Tag Archives: Environment

World Wetlands Day

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Today is the World Wetlands Day. Dating back to 1971, World Wetlands Day is an environmentally-related celebration that reaffirms the protection and love for wetlands, which are the small environments of plant life and organisms found within water bodies that bring about ecological health in abundance to not only water bodies but environments as a whole. First celebrated in 1997, World Wetlands Day serves to recognise the influence and positive production that Wetlands have had on the world and in terms brings communities together for the benefit of Mother Nature. This day also raises global awareness because wetlands play a significant role in people and on the planet. The day was formally acknowledged by the United Nations on 30 August 2021as World Wetlands Day. 2 February each year is World Wetlands Day to raise global awareness about the vital role of wetlands for people and our planet. This day also marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands on 2 February 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

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A patch of land that develops pools of water after a rainstorm would not necessarily be considered a wetland, even though the land is wet. Wetlands have unique characteristics: they are generally distinguished from other water bodies or landforms based on their water level and on the types of plants that live within them. Specifically, wetlands are characterised as having a water table that stands at or near the land surface for a long enough period each year to support aquatic plants. A wetland is a distinct ecosystem that is flooded by water, either permanently or seasonally. Flooding results in oxygen-free or anoxic processes prevailing, especially in the soils. Wetlands are considered among the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems, serving as home to a wide range of unique plant and animal species and occur naturally on every continent, except for Antarctica. The water in wetlands is either freshwater, brackish or salt water and the main wetland types are classified based on the dominant plants and/or the source of the water. Wetlands contribute several functions that benefit people and are called ecosystem services and include water purification, groundwater replenishment, stabilization of shorelines and storm protection, water storage and flood control, processing of carbon including carbon fixation, decomposition and sequestration, other nutrients and pollutants, and support of plants and animals. Wetlands also place a role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. The world’s largest wetlands include the Amazon River basin, the West Siberian Plain, the Pantanal in South America, and the Sundarbans in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. According to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, wetlands are more affected by environmental degradation than any other ecosystem on Earth.

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Over time, human construction has led to various ecological problems affecting wetlands. Overpopulation and construction have led to a decrease in environmental conservation and total has brought issues to these lands. Many wetlands are being lost and ecologists claim that humans should recognise this dilemma before the loss of a natural filter and conserver of the world.

The theme for the 2022 World Wetlands Day is Wetlands Action for People & Nature and today the Convention on Wetlands and its Contracting Parties will launch the next World Wetlands Day campaign to scale wetlands conservation actions for people and planetary health.

In My Hands Today…

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The World Without Us- Alan Weisman

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists—who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths—Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primaeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn’t depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.

In My Hands Today…

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Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore – edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

In this era of climate crisis, in which our very futures are at stake, sustainability is a global imperative. Yet we tend to associate sustainability, nature, and the environment with distant places, science, and policy. The truth is that everything is environmental, from transportation to taxes, work to love, cities to cuisine.

This book is the first to examine contemporary Singapore from an ecocultural lens, looking at the ways that Singaporean life and culture is deeply entangled with the nonhuman lives that flourish all around us. The authors represent a new generation of cultural critics and environmental thinkers, who will inherit the future we are creating today. From chilli crab to Tiger Beer, Changi Airport to Pulau Semakau, O-levels to orang minyak films, these essays offer fresh perspectives on familiar subjects, prompting us to recognise the incredible urgency of climate change and the need to transform our ways of thinking, acting, learning, living, and governing so as to maintain a stable planet and a decent future.

In My Hands Today…

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A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes – Eric Jay Dolin

Hurricanes menace North America from June through November every year, each as powerful as 10,000 nuclear bombs. These megastorms will likely become more intense as the planet continues to warm, yet we too often treat them as local disasters and TV spectacles, unaware of how far-ranging their impact can be. As best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin contends, we must look to our nation’s past if we hope to comprehend the consequences of the hurricanes of the future.

With A Furious Sky, Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus’s New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes, such as Benito Vines, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest whose innovative methods for predicting hurricanes saved countless lives, and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.

Dolin draws on a vast array of sources as he melds American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation’s course. Hurricanes, it turns out, prevented Spain from expanding its holdings in North America beyond Florida in the late 1500s, and they also played a key role in shifting the tide of the American Revolution against the British in the final stages of the conflict. As he moves through the centuries, following the rise of the United States despite the chaos caused by hurricanes, Dolin traces the corresponding development of hurricane science, from important discoveries made by Benjamin Franklin to the breakthroughs spurred by the necessities of the World War II and the Cold War.

Yet after centuries of study and despite remarkable leaps in scientific knowledge and technological prowess, there are still limits on our ability to predict exactly when and where hurricanes will strike, and we remain terribly vulnerable to the greatest storms on earth. A Furious Sky is, ultimately, a story of a changing climate, and it forces us to reckon with the reality that as bad as the past has been, the future will probably be worse, unless we drastically reimagine our relationship with the planet.