New Eco-Tourism

So eco-tourists can visit places like Xcaret or do any number of other eco-tourist travel activities in places all around the world but I read of an opportunity today that I think is a little more unique.

I read an article about how tours will begin to be offered to visit the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine beginning in 2011. This is something that is unique in that it deals with a number of environmental issues as well as telling the story of the disaster and the fallout from the nuclear accident that occurred in April 1986. The tours will enter the 30-mile exclusion area surrounding the plant on the visit, this highly contaminated area has been closed to everyone except workers at the plant since shortly after the accident when resettlement of survivors and those living in the area occurred. A picture of the sarcophagus covering the damaged reacrot is below.

Village Volunteers

This post has been a long time coming as I had reminded myself by sending an email but hadn't gotten back to the email for quite a while.

Village Volunteers is a non-profit orgnanization that works " in partnership with rural village and capacity-building programs to support the development of sustainable solutions for community survival, education, and growth."

That sounds like just the type of organization that can be shared here on Enviro-Sustain. they have operations in several countries on three continents, including Kenya, Ghana, India, Nepal and Belize. Here is more about the organization and what they do. They have a blog that you can follow to see what is happening from time to time.

EPA 40

The US Environmental Protection Agency turns 40 today. It was founded on December 2, 1970. Here is a link with more information about the history of the agency thus far.
There is a neat video montage on that site and here is a slideshow of images.

Permafrost Methane

This isn't a new topic but it is new to Enviro-Sustain as a dangerous element of climate change. Here is an article I read today but I saw a different article earlier this week and read at the time but can't find now. Basically, as global temperatures rise more arctic permafrost land is thawing, with that methane is released. As the methane is released it compounds the greenhouse gas aspect that is pushing temperatures higher in a literal vicious circle.

This is pretty much how it works: "As the Earth warms, the summer thaw bites a bit deeper, awakening ice-age microbes that attack organic matter – vegetation and animal remains – buried where oxygen cannot reach, producing methane that gurgles to the surface and into the air."

Just another thing to keep up with in this world of environmental and sustainability issues.

More Ecological Footprint

I have a great interactive visual from The Global Footprint Network that provides a country by country view at different aspects of how the ecological footprint of humans is.

Tigers - Extinct? Soon...

Generally my posts are about websites, larger environmental issues or living sustainably and environmentally consciously. This post is about a different sustainability issue - poaching endangered species, which often get to be endangered because their hunting is not done sustainably.

Here is an article about the poaching of tigers and their precipitous drop in populations and ranges over recent years. Last year5% of the wild tiger population was killed, meaning at that rate it would be less than 20 years for extinction of all tiger species.

I learned a lot from this article and I recommend that you read it but an example of something I didn't know was that tigers were once found in 25 countries and now only in 13 countries and that their populations have declined from an estimated 100,000 100 years ago to about 3200 in the wild today.

Behind on Posting

I am woefully behind posting to this blog but I haven't given up! I have several topics at any given time that I want to post about, sometimes they end up being larger than I want them to be and need to be pruned, sometimes I am fighting for time in my life to squeeze them in and sometimes I just post to the less serious blogs that I maintain.

Since this is a post about being behind on posting it gives me the perfect opportunity to share that Earth went into overshoot just over 3 months ago. Some of the blog readers who have followed from the beginning will understand what overshoot is and here is a post from mid-may about it.

We went into overshoot on August 21, 2010!!! Yes, that is correct, Earth Overshoot Day moved more than a month ahead of when it was in 2009! That is a startling change! Here is a link to the Global Footprint Network news release about that.