Mans Impact On Earth

Man vs. Earth - The Battle Is On

YouTube user Steve Cutts illustrates the fight between humans and the place we all call home. Who will triumph? 

Watch all three-and-a-half minutes to learn the surprising identity of the winner.

Via: "Mashable"

Meet The Frackers

“…There’s a new resident moving into America’s cities and suburbs, peeking over backyard fences and casting a shadow over shopping malls. Some folks are being right neighbourly and are welcoming the new arrival. But many more are fretting about how the stranger might dramatically impact their safe and peaceful suburban lives. It’s setting neighbour against neighbour and dividing communities. Honey, meet the Frackers…”

“…If conniving TV oil baron JR Ewing stepped out onto the porch of Southfork and surveyed a sprawl of fine suburban housing intermingled with oil and gas plants you’d be sure that characteristic big wide winners’ grin would break out across the Dallas bad guy’s dial. Surely this is a triumphant picture of industry at harmony with residential life. An American dreamland.

But this isn’t Southfork, Dallas it’s Southlake, Dallas and many residents aren’t so taken with the idea of drilling rigs pressing up against their backyard fences.

‘There is no amount of money that will convince me that we should have this in the middle of our neighbourhoods. I’m not going to put a price tag on the health and safety and well being of my family.’ DIANE HARRIS Southlake resident

Spreading beneath Southlake and a chain of communities fanning out from the big Texan centre is an oil and gas rich Eldorado called the Barnett Shale field and developers are stampeding for a piece of the action. It’s all part of an accelerated quest within the United States for energy independence, to loosen the reliance on the Middle East and shoot for home grown solutions to energy demand.

But to liberate the bounty below calls for a controversial process called Fracking.

Fracking involves injected huge quantities of water and chemicals into a subterranean setting shattering the shale and releasing gas and oil.

‘A lot of things that are generated during this process are known to be harmful to human beings. But it’s similar in my mind to how we found out about cigarette smoking and cancer. It wasn’t that we did a study and found out oh no look cigarettes cause cancer, it was 40, 50 years of ah… exposure.’ DR GORDON AALUND Emergency Doctor and Southlake Resident

In this revealing journey through America’s suburban heartland and onto where fracking is taking place on a panoramic scale in hitherto moribund states like North Dakota, North America Correspondent Michael Brissenden hears very conflicting views about the pros and cons of fracking.

There’s the young urban gas jock making a bundle on a rig outside Fort Worth.

‘Every day, probably to the end of this world, we’ll keep drillin’. There will be holes in the ground and we will be there.’ TAYLOR HINKLE, Rig worker

There’s the North Dakota county development chief watching the boom go kaboom! and dramatically transforming his state.

‘A boom beyond - I think it’s safe to say - anything that anybody has really seen in this country since probably the land rushes in the early 1900’s.’ GENE VEEDER Watford City, McKenzie County

And there’s the small Dakota landholder who says her pristine creek has been tainted by underground leaks generated by fracking such that it doesn’t freeze over, even in the depths of a bitter North Dakota winter. Jacki Schilke is also blaming fracking for her failing health.

‘They’re here to rape this land, make as much money as they can and get the hell out of here. They could give a crap less what they are doing here. They will come on your property look you straight in the eye and lie to you. And they will leave without a second thought and they don’t care’JACKI SCHILKE, North Dakota farmer

As the fracking question gathers momentum locally — are we glimpsing an Australian future?…”

Transcript- http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2012/s3441606.htm

 & http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-28/meet-the-frackers/3858344

The Crisis Of Civilization

A dark comedy remix mash-up bonanza about the end of industrial civilization. 

Website http://crisisofcivilization.com


Listen to our response to some of the your comments herehttp://crisisofcivilization.com/podcast2/


Directed by Dean Puckett


Animations by Lucca Benney

Based on the Book by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed :http://crisisofcivilization.com/book/

Animal Cruelty

Post by "CavalierZee"



Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates, and cages. Vile ignoble gulags of despair.


I heard the screams of my dying father as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him. And I realised I had heard these screams before.


In the slaughterhouse, eyes stabbed out and tendons slashed, on the cattle ships to the Middle East and the dying mother whale as a Japanese harpoon explodes in her brain as she calls out to her calf.

Earth As Art : Masterpieces Of Stone and Ice

Post by "CavalierZee"



Revel in Earth as Art. Make sure you watch in glorious 1080p. Landsat missions were launched for scientific purposes, but they make up one of the most awe-inspiring collections of beautiful images of our home planet.

For the last few centuries, artists have been exploring Earth's untamed and awe-inspiring vistas, often as an antidote to life in the modern world. They evoked the grandeur of the Hudson River, the peace of Scandinavian fiords, or the omnipotent power of the ocean. This romantic ideal today has gained a new vantage point, from space, and a new set of brushes for capturing the beauty of our planet.

Landsat images feature colors tuned to record geological or even human forces at work. More than that, though, this great gallery of Earth explores its timeless beauty, its uncertain path forward.

So take this tour of Earth's great landforms as seen from space. We travel to Africa and the Sahara and Namib deserts, to Argentina and Bolivia, the American heartland, and the great Canadian land and ice forms. Then it's on to Greenland, Iceland, Russia, India, China, and finally the continent down under.

We wrap our journey in a small corner of the vast Great Sandy Desert. The satellite has brought out the scarring action of natural wildfires. The narrow sand dunes that cut across the scene are like cracks on an ancient brittle canvas. A masterpiece, from the turbulent imagination of an artist, whose brushes are wind, and fire, and time.

Earth May Reach Tipping Point

Posted by "CavalierZee"


By ALEXANDER ABAD-SANTOSJUN 7, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Atlantic Wire"

A new study by 22 biologists and ecologists has found that environmental changes on our planet are reaching a point of no return that leads to mass extinctions and harms human welfare. The situation, said one scientist, “scares the hell out of me.” That would be James H. Brown, one of the authors of alarming paper published by Nature, talking to New York Times Green blogger Justin Gillis. Brown is not one of your everyday cranks predicting raptures and the end of days. He is a macroecologist at the University of New Mexico. And as The Atlantic's James Fallows, who pointed out this terrifying study to us, writes, this could be the most important news of 2012. How soon do these scientists expect the world as we know it to end? Gillis writes, "within a few human generations, if not sooner." The most frightening thing is that this finding isn't about what will come if we do not act, but that our effects on the planet's environment -- global warming, population growth, and overall resource extraction -- means that we've already passed a "tipping point." This isn't a plea for change. These are things scientists have been warning us about for decades.

Here's a video from one of the scientists involved: 

Welcome To The Anthropocene

Posted by "CavalierZee"



A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes. 

The film was commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, London 26-29 March, a major international conference focusing on solutions.planetunderpressure2012.net

The Anthropocene is a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. 

The term was coined by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere.

In 2008 a proposal was presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to make the Anthropocene a formal unit of geological time.

A large majority of that Stratigraphy Commission decided the proposal had merit and should therefore be examined further. Steps are being taken by independent working groups of scientists from various geological societies to determine if the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.

Many scientists are now using the term and the Geological Society of America titled its 2011 annual meeting: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future. 

The Anthropocene has no precise start date, but based on atmospheric evidence may be considered to start with the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century). Other scientists link it to earlier events, such as the rise of agriculture.

Evidence of relative human impact such as the growing human influence on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity and species extinction is controversial, some scientists believe the human impact has significantly changed (or halted) the growth of biodiversity.

The Anthropocene may have begun as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years before present, based on lithospheric evidence; this has led other scientists to suggest that "the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousand years"; this would be closely synchronous with the current term, Holocene. 


[Info via: WikiPedia]