Whilst doing some research on the subject I came across the following quote on toiletpaperworld.com

"In the early 1970s, an EPA study for Congress concluded that using one ton of 100% recycled paper saves 4,100 kwh of energy (enough to power the average home for six months) and 7,000 gallons of water. It also keeps more than 60 pounds of pollution out of the air and saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space, which is increasingly important as many local landfills near their capacity. Paper industry representatives have actually estimated that one ton of recycled paper saves approximately 17 trees."

I was quite shocked by this, firstly because I couldn't believe that there was a website devoted to toilet paper, but secondly by the size of the environmental benefits of recycled toilet paper.

If this is true then the energy savings alone would be reason enough to use recycled toilet paper, but together with savings on landfill, pollution and water usage then surely recycled toilet paper must be the choice of the environmentalist?

The saving of 17 trees sounds impressive too, but most of these trees would be from plantations which are of low biodiversity, so that is less important than perhaps it sounds. However, some of the pulp for toilet paper (including recycled toilet paper) comes from virgin forests, so any saving is lenghtening the lifetime of these forests.

However, there is the problem of bleaching in the process of making recycled toilet paper!

Still, this article suggests that there are real environmental benfits to using recycled toilet paper, just so long as one realises that using it does not mean that there is no environmental impact: Behind the label: Recycled Toilet Tissue.

There are many people who support conservation in principal but are not sufficiently motivated to participate themselves or to question polititians about what they are doing. A number of conservation bodies of a variety of types have come up with a way in which these people are able to actively support conservation; by adopting an animal. In these schemes, one does not actually take an animal into ones home like an adopted child, rather a payment is made to the conservation charity who then send information about the adopted animal and usually supply regular updates. the money they recieve for this goes directly towards the conservation of this particualr animal and the organistaion's conservation work in general. I have made a page on Squidoo.com listing a large number of available animal adoptions for conservation: Adopt Animals for Conservation.

Please take a look at this list and see if there is an animal or charity that you would consider supporting.

One of the biggest threats that wildlife faces, other than habitat loss, is direct persecution from humans. The illegal trade in wildlife is still a huge industry in many parts of the world, particularly southeast Asia, and this unsustainable harvesting of wildlife poses a real threat of extinction to many species.

Tigers and rhinoceros are species which are under great threat of total extermination due to poaching for parts involved in traditional medicines and even in developed nations such as the United Kingdom, direct persecution is still a problem for raptors, especially the Hen Harrier.

On thaibirding.com I have catalogued persecution events of birds as I have heard of them or discovered them myself and unfortuantely there will be many hundreds of cases that I am unaware of: Bird Persecution. In Thailand birds are captured for food, to prevent them from eating farmed fish, for the cage bird trade and for releasing to make merit in Buddhist culture.

Unfortunately, as well as suffering loss of habitat at an accelerating rate, wildlife is still under direct threat of destruction at the hands of humans.

I have built a page on squidoo.com which discusses these issues; please take a look at it: Methane is a Greenhouse Gas.

This page expands upon that whioch I have mentioned here and also suggests some reading material. There is also place to vote on which source of methane poses the greatest threat to the environment in terms of its contribution to the greenhouse effect.

environment, global warming, climate change, greenhouse effect

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What appears to be a breakthrough in technology by Go Sun Solutions in New Zealand could make solar power an attractive prospect for every household. Current solar panels are based on silicon which is an extremely common element within the earth's crust, however, refining it into a form useable for solar panels is a very energy-hungry process and gives fuel to those that argue that solar panels are an irrelevance (given this fact, they could be right).

In this new breakthrough scientists use photo sensitive dyes to produce electricity at a greatly reduced cost. Fortunately, isolating the elements needed for these dyes is a low energy process. Apparently many companies are interested in using this technology and these new panels could be in production by the end of this year. If this is true it could result in a massive change in the way we get our electricity, particularly as these solar panels work at low light levels. If solar energy beomes financially attractive, large numbers of people may make the switch, reducing carbon emissions and giving individuals greater freedom from large corporations.

Sometimes the sustainable living ideology gets taken too far - the idea of eating roadkill isn't likely to persuade many people to live in a more sustainable way. I think that the push for locally produced food is a good idea, not only in terms of the environment but in terms of taste. I remember the first time I tasted a watermelon immediately after picking it in Australia. I couldn't beleive that the delicious thing I was eating was the same as the tasteless pap that passes for watermelon in supermarkets in the UK. Still, sometimes things just aren't available locally; I like coconuts and they just aren't going to grow well here in East Yorkshire and I guess that the coconut is just about the only export product from many small tropical countries.

Locally produced food, though, has the advantage of reducing carbon emissions through a decrease in transport and often in terms of the amount of energy used in processing and packaging, as locally bought foods often come straight from the farm to the market.

One particular farmers' market in Canterbury, Kent, provides not just locally produced food, but locally hit roadkill! Fergus Drennon has been a forager and scavenger of food since the age of 6 or 7 apparently, and only eats meat when he finds it dead on the road, regularly selling foraged food at the market in Canterbury. In a way I quite like this idea - I don't like seeing things wasted and I'm sure that many freshly killed animals are quite tasty. However, maybe it's the sort of thing best kept to oneself? Whilst people like Fergus may pride themselves at the sustainability of their lives, this type of environmental fanaticism may well discourage many people from making sustainability part of their lives.

Fergus, though, does share my distaste for supermarkets (maybe he worked in one too), saying that it is unlikely that supermarkets will stock the unexpected treat of unlaid eggs within a roadkilled bird!!!! Still, he says that he is very happy with his lifestyle, and that is what matters, and I would assume is something that many supermarket shoppers could not honestly say. At least this is what it seems to me by the miserable expressions on the faces of most of the customers where I work.

I've just found out that the sun is directly responsible for global warming!

Apparently solar energy originating from the sun penetrates the earth's atmosphere where it warms the planet to just the right level for it to sustain life. However, it doesn't warm the earth equally across it surface, some areas receive more solar energy than others, meaning that they are warmer. To confuse this further, planet earth orbits the sun and rotates on its own axis, meaning that solar energy levels affecting various points on the globe vary periodically throughout time. Add to this that the earth's orbit is slightly elliptical and it varies in its degree of ellipticality with time and the solar energy reaching any one point on earth is extremely variable. This results in weather patterns that are different on different places on earth and ones that interact with each other in a stable but fluctuating fashion. This is known as climate.

The climate is changing.

Before humans had become very numerous the climate could change and no one very much cared about it. Climate change probably happened fairly slowly giving species a chance to migrate to more suitable areas, this wasn't really a problem as there were large areas of suitable habitat for these species to move to. Some species did become extinct as we know from fossil records, but others evolved to fill the niches left by the extinct ones. Throughout all of this the Sun did its job properly.

However, now the Sun doesn't seem to have caught on, it's not moving with the times. It hasn't adapted to humans pumping large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere where they trap heat. The Sun hasn't moved further away or colled down so that the natural speed of climate change can prevail, instead it has stubbornly remained in the same place as it has been for at least 5 billion years collaborating with greenhouse gases to speed up the rate of climate change to a level at which species (other than humans) are unable to adapt. At the same time the Sun has refused to supply enough solar energy for vegetation to grow faster than humans can clear it, so that now insufficient habitat remains for species to migrate into as the climate changes. Instead, suitable habitat is much reduced and fragmented so that many species are unable to make the migration to safer regions, particularly now the Sun has increased the rate of climate change. Because of this irresponsible behaviour of the Sun, the process of evolution is unable to operate properly to fill the ecological niches vacated by unusually high rates of extinction, because in many cases these niches only exist in small isolated pockets.

However, there is some hope.

Humans are coming to the rescue by inventing ways to combat the refusal of the Sun to either cool down or move further away. Plans are afoot to make machines that sequester carbon, to reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere (an important greenhouse gas), these will in effect be robotic trees. Other heros have come up with the idea of artificially creating cloud layers to reflect the sun's rays before it can be trapped and my contacts at NASA have hinted that there is a project underway to build a "solar tug" which will be able to tow the sun further away or drag it closer as required.

Until this miracle is realised by humankind we can all do our bit. We can all shave our heads and paint them silver to reflect more solar energy back into space. Alternatively we could walk around with silver umbrellas for the same effect. Another idea is to get rid of the leaves that rot and release CO2, drain the oceans from which eminates huge amounts of CO2 or kill all those disgusting wild animals to prevent them from emitting methane (another greenhouse gas) as animal flatulence is a major contributor to global warming - the millions of domestic animals kept for the benefit of humans would be exempt from this cull as they are "tame" and polite beasts with far better manners than their wild cousins.

Alternatively we could stop being such dirty, wasteful bastards and reduce the amount muck we pump into the atmosphere. Some people could become slightly less rich from this though.

Damn you Sun!