Wednesday, March 30, 2005
TICK TOCK TICK TOCK
UN Study: Earth's Health Is Deteriorating
(AP) Unless nations adopt more eco-friendly policies, increased human demands for food, clean water and fuels could speed the disappearance of forests, fish and fresh water reserves and lead to more frequent disease outbreaks over the next 50 years, the U.N. report said.
Growing populations and expanding economic activity have strained the planet's ecosystems over the past half century, a trend that threatens international efforts to combat poverty and disease, a U.N.-sponsored study of the Earth's health warned on Wednesday.
The four-year, US$24 million (18.57 million euro) study -- the largest-ever to show how people are changing their environment -- found that humans had depleted 60 percent of the world's grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers and lakes.
Unless nations adopt more eco-friendly policies, increased human demands for food, clean water and fuels could speed the disappearance of forests, fish and fresh water reserves and lead to more frequent disease outbreaks over the next 50 years, it said.
"This report is essentially an audit of nature's economy and the audit shows that we have driven most of the accounts into the red, if you drive the economy into the red ultimately there are significant consequences for our capacity to achieve our dreams in terms of poverty reduction and prosperity," Jonathan Lash, a member of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment board, said in London.
Walter Reid, director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, said over the past 50 years humans had changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than any comparable period in human history.
"These changes have resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss to the biological diversity of the planet," Reid said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan stressed that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment "tells us how we can change course," and urged nations to consider its recommendations.
Earlier in the day at an event in Japan, A.H. Zakri, director of the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, said eliminating trade barriers and subsidies, protecting forests and coastal areas, promoting "green" technologies and lowering greenhouse gas emissions thought to contribute to global warming could help to slow environmental degradation.
The study was compiled by 1,360 scientists from 95 nations who pored over 16,000 satellite photos from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and analyzed reams of statistics and scientific journals.
Their findings, announced in several cities worldwide, highlight the planet's problems at the end of the 20th century, as the human population reached 6 billion.
A fifth of coral reefs and a third of the mangrove forests have been destroyed in recent decades. The diversity of animal and plant species has fallen sharply, and a third of all species are at risk of extinction. Disease outbreaks, floods and fires have become more frequent. Levels of carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas -- in the atmosphere have surged, mostly in the past four decades.
Conservation groups called on governments, businesses and individuals to heed the study's warnings.
"Ecosystems are capital assets. We don't include them on our balance sheets, but if we did the services they supply would dwarf everything else in value," said Taylor Ricketts, director of conservation science at World Wildlife Fund.
The report said degradation of ecosystems was a barrier to achieving development goals adopted at the U.N. Millennium Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2000: halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015 and improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.
The ecosystem assessment was designed by the U.N. Environment Program, the U.N. Development Program, the World Bank, the World Resources Institute, the Global Environment Facility and others. Governments, non-governmental organizations, foundations, academic institutions and the private sector also contributed their expertise.
© 2005 Associated Press.
© 2005 Sci-Tech Today.Tuesday, March 29, 2005
WHY WE LOVE SANDY BULLOCK
Sandra Bullock: Forty and Definitely Fabulous
Jenny Peters, Fashion Wire Daily March 28, 2005 - LOS ANGELES
Why is Sandra Bullock the coolest actress in Hollywood? Because she says things like this, when asked how it feels to have hit the Big 4-0 last July:
"Do you think that when you turn forty things fall off? Oh, Christ. It is your fault that people make an issue out of [aging]!"
Bullock has always been blunt, funny, and completely down to earth in interviews, ever since her star went on the rise with "Speed" way back in 1994. She’s also always been smart, charming, and absolutely gorgeous, with the passing years seeming to enhance her beauty; and (perhaps her best quality of all) she never takes herself too seriously.
"[It’s] surgery, baby. Plastic surgery," the star of the just-released comedy "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Dangerous" cracks, "Of course I have [had surgery]. Look at me! No. C’mon! Give me a break!"
Bullock may not have gone off to have plastic surgery, but she has been out of the public eye for the last couple of years — "Two Weeks Notice" was her last film, released in 2002. She dropped out of sight for a while partly because as one of the highest-paid actresses working today, she’s so rich at this point that she never has to work again, and partly because she was ready for a change.
"I just needed to do some other stuff. I wanted a life again," she explains. "I’m sort of a workaholic and I use that as an excuse not to stop. And I didn’t know what was going on in my life anymore, or what time I liked to get up anymore, what I liked to do for a living, or who I was. I had some, sort of, life catching-up to do, I think."
She also found a new man in her time off, "Monster Garage" biker bad boy Jesse James; the couple has been dating for the past year or so, a fact that hasn’t escaped the tabloids and the paparazzi. Bullock advises her fans to take everything they see about her in the tabloids with a healthy dose of skepticism, however.
"You know what? What the hell do the tabloids know? The tabloids have hooked me up with so many people that I don’t care. They can say whatever they want as long as they don’t say that I’ve killed anyone," she says with a grimace and a shrug, adding, "I think that it’s kind of funny sometimes. Any time that I’m photographed, when I see the paparazzi I always look my worst. I wear the pants that make your ass look huge. I have got dog hair on a sweatshirt because I was rolling with the pooches. And you’re like, ‘Why couldn’t I have been dressed?’ But I’m not going to be the person who’s going to get dressed up to leave the house just in case. I wish that I was!"
She wants people to remember another thing, too, especially when she looks particularly awful in a tabloid shot. "It’s just like you never ever know, and it’s the most inopportune times. I do go up to the people [I see] with ‘The Enquirer’ and go, ‘Is my ass that big? Does the cellulite go down to the ankles?’ And they go, ‘You don’t have cellulite on your ankles.’ So you have to also realize that there’s doctored photographs [published all the time]. There’s photographs that are printed to make women look worse, and it’s always worse for us women."
And while we find it pretty hard to believe that Sandra Bullock ever really looks bad (those pics must be doctored!), it is great to hear a huge Hollywood star say she is just like the rest of us, with good days and bad days. She really is the coolest "A" list actress in the world, and it’s good to have her back, in "Miss Congeniality 2" and one hopes, way beyond, where she can prove just how fabulous being a woman in her forties really is.