Together For Trees

Tesco have a really good campaign running at the moment that helps to educate people about the importance of the rainforests and their influence on all our lives. As with my ‘one small step’ philosophy, Tesco want to encourage people to make small changes in their lives that together will have a huge impact on halting the destruction of the rainforests. If you’re looking for some inspiration to motivate yourself to start taking those small steps, I think it’s best to let the facts speak for themselves. Full information can be found at www.tesco.com/trees.

• Rainforests regulate the climate, store carbon, clean water and provide a home to animals and birds. They are often referred to as the ‘green lungs’ of the planet because much of the oxygen in our air comes from rainforests. The trees and soil also store a huge amount of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. When the trees are cut down those gases are released back into the atmosphere, heating it up and contributing to global warming. The destruction of the rainforests creates more carbon dioxide each year than the emissions from all our planes, ships and cars put together.

• An area the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds. That’s almost eight million football pitches a year. 50 years ago, it is estimated that the rainforests covered 14% of the Earth. Now they cover just 6%.

• The rainforests support more than one billion of the poorest people on the planet.

• An estimated 140 animal and plant species are lost every day through the destruction of the rainforest.

• More than 70% of all land-based species exist only in the rainforest.

• There are a huge number of items that we use everyday that originate from the rainforests, including grapefruit, coffee, tomatoes, chocolate, plant ingredients for modern medicine, oils to make cosmetics and detergents, coconuts, avocados, figs, lemons, limes, bananas, squash, pepper, tumeric, cayenne, vanilla, cloves, cinnamon and ginger. There are still many more to be discovered.

Plate to Planet

   If you're still not convinved that our dietary choices have such an effect on the environment, or you think it's all a conspiracy (although I can't think of anything they would be conspiring for), then the www.platetoplanet.org website should provide you with proof that factory farming is a very real problem. Here are just a few of the scary facts that platetoplanet highlight about the effect of factory farming in the US:

   * Agriculture generates 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.
 
   * Animals raised for food in the US produce so much manure that alot of it is stored in lagoons. When the lagoons leak, the maure enters into the environment and threatens water quality across the US.

   * Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute say that the equivalent of seven football fields is bulldozed every minute for animal agriculture.

   * It takes an average 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of beef and takes 11 times as much fossil fuel to make 1 calorie from animal protein as 1 calorie from plant protein.

   * It takes an estimated 4,000 gallons of water to produce one day of animal-based food for the average American. In comparison, one day of plant-based food only requires about 300 gallons.

   How mad is it that most factory plant farming is fertilised using chemicals, when the factory animal farms are producing tonnes of maure that goes to waste? Before any of my fellow Britons say 'That's America, not the UK', remember that the effects of factory farming are felt all over the world, the focus is just more on the US because they have more space in which to farm. Next time you're about to bite into your McDonalds burger, think about where the meat came from.
   You can also pledge to go meat free for a week, a month or forever on the platetoplanet website. So even if you only sign up for a week, please, please make a pledge today. You never know, not eating meat for a week might open up a whole new world of experiences for you.

Our last chance to save the world

The Metro published an article on Thursday about the UN climate change summit. Government ministers and the heads of influential environmental charities from more than 190 countries are represented. Rather fittingly, on the first night of the summit the lives of six Durban residents were taken by torrential rain, unseasonal weather for that area. Our thoughts of course go to the families of the six victims, and UN climate chief Christiana Figueres used the incident to demonstrate how weather is likely to get more extreme as the planet heats up.
This is our last chance to save the planet from global warming. Perhaps one of the reasons we don't act is because the biggest impact is on the world's poorest people, despite them being the least responsible. Here in the west we are causing the problem, but so far the changes have been so gradual that we can ignore them. I'm reminded of Al Gore's comments in his book 'An Inconvenient Truth. He said 'If we experience a significant change in our circumstances gradually and slowly, we are capable of sitting still and failing to recognise the seriousness of what is happening to us until it's too late. Global warming may seem gradual in the context of a single lifetime, but in the context of the Earth's history, it is actually happening with lightning speed.'
When I was at high school we watched a film called 'Two Seconds to Midnight'. The basic theory of the film is that if you think of the entire history of Earth as a 24 hour clock, so the Big Bang is at midnight on the first night and present day at midnight on the second night, then humans only arrived on the planet at two seconds to midnight. However, we have had more impact than any other inhabitants. I saw the film in the mid-90s, and it was old then. Although our attitude to environmental concerns have changed in the past 15 years, I think 'Two Seconds to Midnight' would still be relevant today. My old high school probably are still showing it on VCR.