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Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts

Costa Concordia shipwreck according to Carlo Borlenghi

©Carlo Borlenghi

Carlo Borlenghi had visited Giglio Island in order to give us his own view of the recent dramatic shipwreck that led the huge Costa Concordia cruise ship to crash against the rocks of the little island in front of Tuscany coast.

©Carlo Borlenghi

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With your iPhone you can help to improve water quality

What I love more about internet is the ability to mobilize millions of people towards a common target. I'm one of those. who think that web and new technologies will save our world.
In California, every citizen with an iPhone can make his contribution to monitor water quality and alert authorities to problems:
A new iPhone application, called Creek Watch and created by IBM, is now available in Apple’s App Store. The first state to partner with IBM to use this data to monitor the thousands of miles of creeks and streams in their jurisdiction is California’s State Water Control Board.
Developed by IBM Research and available for free at Apple’s App Store, Creek Watch is an easy-to-use application that allows community members to snap a photo of a creek or stream and answer three simple questions about the particular waterway. The data is uploaded in real-time to a central database, accessible by water authorities responsible for monitoring local water supplies.
According to the United Nations, contaminated water kills more people than all wars, crimes and terrorism combined; every 20 seconds, an infant dies from polluted water. While most agree that water is among our most precious resources, what many do not realize is that we walk over and drive past our drinking water everyday, making valuable observations about the water’s condition as we do so. Creek Watch makes it easy to capture these observations, providing water resource managers with additional insight and data to better ensure a sustainable water supply.
Creek Watch uses a combination of the iPhone’s built-in location sensor and user contributed data to provide information that is valuable for water management analysis – e.g., at what times of the year specific creeks begin to run dry or when the water levels are at capacity.
Contributing water data with IBM’s Creek Watch app requires just four easy steps:
· Use the iPhone’s built-in camera to snap a photo of a waterway
· Specify the Water Level: Dry, Some or Full
· Specify the Flow Rate: Still, Slow or Fast
· Specify the Trash Level: None, Some or A lot

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What will it take before we respect the planet?

Another WWF advertising campaign entitled "What will it take before we respect the planet?" for Biodiversity And Biosafety Awareness

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The last brilliant Banksy's masterpiece

Photo: Banksy.co.uk
Banksy, the famous British graffiti artist, political activist and painter, whose identity is unconfirmed, has always had environmental issues as one of his favourite themes.
This time he has cleverly "reconditioned" a dolphin shaped kiddie ride in a anti-BP statement with the help of an oil drum and a tuna net.

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The Cove

Photograph courtesy Brooke McDonald, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society via AP

First of all: the picture above has not been altered in any way, what yyou see is blood, dolphin's blood
Probably you've already had listened something about the documentary "The Cove" especially now that it has won the Academy Award, if it's not the case you really should inquire about it.
The Cove is a 2009 American documentary film that describes the annual killing of dolphins in a National Park at Taiji, Wakayama, in Japan from an anti-dolphin hunting campaigner's point of view. The film highlights that the number of dolphins killed is several times greater than the number of whales killed in the Antarctic, and claims that 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are killed in Japan every year. The migrating dolphins are herded into a hidden cove where they are netted and killed by means of spears and knives over the side of small fishing boats, a particularly horrible (at least from my point of view) way of fishing called "Dolphin drive hunting". I had already spoken about this kind of fishing in the post entitled "The sea became bloody red.. the horrible bloodshed of the pilot whales in the Fær Øer islands." about the pilot whales slauthering that occurs each year in the Fær Øer islands.
The film was directed by former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos. Among the challenges faced by the production team were the tight security and inaccessibility of the cove therefore portions were filmed secretly during 2007 using underwater microphones and high-definition cameras disguised as rocks.

The documentary won, amongst many other prizes the U.S. Audience Award at the 25th annual Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. On March 7, 2010 The Cove won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film at the 82nd Academy Awards.

The movie follows former dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry's quest to document the dolphin hunting operations in Taiji, Wakayama, Japan. In the 1960s, O'Barry captured and trained the five wild dolphins who would play the role of "Flipper" in the hit television series of the same name. This pop-culture phenomenon fueled widespread public adoration of dolphins. It was when one of the dolphins committed a form of suicide in his arms, closing her blowhole voluntarily in order to suffocate, that O'Barry came to see it as a curse not a blessing. Days later, he found himself off the island of Bimini, attempting to cut a hole in the sea pen in order to set free a captured dolphin. Since then O'Barry has worked tirelessly as an advocate on behalf of dolphins around the world.

After meeting with O'Barry, Psihoyos and his crew travel to the small town of Taiji, a town that appears to be devoted to the wonder of the dolphins and whales that swim off their coast. But in an isolated cove, surrounded by wire and "Keep Out" signs, some of the townspeople hide a stark reality. It is here that the fisherman of Taiji, driven by a multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry and a dubious and artificial market for mercury-tainted dolphin meat, engage in the unseen killing. Local volunteers physically block attempts by outsiders to view the dolphin killing taking place in the cove. Together with the Oceanic Preservation Society, Psihoyos, O'Barry, and the crew utilizes special tactics and embark on a mission to get the truth on what is really going on in the cove and why it matters to everyone else in the world.

For further info you can:

Visit the official website of the movie: THECOVEMOVIE.COM
Read an interesting article from National Geographic about the consequencies of The Cove movie winning the 2010 Oscar.
View the official HD Trailer of the movie:
View a new video about the dolphin slaughter in Taiji:

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The church that resurfaced

The image of a church emerging from the water just with the bell tower is quite distinguishing indeed, but it's not so rare, there are at least half a dozen example in the world (and a wonderful one, I've already spoken about, is in Italy) and the story behind it's more or less always the same: a dam built for hydroelectric purposes causing an entire village to be submerged. The bell tower, which often is the highest spot of a village remains as a picturesque recall (of economic interests overwhelming people's interests).

©Reuters

This time however, even if the first part of the story is just the same, there is an unexpected (and somehow worrying) turn in the plot. The church has resurfaced!
It's in Venezuela and the cause is a severe drought which is hitting the nation, exposing a church, pictured in 2008 (left) and on February 21, 2010.

©Reuters

The 82-foot-tall (25-meter-tall) church and the Andean town of Potosi were flooded in 1985 to establish the Uribante-Caparo water reservoir to power the plant, which is currently operating at just 7 percent of its capacity.

©Reuters

The church is now an ominous symbol of energy shortages in the country, which gets around 68 percent of its power from hydroelectricity. The droughts spurred Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to declare an energy emergency in February.

©Reuters

In a little over a year, the Venezuelan church went from almost fully submerged to bone dry.

The drought that caused the rapid decline has been linked to El Niño, a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to seven years and changes worldwide weather patterns. During an El Niño event—such as the current one, which began in summer 2009—the Pacific Ocean warms up near equatorial South America and disrupts large-scale atmospheric circulation.

©Reuters

©Reuter

©Reuters

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Collision between Sea Shepherd’s Adi Gil and Japanese whaling boat

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's vessel Ady Gil had its bow sheared off and was taking on water Wednesday after it collided with the Japanese whaling ship in the frigid waters of Antarctica. The boat's six crew members were safely rescued. The clash was the most serious in the past several years, during which the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has sent vessels into far-southern waters to try to harass the Japanese fleet into ceasing its annual whale hunt. Each side routinely accuses the other of dangerous activity during what has become a cat-and-mouse chase in one of the world's most remote regions.