Why does the contemporary Western lifestyle influence the rise in mental illness and depression? Why is our separation from Nature detrimentally affecting human health and consciousness? Our growing distance from Nature doesn’t serve the Earth or us. It is clear there is an increasing need for humanity to reconnect with Nature and why it is crucial that western society needs to become more ecologically sustainable within the means of the Earth’s natural limits.
Carlita is an independent environmental journalist and project developer who provides information overlooked by mainstream journalism funded by political agendas, since Carlita has worked closely with indigenous groups in Latin America for the last fifteen years.
Isolated Amazon indigenous people. Photo taken by author.
60 million to 200 million indigenous people are almost wholly dependent on forests, these indigenous forest communities live in the world’s last remaining forests which are critically endangered as the equivalent of 987,500 football fields of Amazon Rainforest have been destroyed over the last few years in Brazil.
These indigenous forest communities are facing ecocide and they are key to the protection of the Amazon rainforest and climate balance. There are at least 80 indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest still living in complete isolation from the outside world. Human contact would be detrimental to their very existence, they are the most vulnerable communities since they have no resistance to disease and would be wiped out upon first contact with people from the outside world. We must respect their way of life and leave them in peace and protect them from gold and oil miners.
The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) and WRI Report found that Indigenous Peoples and local forest communities manage at least 54,546 million metric tons of carbon (Mt C) in the tropical forests they live in globally, or just under one-quarter of the total carbon found above ground in the global tropics.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage at least 24 percent of the total carbon stored aboveground in the world’s tropical forests, or 54,546 million metric tons of carbon (MtC), a sum greater than 250 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global air travel.
There is a deeply intrinsic relationship between the health of the Amazon rainforest and the health of the planet. Rainforests contain 90-140 billion metric tons of carbon, not just in the tree trunks but also stored in the soil below, this helps stabilise local and global climate. Deforestation, oil extraction and mining activities releases significant amounts of this locked carbon, which is having catastrophic consequences on the climate around the world.
The Rights and Resources Initiative offers Amazon forest and global governments to consider improving protection of deforestation and forest degradation pressures, to enhance local livelihoods, tropical country governments and the international community should:
• Support the efforts of forest peoples’ organisations to document and secure their collective forest
rights by scaling up dedicated funding streams and technical assistance;
• Make Indigenous Peoples and local communities part of the climate solution by incorporating
community-based actions in Nationally Determined Contributions;
• Develop/adopt institutional safeguards that significantly increase the voice and contributions of
forest peoples in the design and implementation priority actions to conserve/enhance forest carbon stocks and non-carbon benefits.
The Amazon rainforest is the worlds largest biodiversity rich biome containing more than half the worlds 10 million animal and plant species, with green capital preservation we can emphasize the immense value of the rainforest and its contribution to the planet.
The Amazon rainforest contains:
One in ten known species on Earth
1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests.
4,100 miles of winding fresh water rivers.
2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40 percent of South America.
We are at a critical time where global governments, rainforest conservation groups and non-governmental organisations need to reinforce protection of environmental laws for Indigenous people’s defence treaties for the last remaining Amazon rainforests on the Earth. After spending fifteen years working on conservation projects with indigenous people in the Amazon, their challenges involve dealing with many front line issues that the largest established charities, governments and academic institutes know very little about. One common example in the Amazonia regions of South America, is the ongoing internalised governmental corruption where some government affiliated corporations provide finances and arms to military and vigilante groups to attack and continually persecute indigenous environmental activist leaders and to drive indigenous people forcefully off of their land. This is why there is an exponential rise of murders of Indigenous environmental activists every year.
One such story I learned in 2012 at Shell airport waiting to fly deep into the Amazon, here I met with Cristina Gualinga. Cristina is from the Kichwar Sarayaku territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Sarayaku community were subject to violent force to remove them from their ancestral land by illegal invasion of oil companies and their government sponsored military soldiers. Cristina Gualinga and many in her Sarayaku community are life long activists against oil exploitation, after they were subject to brutal expulsion from their territory and Cristina witnessed systematic destruction of her ancestral lands for an oil pipeline, there is a documentary about the Sarayaku’s experience called The Children of the Jaguar.
Governments who are included in the Amazon Basin region countries must collaborate with international conservation organisations and governments from all global countries to step up protection through reinforcement of environmental laws and indigenous peoples rights and powers to indigenous leaders of key communities who are our environmental protectors of the Amazon.
The international governments have a responsibility to the conservation of the planet and especially the Amazon rainforest and should be providing reinforced prosecution for indigenous communities threatened by oil extraction, hydrodam building or gold mining and every other activity that is rapidly causing ecocide in the Amazon rainforest.
The above map shows the amount of industrial activity in the Amazon and the red crosses show the amount of indigenous people assassinated due to conflicts over rainforest that they are fighting to protect.
Between August 2017 and July 2018 some 7,900 square kilometres of forest were logged in the Brazilian Amazon. In addition to the ongoing illegal logging and goldmines, in 2019 over 7,200 square miles of the Brazilian rainforest burned—an aggregated area nearly the size of New Jersey. The worst annual rate of deforestation in a decade, according to official government data. This represents an increase of 14 percent over the same period last year.
Greenpeace Brazil pointed out, approximately 1,185 million trees were felled in an area equivalent to the size of 987,500 football fields.
The above graph from Global Witness report ”At What Cost” shows Brazil has the highest rate of environmental defenders being killed than any other country in the world.
Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro ignores invitations towards implementing and reinforcing conservation action by other Amazon countries and he encourages persecution of indigenous people, conveniently overlooking the continued murders of Amazon protectors and environmental campaigners, further accelerating the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon, last year many of the raging fires which raged through the Brazilian Amazon were a result of arson as a preliminary measure to clear forest for oil drilling and illegal gold mining in indigenous territories that should be protected areas of the Amazon. Bolsonaro has publicly declared his hatred of indigenous communities, specifically the Kawahivas people who are on the edge of extinction, his promise to corporate interests are to continue to open more the Amazon to the development of the mining and timber industries.
Therefore, corporate sponsored murders of indigenous environmental protectors are conveniently overlooked, increasing the kidnappings, torture and assassination of key environmentalists. Consequently, illegal mining and logging activities are rising with corporate land grabs and violations of indigenous people’s rights to critical escalation Brazil and other countries that the Amazon basin covers, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia.
The Amazon rainforest is deadlier than ever for land and environmental defenders, with mining and oil industries and agribusiness, these industries are the most linked to murder of environmentalists and indigenous rainforest activists.
Many indigenous communities live solely off of the land, many live in isolated regions that are difficult to access, they are adept at survival from the bounty of nature and in tune with the spiritual elements that come with their connection and close relationship with nature, therefore most of these communities are not in need of money or the materialistic way of living that Westerners are used to, and this goes in their favour to be the world’s best and most trusted conservationists. Their lives depend on the preservation and conservation of their ancestral land, not on money. Their connection with the environment is not just dependent on daily living, it is part of their spiritual ancestry, their spiritual ecology, part of their souls and beating hearts. This is what we have forgotten in Western civilisation.
For these reasons, Indigenous people are the best conservationists to manage and conserve the forests and last great wildernesses, as their immediate survival depends on the land and they are attuned to the environment around them, because of this, they are also the most vulnerable when it comes to ecocide, their cultures and survival is ultimately threatened. Read previous article People on the Edge of Extinction-The Last Tribes of the Amazon
There are indigenous conservation treaty recommendations supported by many Indian and Alaskan Native organisations. A recent convention set up by the Indigenous peoples of all the Americas allowed them to form sixteen principles for building a sustainable and harmonious world community.
These principles are rooted in the concerns of hundreds of Indigenous Elders, Spiritual Leaders and Community Members, they are also rooted in deep ecology values, they recognise the interconnection of all life on Earth and how we affect one another and the Earth with our actions. They recognise how humans must work on internal balance to create external balance and a sustainable world. They recognise the importance of morals, and ethics in communities. These guiding principles constitute the foundation for the process of healing and developing ourselves (mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually), our human relationships (personal, social, political, economic, and cultural) and our relationship with Mother Earth.
The senseless annihilation of the Earth’s last rainforests is part of an ecosystem, not only providing vital equilibrium for the climate but also plant medicines and foods and resources everyone takes for granted. Corporate ecocide has to stop along with the global unfolding ecocide of other ancient wildernesses where our great indigenous people remain.
All this senseless destruction of the Amazon rainforest, is for logging, gold, hydrodams and mostly for petroleum oil, the black life blood of Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, these resources are valued over human life and over the most essential biome of the Amazon rainforest, a major oxygen producer for all life on planet Earth. How many of us have to suffer and to what limit of destruction will this planet be pushed to, before we realise human consciousness is now an ecological issue? Humanity is a threat to itself unless we change the way we live on this planet, we have to live with nature, not separate from her, we are our environment, we are nature. Meanwhile there are solutions that we at Evolve to Ecology are working on to give more power and protection to indigenous communities in the Amazon with the Biobank Green Economy initiative.
Carlita is an independent environmental journalist and project developer who provides information overlooked by mainstream journalism funded by political agendas, since Carlita has worked closely with indigenous groups in Latin America for the last fifteen years.
My new book is now published and available here in Paperback and Kindle
This book provides a fresh perspective on the exponential rise in depression and suicide in modern western society. It’s an alternative book for alternative people who have tried conventional medicine or who aren’t interested in treating depression with allopathic options, and who are open to trying other options. Scientists have studied depression is in fact a normal response to a global environmental destruction, with growing scientific peer reviewed papers that confirm our degrading environment affects our mental health. There is an urgent need for humanity to reconnect with nature and change society to become more environmentally friendly. The author offers advice on how to manage depression better with nutritional advice and controversial health hacks, recommended lifestyle changes including learning the art of living after surviving grief, deep trauma, and loss.
The aim is to help the reader see their depression as a calling to look within, connect with their truer inner being and begin to nurture themselves spiritually, mentally and emotionally. Furthermore, this book invites the reader to consider their own place in human evolution and redefine their lost purpose to one that is more aligned to Ecology than to Western Materialism, to become self-empowered, not a victim of depression. We look at talk therapies and radical new alternative therapies for managing depression in a challenging world.
Contents-
Introduction
Poem-Faithful Black Dog
Chapter One- I am Not my Story
Poem-The Exiled Dissidents
Chapter Two-Corporate devolution vs Ecology
Poem-My Friend, My Shadow
Chapter Three-A Brief History of Depression
Poem-The Thief
Chapter Four- The Art of Living
Poem-The Heart’s Compass
Chapter Five- Gluten Free Living, Health the Gut, Heal the Mind
Poem-Patented Flower in a Planet Sized Laboratory
Chapter Six- Health Hacks to Avoid Inflammation and Depression
Poem-Beat Your Drum
Chapter Seven- A Look at Different Talk Therapies
Poem-Illusions of Polarities
Chapter Eight- The Therapeutic Benefits of Entheogens and CBD oil
Poem–Merging Galaxies
Chapter Nine- The Noosphere, Consciousness and Biosphere
Carlita is an independent environmental journalist and project developer who provides information overlooked by mainstream journalism funded by political agendas, since Carlita has worked closely with indigenous groups in Latin America for the last fifteen years.
After a state of emergency was declared in Ecuador, with two weeks of intense demonstrations in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, Ecuadorian protestors have released ten police and thirty journalists, who were reportedly taken hostage by activist groups, in the midst of violent outbreaks during demonstrations against IMF austerity pressures on the Ecuadorian government, namely the reason why oil subsidies were being withdrawn,
Before being liberated later that evening, some of the police officers were made to carry the coffin of a protestor, named Inocencio Tucumbí, whose coffin was taken to the city centre, Inocencio died after being hit by a tear gas canister fired by the police at a protest last Wednesday.
Getty
Three other protestors have lost their lives during the protests and over 650 protestors have been arrested.
President Moreno had to move the government out of Quito to Guayaquil, Lenín Moreno has agreed to reassess the subsidies, but not necessarily repeal them.
This is not just about subsidies and the IMF, it is a reaction to the growing awareness by the people of Ecuador, that their country has been bought out by politicians and corporations, heavily exploited. As a result Ecuador now carries heavy debt.
Indigenous people are tired of the exploits of oil companies continuing to ignore the laws and rights of indigenous people. For over a century, oil and mining companies continue to ignoring the rights of indigenous people, accordingto Ecuadorian law, they are to seek prior consultation to any indigenous community that their activities may affect. They need to seek prior notice before going into an area of indigenous territory in the Amazon and exploiting the area for oil or mining. However, most oil and mining companies continue to ignore that indigenous communities exist, and that the ancestral lands belong to in the Amazon people, not for the Ecuadorian governments to allow corporations to enter, for oil, for gold, uranium and so on, this has continued to increase intensively, without international intervention or help, similarly the same is happening in Peru and Brazil where the middle of the rain forests have seen devastating gold mining expansion over thousands of hectares of Amazon rainforest have been turned to deserts this year .
In Ecuador, indigenous communties are strong and resistence affects the country immediately. Unfortunately, for Moreno, he took on Ecuador after the prior president Rafael Correa left a messy legacy behind. Correa squeezed all the money he could steal, out of the Ecuadorian economy.
Rafael Correa sold Ecuador out completely just before April 2017 Elections, while he was in government, he did a lot of back handed deals, one such deal was while he was running the Yasuni campaign to keep the oil in the ground, behind closed doors, he secretly made oil deals with Chinese oil companies while pretending to the public he wanted to conserve Yasuni National Park. Promptly after Moreno was elected, Rafael Correa immediately left for Brussels.
Two years before PetroAmazonia oil bonds were sold in the New York Stock Market, Correa’s government denounced the 10 per cent in annual interest the country paid on its bonds as “usury in 2015.” So when the 51-year-old former economics professor was only willing to pay 10.5 per cent in a sale of notes back then, it raised speculation the Opec nation may be running short of cash after oil prices collapsed. Before the March 19 sale 2015, Correa told potential buyers it wanted to pay less than 8 per cent to borrow at least US$1 billion for as long as seven years. Instead, the Andean nation got just US$750 million for five years at yields that were more than two percentage points higher. The sale “indicates that they are running into trouble,” said Sarah Glendon, an economist at Gramercy Funds Management.
Moreno and the people of Ecuador are paying this price, and Moreno is under a lot of pressure to try and find a solution to the mess. However, the ramifications are worse for the indigenous people and so as it is nearing 2020, when the debts of U.S.$315,339,980, has to be paid back at least
4.625% of notes are due by 2020, the pressure on Ecuadorian people and the government is worse than ever, what will Moreno do to compromise for the people of Ecuador? Times have already been hard on the Ecuadorian economy after Ecuador had to spend a lot of money rebuilding important infrastructure recovering from the 7.8 Earthquake in 2016.
Many indigenous people over the last three years have been greatly pressured and exploited as oil and mining activities expand an develop exponentially in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Since this means more destruction of the Amazon, to be exploited by oil companies such as Petro Amazonas and other oil companies for exploitation and drilling, as this debt needs to be paid back by next year, 2020 and these notes were borrowed on Petro Amazonas assets, one of the driving destroyers of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
How could the concept of Natural Capital help Ecuador reclaim economic autonomy?
Ecuador has more than half the world’s biodiversity found in the Amazon rainforest, in terms of Natural Capital, there is a great deal of value in the Amazon that could wipe out all of Ecuador’s world debt.
Today, biodiversity rich areas of the world are a critically endangered and a limited natural resource. We are living in the Sixth greatest mass extinction, because of our addiction to oil and wealth in terms of short term gain, this drastically affects how we manage biodiversity. It is an apocalypse happening in slow motion which affects all of the earth’s biodiversity which took 3.8 billion years of evolution to form. This extinction differs from previous extinctions, in that it is caused by humans, not by natural causes, as we are the cause, we can also slow it down or prevent it, if we make big changes. While governments are aware of this and we continue to accelerate it, each year, and this affects every single species and ecosystem on the planet, nothing is being done to protect biodiversity, instead twenty years on from my environmental science degree, it is disheartening to see environmental laws have become greately weakened as politicians are the stakeholders of lobbying corporations and are legally bribed to rewrite laws for backhanded payments. According to recent scientific data, animals and plants are disappearing at a rate of between 75 and 150 species per day. There may be no rain forest left in twenty years from now, nor fish in the ocean in ten years time and over half the world will have a water crisis, fifteen years from now. Bees are our most important crop pollinators and are fast disappearing and the rate of deforestation and ocean pollution is destroying these keystone ecosystems, which are drastically affected by man’s own actions. As most people are ecologically illiterate, we negate the goods and services and value these natural resources and the wealth they generate or the species that also contribute to the work of ecological goods and services.
Look at Africa, the natural capital if given monetary value would make it the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources. Western society must live more within our ecologically realistic limitations, consume less and live more sustainably. We agree that predatory capitalism equals exploitation, and thrives from growing centralized power structures. This is part of its subjective characteristics and results in a few countries having more power, wealth and opportunities than the rest of the world, which is the cancer of this growing disparity between the first world nations and ”third world nations”, which were originally ancient first world superpowers in the story of ancient history.
Natural Capital is a concept that was explored nearly 20 years ago now, pilot projects have been quietly funded by the United Nations to see how we can value nature and biodiversity for policy makers. The World Resource Institute (WRI) estimates the value of ecosystem services to be US $33 trillion a year, nearly twice the value of the global gross national product (GNP) of US $18 trillion. The US is also in debt by 17 trillion dollars, if the US switched to an economy based on natural capital, the financial value tied up in its natural capital would take care of this debt. In the same way that a banknote is a promissory note against the gold or silver that has been deposited in the bank, ecological economists are seeing how we can start to put the same value onto ecosystems and the role of species in ecosystem production; another example would be the 80 percent of oxygen generated by algae and microbial activity in the oceans. Hypothetically, the value of the work done in existing ecosystems could regenerate local economies and increase the wealth and monetary value of nature globally, simply by ensuring its conservation and existence by using initiatives similar to the TEEB Economic of Ecosystems and Biodiversity model if we took it to a community level to decentralize governmental powers and management of our natural resources.
Nature’s ecological banking system could be a way to revolutionise our world and local economies and transfer wealth from an oil-based economy to an ecology-based economy, this wealth would provide poor countries with enough ecological economy that global debt would become a thing of the past. This starts on a local level, worldwide, which would regenerate and allow local communities to have better control over their own natural resources, protecting and managing them from over-exploitation of previously decentralised management of resources, which could be prevented, if corporate social responsibility pays a tax to the natural capital destroyed and when more is taken out of the ecosystems and Natural Capital, than is put into them, this crucially needs to be taken into account in order to gain more balance.
In terms of flipping this over to give people power instead of governments, we could make local land trusts run by the local communities which protect thousands of hectares of rain forest for the future preservation of biodiversity and translate the value to cryptocurrency rather than fiat, which is centralized and controlled by governments, whereas cryptocurrency is not. Ecuador, Peru, Brazil,Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia would be infinitely more wealthy because these countries are where the Amazon basin covers. If we put a value on just one hectare of the Amazon for the biodiversity it holds, or for the oxygen and clean water it produces, or for
Here we provide further steps towards sustainability and increasing power to local communities and protect nature from centralized predatory capitalism exploits:
1. Decentralisation of power in cities and governments, to smaller towns and villages, for local communities to have more say in governance of local resources instead of foreign governments.
2. Improve infrastructures in rural areas for solar and wind technology for self sustainable towns and greener cities, strengthening local infrastructures for alternative fuel systems to make the transition from oil easier, such as make hydrogen fuel cell refuelling stations, along with electric cars more available in every town and city and alternative energy resources for off the grid power generators.
3. Ideally, (because this won’t happen in real world politics), Western governments that currently have central power would return the rights for developing countries the access to manage their own land and natural resources which would remedy starvation, put a stop to corporate land grabs and create a more sustainably balanced structure that is not centralised or controlled by corporations and politicians of the Western World.
4. This is a hard one since those who have the power prefer to keep countries in debt, especially to exploit their resources. -Abolish “third world debt” based on unrealistic inflation agendas for the world powers to control natural resources in ‘poorer’ foreign countries that are actually ‘richer’ in rare minerals and natural resources than most Western countries, we will see how in further paragraphs the Natural Economy in terms of goods and services and biodiversity, can turn the poorest nations into the richest over night and would be used to wipe world debt.
5. Environmental laws need to make corporate exploitations of foreign natural resources a crime, more stringent environmental laws are necessary and no more erosion of these laws by politicians who are corporate pimps bribed to rewrite laws for corporate agendas. Western corporations need to abolish privatisation of water, and land resources in “third world countries”.
6. Return land rights to rural community agriculturalists in developing countries, and locally supporting sustainable agriculture. With localised sustainable farming, there would be an equal distribution of food and grain and where there is poor soil quality implementation of soil restoration projects .
The current global conflicts, we see emerging in both the ecological and economic crisis, is a sign that we need to re-evaluate the global economy that has been built on short-term gain and erroneous decisions of greedy politicians and their corporate partners, with no acknowledgement or regard for nature’s capital, invisible goods, services and production that everyone takes for granted. This completely disregards nature’s capital value. Our view of nature is to see ourselves as separate and above it, a western view that is so engrained in our perception of the world, we don’t think twice about our wasteful consumerist culture. We could start exploring new ways of seeing nature as a valuable investment we need to protect, to preserve biodiversity and the natural balance of ecosystems for the future of humanity.
Graphene can act as an insulator and superconductor.
It is a general consensus that carbon dioxide is considered to be adding to greenhouse gases and its global warming effect. However, for chemical reactions, carbon dioxide can also be a helpful raw material.
Carbon dioxide is significant for chemical reactions, a scientific research group has now announced at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), on this phenomenon and how it could be applied in a way to increase the development of an essential material that could revolutionise clean alternative energy harnessing, with Carbon dioxide. They discovered they could utilise carbon dioxide as a raw material to produce graphene, a technological material which is currently the subject of intense study.
Back in 2011, Justin Hall-Tipping was the first scientific pioneer to use graphene in Nano Solar energy, which was a huge innovation in nanotechnology, that few people still have not heard much about today. This technology will put an end to nuclear and coal power stations. Tippin and his group of nano-tech and solar energy scientists produced a clear film of transparent plastic, that you can stick to your window, turning a window of any building into a an electricity generator or a modern power station to produce all your power needs or send others energy if they need it.
The entrepreneur, Justin Hall-Tipping, sought out the world’s leading nanotechnology scientists to harness the electron and create energy through nanotechnology, now they have a company called Nanoholdings, which consists of team of scientists, investors and innovators working at the cutting-edge of nanotechnology to develop solutions to the world’s growing energy problems. Working in partnership with the world’s best universities, they have developed products and companies that will revolutionise the way we use and generate energy. Imagine you live in a building that has very large windows, you can use each window much like a solar panel, simply by using a thin plastic film with energy harnessing systems, embedded inside the film as fine or finer than a human hair, the plastic sheet can be stuck onto the window panes of a house or office building to use the light and heat energy beaming in through the window. This becomes a powerhouse using nanotechnology to convert light energy from the sun to power up the building for heat or to cool or generate electricity and if it is not required there, it can then be sent to someone else who needs it more.
(Hall-Tipping, 2011).
Now this new discovery about graphene announced at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), on using Carbon dioxide to produce graphene, adds even more exciting developments to the nanotechnology exotic altenative energy possibilities of the future of free energy.
The current archaic combustion of fossil fuels, includes coal and oil which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and even more so when the oil or gas has been drilled from the Amazon rainforest. Every day, destruction of vast areas of rainforest is at a critical scale, the trees and disturbed soil, where the carbon dioxide had been naturally sequestered, (acted as a carbon sink before being disturbed), are then released into the atmosphere. Cutting this causal chain is what motivates Kit scientists to search for the opportunity of producing electricity from graphene, but additionally for alternative uses of carbon dioxide. One opportunity could be to look at carbon dioxide as a valuable resource for the synthesis of other precious elements, sequestering it back to the natural cycle, the result would not only clean up the planet, but also provide cleaner energy materials and off grid resources.
An example can be found in nature. During photosynthesis in the leaves of plants, the combination of light, water and carbon dioxide creates biomass, closing the natural material cycle. In this process, it is the job of the metal-based enzyme RuBisCo to absorb the carbon dioxide from the air and make it usable for the further chemical reactions in the plant. Inspired by this metal enzyme-based natural conversion, researchers at KIT are now presenting a process in which the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide together with hydrogen gas is converted directly into graphene at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius with the help of specially prepared, catalytically active metal surfaces.
The team of scientists were inspired by a metal enzyme-based natural conversion, therefore they are actually presenting a system wherein the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide together with hydrogen gas is converted at once into graphene at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius, with the assist of specifically prepared, catalytically active metallic surfaces. This innovation was drawn from the role it has in photosynthesis in plants, the combination of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide creates biomass, the metalic-based enzyme RuBisCo can soak up the carbon dioxide from the air and make it usable for more chemical reactions in the plant.
Graphene is the two-dimensional form of the chemical element carbon, and as mentioned earlier has been used in nanotechnology to enhance solar energy cells to be able to harness energy through a transparent plastic film. Graphene has been used in a number of alternative energy generators and is known to have interesting electrical properties and is therefore an choice for innovative off-grid clean alternative energy generators, likely to be met with the same counterpressures as other alternative generators however the difference is this is nanotechnology, this industry has been growing rapidly and there is a great deal of money in this system, It is unlikely this innovation can be derailed in the same way other forms have. Its discovery and workability in 2004 brought about international, intensive studies and earned the discoverers, Andre Geim and Konstanin Novoselov, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.
The Scientific workgroup at Kit have join forces to publish and present the technique within the ChemSusChem journal for setting apart graphene from carbon dioxide and hydrogen by way of a metal catalyst. “If the metal surface exhibits the correct ratio of copper and palladium, the conversion of carbon dioxide to graphene will take place directly in a simple one-step process,” explains the head of the study, Professor Mario Ruben, from the Molekulare Materialien working group at the Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) and the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry (AOC) at KIT.
In other developments with graphene, the research group have been even capable of produce graphene several layers thick, which might be exciting for feasible programs in batteries, digital compounds, or filtering compounds. Following research is to form functioning energy components from the graphene. Carbon based materials such as graphene and magnetic molecules could be the constructing blocks for future quantum computers along with other possibilities. Therefore, using Carbon Dioxide to produce Graphene, could develop exotic nanotechnologies even more as a driver for graphene based electrity generators in alternative energy and help restore climate balance at the same time,. The days of the coal or nuclear power stations are numbered as graphene and nanotechnologies are developing.
Written by Carlita Shaw
Author of The Silent Ecocide
You can also follow my ecological projects and articles on Ecosolutionaries at Steemit.
Concepción Molina‐Jirón, Mohammed Reda Chellali, C. N. Shyam Kumar, Christian Kübel, Leonardo Velasco, Horst Hahn, Eufemio Moreno‐Pineda, Mario Ruben. Direct Conversion of CO 2 to Multi‐Layer Graphene using Cu–Pd Alloys. ChemSusChem, 2019; DOI: 10.1002/cssc.201901404
Gluttony for new technology is feeding African slavery and causing extinction of rare natural elements, a heavier price for our insatiable consumer paradise, if we buy a new cell phone device or a laptop, we are part of this destructive predator named Capitalism, the beast of ‘First World Nations’ that is driving ecocide and modern slavery. The predator that we feed, leaves behind a trail of destructive footprints across the planet, wherever it treads to extract and deplete, natural resources. The frightening thing is, no where on Earth is left sacred, protected or untouched any more, because Corporations are able to lobby, (legally bribe) politicians to rewrite environmental laws or any law that allows corporations to access minerals, oil, gas or any other biological resource, even in the most protected national parks, environmental laws have dwindled dramatically over the last forty years. All species, all ecosystems, all natural resources are dwindling at an exponential rate, as a result of this predatory insatiable appetite.
Another EPA report reveals that by recycling one million cell phones, we can recover more than 20,000 lbs of copper, 20 lbs of palladium, 550 lbs of silver, and 50 lbs of gold. Then there are these other rare elements below that will soon be extinct, if we were able to recycle computers and cell phones without worrying about license laws, but with the care of the planetary resources in mind, we could millions of tons of reduce electronic waste each year and salvage rare elements that are becoming seriously depleted.
Diagram shows the scarcity of the elements. A new periodic table sizes the boxes for each element based on their relative abundance. Credit: EuChemS/CC BY-ND
Our over-reliance on renewing our technological devices, is driving this unfolding ecocide, the consumerism of electrical goods such as ipads, tablets and android phones. All of these electrical devices rely on a highly unethical mining industry that uses slave labour to mine and assemble electrical products in inhumane conditions; in addition to driving the destruction of the last cloud forests home of the highly endangered Silverback Gorilla populations in Africa. This is well illustrated by the story of the Silverback Gorillas in the African Congo.
The mining of Gold, Diamonds and Coltan, (Ta on the Periodic table-geological name – Columbite Tantalite), a mineral used in the microchips of every single new electronic device, cell phone or tablet and laptop, comes from the African Congo, in the Virungas National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The African Congo has a small area of biodiverse cloud forest ecosystem, where a small group of the world’s last pocket of remaining Silverback Gorillas which lend thanks to the work of Dian Fossey who was murdered on December the 26th 1985, her work was to preserve and protect these primates, which are critically threatened with extinction from poaching and a continually eroded habitat due to these existing ‘Conflict Minerals’ being extracted in the area. Including the mineral Coltan used for microchips, the western greed for constantly renewing cell phones and laptops, is responsible for this plundering. Other rare elements such as Indium are also depleting for the same reason –
”Devices like computers and smartphones. Indium, for example, is a silvery metal used to create touch screens for phones and computers. According to Cole-Hamilton, the world’s indium supply is “extremely thinly spread” across the planet and could soon dry up if we continue chucking out our old devices every few years”-LiveScience
According the the European EuChemS new Periodic table on the rarest elements, Coltan Ta is under serious threat of disappearing within the next hundred years. Coltan Tantalite is used primarily for the production of tantalum capacitors, used in every kind of electronic devices such as mobile phones.
Niobium and Coltan Tantalum have a wide range of uses, including refractive lenses for glasses, cameras, phones and printers. They are also used in semiconductor circuits, and capacitors for small electronic devices such as hearing aids, pacemakers, and mp3 players, as well as in computer hard drives, automobile electronics, and surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters for mobile phones. Coltan is also used to make high-temperature alloys for jet engines and other engine turbines.
Coltan can only be found in a few places in the world, one of which is in Australia, which was the world’s largest producer at Wodinga Tantalum mine in Western Australia, however they closed their mine in 2012 because it is cheaper to mine Coltan using child and adult slave labour in inhumane conditions in Africa’s Democratic Republic of Congo and exposing these working communities to toxic chemicals. To make matters worse for the Silverback Gorillas, the SOCO International energy company are pushing to extract gas and oil reserves from under Lake Edward in the National Park. All this, at the cost of one of the last greatest African forests and majestic Gorillas which have only been given an estimated 15 years of survival amidst the adversities they face through our lack of global responsibility to better manage conservation of critically endangered species, because minerals, gold, diamonds and oil are far more important to the world than saving the Silverback Gorillas and their forest home.
The fact that global mining companies can cut corners to make a bigger profit at the expense of an entire endangered species such as the Mountain Gorilla and at the expense of hard working African miners, who are exploited slave labourers,
shows that international environmental and human rights laws are far too flimsy and ineffective.
However, the Western world conveniently lacks humanitarian and environmental ethics in business, which in turn perpetuates slavery, species extinction and ecocide. This has come so far as corporations suing and imprisoning entrepreneurs and innovators whose mere crime is to combat human waste and planned obsolescence to attempt to create sustainable solutions.
Eric Lundgren, ecological entrepreneur was imprisoned for recycling computer circuit boards into reusable computers. Image credit-David Sprague
Eric Lundgren, a 33 year old e-waste entrepreneur, from Los Angeles, United States, was imprisoned in 2018 for his success in a business which achieved recycling of 41 million pounds of e-waste each year from major corporations such as IBM and Sprint.
Microsoft took Eric Lundgren to court where he was then served a sentence of 15 months in prison and had to pay a $50,000 fine on April the 11th 2018. Microsoft’s argument was that Lundgren could potentially damage their future sales of new computers and new software licenses, the court ruled in favour of Microsoft saying that he had infringed on Microsoft Corp. to the sum of $700,000.
Lundgren pleaded guilty, but he stated that the value of his discs to Microsoft was zero, as Microsoft, nor any computer manufacturers, sell them. He also explained that the discs could only be used to restore the software to computers already licensed for it. The licenses are good for the life of the computer.
Right-to-repair activists want legislation to remove the manufacturing and legal barriers that make it harder for consumers to fix their stuff. When people buy used devices and keep those devices working longer, fewer natural resources are needed for manufacturing and less e-waste ends up in landfills.
Planned Obsolescence needs to be revealed for what it is. People need to wake up to the damage corporations and consumers are causing to the environment and the perpetuation of slave labour, habitat destruction for mining and as a result species extinction.
The above map shows the amount of industrial activity in the Amazon and the red crosses show the amount of indigenous people assassinated due to conflicts over rainforest that they are fighting to protect.
Between August 2017 and July 2018 some 7,900 square kilometres of forest were logged in the Brazilian Amazon, the worst annual rate of deforestation in a decade, according to official government data. This represents an increase of 13.7% over the same period last year.
Greenpeace Brazil pointed out, approximately 1,185 million trees were felled in an area equivalent to the size of 987,500 football fields.
This worrying news comes amid fears that the new far right president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, may worsen the situation due to his promise to open more the Amazon to the development of the timber industry, in addition to his public hatred of indigenous people, specifically the Kawahivas people who are on the edge of extinction.
The above graph from Global Witness report ”At What Cost” shows Brazil has the highest rate of environmental defenders being killed than any other country in the world.
The Amazon rain forest is deadlier than ever for land and environmental defenders, with mining and oil industries and agribusiness, these industries are the most linked to genocides of environmentalists and indigenous rainforest activists.
Between 2005 and 2011 deforestation decreased in Brazil by an encouraging 70%, mainly due to the increase in government protection in response to a growing awareness to protect the rainforest. Even between 2011 and 2017, when Brazil entered a more chaotic political period, the decline in deforestation stopped, but did not reverse. Bolsonaro’s leadership plans, unfortunately, will undo some of that progress.
In a statement, Brazil’s environment minister, Edson Duarte, blamed illegal logging for increased deforestation in the Amazon and called on the government to step up surveillance in the forests, Reuters reported.
Greenpeace claims that the Brazilian government is not doing enough to stop deforestation. In addition, with Bolsonaro in command, “the predictions for the Amazon (and for the fight against climate change) are not good”.
The loss of forests creates an unpleasant feedback loop in climate change. Forests and forest soils are a major carbon sink, and deforestation adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
In the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, regarding the limitation of global warming to 1.5 ° C above pre-industrial levels, it is pointed out that the planting of more trees and the maintenance of existing trees are essential to achieve that goal.
Moreover, in the Amazon, biodiversity loss is devastating and irreversible when deforestation occurs, it is not a matter of planting more trees. It is impossible to replace the biodiversity and species lost which have evolved through millions of years in the biodiversity rich Amazon. Half of the world’s entire animal, amphibians, reptiles, birds, plants, and insect species are found in the Amazon rainforest which is the world’s largest biodiversity hotspot.
The Amazon rain forest contains:
One in ten known species on Earth
1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests
4,100 miles of winding rivers
2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40 percent of South America
There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion metric tons of carbon, help stabilize local and global climate. Deforestation may release significant amounts of this carbon, which could have catastrophic consequences around the world.
Eric Lundgren, ecological entrepreneur was imprisoned for recycling computer circuit boards into reusable computers. Image credit-David Sprague
The above map shows the amount of industrial activity in the Amazon and the red crosses show the amount of indigenous people assassinated due to conflicts over rainforest that they are fighting to protect.
Between 2005 and 2011 deforestation decreased in Brazil by an encouraging 70%, mainly due to the increase in government protection in response to a growing awareness to protect the rainforest. Even between 2011 and 2017, when Brazil entered a more chaotic political period, the decline in deforestation stopped, but did not reverse. Bolsonaro’s leadership plans, unfortunately, will undo some of that progress.
Image: Rich Carey 
