I would have to say that Asian countries will be more likely to be environmentally friendly. They have religious and social traditions which place value on the environment. People in the west took God's word to heart that the land was there for us to use.

One word: Bangkok?

I would have to say that Asian countries will be more likely to be environmentally friendly. They have religious and social traditions which place value on the environment. People in the west took God's word to heart that the land was there for us to use.

One word: Bangkok?

Not much one can do about cities. I was thinking rural areas, but I could be wrong.

I would have to say that Asian countries will be more likely to be environmentally friendly. They have religious and social traditions which place value on the environment. People in the west took God's word to heart that the land was there for us to use.

One word: Bangkok?

Not much one can do about cities. I was thinking rural areas, but I could be wrong.

Chopping down the trees, filling in the lowlands, trashing the sea with plastic, eating or selling the wildlife..... blah blah. NOPE, wouldn't say it's particularly environmentally-friendly around here. Not AT ALL!!!

You wanna share what you're on bro' honey? I spent the the first 40 years of my lfe being "happy, happy, joy, joy" - just like you! I knew where my heart was. In recent times, though, I guess I "think too mut".... the planetary glamour has tarnished somewhat... where do you live btw (dear bro)?

It's not that people think too much but more importantly what they think about. Is it so odd that someone can know well-being? And of course it's only natural that those that don't will deny those that do both their knowledge and their sanity.

I live in BKK. Does that have any bearing?

We can only learn to love by loving.

~ by Iris Murdoch ~

I choose to love the wellbeing of the planet. Valuing my sanity, the posts you see here are a minute fraction of my daily thoughts and energy expenditure. A complex being, I spend most of my energy on positive action and interaction. Peace bro!

We can only learn to love by loving.

~ by Iris Murdoch ~

I choose to love the wellbeing of the planet. Valuing my sanity, the posts you see here are a minute fraction of my daily thoughts and energy expenditure. A complex being, I spend most of my energy on positive action and interaction. Peace bro!

An apt and truthful quote, dear sis. Taking it to heart fully, and not merely intermittently or half-heartedly or when it seems to be easy and comfortable, is a greater achievement than most would realize.

Peace and happiness to you, dear sis.

We can only learn to love by loving.

~ by Iris Murdoch ~

I choose to love the wellbeing of the planet. Valuing my sanity, the posts you see here are a minute fraction of my daily thoughts and energy expenditure. A complex being, I spend most of my energy on positive action and interaction. Peace bro!

An apt and truthful quote, dear sis. Taking it to heart fully, and not merely intermittently or half-heartedly or when it seems to be easy and comfortable, is a greater achievement than most would realize.

Peace and happiness to you, dear sis.

Break out the tie-dye, Leary is making a come back!

We can only learn to love by loving.

~ by Iris Murdoch ~

I choose to love the wellbeing of the planet. Valuing my sanity, the posts you see here are a minute fraction of my daily thoughts and energy expenditure. A complex being, I spend most of my energy on positive action and interaction. Peace bro!

An apt and truthful quote, dear sis. Taking it to heart fully, and not merely intermittently or half-heartedly or when it seems to be easy and comfortable, is a greater achievement than most would realize.

Peace and happiness to you, dear sis.

Break out the tie-dye, Leary is making a come back!

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water..... along comes China..... AGAIN!

China to let tourists hunt endangered species: paper

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is to auction licenses to foreigners to hunt wild animals, including endangered species, a newspaper said on Wednesday.

The government would auction licenses based on types and numbers of wild animals, ranging from about $200 for a wolf, the only carnivore on the list, to as much as $40,000 for a yak, the Beijing Youth Daily said.

The auction, taking place on Sunday in Chengdu, capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, would be the first of its kind in Chinese history, it added.

"Some animals are from the first and second category of national wildlife protection, but with the strict limitations in place, the hunting could not destroy wild animal populations," the daily said.

The report made no mention of the endangered giant panda, some 1,500 of which survive in nature reserves in southwestern China.

Five western areas, including Qinghai, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces and the autonomous regions of Ningxia and Xinjiang, are involved in the auction.

Hunting of animals is popular with Chinese who like to eat exotic meats or use animal parts in medicines for their perceived aphrodisiac or medicinal properties.

But the hunting licenses would be available only to foreigners, given China's strict rules on gun control, the daily said.

"Hunting is not slaughtering," it quoted an official at a wild animal protection department as saying.

Proceeds from the auction would be used for wild animal protection, the report said.

How nice to see an intelligent and meaningful topic back in Bedlam!

Don't show that report to the Night Safari in Chiang Mai!

They might have an answer to replace the restaurant.

Revealed: how Japan caught and hid $2b worth of rare tuna

August 12, 2006

AUSTRALIA'S top fisheries manager has revealed Japan illegally took $2 billion worth of southern bluefin tuna, effectively killing the stock commercially.

An investigation into the imperilled fishery found Japanese fishers and suppliers from other countries caught up to three times the Japanese quota each year for the past 20 years, and hid it.

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority's managing director, Richard McLoughlin, said it was an enormous international fraud. "Essentially the Japanese have stolen $2 billion worth of fish from the international community, and have been sitting in meetings for 15 years saying they are as pure as the driven snow. And it's outrageous."

Mr McLoughlin was speaking at an ANU seminar in a speech recorded and posted on the internet. The official findings of the inquiry were presented at an international meeting in Canberra in July, but remained confidential.

Mr McLoughlin's revelations raised the prospect yesterday that other fisheries in the Pacific and Indian oceans were pilfered. There were also renewed calls for southern bluefin to be protected under international wildlife law.

One of the world's most expensive fish, southern bluefin migrate around the temperate waters of Australia and grow to about 200 kilograms. A $280 million industry is based on catching the fish in the Great Australian Bight and cage-fattening at Port Lincoln.

The Japanese overcatch was uncovered by Australian industry figures who scrutinised publicly available market documents.

An independent review was ordered after the Federal Government put its concerns to Japan at a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. The Japanese also sought a review of Australian southern bluefin tuna farming.

Mr McLoughlin detailed the fraud on August 1 during a wide-ranging speech on national fisheries reform at a lunchtime seminar to the Australian National University's Crawford School of Economics and Government.

"It's just been revealed that … on a 6000-tonne national quota, Japan's been catching anything between 12,000 and 20,000 tonnes for the last 20 years, and hiding it. And has probably killed that stock … And that's one of our major fisheries in Australia."

At the end of the seminar he was asked how it happened. "Largely it's [because] the Japanese only ever allowed Japanese observers on Japanese boats. And essentially it was just plain fraud.

"There were many thousands of tonnes of bluefin a year that were coming in unreported, or were being caught in Taiwanese or Thai boats that were coming in through the back door of Japanese business houses; that were going onto the marketplace recorded as big eye tuna, or you know, northern bluefin or something like that. So it has been an enormous international fraud … [discussion of which] has reached all sorts of levels of government at the present time."

Asked what the solution was, Mr McLoughlin said attempts had been made for years to put satellite monitoring systems on the Japanese vessels. "They won't have a bar of it," he said.

Legal catch limits for southern bluefin have been steady at about 14,080 tonnes in recent years, despite indications the fish stock is still in dire straits.

But it is a relatively tiny portion of the Japanese appetite for tuna. The country imports about 650,000 tonnes of tuna annually, much of it from the Pacific and Indian oceans.

"This is a defining case," said Glenn Sant, the Oceania director of the global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, Traffic. "People can no longer believe what they are told. What we now have to have is transparency."

At least until the early 1990s there was substantial under-reporting or non-reporting of catches in the South Pacific, said Sandra Tarte, of the University of the South Pacific.

The findings also raised a red flag over the Japanese whale fishery, said Humane Society International's Nicola Beynon. "Any countries that are contemplating lifting the moratorium and letting Japan go whaling must be concerned about the probability that it will be misreported as well," she said.

The Bureau of Rural Sciences said the most recent estimate by Australian scientists of southern bluefin's parental biomass - the quantity of adult tuna - was that it stood at as little as 4 per cent of its original size.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/revealed-...4803102432.html

So?

So?

It will be a big deal when the collapse of one type of fish leads to the decline of other species.

Remember that nature is a fine-tuned machine, with most things, aside from man, residing in harmony. No one species, aside from man, is able to outstrip it's natural environment to the extent of wiping out other species.

In Canada, over-fishing (mostly by European countries) almost totally wiped out the cod stocks on the east coast. It resulted in the government having to close the commercial fishing or risk the total destruction of the cod. This would have had a devestating effect on the seal population that rely on the cod as their primary food source.

Many criticize the seal hunt every year in Canada, but fail to take into account that, unchecked, the seal population could wipe out the cod themselves. Between the fishing and the ever increasing number of seals, the natural balance is gone.

Over fishing is also having an effect on the wild salmon stocks on the west coast. In British Columbia, they have a sport fishery, a commercial fishery and a native fishery. In recent years the government has had to cancel, or severely resrtict, the commercial and sport fisheries due to the reduced numbers of salmon returning to spawn. The native fisheries (which are supposed to be only for their own use and ceremonial purposes) are usually allowed to proceed, and a blind eye turned towards how much is caught and what is done with that catch.

Japan hiding the amount of fish they catch isn't a surprise. Look at their whaling industry. While most countries have stopped commercial whaling, the Japanese continue to harvest more and more every year. They claim they are catching the whales for scientific purposes.

In truth, all they do is weigh and measure each whale they harpoon, then process it for food. The good news is that the Japanese are apparently losing their taste for whale meat. When the demand for whale drops, then maybe they will stop harvesting as many.

Man is his own worst enemy. I mentioned somewhere else that if man were removed from the equation, the earth would eventually heal itself and return to a healthy, naturally sustainable environment. No more endangered species. No more oil spills. No more nuclear "accidents". No more toxic waste dumps poisoning the planet.

It will happen eventually. Nothing is forever. We have only been the dominate species on this planet for a few thousand years, but have caused more damamge to the planet than any other species in Earth's history. Our time is limited, and will most likely come to an end as a result of our own stupidity.

And when the end comes, you can rest easily in the knowledge that I will have had

The

LAST

WORD !!!

Every thread has just blurred into one The Last Word for you haven't they?

Every thread has just blurred into one The Last Word for you haven't they?

Kinda like every thread in Bedlam seems to blur into an off-topic version of The Last Word !

Every thread has just blurred into one The Last Word for you haven't they?

Kinda like every thread in Bedlam seems to blur into an off-topic version of The Last Word !

Oi!!! This is a serious thread, a save-the-world thread... bugger off you two

You wanna save the world?

Wouldn’t you love to be the guy behind the rifle here?

Every thread has just blurred into one The Last Word for you haven't they?

Kinda like every thread in Bedlam seems to blur into an off-topic version of The Last Word !

Dude, that's heavy.

You wanna save the world?

Wouldn’t you love to be the guy behind the rifle here?

Ok - I'll re-phrase .... this thread is about saving the natural world from greedy, polluting human beings.... no terrorism or politics allowed - so bugger off Boon Mee!!

For khall64au

Evil man, Boon Mee!!!

Bring on the fairies, bring on the aliens, bring on the INTERVENTION!!!!!!!!

That'll sort you out......

As much as the following article is an intelligent eulogy to Steve Irwin - the recently deceased "Crocodile Hunter" - it is the last 3 pars of the article that say it all about an individuals influence in helping to save the planet... rather humorous too, I may add!

John Birmingham: Expat's feral attack

Germaine Greer's bitter diatribe against Steve Irwin could easily have been dismissed but for the fact that she speaks for a significant Australian minority

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 07, 2006

I WAS standing just down from the radio station 3RRR at the corner of Blythe and Nicholson streets in Melbourne when my phone rang.

I had a photocopied magazine article in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and I had to juggle them to take the call.

Papers jammed in between my legs, cup perched precariously on a brick fence, I flipped open the batphone, retrieved the papers and found out that Steve Irwin was dead.

I swore loudly as the moment fused, possibly forever, into memory.

Something similar happened millions of times over in this country alone. Perhaps hundreds of millions of times across the world.

You almost certainly remember exactly what you were doing when you heard. It is even possible that Irwin's death may become our very own Kennedy moment, given that his greatest fans are all children and they will grow up carrying with them their memories of the day the crocodile hunter got skewered by a killer ray.

An odd generational marker, but undeniably our own and one that is our gift to the world as Irwin takes his place in the mass cultural afterlife next to JFK and princess Di.

Kurt Cobain was sharing a cloud with them for a while, but he seems to have wandered off somewhere.

Not everyone is mourning, however. Being on the road when it happened, I had the strange experience of watching an emotional shockwave as it travelled around the country at the speed of light, borne by text messages, phone calls, the net and the media.

Genuine shock and grief were the most obvious and powerful reactions.

In airports and in bars, on buses and trams, on talkback radio and in high-traffic blogs, people gathered, stunned, literally stunned. I watched a family in the Virgin terminal at Melbourne, the parents hugging their children, who were all brushing tears from their eyes.

Dozens of fellow travellers stood around them in numb silence. But as I said, not everyone was mourning.

Here and there, expensively dressed businessmen and women worked their PDAs and laptops without a second glance at the big plasma screens, which were all running archival footage of the big, sweating galoot having his way with a croc, or interviewing celebrities about their pain or loss. One cable news show even sought out a neuropsychologist to explain, with the help of a computer-generated image of Irwin's brain, how he'd become addicted to danger.

It was all in the dopamine, she assured us. Crikey.

Most - but not all - of the suits ignored the emotional torrents swirling around them. They were too busy to bother with a bloke who had been, well, a bit of an embarrassment when you got down to it.

Three IT guys at a conference in my hotel had even snorted in hard-boiled amusement at the headlines over breakfast on Tuesday. For them, he was just "a f--ing moron" and, worse, "a cashed-up bogan".

"What's he ever done, really?" the alpha male of that particular little wolf pack wondered aloud.

They were some of the harshest, most unfeeling words I heard until, inevitably, expat Germaine Greer pulled on her redundant fright mask and charged into print to bitchslap and rake at the dead father of two for his arrogance, his stupidity and his wanton cruelty to those poor dumb beasts ill-equipped by evolution to make a fast enough getaway when they heard the approaching thunder of Irwin's boots.

Professing her deep connection to all the dangerous thingies wrestled into submission by her erstwhile countryman, Greer championed the parrot that had once bitten him and scolded his millions of fans: "Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress."

For the childless former Celebrity Big Brother contestant, the distress of Irwin's family was nothing when measured against the rightful vengeance of the animal world. Less a harridan than a poorly sketched caricature of a harridan, she would be easy to dismiss as some unwashed and wretched bag lady who had somehow stumbled on to the opinion pages of The Guardian, were it not for the fact this feral hag does actually speak for a significant minority.

Although, to be fair, she probably wouldn't like to think of herself as having anything to do with those three guys at the breakfast buffet, as they were grown men rather than hairless boys, and thus deserving only of her contempt rather than any creepy sexual consideration.

In one poisonous discharge of bile, Greer has condensed the ill feelings of a whole class of Australian sophisticates who found Irwin's cartoon imagery uncomfortable and even humiliating, given his global exposure. Why, oh why, when we are now so very grown up and important, did the world have to fall for this ocker buffoon's man-child routine? And to think of what Barrie Kosky could have done with an hour a day on Animal Planet! Oh the humanity.

Irwin was very much aware of the mixed feelings the inner urban elite had for him, but if it hurt his feelings, he never let it show.

He is well known for enormous sums of money he spent on conservation, but he was also a heavy donator to cultural institutions such as the Queensland Museum.

In the end he knew that he was doing more for the planet than any number of self-styled green activists or sympathisers. Yes, he was a showman, but when he had your attention by slamming a headlock on some recalcitrant man-eater, he wouldn't let you go until you understood just how close to annihilation was so much of the world's wildlife.

Greer and her ilk took umbrage at the fact that Irwin was a fan of John Howard and had even been invited to the Lodge to meet George W. Bush, on the insistence of the US President.

But a few words from the Crocodile Hunter to the most powerful man in the world could have done more to change the Bush administration's environmental policy than any number of rants by a barking maddie such as Greer.

We should have sent Irwin to the Crawford ranch instead of Howard. He could have crash-tackled Dubya to the ground and held him there.

"So you gonna ratify Kyoto or what, mate? Orright! You little beauty!" We are all much poorer for his passing.

John Birmingham is a Brisbane-based novelist and writer

Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...936-601,00.html