Spotorno for a Healthy New World

Italy’s hidden gem? Bogliasco near Genoa, on Liguria’s coast. Turquoise waters, pesto and focaccia. Welcome to Bogliasco. In this video, you’ll have an immersive experience in the Italian village and beaches of Bogliasco, a non-touristy alternative to the U...

This image was captured at the Khongor Sand Dunes in the Gobi Desert during the Mongolia Photo Workshop a few days ago. The Gobi Desert is renowned as one of the harshest places to inhabit globally, and yet, the double-humped Bactrian camels 🐫 have thrived here for thousands of years!

Two types of Bactrian camels inhabit this region: wild and domesticated. Currently, there are only about 800 wild camels remaining, and they are classified as a Critically Endangered Species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In contrast, Mongolia is home to more than 250,000 domesticated Bactrian camels, primarily concentrated in the Gobi. Domestic Bactrian camels have held a crucial role in the lives of steppe nomads since their domestication around 2500 BC. They serve as transportation, capable of carrying loads ranging from 170kg to 250kg (375lbs to 550lbs) and covering distances of up to 47km (30 miles) per day.

Remarkably, they can sustain this effort for up to 30 consecutive days without consuming a drop of water! Beyond their role as pack animals, Bactrian camels contribute in various other ways. Their thick, coarse hair is essential for crafting durable ropes that encircle traditional Ger camps. Their fine wool is used for making garments and socks, with a single adult male camel providing up to 18kg of wool per year. Additionally, they serve as a source of milk and meat.

Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus moluccanus) in Australia
by Merryl Watkins Photography

How can a nation be sustainable?

For sustainable development to be achieved, it is crucial to harmonize four core elements: economic growth, social inclusion, environmental protection and conservation. These elements are interconnected and all are crucial for the well-being of individuals, societies, our environment and each nation playing a major role securing the wellbeing of our global conservation.

Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).

Social inclusion is the process of improving the terms on which individuals and groups take part in society—improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of those disadvantaged on the basis of their identity.

Environmental Protection includes programs that are aimed at reducing risks to the environment from contaminants such as hazardous materials and wastes, fuels, and oils.

The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to manage and protect natural resources, including animal, fungus, and plant species as well as their habitat for the future. Conservationists are concerned with leaving the environment in a better state than the condition they found it in. Evidence-based conservation seeks to use high quality scientific evidence to make conservation efforts more effective.

There are benefits from forest 🌳 fires 🔥. It's not all gloom and doom. There are also benefits from volcanic activity as what scientists leaned from Mt. St. Helens since it’s eruption 🌋 in 1980.

Fire is part of a cycle in most ecosystems. It reduces dead vegetation, stimulates new growth, and improves habitat for wildlife, kills bacteria, many of the details park visitors imagine when they think of a national park.

Cutting down our forests 🌳 is detrimental to our ecosystem and wellbeing. They are the life lungs 🫁 to our world 🌍.

Naturally, periodic forest fires help to clear away old brush and allow for new growth. They recycle nutrients back into the soil, disperse seeds of fire-adapted plants and burn ground cover to give seedlings a chance at light.

Recently, however, biologists have learned that flames aren't enough to unlock some fire-resistant seeds — they need the smoke as well. In the 1970s, researchers discovered that some seeds germinate when exposed to the merest whiff of wood smoke, even if the seed is buried in the soil.

Ferns and mosses are some of the first greenery we see after a fire. They have rhizomes, horizontal stems tucked away underground that stay protected and often survive moderate fires. The booster shot of nutrients available immediately after a fire makes for rich soil for the new sprouts.

Plants that need heat for seed germination will release their seeds during a fire. Wind can carry the seeds to other areas. The tall trees are no longer stealing sunlight from the plant species beneath them. Now the seeds are nourished with sunlight and rain.

In a moist post-fire climate, native plants like manzanita, chamise, and scrub oak will thrive. Sometimes, post-wildfire landscapes will explode into thousands of flowers, in the striking phenomenon known as a superbloom.

Finally, fire has long been used as a tool to fertilize soils and control plant growth, but it can also substantially change vegetation, enhance soil erosion and even cause desertification of previously productive areas. Indeed fire is now regarded by some as the seventh soil-forming factor.

The wonders of our world. It’s not all gloom and doom. Our primary mission is accelerating resources worldwide combatting the illegal dumping of toxic waste in our oceans, seas, rivers, landfills and atmosphere, preventing accidental chemical and oil spills, putting an end to deforestation and finally accelerate reforestation…globally. And rejuvenating the forests of our sea; phytoplankton, red algae, kelp, seagrass, and sargassum, the life source of life on earth 🌍. Finally informing the public the empirical evidence, all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.

The Material Cost of “Clean Tech”

The materials extracted from the earth to fabricate wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries (to store grid electricity or power electric vehicles) are out of sight, located at remote quarries, mine sites, and mineral-processing facilities around the world. Those locations matter in terms of geopolitics and supply-chain risks, as well as in environmental terms. Before considering the supply chain, it is important to understand the scale of the material demands. For green energy, it all begins with the fact that such sources are land-intensive and very diffuse.

For example, replacing the energy output from a single 100-MW natural gas-fired turbine, itself about the size of a residential house (producing enough electricity for 75,000 homes), requires at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles of land.

Building those wind machines consumes enormous quantities of conventional materials, including concrete, steel, and fiberglass, along with less common materials, including “rare earth” elements such as dysprosium. A World Bank study noted what every mining engineer knows: “[T]echnologies assumed to populate the clean energy shift … are in fact significantly more material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems.”

Mines extract raw materials; for batteries, these raw materials typically contain lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite. The “upstream” portion of the EV battery supply chain, which refers to the extraction of the minerals needed to build batteries, has garnered considerable attention, and for good reason, a single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.

Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.

By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.

Spotorno for a Healthy New World Let’s look for progress, not perfection

Fire-tailed Myzornis (Myzornis pyrrhoura) in Sikkim, India by Ratul Ghosh.

If we all pitch in, work together, our world can make it. Our primary objective is to combat pollution and forest deforestation. If so, our world can be a better place for all mankind and it’s creature’s. It’s not all gloom and doom as many proclaim.

Nancy Brown
• Chief Executive Officer, American Heart Association

No matter who you are or where you are from, your health is sacred. It’s the ultimate key as it opens the door to all else in our lives. In every nation, regardless of economic status, improving quality of life and increasing longevity are common threads that tie us all together.

Knowing that far too many people in far too many places lack basic resources like shelter and food, it’s essential to protect our diverse populations from the devastating impact of preventable illnesses.

The problem

Cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease are all noncommunicable diseases. Together they are the world’s leading cause of preventable death, and represent the defining global health crisis of our generation.

In 1990, about 40% of deaths from noncommunicable diseases were in developing countries, compared with about 75% today. This surge can be traced largely to four areas: to***co use, harmful use of alcohol, insufficient physical activity, and unhealthy diet/obesity.

Each year, 38 million people die from noncommunicable diseases globally, and almost-three quarters of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. In addition, these health threats carry an economic burden of increased medical costs and lost wages that continues to climb. A 2011 report of the World Economic Forum estimated that noncommunicable diseases could cost the world a cumulative output loss of $47 trillion by 2030. Of course, this doesn’t even begin to factor in the emotional toll on family and friends – the children left without parents, the students left without teachers, the businesses left without leaders.

What can be done?

We all have an obligation to help people control their risk factors. It’s more straightforward than you may think. A 2015 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine concluded that chronic conditions such as heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and cancer could be cut by at least in half if people adopted healthy lifestyles such as regular exercise, diets low in sodium and added sugars, and abstained from using to***co. Adopting healthy lifestyles however, doesn’t happen overnight. There is science behind why people change, as each person is inspired and motivated by varying emotional and life factors.

While taking an individual approach to extending and saving lives is effective, think about what a dramatic impact we can make by casting a bigger net and creating a culture of health. This means designing infrastructures so “the healthy choice is the easy choice”. For instance, nations can prioritize creating or maintaining safe spaces for exercise, low-cost options to purchase healthy foods, and clean-air laws that protect people from the dangers of secondhand smoke. It doesn’t even have to be an entire nation. It could happen in a company or in a neighbourhood. Every little bit helps.

Effective prevention also means understanding the unique risk profiles based on race or ethnicity. For example, in the United States, African Americans have a high prevalence of hypertension, a key risk factor for stroke, and not surprisingly, stroke rates are much higher among African Americans. Where you live (whether it’s part of a culture of health or not) can also make a big difference; we’ve seen life expectancy differ by more than 20 years for people living just 5 miles apart.

There are many more ideas and many more potential solutions. The key is working together. BY doing so, we can create a world that is healthier. And all manner of prosperity is sure to follow.

These ‘Invisibile’ Solar Panels Appear Just Like Historic Italian Terracotta Roofs and Can Help Green Historic Buildings.
By Andy Corbley - Jan 26, 2023

In the historic Italian city of Vicenza, Veneto, a typically-Italian family business of artisans is handmaking not-so-typical solar panels.

Designed to be indistinguishable by the naked eye from regular terracotta roof tiles, “Invisible Solar” tiles are made to improve the energy efficiency of heritage buildings without compromising their historic appearance.

They make each tile out of a non-toxic and recyclable polymeric compound they themselves developed, and the tiles allow for sunlight to pass into a hidden bank of photovoltaic cells without the human eye being able to tell they are translusent.

This gives them the appearance of regular handmade clay tiles that cover most of the roofs in Italy and almost all of the roofs in their native, UNESCO-listed Vicenza.

The company is called Dyaqua, and their founder, Giovanni Battista Qualiato says that just like regular roofing tiles, Invisible Solar can be installed by roofers without any special training or equipment.

In 2015 Invisible Solar was mentioned by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MiBACT) as a solution to improve energy efficiency in cultural heritage across the country, and they are already installed in Pompeii.

“They look exactly like the terracotta tiles used by the Romans, but they produce the electricity that we need to light the frescoes,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.

“Since we needed an extensive lightning system, we could either keep consuming energy, leaving poles and cables around and disfiguring the landscape, or choose to respect it and save millions of euros.”

A pilot program will see Invisible Solar terracotta tiles installed in the Portuguese city of Evora, and the Qualiato hope that soon there will be an interest in Dyaqua’s other products, because the same technology and materials that allow them to make solar panel terracotta tiles allows them to mimic natural stone, concrete, and wood exteriors, in not only the roof of a building, but also their walls and courtyards.

About 90 square feet (9 square meters) of tiling will generate about 1 kilowatt hours of electricity, which isn’t much, but it does offer the choice between some solar power on historic buildings, and no solar whatsoever.

SHARE This Great Idea To Green Historic Places On Social Media…

For the First Time Since 1977, Zero Rhinos Were Poached In India’s Parks.

In May 2021, a new Chief Minister of the Indian state of Assam set out to thoroughly put an end to poaching in the state’s protected areas.

Now 20 months later, the forestry and police departments of the state have reported that 2022 saw no rhinos lost to poaching, the first time that’s happened since 1977.

Located on the borders of Tibetan China to the north and Myanmar to the east, Assam is one of the richest biodiversity zones in the world and contains Kaziranga, Manas, and Orang national parks as well as Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary.

Together these four protected areas make up most of the one-horned rhinoceros’ range in the country, and of the 2,895 rhinos in the state, nearly all of that number can be found inside them.

Chief Minister Sarma put together a special anti-poaching task force led by Special Director General of Police G. P. Singh. The task force created a database of past incidents of rhino poaching with details of when, how, and where they took place. Convicted poachers had their phones monitored, and local fishermen and villagers were brought on as informants.

When the work came to inside the park, the rhinos were treated like presidents. Sophisticated police commando teams patrolled the parks with night vision equipment and drones, and the number of teams increased on full moon nights.

When flooding in Kaziranga drove the rhinos to higher ground during the 2022 monsoon season, the teams stayed in the field 24-7 until the animals could disperse again after the waters receded.

“If we continue with this pressure, rhino poaching will stop completely,” Singh told the Hindustan Times. “For this, the cost to poachers has to be higher than the profit they earn.”

A colleague notes that the coordination has become so thorought that poacher arrest rates are now being measured weekly, rather than monthly as before.

It’s this kind of devotion that has seen the numbers of one-horned rhinos climb from just around 100 individuals in 1910, to almost 3,000 today.

SHARE This Dedicated Police Work And The Success It Brought To Rhinos…

Why dead trees and downed logs are important to the ecosystem...

Colorado, USA!!!

Rare photo of two Montana residents exchanging pleasantries on a snowy morning (circa 2023, colorized)

Photo credits:

Great Egret (Ardea alba) hunting. Photo by Corrado Corradini

Sequoia National Park In California, USA!!!

The Battleship sails amongst a sea of clouds within the Grand Canyon. If you look closely, you can see snowflakes falling into the canyon.

Clatsop officials consider giving away public land Clatsop officials consider giving away public landSubscribe to KOIN 6's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/KOINLOCAL6?sub_confirmation=1 Go to KOI...

Really looking forward to being in Iceland again soon. Maybe my group and me get to see the northern lights. Fingers crossed!

If you want to hear the story of this specific image, go to my homepage and check the ‘listen’ section.

The 20 Best Kayak And Canoe Trips In The US - Add to Bucketlist , Vacation Deals The 20 Best Kayak And Canoe Trips In The US: Are you interested in water sports? Do you enjoy the American outdoors but have little interest

Green-tailed Sunbird (Aethopyga nipalensis) in Uttarakhand, India by Sagar Dhumal. https://www.instagram.com/sagar.dhumal.photography/

The last of the warm light on a cold winter day at the Grand Canyon.

Hybrid Golden Pheasant x Lady Amherst Pheasant by Ted’s Photography.

Boat-billed Heron (Cochlearius cochlearius) in Brazil by Celso Queiroz.