So I don’t know if everyone has heard, but a new study has came out highlighting the harm that exfoliating soap does to the world’s oceans. The exfoliation comes from little plastic beads that wash down the drain & find themselves in our oceans where the sea life can choke on it & die. Remember plastic doesn’t biodegrade so it’s best to limit its usage, especially in something like soap where the waste is inevitable. So buy a different type of soap.

Check out this link for more information: http://www.slate.com/id/2193693/

I’ve recently started loaning money to third world entrepreneurs on a microfinancing website called Kiva. I think it’s a pretty cool way to contribute to the under-privileged in the developing world. It’s not a handout so it comes back down to the basic principles of teaching a man how to fish. Sometimes I wonder if traditional charitable contributions to the third world do more harm than good, such as turning a nation’s peoples into beggars. I think microfinance is a way to combat that while providing encouragement, & exhibiting generosity, but at the same time providing a real world sense of responsibility.

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Kiva (www.kiva.org) is a non-profit that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world.

You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay their loan, you get your money back. It’s a powerful and sustainable way to empower someone right now to lift themselves out of poverty.

You Can Help Stop Global Warming Today
The most effective way to fight the global warming crisis is to stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy products. Please also take a few moments to encourage Al Gore, the most prominent voice in the fight against global warming, to add going vegetarian to his list of solutions to our climate crisis.

Wasted Resources
Vast tracts of land are needed to grow crops to feed the billions of animals we raise for food each year. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals—that’s roughly half of the total land mass of the U.S.10 More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.

The U.S. certainly isn’t alone in its misuse of land for animal agriculture. As the world’s appetite for meat increases, countries across the globe are bulldozing huge swaths of land to make more room for animals and the crops to feed them. From tropical rain forests in Brazil to ancient pine forests in China, entire ecosystems are being destroyed to fuel our addiction to meat. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.

In the United States and around the world, overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren. Livestock grazing is the number one cause of threatened and extinct species both in the United States and in other parts of the world. Philip Fradkin, of the National Audubon Society, states, “The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined.” As more and more land both in the U.S. and around the world is irreparably damaged at the hands of the meat industry, what little arable land does remain may not be enough to produce crops to feed the burgeoning world human population.

Overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren.

While factory farms are ruining our land, the commercial fishing industry is pushing entire oceanic ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Commercial fishing boats indiscriminately pull as many fish as they can out of the sea, leaving ecological devastation and the bodies of nontarget animals in their wake. Fishing methods like bottom trawling and long-lining have emptied millions of miles of ocean and pushed some marine species to the brink of extinction.

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Hey so you should be concerned with global warming, in fact we all should. Let’s talk about this;

With the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions & the newfound phenomena of global dimming. The earth’s temperature can be expected to rise by three degrees Celsius in the next twenty-five years.

At said point in temperature rise, Greenland’s ice fields will start to melt. Once the ice fields start to melt, nothing could ever be done to reverse their melting. If Greenland’s ice fields melt, sea levels across the globe can be expected to rise anywhere from six to eight metres. This of course would mean that once the ice fields started to melt, a large number of the world’s major cities would be living on borrowed time.

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