I am in search of any information pertaining to the Order 81. Iraqi Order 81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq.
PRESS ACTION

“The American Administrator of the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) government, Paul Bremer, updated Iraq’s intellectual property law to ‘meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection’.
The updated law makes saving seeds for next year’s harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, and is the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, to be now illegal.. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified (GM) seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from seeds developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, and shared freely like agricultural ‘open source.’”
GRAIN

a quote from Barry Lopez, author of one of my favorite books about the Arctic, arctic Dreams:

It is my belief that a human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at an early age. The visual landscape, of course, or the depth, elevation, and hues of a cityscape play a part here, as does the way sunlight everywhere etches lines to accentuate forms. But the way we imagine is also affected by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger ocean of air; by what the North American composer John Luther Adams calls the sonic landscape; and, say, by an awareness of how temperature and humidity rise and fall in a place over a year.Over time I have come to think of these three qualities–paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place–as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

Though I study climate change and its impacts on the arctic landscape for living, I don’t really study what causes climate change and what we should do about it, and so have no special expertise there. My personal take on these differ from most people’s, so I thought I’d share them.

My family and I live in a small cabin in Fairbanks that is electrically off-the-grid, heated by local wood, and has no running water. Do I think this has any measureable or useful impact on climate? Not a bit. Driving hybrid cars, recycling, etc – I don’t think any of these things are going to help, as they just address the symptoms of the problem, not the causes.

Hello friends–this is a wonderful site–there have been many times over the past two decades when I’ve wished for just such communities, and to see them start forming and getting to work is truly an inspiration.

This winter, a few of us decided the time for mass action on climate change had finally arrived in this country. We’d organized a walk across Vermont last summer–fifty miles in five days–which drew a thousand people. That was great, but it was dismaying to learn that a thousand people was the largest crowd that had ever gathered anywhere in the U.S. about climate issues. So a week ago we launched stepitup07.org. Our plan is to get local people and groups to host rallies in hundreds of places across the country on April 14, and then link them together electronically. And so far it seems to be working–in that week, 111 rallies in 32 states have already been set up. There’s no question that this will turn out to be the largest demonstration on global warming in U.S. history.

I am sure that environmentalists and environmentally conscious individuals ponder what has been accomplished since the beginning of the movement in the U.S. There have been many notable successes, and yet things seem to be getting worse. And, of course, much traction was lost during this U.S. presidency as laws were rolled back or changed. It is time to do some serious introspection and cold assessment of the strategies that have been used, otherwise, I believe, we will continue to experience pendulum swings of public support for environmental causes.

Currently, the only long-term direct measurements we have of air temperature change in the US arctic come from a single station – Barrow, located on the coast. So for all this talk of arctic climate change, the US has only one direct measurement representing an area the size of the California, and this comes from a coastal station which is no more representative of California than is one in San Francisco. Other stations had been discontinued 20 years ago due to funding, and new ones are not necessarily as robust as they should be for trend monitoring. I’m involved with several projects to install new long-term sites, but long-term funding remains the central problem. That is, even though I can get funding to install new sites today, there are no guarantees that funding will exist tomorrow to maintain them. These sites are about as remote as it gets and the equipment costs are almost negligible compared to the logistical costs.

Lots of news today about the Iraq Study group, which suggests that Iraq
privatize its oil industry and to open it up to international companies.

Nowhere is mentioned what author and activist Antonia Juhasz notes:

“Put simply, the oil companies are trying to get what they were denied before the war or at anytime in modern Iraqi history: access to Iraq’s oil under the ground.”  I’ll just quote the conculusion of her article but you should read the entire piece :

Hi, finally the week draws to an end and I begin to reflect on the recent activities and look ahead to the coming week. I am the executive director of The Regeneration Project which is (most descriptively) a ministry for the religious community to draw on for support and resources when seeking to find solutions to the problem- potentially catastrophic problem- of climate change. We have an affiliated network of religious leaders from many diverse faiths in 21 states in the US. “A religious response to global warming” operates under the banner of Interfaith Power and Light. Each state program operates autonomously, but in collarboation with the others. Our aim is to reduce the US overall dependency on fossil fuel for energy by example in our memeber congregations. We promote energy efficiency, conservation and use of renewable clean resources for electricity. We ask our member congregations of which there are roughly 2000 to preach about the moral responsibility of religious people to care for God Creation. This means all living things with particular focus on the poor and in addition those living things that cannot speak for themselves.

After implementing environmental standards, why does green architecture look so bland? Passive cooling, low flush toilets, and harvested lumber do not foreground evocative design. During the last two decades, the prevalent challenge for the sustainable design movement in the United States has been to sluggishly modify the behavior of the developers, architects, and planners responsible for the sizable majority of new projects. From this outlook, it’s not salient ensembles but uniform conventions that ought to stand as the peak objective for green advocates. I’ve considered such standardized aspirations as limiting and myopic. We need more “design” in green design and less limiting conventions.