Category Archives: Human Response

Background for World Conservation Day

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Nature Conservation Background

World Conservation Day is just around the corner. Here’s a series of background reports on global carrying capacity and human impact from the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB). Stock your neurons with useful information. I haven’t finished reading these reports, but the bits I’ve scanned indicate they are important contributions. My pieces on conservation here and here cover some of the ideas. My ideas are less focused on humanity than on the plants and animals of the natural world, but all approaches to conservation have merit. We need them all now.

Cherokee National Forest, Tennessee (Country Living)

More articles from MAHB.

 

Access to nature reduces depression and obesity, finds European study

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GR: Researchers have shown that people are healthier and happier when they have regular contact with nature (plants and animals). Controlled experiments show that even a photograph of natural vegetation reduces our blood pressure. Roger Ulrich, a colleague from long ago, described his research finding that views of vegetation reduced the need for pain medication and speeded recovery of surgery patients. This suggests that life in intensive urban settings, or life in a completely artificial habitat such as a space ship, would reduce overall health and lifespan. This link takes you to a discussion of the inclusion of nature in architectural design.

Here’s an article on people and plants:

Hardcastle Crags, West Yorkshire. The study cites research that 26% of England’s black and minority ethnic populations visit natural environments less than three times a year. Photograph: Rebecca Cole/Alamy

“People living close to trees and green spaces are less likely to be obese, inactive, or dependent on anti-depressants, according to a new report.

“Middle-aged Scottish men with homes in deprived but verdant areas were found to have a death rate 16% lower than their more urban counterparts. Pregnant women also received a health boost from a greener environment, recording lower blood pressures and giving birth to larger babies, research in Bradford found.

“Overall, nature is an under-recognised healer, the paper says, offering multiple health benefits from allergy reductions to increases in self-esteem and mental wellbeing.

“A study team of 11 researchers at the Institute for European environmental policy (IEEP) spent a year reviewing more than 200 academic studies for the report, which is the most wide-ranging probe yet into the dynamics of health, nature and wellbeing.” –Arthur Neslen (Continue reading: Access to nature reduces depression and obesity, finds European study | Society | The Guardian.)

“Everything I was Dreaming of is Gone” — How Climate Change is Spurring a Global Refugee Crisis to Rapidly Worsen

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“Over the past two weeks, news of the plight of a swelling wave of refugees fleeing to Europe has filled the mainstream media. We looked on in horror at reports of innocent human beings fleeing destabilized countries in the Middle East, of people suffocating while stuffed into the backs of trucks, of drowned children washed up on the shores of nations their families had hoped would care for them.

“It’s all a part of a growing global mass migration. A tragic dislocation and diaspora. But this time it’s not only birds, or polar bears, or fish, or walruses, or insects, or plants that are being forced to move by habitat and food loss, by toxified environments or by increasingly dangerous weather. It’s human beings too.

In the video we are rightfully compelled to compassion for a drowned boy and his family. A family suffering in a country ripped apart by conflict. A country fractured by insurgent forces that will use any form of brutality to gain and secure power. And in this very narrow frame we are provided with a perpetrator — ISIS — and an-all-too innocent victim. The call for warfare against the human monsters that make up ISIS is clear. But the conditions that created the monster in the first place, as happens all too often with climate change, are completely ignored.

Climate Change as Threat Multiplier in Syria

“Syria was never a stable country. At least not so long as colonial and. . . .”  Read more at: robertscribbler.com