A new study has finally brought light upon the harm that exfoliating soap does to the world’s oceans.
The exfoliation power of the soap comes from little plastic beads. These beads wash down the drain and find themselves in our oceans where they are a hazard to sea life.
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.
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.
Many times in third world countries people are without established credit histories leaving loan sharks as the only available option. That’s where microfinance comes in. By lending on a website like Kiva you are helping to guarantee the principle of the loan which in turn allows people to get loans from the financial institutions at low interest rates.
And if you don’t believe microfinance is a viable endeavor I refer you to one Bill Clinton.
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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.