I think we have to get Donville the Doer to tackle the excessive vehicle emissions, importation of banned chemicals,improve surveillance of foods imported and ban backyard burning. Dead Dennis aint doing a thing for de environment.

The comments to this very serious issue is like a pock mark on this blog. The topic does not allow political spinners to fulminate so there is little interest. A lady recently recently on the call in programme said that she saw tear drop like formation in the caribbean sea. These tear drops indicated that the sea bed was denuded. The recent earth quake in the US spread over 22 states. People remember that our quake stated in south america and came through the caribbean sea bed. What hurts me is that we have a fool like liz thompson having a major say in this environmental thing.

Grow wunnuh own food. Stop eating the imported crap that the white merchants import. Eating, eating-out, and gourmet cooking is highly overated and part of our problem. In fact I believe that the less business the majority black population of Barbados transact with the minority elite so-called business class the better their lot will be.

Are we buying what Dr. Nurse from the CZM is telling us about the invasion of the seaweed.

@ Adrian Hinds,

I hope yuh ent mean fellas like “Proper pork” Bynoe an Jordan an dem so.

There seems to be a weighty concern that aggressively removing the seaweed can interrupt the ecosystem which feeds on it. The plan is to shift the weed to the backside of the beach.

@Caswell

A mini-stimulus!

B.U David:I would hope ‘POSTINGS’ like that above are not a ‘one day
wonder!’ People and politicians should constantly be reminded about the dangers to our environment; our future is at stake.
Some of us are aware of ‘postings’, ‘RE- monsanto’ and the dangers our environment.
I have not come across one politician who has publicly denounce
such practices.It is my belief that no politician would speak out
while in office, no matter how he feels about the subject in private.
Just cast our minds back to how good DDT was; the warnings by many ‘doctors/scientists’ about the dangers of many drugs, appproved for use today.
We have also read about the threats to the livelyhood of employeees working in such firms, who have stuck their necks out to warn the world of the dangers many of those drugs tested and found to be a serious threat to the ‘person’, yet many are still is use today Has anyone seen the exploding melons growing in China for consumption and perhaps export; ‘the tainted milk issue in China and God knows what else!
I think the tide has swung against us; I cannot see how it can be turned around.
The seaweed we are seeing on the coast has been spotted some time ago off the coast of Canada, up North. I have never known or heard of so much seaweed to be deposited on beaches around the world like what we are seeing now. Is it because of chemicals?” Are our eco-system now being threatened or is this an on-going process?
Technology: Is making strides; has anyone stopped to think how this is impacting the environment?
Who and what are responsible? My answer is somewhere!
Who are the real people behind the economy?
I have read for some time, the high level of mercury in salmon for many years; the high level of sulphur in diesel and the high level of lead in petrol.
Lead in petrol was discontinued by majority of countries, now being replaced by MPTE.This can have a devastating effect on the environment; it is not easily broken down; yet it is still widely used. For many years we have seen an increased in many types of cancer and other diseases. We tend to gloat about the advances in medicines and yet we cannot find a cure for cancer. We observe Billions of dollars spent to send people to the moon yet we cannot find a cure for ‘the cold’.
This is all about money and who controls money.
I am outa hey!

When last have you seen butterflies, local honey bees, doctor bubies? Are they bordering on extinction in Barbados? People get vex when I say Dr Denis Lowe and his Ministry aint doing a thing to protect de environment.

A related link:

Beekeeping becomes the new buzz in London
Emma Jacobs
London— Financial Times
Posted on Friday, August 26, 2011 6:44AM EDT

Despite its recent battering, the London Stock Exchange will next month take on thousands of new workers. The new recruits, however, are not traders, but worker bees, as the LSE becomes the latest business to install hives on its premises.

Xavier Rolet, LSE chief executive, is enthusiastic about the project.

He keeps bees at his family’s home, in a converted medieval priory in Provence. When the LSE takes delivery of its two hives, housing 100,000 bees in the heart of London, it will be helping to maintain a fragile and dwindling population.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/global-exchange/financial-times/beekeeping-becomes-the-new-buzz-in-london/article2142933/

I’m glad to see an environmental issue being discussed…so often we pay lip service to or gloss over issues coming from the natural world as if we are not part of that world. We also have a tendency to see the environment as a vehicle to be exploited solely for the benefit of the human race without seeming to recognize that exploitation incurs penalties. In a small land space with such a large population, I too think that we use far too many insecticides and herbicides. An individual spraying copious amounts of malathion may not realize that a few hundred yards down the road, individuals may be breathing in micro droplets carried by the wind. Or those individuals who spray the contents of a can of insecticide in a closed room to kill a harmless gecko lizard (poison lizard) without realizing that they have committed two grievous sins. First, they have removed a predator which consumes large quantities of potentially disease bearing mosquitoes and secondly, the toxins released may very well trigger the development of some underlying cancer years down the road.
Bees do seem to be in short supply and when swarms are found, the reaction seems to be to destroy them. Bats are also not seen for what they are…very efficient consumers of potentially dangerous insects. I don’t see any companies in the Yellow Pages advertising the sale of bat houses (there really are such things), but I do see advertisements by companies willing and ready to eradicate bats through the use of some form of poison. Is this widespread use of toxins really related to the high incidence of many types of cancer on this island? These are issues which should concern us.
Butterflies and humming birds (Doctor Boobies)can be encouraged by planting specific types of flowering plants..i.e. sage or Antigua heath. Our innate sense of order ( a very Barbadian characteristic now undergoing dilution) sees “bush” i.e. natural vegetation, as unsightly. We like a tightly controlled environment…neatly mowed lawns. However, an acre of bush has many more life forms in it than ten acres of relatively sterile lawns.
The unprecedented deposits of sargassum weed on both sides of the Atlantic (beaches in West Africa are also being affected) is cause for concern. It is unsightly and as rightly pointed out by the authorities, may cause tourists to stay away…nobody wants to sun or swim on beaches covered with mounds of rotting vegetation. But more importantly, what does this incursion of weeds mean? If as many scientists think, oceanic currents which control the Sargasso Sea have altered, is this a temporary phenomenon? Will things go back to normal next year? Are there more significant climatic changes underway? Is the melting of the Arctic icesheet in any way related?
Misery they say loves company…but if you all think we have it bad, consider the islands to the north with their many bays, now all clogged with the weed. Antigua, St Martin, St Barts on and on…. We can and should clean our beaches carefully without destroying our greatest environmental success to date, the many turtle nests…that will be an on going exercise as there are huge rafts of the weed several square miles in diameter on their way down. I don’t entirely agree with Mr Francklyn. Yes people can be paid to clean, but a community effort driven out of genuine concern and not just its cash rewards, has many spinoffs, not the least being an appreciation of the complexities of nature and underscoring the fact that contrary to the arrogant and widespread human belief of invincibility, we are still part of a system in which change is a constant.

The Future Centre Trust is fighting a losing battle trying to get Barbadians understand an unhealthy environment leads to an unhealthy existence which leads to a higher death rate.

Sacred Economics: Chapter 7, “The Crisis of Civilization”
by Charles Eisenstein

We have bigger houses but smaller families;

But nothing in the room. –Authorship unknown

The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries of near-continuous money creation have left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, and the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, of images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item.

Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine endowment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. Pythagoras’s dictum, “All things are number,” has nearly come true: the world has been converted into money. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the “developed” world. In the “developing” world (notice how these terms assume our own economic system as the destination of other societies) there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine’s insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this strip-mining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

snip

Various pundits have observed that Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was not so different from the financial industry’s pyramid of mortgaged-based derivatives and other instruments, which themselves formed a bubble that, like Madoff’s, could only sustain itself through an unceasing, indeed exponentially growing, influx of new money. As such, it is a symbol of our times — and even more than people suppose. It is not only the Wall Street casino economy that is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. The larger economic system, based as it is on the eternal conversion of a finite commonwealth into money, is unsustainable as well. It is like a bonfire that must burn higher and higher, to the exhaustion of all available fuel. Only a fool would think that a fire can burn ever-higher when the supply of fuel is finite. To extend the metaphor, the recent deindustrialization and financialization of the economy amount to using the heat to create more fuel. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the amount created is always less than the amount expended to create it. Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the economy as a whole has done for ten years now.

Yet even abandoning this folly, we still must face the depletion of fuel (remember, I mean not literal energy sources, but any bond of nature or culture that can be turned into a commodity). Most of the proposals for addressing the present economic crisis amount to finding more fuel. Whether it is drilling more oil wells, paving over more green space, or spurring consumer spending, the goal is to reignite economic growth — that is, to expand the realm of goods and services. It means finding new things for which we can pay. Today, unimaginably to our forebears, we pay even for our water and our songs. What else is left to convert into money?

snip

I sometimes read the financial website Zero Hedge for its remarkable insight into the pretenses and machinations of the financial power elite. In that website’s dim view, no asset class except physical gold and other physical commodities is safe today. I agree with its logic as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. If the system breaks down to the point of hyperinflation, then the institution of property — as much a social convention as money is — will break down too. In times of social turmoil, I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than possessing a few hundred ounces of gold. Really the only security is to be found in community: the gratitude, connections, and support of the people around you. If you have wealth now, I recommend, as your investment advisor, that you use it to enrich the people around you in lasting ways.

In the meantime, before the collapse of the current system, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, or make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring Machine will help shorten the Machine’s life span. And when the money system collapses, if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life’s necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies on the social level. Any form of natural wealth, whether biodiversity, fertile soil, or clean water, and any community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money, will sustain and enrich life after money.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_chapter_7_crisis_civilization