A short documentary by Brent Melton about the fight to save the Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania. The Tarkine, one of Australia's great wild places, is threatened not just by logging, but by proposals for up to nine new mines in the area.
It's well worth setting an hour aside to watch this lecture by Canadian journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer. Dyer's book, Climate Wars, explored scenarios that could arise from global warming in the coming decades, as changing climate creates food and water shortages and leads to increasing global conflict over resources. Dyer (whose has been dubbed, apparently, "Grim Die-er") doesn't paint a cheerful picture.
I've always thought, if you had a spare few million dollars and a team of computer geeks, that creating a computer game would be a great way to get (mainly young) people to engage with the complexities of environmental issues.
And now someone has done just that.
A new British strategy computer game called Fate of the World puts you in the position of an eco-minded World Bank type organisation trying to prevent runaway climate change. Your options apparently range from the usual building wind farms and public transport to killing everyone over 30 to reduce human population.
Another game, EnerCities allows you to build your own sustainable city on Facebook.
The big question is, of course, are they any good?
Bees are disappearing /dying in record numbers. This is serious business and very personal. Guys, no bees = NO COFFEE. Ladies, no bees = NO CHOCOLATE. These are just 2 of the many many fruits, nuts and veggies we will no longer see on our tables if bees continue to decline.
Bees are disappearing. Maybe it's due to toxins in chemical pesticides. Maybe it's stress caused by commercial bee-keeping techniques, maybe it's disease.
Last week was the 40th anniversary of the Neil Armstrong's first small step on to the Moon. Since then the space program no doubt taught us many valuable things about what lies beyond our world. But the most important discovery has been about our own planet.
Here's something I didn't appreciate. Forty per cent of fish caught in the world's oceans are used to make fish feed to feed farmed fish. In fact, more fish by weight is caught in the oceans than is produced by the fish farms they feed. The process is one of feeding low-grade fish to grow more prized species such as salmon. It turns out farming seafood, certainly as it is practised now, is not the solution to the overfishing of the planet's oceans that I'd hoped.
Our favourite film brothers direct an advert on the merits of clean coal. Note that this video requires flash - if you can't see it here, watch it at ThisIsReality.org.
