Conservation groups put up $9.4-million to save Flathead Valley
Slow start: Sturgeon spearing season on Lake Winnebago
Environment Minister John Baird says he and David Suzuki are on the same page when it comes to addressing the effects of environmental degradation on public health.Baird met with Canada's best-known environmentalist for 40 minutes on Tuesday to discuss a report on linking the environment and health.
The David Suzuki Foundation presented the document at the annual meeting of the Canadian Public Health Association, calling for governments to pay closer attention to how air and water contaminants give rise to disease.
Wonder what Dr. Suzuki has to say about being used as prop to cover up for cuts to Environment Canada.Toronto -- - Serious budget problems at Environment Canada are threatening wildlife programs and services within the federal department, CBC's The National reported last night .
Money for some programs has been frozen and budgets for others have been slashed to nothing, the network reported.
The Canadian Wildlife Service has had its service budget frozen for the rest of the fiscal year, meaning all its scientific field and survey work has been halted. Sources tell the CBC the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Network, which observes changes in ecosystems, has lost 80 per cent of its budget.
The Migratory Bird Program, which monitors the health of bird populations, has seen its budget cut by 50 per cent. The budget for the National Wildlife Areas, a program that protects habitats for wildlife and birds, has been slashed from $1.9 million to zero.
CBC said that despite the spending cuts, the environment ministry would spend C$60,000 ($59,000) on a consultant to study why employee morale was so bad.
Sierra Club slams Environment Canada budget cuts
Of most concern to conservationists among a handful of cuts is that the Canadian Wildlife Service has had its service budget frozen for the rest of the fiscal year, meaning all its scientific field and survey work has been halted. The national wildlife agency is directly responsible for studying and protecting wildlife in Canada and puts out the Hinterland Who's Who public service ads.I guess they blew the budget on the Bear Sanctuary in B.C. a Liberal promise the Tories made their own to promote their green make over this spring.
The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regime.
Not to forget this;
Can you be progressive and a Green Nazi?The Nazi story in Germany was a story of biophilia gone bad. A confused and desperate people--suffering from the Versailles Treaty, the loss of World War I, and economic depression--seized, for pride and identity, the imagery of their own blood and soil. It was impossible to spice up "superiority" with architecture (the Greeks and Romans were not Germans) or literature and art (the French and Italians were not Germans). So "blood" (the Teutonic tribes of yesteryear) and "soil" (the plants within the Germanic provenance) became the hooks on which to hang nativism, racism, and self-confidence. The future Germany was to be a pure landscape inhabitated by an untainted race.
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, a major historian of the native plant movement in Germany, claims that native plants "became the landscape architect's swastika." He quotes Alwyn Seifert (a leading German landscape architect during the Nazi period) as saying "nothing foreign should be added, and nothing native should be left out." The ideological attention to pure bloodlines led Nazitime botanists to advocate a "war of extermination" against a foreign impatiens felt to be out-competing the "native" impatiens. With the invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler pressed Nazi policy-makers to complete the Reich's Landscape Law to force the exclusive use of native plants within its empire. Nature had been nationalized and became totalitarian and violently enforced. You are as your plants.
Anarcho-Green NazisAs long ago as 1989 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, was running front cover features on what it described as 'the greening of the brownshirts.' For many years former National Front activists have been setting up quasi-green organisations as recruiting fronts for their vile activities, but it is only more recently that the anarchist movement has been targeted as a potential vehicle for Nazi propaganda. Former National Front boss Patrick Harrington has even managed to get a letter published in the latest issue of the American journal Anarchy, in which he writes 'as a life-long vegetarian and pagan, I am genuinely interested in green issues... I do not see any contradiction between this and my other views , indeed I regard them as interlinked.'
A number of anarchists have been won over by this claim and it is these individuals who are most likely to succeed in getting it across to a wider public. The most notorious anarchist convert to National Front style racism is Richard Hunt, the founder of Green Anarchist and the driving force behind the magazine Alternative Green. Hunt vents his racism in anti-Irish rants with headlines such as Off Our Patch Paddy. Alternative Green has also run articles supporting the 'red and brown' united front fighting against democracy in Russia, and currently argues for tough immigration and deportation laws. More sinister still is Richard Hunt's claim that the population must be reduced by 75% if we are to have an ecologically sustainable society. Hunt doesn't make it clear whether he wishes to set up death camps or if people will simply be left to starve to death.
"We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."
That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops. HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.
This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men. The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth.
Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913. In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned. Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party. Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."
Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals. We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god. We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers".
"I understand that last week Canada's Minister of the Environment, Minister John Baird, mischaracterized comments I made last summer as praise for the Harper government's actions on global warming," Mr. Gore, who has become one of the world's best-known environmental activists, said in a statement yesterday.
"The comments I made were designed to encourage the Harper government not to abandon Canada's tradition of fighting above its weight class on the world stage as part of the Kyoto process."
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Northern Climate Exchange
Mr. Speaker, the greatest impact of climate change in the world is on Canada's Arctic.
The Conservatives have claimed they are now finally concerned about the impacts of climate change, but on March 31 the government will close the Northern Climate Exchange which does important tracking and research both nationally and internationally. Why is the government again turning its back on the north?
There is still time for the minister to reverse his ridiculous decision. Will he commit to do that today?
Mr. Speaker, the government recognizes the importance to act on greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is having a huge effect not just on Canada, but particularly in our Arctic.
However, this government believes that the time has finished to talk about things, to study things, to reach into promoting things. The time has come to act. That is why this government is taking real action on climate change reduction. We introduced equal energy initiatives, more energy efficiency and more clean energy.
| --Canada, once again providing leadership in the world, fighting above its weight class and showing moral authority to the rest of the world. That's what Canada's known for. |
Global warming is a given. The cause of global warming is questioned. Some scientists blame man, just as many other scientists contend we are undergoing one of Earth's natural warming cycles.
Our planet has been cooling and warming since God created it.
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File this under all is fair in love and war and politics...
