A Different Perspective on Our Atmosphere

“When I look up in the sky, the atmosphere seems endless.”
“How could that silly, invisible carbon-stuff really hurt anything?”

“WOW, is that really how thin our atmosphere is?”
“It looks so FRAGILE from up here.”

EXACTLY.

Check out the full-sized version of this image by Brad Sharek on “Who Knew? An Occasional Look at Things From a Different Perspective”.

Link [Sharek.com]

Light Pollution Wastes Energy, Disturbs Wildlife

Civilization has long since evolved past going to bed at nightfall and rising at dawn, or sitting around in the dark.  We need lighting for safety in homes, parking lots, sidewalks, roadways and other areas.  But, the majority of lighting is a total waste of energy and a disturbance of wildlife, because improperly designed lighting often shines skywards and extends far beyond the area that needs to be lit.

Learn more about light pollution and how you can reduce it in your home or business lighting fixtures at The International Dark Sky Association.  You can also check out a stunning collection of light pollution photos by Jim Richardson at National Geographic.  The photos have a dreamy quality and are often quite beautiful, but they illustrate just how much we’re illuminating the sky for no good reason.

Link [International Dark Sky Association]
Photo credit: Jim Richardson/National Geographic

Pilot Whales Brutally Slaughtered Annually in the Faroe Islands

Residents of the Faroe Islands, an autonomous province of Denmark, slaughter and eat pilot whales every year, as these photos graphically depict.  The Faroese are descendents of Vikings, and pilot whales have been a central part of their diet for more than 1,000 years.  They crowd these intelligent animals into a bay and kill them, cutting the dorsal area through to the spinal cord.   In the process, their main arteries get cut.  As you can see, the waters in the bay turn bright red from all the blood.

Ironically, this practice, called grindadráp, is diminishing the population of 5,000 islanders.  Many of them get sick and die from high mercury levels in the whales.  Mentally retarded children are reportedly being born at alarmingly high rates.

To be clear, the whales are not endangered and animal rights organizations have largely backed off due to the fact that this process is such an integral part of Faroese culture, and because the Faroese aren’t involved in commercial whaling.  That doesn’t make the pictures any easier to look at, though.

PBS has a video about the mercury problem and this culture’s deeply held beliefs called ‘The Faroe Islands – Message from the Sea’, viewable here.

Link [PBS] + [Wikipedia]

An Artist’s Log of Three Years of Street Trash

From May 5th, 2002 to May 4th, 2005, artist Nico Van Hoorn took a daily 30-minute walk looking for the perfect piece of trash in the street.  It could be paper, plastic or metal but it had to be smaller than 10×15cm and as flat as possible.  The trash was scanned daily, and what results is a series of portraits of trash that really make you think, was this little item – whatever it was, whatever it was used for – worth littering the streets for?

Check out more of the photos at Trashlog.com

Link [TRASHLOG]

Awesomely Creepy Trees: From Frightening Faces to Gnarled Branches

As an environmentalist, it may be a bit cliché (or just really obvious) that I like trees.  They’re just cool – how old they can live to be, how many different shapes and sizes they come in, and the way they can evoke so many different moods depending on their texture, leaves, the way their branches curve or how they’re lit at different times of the day.  I’m also a big fan of old school classic (I’m talking 1965 and earlier) horror movies, and the uniquely eccentric vision of Tim Burton, so naturally I love creepy trees.  There’s just something about them.  Here are some of the coolest creepy tree pictures you’ll ever see.

Check out the rest at Environmental Graffiti.

Link [Environmental Graffiti]

Photos of the Mud Volcano in East Java, Indonesia

Last week, we told you about the mud volcano that has destroyed a huge section of East Java, Indonesia as it bubbles forth an astonishing 100,000 cubic meters per day. The mud volcano, caused by oil drilling, has displaced tens of thousands of people and caused millions of dollars in damage. These amazing photos, taken by Reuters photographer Sigit Pamungkas, depict the wasteland that the affected area has become and attempts by villagers to salvage materials left behind in the wreckage.

From Boston.com:

Link [Boston.com]

Story of ‘Uncontacted Brazilian Tribe’ Not Entirely True

We got punked, along with the rest of the world. When the Brazilian media released photos of an ‘undiscovered native tribe’ in the Amazon, painted head-to-toe and pointing spears at the airplane that was flying overhead, people around the world were amazed. Now, it’s been revealed that, while this is indeed a real uncontacted tribe, the Brazilian government has known about them for decades – so they aren’t ‘newly discovered’.

It turns out that Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, intentionally flew over the area where the tribe is known to live in an attempt to get a photograph, so that he could both prove wrong those people who insist there are no more isolated tribes left in the world, and so he could call attention to the danger facing them in the form of outside contact. Ironically, flying over the tribe in an airplane and photographing them is, in itself, a form of outside contact.

From The Guardian:

In his first interviews since the disclosure of the tribe’s existence, Meirelles described how he found the group, detailed how they lived and how he planned the publicity to protect them and other tribes in similar danger of losing the habitat in which they have flourished for hundreds of years.

Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident. ‘When we think we might have found an isolated tribe,’ he told al-Jazeera, ‘a sertanista like me walks in the forest for two or three years to gather evidence and we mark it in our [global positioning system]. We then map the territory the Indians occupy and we draw that protected territory without making contact with them. And finally we set up a small outpost where we can monitor their protection.’

Meirelles wanted proof that the tribes were flourishing, to confirm that the government policy of no contact and protection was working. The aim was partially to convince Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, that the tribe is real, since Garcia has stated in the past that he thinks uncontacted tribes along the Peru/Brazil border are ‘the creation of the imagination’ of environmentalists and anthropologists. Since the photos were released, Peru has begun to re-examine their logging policies – they had been cutting down trees dangerously close to the tribe’s home.

Hopefully all of this will preserve the areas of the Amazon where native tribes still live, so that, in the event that they did become aware of outside society, they would still have a choice as to whether they wanted to join it or continue living as they have been. Imagine how traumatic it would be for them to be forced into modern society due to logging.

Link [The Guardian]

‘Hell on Earth’ in Bangladesh: The Lives of Shipbreakers

There are many moments in life where you realize just how good you have it: you’re clothed, fed, and sheltered, and have a job that doesn’t subject you to constant broken bones, burns, malaria, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis and great risk of drowning. And that’s enough, isn’t it?

Unfortunately for the shipbreakers in Chittagong, Bangladesh, life is not that good. Every malady I listed is what faces them each day, as they disassemble old, rusting ships sent to India by first-world countries to be sold as scraps. It’s difficult to get to Chittagong – tourists aren’t allowed nearby, and if you try to bring in a camera, you’ll find yourself in jail.

DeviantArt user alexiuss has compiled all of these photographs and the following information on Chittagong, which more closely resembles hell on earth than anything I’ve ever seen.

From the journal entry:

These ShipBreakers scrap the world’s ships with little more than their bare hands.

Despite wretched conditions, they say it is better to work and die than to starve and die.

Using blow torches, sledgehammers, chisels and wedges workers break the mammouth steel behemoths.

Massive slabs of carved up ships, plunge into the water, raising clouds of mist.

After the huge pieces crash into the water like glaciers calving, they are winched onto shore where they are cut up into bite-size pieces weighing hundreds of pounds then lifted and loaded by teams of guys–who sing in rhythm as they walk lock-step carrying the very heavy inch-thick steel plates–onto trucks

These metal scraps are sold (very profitably by the owners who live in huge mansions in town) as scrap metal across the country and Asia (with some reworked into ‘new’ ships).

This ShipBreaking installation exists because of the tide. It is one of those places — like the Bay of Fundy in Canada — where a host of geographical circumstances come together to create exceptionally large differences between the twice-daily high and low tides. Coupled with a soft, shelving beach, the tides at Alang make shipbreaking possible with a minimum of construction. There are no piers or drydocks. Ships are simply run onto the shore, and sometimes even pulled by the ShipBreakers towards their final destination.
ShipBreakers live in hovels built of scrap, with no showers, toilets or latrines. You can see such hovels from space using google map:

Ship breaking is done from 7 AM to 11 PM (same crew) with two half hour breaks and an hour for lunch (supper is eaten after they go home at 11); 14 hours a day, 6-1/2 days a week (off half day Friday for Muslim observations).

Workers in Alang begin stirring around 7:30 a.m.. Some wash from a bucket on the muddy ground outside their huts. Others squat by puddles, dipping toothbrushes in the yellow water and cleaning their teeth. There’s early morning coughing all around.

I don’t know about you, but this sure as hell makes me incredibly grateful that I’m safe and comfortable in my home as a paid blogger. I can’t begin to imagine living such a life as the shipbreakers lead.

Get the whole story on DeviantArt.

Link [DeviantArt]

Alternative to a Digital Camera: A Box with a Hole in it

We may not have liked Low Tech Magazine’s bumper car idea, but this one is actually really good. Sometimes, in this world full of ever-increasing, complicated technology, the simplest solutions are the best ones, as Low Tech shows with their pinhole camera demonstration. Pinhole cameras are the ultra-green consumer’s alternative to purchasing expensive digital cameras that will just be obsolete e-waste in a few years – just get a box and put a small hole in it.

From Low Tech Magazine:

A pinhole camera is very easy to make yourself, although it can also be bought. Basically, it is a light-tight box with a tiny pinhole on one side (made with a needle) and photo paper or film on the other side (taped to the box). No lens, battery or automatic operation is used. A pinhole camera can be constructed from a can or a container, as in this mint tin [see photo] (see the pictures made with it) or this tea can. The vessel used could also be a coffee pot, for instance. A pinhole camera can be built from scratch using cardboard or wood, or made from an existing camera by removing the lens and replacing it with a pinhole. These low-tech cameras could be as small as a matchbox, but they might as well have the dimensions of a suitcase or a refrigerator as they allow you to produce gigantic photographs.

The photos pinhole cameras produce are really stunning. They have that romantic, hazy, sort of eerie quality to them that’s hard to capture with a super-sharp digital camera. Plus, as Low Tech points out, “Digital photography might spare the harmful chemicals of the analog developing process, but the materials and energy needed to produce a continuous stream of new gadgets (and batteries) is far worse.”

Link [Low Tech Magazine]
Photo credit: Chris Keeney

Trees Eating Bicycles, Cars & Benches

I’m about to sound like a real patchouli-scented Birkenstock-wearing treehugger, but here goes: trees are really pretty amazing, when you think about it. Some of them are astoundingly old. Without them, we simply couldn’t survive on this planet, yet we as a species have made life on Earth pretty difficult for them. That’s why I love to see things like this: trees taking back the world! Check out these photos of trees growing around objects that were left nearby for too long.

See the rest of the photos at The Contaminated.

Link [The Contaminated]

Sometimes it Sucks to be a Bicyclist

Imagine taking part in a weekend bike race, merrily pedaling along without a care in the world, when suddenly a car seems to be coming straight at you. Before you have time to move, it has plowed into the crowd, sending cyclists up into the air. This horrific photo shows just that, and the result was one dead cyclist and ten injured.

From CNN:

The 28-year-old driver was apparently drunk and fell asleep when he crashed into the race, said police investigator Jose Alfredo Rodriguez.

A photograph taken by a city official showed bicyclists and equipment being hurled high into the air by the collision.

It’s things like this that make people afraid to ride bicycles in the roads. I still maintain that it should be harder to get and keep a driver’s license. There are way too many people out there that barely know what they’re doing, and the fact is, every time you get behind the wheel you become operator of a huge piece of dangerous machinery that, as illustrated here, could easily take out a crowd.

Link [CNN]
Photo credit: Jose Fidelino Vera Hernandez / AP

From Children in Buckets to Old Men in Suits, Amsterdam Does Bikes Right

Amsterdam gets a lot of things right. Among them are drug policy and tulips. It’s becoming increasingly clear that another thing they do far better than most other countries is bicycles. A traveler in Amsterdam took 82 pictures of bicycles in 73 minutes in a single city square, and the variety is amazing. Riding bicycles isn’t just an occasional recreational activity in Amsterdam – it’s a way of life.

This photo shows a normal scene of bikes parked in Amsterdam:

Here are just a small selection of the photos taken, and in them you’ll see bicycle riders of all sizes, ages and walks of life, including a very old man and a very young child, a man in a suit, a woman in pearls, people carrying large bundles and children balanced precariously on handlebars. It almost sounds like a Dr. Seuss book. It’s awesome.

People in Amsterdam take their bikes seriously. Very seriously. Check out the high security chains and locks, human-powered headlight contraptions, and all of the decorative touches. The photographer questions why they use such strong locks when all the bikes look to be worth about $10 – I think it’s because so many people ride bicycles, people wouldn’t think much to ‘borrow’ somebody else’s to get where they need to go – not to sell it.

You may find it curious that nobody’s wearing a helmet, kids seem so dangerously unprotected and many of these people are even talking on cell phones while they veer around cars in busy intersections. Sure, it looks dangerous to us. Trying to do these things in America would amount to a death wish, but there’s a simple reason why it works in Amsterdam: respect and awareness. They’re just used to it. The people driving cars know to watch out for people on bicycles. When you have a culture where bicycle riding is so commonplace, it’s easy to adjust. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get there, too?

Check out the site for all 82 pictures, plus large enhanced versions.

Link [Ski Epic]