ECOMIGRN-ENVOMIGRATION

//////////////////////November 30, 2007
Ecomigration: Will there be a Coming Environmental Exodus?
By the year 2100, global warming likely will cause the extinction of numerous species by eliminating the climate zones in which they are able to live, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences earlier this year. But not only will animals be forced to move or die, people will be faced with this same dilemma as well.
With the planet heating up, and global warming predicted to redefine world climates, and some places will be harder hit than others. A new study shows that as climate change intensifies droughts, storms and floods, this will undoubtedly lead to environmental migrations and potential conflicts in the areas migrated to.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the US, large populations were forced to find refuge elsewhere. Rafael Reuveny from Indiana University says these types of displacing natural phenomenon is only going to grow. His new study takes a look at the role environmental degradation on population migration, or ‘ecomigration’ will play in the future. The study examines the potential impact on areas receiving migrants and the resulting violent conflict that could follow. This study was recently published online in the journal Human Ecology.
The study underlies the fact that people facing environmental disasters are usually forced to leave the affected areas to avoid death. However understandable this might be, the larger the migration and the shorter the period over which it occurs, the harder it is for surrounding populations to absorb the migrants. Reuveny says this will dramatically raise the likelihood of conflict. For example ecomigrants may clash over jobs with locals, as well as over resources and culture. Violent interactions such as theft, seizure of resources and property, murders and insurgencies are likely to rise, he predicts.
Reuveny asserts that in order to minimize the impact of these future environmental migrations, developed countries should already be involved in creating preventive strategies both at home and in developing countries to mitigate these likelihoods. The time to come up with game plans is now, he argues, because climate change is expected to degrade the environment considerably during this century.
Reuveny’s analysis of three case studies – the US Dust Bowl in the 1930s; Bangladesh since the 1950s; and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, shows that although climate change can spur large population movements, public policy does have the power to alleviate the pressures of ecomigration. If a country can invest in areas affected by environmental problems, the scope of ecomigration can be reduced and transitions will be smoother, he argues.
According to Reuveny, “minimizing climate change-induced migration and violent conflict in receiving areas requires an engineered economic slowdown in the developed countries, and population stabilization and economic growth in developing countries financed by the developed countries.”
Scientists have concluded that by 2100, climate zones will have likely changed across 12 to 39 percent of the Earth's land surface, based on a model that presumes a continuation of current patterns of fossil fuel use and carbon emissions. How this may affect world migration trends, is an interesting topic to ponder. Anyone selling land in Siberia?
Posted by Rebecca Sato
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////////////////////////SAMTA=From Chapter VI: The Yoga of MeditationArjuna Uvaacha:VI.33. YO'YAM YOGASTWAYAA PROKTAH SAAMYENA MADHUSOODANA;ETASYAAHAM NA PASHYAAMI CHANCHALATWAAT STHITIM STHIRAAM.Arjuna said(to Krishna):This Yoga of equanimity taught by Thee, O Krishna, I donot see its steady continuance, because of restlessness(of the mind)!VI.34. CHANCHALAM HI MANAH KRISHNA PRAMAATHI BALAVAD DRIDHAM;TASYAAHAM NIGRAHAM MANYE VAAYORIVA SUDUSHKARAM.The mind verily is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding,O Krishna! I deem it as difficult to control as to control the wind.COMMENTARY: The mind ever changes its point of concentration fromone object to another. So it is always restless. It is not onlyrestless but also turbulent and impetuous, strong and obstinate.It produces agitation in the body and in the senses. That is whythe mind is even more difficult to control than to control the wind.


////////////////////////A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview, free of supernatural and mystical elements


//////////////////LIVE SC=
People Really Do Wash Away Sins
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
posted: 07 September 2006 02:00 pm ET
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Rituals that cleanse the body to purify the soul are at the core of religions worldwide. Now scientists find these ceremonies apparently have a psychological basis.
Researchers discovered sins actually seem to urge people to clean themselves, a phenomenon they dubbed the "Macbeth effect" after dramatized murderess Lady Macbeth, who vainly tried scrubbing her hands clean of imaginary blood in Shakespeare's famed Scottish play.
Intriguingly, the researchers also found purifying the body then helped people absolve their consciences.
"Showering and handwashing occur daily, but now we find these core routines can really have a psychological impact," behavioral researcher Katie Liljenquist at Northwestern University in Chicago told LiveScience.
Future studies could see whether "living in a very clean environment facilitates more ethical behavior, or ironically licenses unethical behavior," Liljenquist added.
Liljenquist and her colleague Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto in Canada first asked undergraduate student volunteers to focus on ethical or unethical deeds from their past. The volunteers were more likely to interpret the word fragments "W _ _ H" as "wash" and "S _ _ P" as "soap" if they had been thinking of an unethical deed, and to choose an antiseptic wipe instead of a pencil as free gift.
The investigators also asked volunteers to hand-copy a short story written in the first person about either helping or sabotaging a coworker. Zhong and Liljenquist found the students who copied the unethical story were more likely to then rate cleansing products such as toothpaste and detergent as more desirable than noncleansing products such as batteries and candy bars in what the participants thought was an unrelated marketing study.
In their last set of experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to first remember an unethical deed and then either gave them the chance to wash their hands or not. When the students were afterward asked whether they would volunteer without pay for another research study to help out a desperate graduate student, 74 percent of those who had not washed their hands offered to help, while only 41 percent of the participants who had a chance to wash their hands did. This suggested volunteers who did not get the chance to clean themselves felt a need "to absolve their consciences," Liljenquist said.
"Past studies have shown there are definite overlaps in the brain in the regions stimulated by moral disgust and physical disgust, the kind you get to potentially bad food or other things you'd evolve to want to avoid," she added.
Whether the psychological impact of cleansing rituals existed before religion adopted them or whether such an impact arose after religions ingrained cleansing rituals into society remains an as yet unresolved chicken-or-egg question. To answer it, Liljenquist said future experiments can explore whether a person's level of religiosity moderates the Macbeth effect and what specific negative emotions trigger it the most deeply in people.
The researchers reported their findings in the Sept. 8 issue of the journal Science.


////////////////////Prayer does not heal the sick, study finds
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By Sam Knight and agencies
Praying for the health of strangers who have undergone heart surgery has no effect, according to the largest scientific study ever commissioned to calculate the healing power of prayer.
In fact, patients who know they are being prayed for suffer a noticeably higher rate of complications, according to the study, which monitored the recovery of 1,800 patients after heart bypass surgery in the US.


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Eating your way to lower emissions
Are you a carnivore, pescetarian, flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan, vegansexual... or a "locavore"? That is, someone who chooses to only eat food that's been produced locally.The word was coined two years ago on a website by Jessica Prentice (author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection). She and three Californian friends decided to only eat food produced within 100 miles of San Francisco for a whole month – and challenged others to follow suit, which many gladly did – and continue to do so. (Here are some tips on how to be a locavore)Indeed, eating locally produced food has become such a popular phenomenon that "locavore" was voted Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. (Some people refer to themselves as "localvores" but they are one and the same thing.)So what exactly is the great appeal of food that was reared or grown nearby? First and foremost, it's less damaging to the environment. The question is, though, how much less? Let's take a look at the figures.Every year humans are responsible for emitting a total of around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Of that, the average western European is responsible for 12 tonnes each. Food accounts for 2 of the 12 tonnes (more than the same person's emissions from flying, which add up to around 1.6 tonnes!).Although eating locally produced food does reduce food miles (the distance the food has travelled to get to your mouth) and hence CO2 emissions – it's actually the growing and processing of food that is particularly energy expensive (e.g. manufacturing fertilisers and heating greenhouses).So if you really want to do your bit for the environment, then try to stick to locally grown food that's not been processed or packaged either (importing Spanish tomatoes may require less energy than heating a greenhouse in the UK!). And by doing so, you will save around 0.7 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.And to make an even bigger difference to your carbon footprint, go vegan and reduce your carbon footprint by a further tonne of CO2 (the food the animals eat is energy-expensive to grow). But if you love meat and milk too much to give it up, then try to make sure it's organic, as this will reduce your CO2 emissions by a similar amount. Does anyone know if there is a word for someone who only eats organic food – organivore, perhaps?So, if you were vegan (or an organivore) and ate only locally produced, unpackaged, unprocessed food – you would reduce your yearly CO2 emissions from food by 1.7 tonnes, that's a whopping 85% of the carbon food bill. And what would that make you I wonder – a veganlocavore? A saint more like.I'm a vegetarian (thinking about turning locavore – so I might be a vegilocavore soon), and my boyfriend is a carnivore, but only eats animals that have been reared via a high standard of welfare, so perhaps that makes him a welfarivore.What are you, and why?


BEING A LOCAVORE-KOL/VK


//////////////////////DNGFD=DO NOT GET GUCKING DIFFICULT



///////////////////////New study finds that sleep duration raises the risk for diabetes
The most common factors believed to contribute to diabetes are a decreased amount of physical activity and access to highly palatable processed foods. However, there is growing evidence that another aspect of our modern lifestyle, short sleep duration, is also contributing toward the “diabetes epidemic”, according to a study published in the December 1 issue of the journal Sleep.
The study, authored by James E. Gangwisch, PhD, of Columbia University in New York, explored the relationship between sleep duration and the diagnosis of diabetes over an eight-to-10-year follow-up period between 1982 and 1992 among 8,992 subjects who participated in the Epidemiologic Follow-Up Studies of the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The subjects’ ages ranged from 32 to 86 years. According to the results, subjects who reported sleeping five or fewer hours and subjects who reported sleeping nine or more hours were significantly more likely to have incident diabetes over the follow-up period than were subjects who reported sleeping seven hours, even after adjusting for variables such as physical activity, depression, alcohol consumption, ethnicity, education, marital status, age, obesity and history of hypertension.


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