shade can be directed with a series of mirrors in a tunnel to light up the floor below
Diffused light is captured in the shade of the temple to direct to the lower floors	This skylight channels daylight through a winding tube using internal mirrors to deliver light to the temple interior
The hall is lighted by the sunlight coming from the atrium and ventilated by the mesh-like design of the walls	Solar panels come in this size. Mr Lee experiments with different types of panel. He found the "amorphous panels" to be the best for Singapore's cloudy skies.
Harvesting wind power is not so effective as Singapore is not windy enough.	There are more than 3 types of solar panels being experimented with by Mr Lee. There is much R&D in this field of technology.
Solar power is harvested to heat up water for the temple's use.	Look at the panel. Today 23 KWH has been harvested from the sunlight
Table cum bed cum cupboard at the temple is made of bamboo, a fast growing, sustainable alternative to the usual hard wood used in making furniture

To listen to some songs on the environment by Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, click on the link below:

http://asal-sakti.blogspot.com/search/label/Peter%20Garrett

Cheers

Earth Hour 2009 celebrations

Hi,

Our school joined many groups and individuals around the world to mark Earth Hour 2009 on 28 April. Although it is now June, this post is not untimely as the point of Earth Hour was not to raise awareness of global warming only to have it forgotten as swiftly as the next hour. So, a reminder of what we did in our school...

Form teachers and Co-form teachers of each class were asked to spend time during their Form Teacher periods to speak about the event.

They were to show the two videos below to their students:
2.2 million people in Sydney ( about 3 minutes only)

Blue Man Group

Blue Man Group on global warming.

Our students were encouraged to join millions of people around the world and celebrate Earth Hour on Saturday 28 March by switching off all lights in their homes.

They were encouraged to find out that many government agencies (e.g. community centres), educational institutions (e.g. the polytechnics and universities), hotels (e.g. Royal Plaza hotel), businesses (e.g. Singtel, Golden Village), shopping malls (e.g. Junction 8, Bugis Junction), and many others were all coming up with interesting ways in which to carry on with their business as usual but with the lights switched off!

Some teachers also found time to view the video below with their classes.

Earth Hour news

Form teachers spent time to reflect on the following question:
“How do you think the Earth Hour Celebration may change your attitude towards conserving energy?”

Coloured paper in the shape of a large green leaf was given to each Form teacher to collate the responses from your class. These leaves were entered for a competition. Prizes will be awarded to the classes with the most original and innovative responses. The responses were displayed outside the Staff Room.

To listen to some songs on the environment by Peter Garrettt of Midnight Oil, click on the link below:

http://asal-sakti.blogspot.com/search/label/Peter%20Garrett


Cheers

Be a flexitarian and do your bit for the environment

Hi,



'Baa-d' news for all you meat eaters! I have a cutting of the Weekend Today dated 24th Nov with me now. I would like to share what I have gleaned from the article entitled "Eating Green" (as well as some of my own thoughts on the issue). It was authored by Carol Leong.

In this article she states Al Gore met up with President-elect Barack Obama to "begin an emergency rescue of human civilisation". Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reminded rich nations of their responsibility to ditch their "unsustainable way of life".

The world's finest brains are arguing that our unsustainable and excessive lifestyle is at the heart of climate change that is affecting the earth.

The head of the United Nations inter-governmental panel on climate change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, suggests that we may try to give up meat on at least one day a week and slowly increase it to more days if possible.

Dr Rajendra points out that if we halved our meat consumption, it would do more to reduce carbon dioxide emission than if we halved our car usage.

Raising animals for food causes deforestation, soil erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, social injustice that destabilise communities and increase spread of diseases. (Singaporeans ate 90 kg of meat and fish per person in 2007 — only 700g less than the Americans.)

I would like to list 6 reasons for eating more vegetables and fruits and less flesh of animals:

1. One-fifth of greenhouse gas emission come from livestock farming. Cows fart and belch methane which is 23 times more poisonous than carbon dioxide. Animal dung, when it decays, produces nitrous oxide which is 296 time more effective as a green house gas than CO2.
   
   Herbivorous animals like cows and sheep have more than one stomach. These animals depend on bacteria to digest cellulose for them. They do not produce cellulase enzymes to digest cellulose that forms the cell wall of all plant cells. The various stomachs contain lots of bacteria which live in a symbiotic relationship with the mammal. The end product of cellulose digestion will be glucose. Glucose will be absorbed into the blood of the cows and used for energy.
   
   Do you notice that many totally herbivorous animals like cows, buffaloes, hippos, and rhinos have large bodies which are built like tanks? This is related to the fact that they have to eat large amounts of plant material and quickly send the cropped plant material to the first two of their four stomachs. (In the wild, herbivorous animals are prey animals, always on the look out for predators and hence the haste in eating their food.) Most of these animals will then "cough up" or regurgitate the food back into their mouths and re-chew ('chew the cud') before sending it into the third stomach. Then the food has to be mixed with the resident bacteria to form glucose, which is fermented by yet other bacteria. The small and large intestines that follow the stomachs are very long as well.
   
   

   SIDE NOTE: All the herbivores I mention above are called 'even-toed ungulates'. You probably are saying to yourself, "Hey! wait a minute, what about horses and rabbits? — they eat grass too." Yes, and they have only one stomach like ours but their caecum (part of the large intestine) forms a large pouch where bacteria further break down the food. Elephants also use a system like this. Horse belong to the odd-toed group including tapirs and rhinos but all three types — horse, elephant and rabbit — independently 'discovered' the same digestive system. It may sound yucky but rabbits go one step further and eat (re-ingest) some of their own droppings for extra digestion.

   Digestion takes time and the process produces lots of gases, farts(through the anus) and belches(through the mouth).


2. Every year, 32 million acres of rainforest is destroyed to provide land for livestock farming.


3. Growing food for the livestock requires land. Grass for the cows, goats and sheep; corn, soya bean, seeds and other plant materials to feed the chicken, duck, pigs, etc. This requires 14 times more water than growing rice, wheat and other grains and fruits and vegetables for human consumption.


4. Fish farming returns only one pound of farmed salmon for 3 pounds of fish food given to the salmon, a return of only 33%. The tiniest of fish are harvested from the ocean, dried and fed to the farmed salmon. This is destroying the ocean ecosystem. (These tiny organisms are part of the natural food chain in the ocean ecosystem.)


5. Animals should not be treated cruelly even if they are raised by man for his consumption. They are also fellow inhabitants of this earth and they deserve to be treated humanely. Most animals are kept in extremely crowded environments with horrendous living conditions and little ventilation. They are injected with hormones to fatten them quickly for the table, some are force-fed and some are even pumped to their eye-balls with antibiotics to prevent them from falling ill. If you are interested to read more on this, click this link on factory farming.


6. In the case of mad cow disease, the herbivorous cows were fed with high protein animal body parts (of other cows from the abattoirs) ground and processed into pellets. This resulted in them getting the "prions"or denatured protein molecules in the brain. Prions will affect the other neighbouring protein molecules in the brain and it spreads just like an infection except that the disease is not due to any pathogenic organism, but due to misbehaving protein molecules. The result is formation of holes or lesions in the brain tissue, described as "spongiform" or looking like sponge, ie with numerous tiny holes.

Swine flu, measles, SARS and avian/bird flu (and AIDS, which I will write about in another post) are all diseases that spread from animals to man. These are new diseases (meaning they are actually animal diseases but some how the mutated pathogen had jumped species and is affecting Man now). Mutations in the pathogens give rise to new variants, or individuals who possess genetic material which allow them to infect a different species from their usual host.

Man has evolved over millions of years to combat and destroy pathogens that infect the human body. His immune system is primed to recognise and kill them and protect him from dying. When he is faced with pathogens that his white blood cells do not recognise as pathogens, then it will result in people dying in large numbers. This has happened many times in the history of mankind. (In 1918, the bird flu swept the whole world and killed more than 50 million.)

What we can do to be a GREEN EATER?

We can reduce on the meat component of our meals to slow down climate change.

Why not become a "flexitarian" i.e. a flexible vegetarian or semi-vegetarian? Lets return to our great-grandmother's healthy diet of treating meat like a very precious commodity.

We seem to have forgotten the real price of eating meat for all our three meals.


If you want to listen to songs on the environment by Peter Garrett of Midnight oil, click on the link below:

http://asal-sakti.blogspot.com/search/label/Peter%20Garrett

Cheers

My favourite band

Hi,

Of course I grew up with Tamil music only in my younger days as my parents, immigrants from Tamil Nadu, only speak Tamil at home. My father picked up Malay and a smattering of English later on in life. My mother, the most intelligent and patient of women, is illiterate. She taught me and my children Tamil in the only way she knows, orally. (My children did well in Tamil in school as she taught them the unadulterated classical Tamil which is seldom spoken in Singapore.)

Many of the songs I heard on the Tamil radio in those days were most meaningful. The values they expounded will always remain with me.

However, I would like to introduce you to "Midnight Oil", an Australian band. It has stayed my favourite ever since my husband introduced it to me. Bear with me if you find them so 1970s and 1980s.

While the songs are old (the band broke up in 2002) they are not dated. There are contemporary references that are historical and parochial (meaningful only to Australians) now, but the messages are if anything even more valid today. Global warming back then was something that existed only in the minds of a few mad scientists and radicals.

An important aside: Peter Garrett, formerly the band's lead singer, is the present Environment Minister in the Australian government. Even in his performing days, he was active in conservation and even sat on the Board of Greenpeace. Kudos to him for his perseverance in pointing to the inconvenient truth of the environmental degradation in our midst and his ability to move the masses in the most non-threatening manner, that is, with music.

You would feel different about 'not seeing the forest for the trees' after watching and listening to the few music videos I have selected below from the Youtube.

1. Short Memory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgukduYJZ44

Man has a propensity to forget his past, his history. He has a short memory, always forgetting the sufferings of the violent colonisation by the Belgians in Congo, the French and English in North America, the Spanish in Latin America, French in Indochina, British in India, everyone in Africa, especially the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Short memory will cause us to have the history of suffering repeat itself again and again.

2. "One country" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTpGgItl4hI

...planet, One planet, One...

I like to extend the idea in this song to the whole world. The onus is on us all to open our eyes to what is happening around us. Environmental events in one country will sooner or later affect us too. We are not living in cocoons. One ocean, one seabed, one landmass sitting on one placemat, all it takes is one atomic bomb to destroy everyone and we are defenceless. We have to act together and not sit on the fence like a lot of us are doing.

3. "Beds are burning" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10BbpGKLXqk&feature=related
(with lyrics)
This song is about our treatment of minorities like the indigenous Australians - saying that we are looking the other way, are in a state denial that we took their land away. The metaphor seems to combine the one about 'playing the violin while Rome burns' with being unable to' sleep straight in our beds'. It's about collective guilt and reconciliation.

BTW, the Kintore East that the song mentions is a community of the last nomadic Aboriginals to make contact with Whites.

4. "River runs red" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EyQkc2w5E4
Deforestation is poisoning the sky. Carbon dioxide, which is a green house gas, is increasing in the atmosphere at a ever increasing rates. Air pollution and water pollution is leaving behind an earth so degraded that it is not fair to our descendants. Instead of sustainable practises, businesses are driven by profits margins only. The rain water is polluted by soot and is falling as black rain, and the land is dry turning to dust, the river is so polluted that it flows red, as though the land is bleeding. The singer feels as though there is a curse on us, he feels trapped and wants to tell the truth to all of us.

Unfortunately, it is depressingly easy to find pictures of rivers that are actually red

5. "Blue sky mine" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByRbiyxlJJk&feature=related

This song reminds me about the Japanese anime "Mononoke" that we saw in the Library on 4th November 2008. The environmental degradation caused by mining companies in their pursuit of profits is real but won't be fixed by mythical creatures - except metaphorically if we can make peace with the Earth.

I am also reminded of a book by Jared Diamond - no, not 'Guns Germs and Steel' - I am thinking of 'Collapse', which is mostly about the passing of ancient civilisations. But it begins with the bad effects of mining in the otherwise pristine wilderness of present-day Montana in the United States. Are we going the way of the ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and Easter Island civilisations that collapsed when they exhausted all their natural resources?

6. "The Power and the Passion" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukmp4v9ZiU&feature=related
We have to strive to know the truth, not just stuff ourselves with so much junk that is thrown at us. We need to be aware and take responsibility for our actions and not just pursue the "five Cs" (Cash, Car, Condominium, Country club and Credit card).

It also reminds me of a writer from the 60s, Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase, "The Medium is the Message". The message behind most advertising is to consume to excess and not worry about tomorrow.

7. "Antarctica" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2SpVVrfIFs
Human beings are the storm, the settlers with a smile on their faces when they see the clean waters and ice mountains of Antarctica. They are going there with their hunting guns, and snow ploughs to destroy the clean air that allows your skin to breathe. We have to leave Antarctica alone to prevent the downhill slide of the now pristine environment there. Fortunately, it is protected by international treaty - but for how long? And will a treaty protect that continent from pollution and global warming?

8. "Read about it" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joto7Bqnf5o
Be 'quisitive, Best Beloveds... (will explain another time ;-) ) Read and be informed about your environment. Knowledge is power, and knowledge of what is happening in your environment will help you to make informed choices.

Enjoy!

If you could decipher the lyrics for the songs listed above, please share them with the other bloggers by posting them in the comments box. (I used to have the lyrics typed out on some of the songs at one time, which I used to share with some of my students, but they are no where to be found now.)

The first person to post me the lyrics for all 8 songs listed above can come to see me in school for a small reward.

Cheers

Global warming is already a tragedy for these people

Hi,

I was reading in the Straits Times of 11 November 2008 that the new President of Maldives, Mr Mohamed Nasheed, is looking around the world for a place for his people to migrate to as his country is fast going underwater.

Click here to read more about the Maldives

Many of you know that global warming is happening but we have yet to feel its full impact. The people of Maldives, a group of small islands in the Indian Ocean, are powerless against the march of the sea. The 300,000 odd islanders live on land with is just about 1.5m above sea level. This means that at high tide, the area of the country would shrink considerably.

Another country that many of you would remember me talk about that is facing the same fate is Tuvalu. This country also consists of many small islands, close to Fiji, in the Pacific Ocean. Most of the country is already underwater. Only some old folks are still living on the islands, as all the youth and young adults have abandoned their country. At high tide, most of the roads will be underwater. I saw a National Geographic documentary on this tragic occurrence. Most of the population have already migrated to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. They are called environmental refugees. Even small rises in sea level would inundate large areas of their country. They have no more land to grow crops, the roads are underwater. the waves eat away at the coast line. (Their country exists in cyber-space as the domain .tv)

Delta of the Ganges River
(Source: Wikipedia)

This brings to my mind another documentary I saw late one evening on TV. It was on Bangladesh. As you would know, the great Ganges-Brahmaputra flows through this country. Most of the land consists of low lying delta in the form of mud-flats. The whole episode was about how water level keeps on rising in the villages. There was an interview with a teacher who pointed to some steps leading to her classrooms. She said that each year the water level has been rising by the height of one step. The school's field was already totally immersed. The students come to school by boat in the last 2 years! They used to walk or cycle to school before.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Since most of the arable land was already underwater, the villagers were living very violent lives in the village documented. The stronger ones were grabbing land from the weaker ones. One villager pointed towards a wide expanse of water in the distance and said that his house used to be there. He said that one day a new river just cascaded down from mountains and washed away all the houses in its way. Students, I am sure you would remember what we saw in the movie "The Inconvenient Truth", by Al Gore that we saw on 4th November. Mr Gore explained how melting of ice caps would cause flooding in the low lying areas. Well the ice on Himalayas is melting fast, forming so much liquid water that new tributaries and rivers were created overnight and Bangladesh happens to be where it has to flow through to reach the sea.

If you want to listen to songs on the environment by Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, click on the link below:

http://asal-sakti.blogspot.com/search/label/Peter%20Garrett



Cheers,
Have a good day.