Nature needs Nurture

Earth Day: Nature Needs Nurture

Earth Day, celebrated first in 1970 led by a U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson who proposed 'to shake up the political establishment' in the world's first nationwide environmental protest, has come a long way since and serves as the world's largest secular platform that unifies the East and West, the rich and the poor and the urban and the rural. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, today, the biggest global authority on all issues related to the environment. It also served to provide individual groups at the local, state, national, and global levels with partners that share their values and bridge the gap between concerned citizens and their political leaders.

The late 60's, before the environment was anywhere on anyone's agenda, saw the products of explosive economic development littered everywhere - polluted rivers, smog-filled air, mercury poisoned fish, and acid rain. A series of books called Silent Spring in 1962 and The Population Bomb in 1968 helped mobilize the movement further. Events like oil spills near England in 1967 and Santa Barbara, California in 1968 also underscored the urgency of the issue together with concern about nuclear radiation fallout from above ground testing.

The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 when 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy and sustainable environment helped crystallize the concerns being voiced on local platforms with a common denominator and in a big way. The national coordinator of the 1970 Earth Day movement, an undergraduate student by the name of Denis Hayes, and his youthful team organized massive coast-to-coast rallies in the U.S. where thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Senator Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the highest honor given to civilians in the U.S. for his role as Earth Day founder.

'[40 years ago when Earth Day began], knowledge on climate change had not been understood or disseminated on a large scale. Consequently, [Nelson's] focus was rightly on conservation of resources at the local level and means by which environmentally friendly solutions could be developed and implemented by people at the grassroots level,' says Dr. Pachauri, TERI's Director-General and Chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

By 1990, Earth Day had gone global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries highlighting the state of the environment on to the world stage, eventually resulting in the United Nations Earth Summit.

Today, over 1 billion people from 184 countries and 17,000 organizations participate in activities related to Earth Day, making it the largest secular event organized in the world in solidarity with Nature. Earth Day is an opportunity to grab, as is everyday towards a sustainable Earth, while it lasts.

Voices of Concern

Life,
Consists of propositions about life...
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate...'
- A 19th century poem titled Men Made out of Words by Wallace Stevens

Voices of concern: world leaders join the green choir

In a world that is flooded with propositions for a better tomorrow, sustainable development is perhaps a topic that has received more propositions than any other. With all the attention that the issue has garnered, an entire spectrum of suggestions on sustainable development by a host of global leaders and eminent scholars now exists.

The world is now waiting for these propositions on paper to actually convert into actions. And although the recent Copenhagen conference failed to reach an accord, it at least brought the ‘whole race’ (in Stevens’ words) together to chirp in a ‘green choir’, discordant notes and all. Despite all the differences between the North and the South on the climate change issue, the recognition that national boundaries are fading away and that they no longer separate nations distinctly is coming fast.

Ranging from ideological shifts on sustainable development strategies to practical solutions, a variety of insights have been coming to the global ‘green’ table regularly. Who will serve as the international policeman if a particular nation fails to deliver on its obligations? What part of the cost of reducing emissions in the poorer nations will be shared by the richer ones? What steps will be taken to ensure that upcoming green technologies will make it to the market, despite stiff resistance because of their exorbitant prices as compared to fossil fuels? It is some of these vexed questions that will dog the post-Copenhagen discourse as the nations of the world stumble on to the Mexico meet later in 2010.

Jigyasa Jyotika and Suparna Mukherji bring to you the discussions by global leaders that crisscross the ‘green tables’ across the world. The themes range from novel suggestions for fundamental ideological shifts in sustainable development strategies to the constraints and unique perspectives of leaders of the developing world and the highly successful ‘green’ stories of the various countries.


Full story at http://terragreen.teriin.org/index.php

Scientific Blogging Contest - I need your votes!

I recently took part in a national science writing contest and am amongst 6 finalists.

But to win the competition (and get a three month internship as the prize) and to advance my career, I need your help. The contest has a slightly strange rule from the final round onwards: since the writing format was blogging, the winner will be determined by public votes (logic: blogs target the masses). So, while a panel of scientists determined finalists , whoever gets the most votes from here wins (the panel actually jokingly recommends that contestants get to know TV show hosts for public announcements and asking all faculty,family, friends and blog reading strangers). :O

To vote is free - just click on the square voting widget just below and to the right of the article title. It'll say "you've voted" if your vote has come in.

Sounds unfair to most participants, but that's what it's going to be :(



Title: Romance Under a Microscope: Of Promiscuous Philandering Types and Monogamous Married Types

Link:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/schrodinger_killed_cat/blog/romance_under_microscope_promiscuous_philandering_types_and_monogamous_married_types_0


Thanks a lot and love, Jigs


p.s. If you're inclined to actually read the articles, please vote for
the one you like best, regardless of my vote-seeking. All articles at http://www.scientificblogging.com/contest/voting (finalist entries mixed in to get what audiences really think)

Mahaganapathim (Toronto Brothers)

Mahaganapathim

What a wholesome quality this piece has..heart warming.

Stating the Obvious

You are what you meditate

http://www.dailycardinal.com/article/21706

You Are What You Meditate

By: Jigyasa Jyotika /The Daily Cardinal

UW scientists receive government grant to help study the surprising effects of meditation and compassion on the brain

With the holidays approaching, hopefully families everywhere will come together to celebrate their love for each other. They may not know the details of how love and compassion works in their brains, but at least there are some TV specials to help in feeling it.

In the meantime, a team of UW scientists has been systematically studying ethereal emotions like love, compassion and forgiveness at the neurological level. Concrete findings about emotions have so far been elusive, yet arguably central to human existence.

UW-Madison professor of psychiatry and psychology Richard Davidson not only thinks he may begin to find answers, but he received a $2.5 million grant from the Michigan-based Fetzer Institute earlier this year to study positive emotions like these.

“I think it would be fair to say that we are the most active research group in the world in the neuroscience of positive emotions,” said Davidson.

Davidson, who directs the UW Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, has been a world leader in the research on positive emotions in the human brain since its inception over a decade ago.

“With this grant, we plan to study the effects of other positive qualities on the brain — besides love, compassion and forgiveness — in the future and see how we can use the findings to find treatments for anxiety and depression,” said Davidson.

Using brain scans, his research has shown that people whose brains have nurtured higher capacities for love, compassion and forgiveness through mediation are significantly structurally different from those who don’t. (No word yet on those who watch lots of holiday TV specials.)

“We have studied Tibetan monks, amongst other practitioners of meditation, and their brains show significant signs of change after years of such meditation,” Davidson said.

“The brain is more plastic than we ever thought before and it will shape according to experience,” UW-Madison emeritus professor of molecular biology Deric Bownds said. “So you are what you are doing.” That means the brains of pianists expand to incorporate their learning and practice and keeping it that way, and the brains of couch potatoes adapt to that lifestyle too.

Professors around the UW campus are not surprised that Davidson’s group received the $2.5 million grant.

“The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been identified as the mecca of emotion research primarily due to Richard Davidson and his team, who had the foresight to lead this research,” UW professor of psychiatry Jack Nitschke said.

Davidson’s group studies brains by scanning them using functional magnetic resonance images (fMRIs), which reveal areas of the brain that light up under different stimuli. Although the fMRI technique, at best, can just establish correlations between brain areas and their likely functions, that may be enough information for the development of therapeutics for depression and other neurological conditions.

While negative emotions like anxiety and depression have received a lot of attention and are widely studied, Davidson is one of the few scientists in the world who studies positive emotions in humans. For his contribution to the field, in 2006 Time magazine named him among the top 100 most influential people.

In addition to meditating every day, Davidson agreed that he had a personal angle in studying positive emotions in the human brain, one worthy of any holiday special.

“I wanted to work on something that was of benefit to others and to alleviate suffering in the world,” he said.

Purna

“OM - Purnamadah Purnamidam Purnat Purnamudachyate,
Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamevavashisyate”

Translation by PR Ramchander:

That is whole, this is whole, from whole there is whole.
If whole is subtracted from whole, whole is still left.
"Whole" can be replaced with ‘infinity’ also.
"That" and "this" refers to OM.