Published: May 10, 2010

British scientists have found a novel way to put an end to the age old dilemma of what brides should do with their wedding dress once their honeymoon is over.

Fashion and engineering students at Sheffield Hallam University have developed a wedding dress that can be recycled into five new fashion pieces.

The dress is made of polyvinyl alcohol, a biodegradable substance that is used in laundry bags and washing detergents, which is knitted into the fabric. This enables it to be dissolved into water without harming the environment.

"The students wanted to challenge the notion that a wedding dress should only be used once and aimed to explore modern society's attitudes towards throwaway fashion," telegraph.co.uk quoted Jane Blohm, a fashion lecturer, as saying.

"The project is a union between art and technology which explores the possibilities of using alternative materials for our clothing.

"The wedding gown is perhaps one of the most symbolic garments in (a woman's) wardrobe and represents the challenges of 'throwaway fashion’

"In order to reduce fashion's impact on the environment, the fashion industry must begin to challenge conventional attitudes and practices," she added.

(Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Life/Fashion/Style-Guide/A-biodegradable-wedding-dress-anyone/articleshow/5911710.cms)

KOENIGSWINTER (GERMANY)
Published: April 24, 2010

Outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer shot down expectations of a climate treaty this year, saying on Monday that a major UN conference in December would yield only a "first answer" on curbing greenhouse gases

His comments came just five months after the hyped Copenhagen climate conference failed to yield much progress despite efforts by world leaders, including President Barack Obama. De Boer said the next major UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, in December will "not provide an answer that is good enough."

He was speaking to reporters at an international climate meeting in Koenigswinter, near Bonn, the former German capital. "A good outcome of Cancun will be an operational architecture on climate change," he said. "And then we can decide on a treaty."

De Boer said he expects such an international climate treaty before the end of 2012, but even that will "not be the definitive answer to the climate change challenge."

De Boer's assessment comes five months after the troubled UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. That meeting was originally intended to produce the international treaty that has been in the works since 2007. Instead, it showed a great rift between industrialized nations, new economic powers like China, and developing countries.

Germany and other countries. have said they have not given up on a deal in Cancun. Germany and Mexico are hosting the meeting in Koenigswinter of more than 40 ministers and high representatives, which is aimed at getting the UN negotiating process back on track. However, de Boer said these negotiations will take some time.

He said what the Cancun conference can produce are decisions on sticking points of the envisioned treaty, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions, financial aid from rich to poor countries, technology transfers, or measures to preserve Earth's forests. Such a "functioning architecture" would provide nations worldwide with tools to fight climate change and "increase the level of ambition," he said.

In Copenhagen, nations did agree that global temperatures must not rise above 2°C in comparison with preindustrial times. In order to achieve this, scientists say industrialized countries need to cut their emissions of heat-capturing gases such as carbon dioxide by 25-40% compared with 1990 by 2020, and developing countries must enter a low carbon path. De Boer said industrial nations have started to act, but are not yet doing enough.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/environment/global-warming/No-climate-deal-this-year-says-UN-negotiator/articleshow/5887750.cms

Accessed on April 10, 2010

It’s early morning. As a speeding passenger bus approaches the Acharya Vihar crossing in Bhubaneswar, a man on the roadside waves a coconut wrapped in a piece of red cloth. The bus screeches to a halt. The conductor hurries down and accepts the fruit. Barely after a kilometre, the bus stops again. This time to collect a bunch of red cloth-wrapped coconuts from a woman. By the time the bus reaches Cuttack, the driver’s cabin is stacked with coconuts.

“These are the votive offerings to Goddess Tarini at Ghatagaon,” said Vijay Kumar, the driver. Every alternate day his bus courses through this village in Kendujhar district, on its way to Rairangpur town in northern Orissa. It is surrounded by lush green sal forests along National Highway 215. “No bus driver ever refuses to carry offerings to the deity,” said Kumar who believes service to devotees brings the blessings of the deity and ensures a safe journey. This faith among bus and truck drivers plying the highways of Odisha has created a volunteer courier service that runs with utmost efficiency and free of cost.

“Sometimes devotees leave sackful of coconuts along the roadside; we always stop by to pick them up. Some even send money as offerings and it reaches the temple,” said Kumar. Even if the bus is on a different route, the driver makes sure to drop the coconuts in a collection box en route or pass them on to a bus headed for Ghatagaon. It is like baton change in a relay race, said Kumar as he received a bagful of coconuts from another bus at Ghasipura, about 50 km from the shrine.

On an average, 30,000 coconuts reach the temple for offering every day through the bus network, said Ajay Kumar Bej, accountant at the temple; the figure crosses 50,000 during festivals. There are about 100 Tarini temples across Odisha, which also serve as collection centres for the fruit headed for the main shrine.

The temple also gets its own supply of 2,000 coconuts every day through a local contractor, said Bej. But often this fails to meet the demand of growing number of devotees visiting the shrine from across the country. To keep the supply flowing, Ghatagaon residents have established six godowns that receive 24,000 coconuts every day. A bulk of it comes from Puri—a coastal district that accounts for 30 per cent of the state’s total coconut yield.

At the busy temple, priests take turns to break these tens of thousands of coconuts in front of the deity. A few hundred coconuts find their place near the deity’s feet. One-third of the rest is taken by contractors, nominated through bidding process, who usually supply the fruit to oil mills.

The rest are sold cheaply to Ghatagaon residents; the husks are given free for making fire. This earns the temple more than Rs.30,000 a day while offering the villagers a source of income, said Bej.

Though very few coconut trees are seen in the region, the economy of the village thrives on coconuts received from the temple. Residents usually prepare coconut oil and sweet coconut balls, called kora, and sell them to visitors. More than 100 shops in the village are engaged in the business. “Kora is a delicacy every visitor wants to take home. It is made by adding sugar to grated coconuts,” explained Umakant Nayak, a vendor outside the temple. “Dry it in the sun so that the kora lasts longer,” Nayak suggested, adding that their home-made coconut oil is also in high demand.

The cottage industry now sustains a few thousand people from Ghatagaon as well as from neighbouring villages like Upardiha, Binajhari and Mukundpur-patna. “A litre of coconut oil sells for Rs.120 and a packet of kora at Rs.10. We manage to make a good saving,” said Pratima Nayak, sitting with other villagers on the road outside the Tarini temple, selling oil under the blazing sun.

Since 2000, several non-profits have pitched in to help the women expand their scale of operation and promote the coconut-based cottage industry.

“Earlier, they used to make oil in small quantities by heating the ground coconut in pans,” said Purna Chandra Mahanta of Utkal Women Activists Forum, a non-profit in Kendujhar. They now extract oil at a mill in neighbouring village. Back home, they only purify the oil by straining it and pack it for sale. The increased production has boosted their profit, said Mahanta. A few non-profits are also training them in making other products, such as sweet paan masala prepared by cutting dried coconuts into tiny bits.

Their business could flourish further, said Mahanta, if the administration allots land for a sales centre so that they don’t have to sit in the open. The women are optimistic; they have their faith in Goddess Tarini.

Source: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/full6.asp?foldername=20100515&filename=news&sec_id=50&sid=30)

LA PAZ
Published: April 24, 2010

Bolivia will create the Mother Earth Ministry, in accordance with Cochabamba's Declaration, which was adopted by the World People's Conference on Climate Change, the national media reported.

The Bolivian Information Agency (ABI) published statements by Vice President Alvaro Garcia, who ratified the idea of President Evo Morales in that reference.

It will be a Ministry that will include large part of the current Ministry of Environment and Water, but it will also be accountable for enforcing the Declaration of Cochabamba, he affirmed.

Garcia confirmed that Morales would visit the United Nations (UN) headquarters, heading an inter-continental delegation of the countries and social movements to present the Agreement of the Peoples that includes 17 items.

He will hand over the Cochabamba resolutions to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon so that the world learns about these conclusions, and also to raise other organizations' and governments' awareness about them, Garcia said.

The Summit in Cochabamba was attended by 40,000 representatives from 140 countries of the five continents, and the forum proposed specific initiatives to revert climate change and the extinction of human beings.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/the-good-earth/Bolivia-to-Create-Mother-Earth-Ministry-/articleshow/5860424.cms

April 30, 2010, WASHINGTON

The newly built global headquarter of wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy Limited in Pune was on Friday certified as an eco-friendly building by the US Green Building Council.

The headquarter named One Earth received the Platinum certification of Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED),
a green environment rating system that complies with the standards of the US Green Building Council.

LEED standards specify stringent norms to be met for the greenest, most energy-efficient and high performance buildings.

The Indian Ambassador to the US, Meera Shankar, presented the certification to Tulsi Tanti, chairman of the Suzlon Group, at a function here.

The event was organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry in association with the US India Business Council.

In her keynote address, Shankar emphasised on the need to focus on such green technologies, which would be relevant and affordable in the Indian context.

Noting that this award underlines Suzlon's commitment to sustainability, Tanti said: "I believe 'One Earth' - named as a tribute to Earth's unique existence as a self-replenishing eco-system - will be inspiration and proof to others that it is possible, if we are really determined, to create a sustainable world for our future."

Developed on an area of 41,000 square meters (10.13 acres) with a capacity to house 2,300 people, One Earth ranks among one of the largest green building projects in India.

This building focuses on key areas such as human and environmental health, sustainable site development, efficient water, energy and waste methods, materials and resource selection, and indoor environmental quality and innovation.

The environment friendly approach has also made it possible to construct the facility at a lower cost compared to other facilities of comparable size, ultimately leading to a lower life cycle cost and smaller environmental footprint in the long term.

(Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Suzlon-office-in-Pune-gets-US-green-building-certification/articleshow/5875666.cms)

April 30, 2010, LONDON:-Scientists have discovered that ice floating in the polar oceans is melting, causing sea levels to rise.

The research is the first assessment of how quickly floating ice is being lost.

According to Archimedes' principle, any floating object displaces its own weight of fluid. For example, an ice cube in a glass of water does not cause the glass to overflow as it melts.

But because sea water is warmer and more salty than floating ice, changes in the amount of this ice are having an effect on global sea levels.

The loss of floating ice is equivalent to 1.5 million Titanic-sized icebergs each year. However, the study shows that spread across the global oceans, recent losses of floating ice amount to a sea level rise of just 49 micrometers per year - about a hair's breadth.

Andrew Shepherd, professor at the University of Leeds, who led the study, said it would be unwise to discount this signal.

"Over recent decades there have been dramatic reductions in the quantity of earth's floating ice, including collapses of Antarctic ice shelves and the retreat of Arctic sea ice," Shepherd said.

"These changes have had major impacts on regional climate and, because oceans are expected to warm considerably over the
course of the 21st century, the melting of floating ice should be considered in future assessments of sea level rise," he added.

Shepherd and his team used a combination of satellite observations and a computer model to make their assessment.

They looked at changes in the area and thickness of sea ice and ice shelves, and found that the overall signal amounts to a 742 cubic kilometres per year reduction in the volume of floating ice.

Because of differences in the density and temperature of ice and sea water, the net effect is to increase sea level by 2.6% of this volume, equivalent to 49 micrometers per year spread across the global oceans, a Leeds release said.

The greatest losses were due to the rapid retreat of Arctic Sea ice and to the collapse and thinning of ice shelves at the < Antarctic Peninsula and in the Amundsen Sea.

The findings were published this week in Geophysical Research Letters.

(Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Melting-icebergs-causing-sea-level-rise/articleshow/5871871.cms)

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

“My wife is from Java, and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read
books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.

While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms.

“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”

In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York Universities
and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered-languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization,” said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.

“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.

The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that
a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in
decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.

Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace Vlashki, spoken by the Istrians, what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.

“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”

Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her mother, 92, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband speaks only Croatian and her son, who was born in the United States, speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.

“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”

Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people. “A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.

Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed that the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumbered those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”

A few fading foreign languages have also found niches in New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.

The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home, and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher,” he said.

Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”

And on Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few
hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, 76, a retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran
45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.

For Professor Kaufman, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mamuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens. Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.

“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” said Professor Kaufman, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.

He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, 45, a refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.

“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself."

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?pagewanted=2&ref=homepage&src=me)
Accessed on April 30, 2010)