Music Banter - The Environmental Watchdog MasterThread

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^ Yeah, that seems a surprisingly high death toll, but then Japan is a very densely populated country and there've been landslides too which are really devastating.

Turning away from extreme weather to find something to be cheerful about:-

Starbucks is eliminating plastic straws from all stores

and:-

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Japan is a very densely populated country

I lived there for a decade teaching English. 3 locations. I learned a bit about their infrastructure and how it’s designed to meet various natural disasters including flooding and landslides. For a country with so many safeguards that’s a very high number. The same storm would’ve had a much higher casualty in a less developed densely populated Asian country, like say Bangladesh.

^ That's interesting to learn! We have an occasional poster who lives in Tokyo, I think, doing the same thing.
From what I've heard the money is good but everything else about life in Japan seems to score a negative, including the attitude of students in an ESL class: too deferential. But perhaps with your experience in US schools you were just lapping that up!!

and yes, Bangladeshi civilians are much more vulnerable. No real defenses, afaik, and not even effective warning systems in place :(

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Originally Posted by Lisnaholic (Post 1972585)

I did all kind of work in Japan. Taught elementary, junior high, kindergarten- some in public school, some in private, then tutoring, helping professional people prepare speeches in English for business trips abroad. I taught at an airport - weather monitors - meteorologists I guess, who had to communicate in English. I worked for Toyota- business English. I taught one class with just nurses.

Then I came to America and worked at schools where teachers get cussed out by students everyday, teachers periodically assaulted by students, parents use profanity and cuss out teachers in the car line. One guy was cussing and got out of his car and was posturing like he was going to hit another teacher. I walked up and said “get the **** back in your car” and he did. But yeah I got written up for being unprofessional. I was like fine he was flexing up like he was going to hit a woman. I was just flying on instinct. Another teacher at that school was assualted multiple time by a violent student. Beautiful Latina woman only like 40. It left her with partial facial paralysis.

So seriously

Japan was a relative utopia

Teaching in America is **** work - the worst

Teachers are expected to be the punching bag for frustrated blacks. It’s bull****.

Wow! That kind of teaching in the US sounds terrible. I couldn't handle that at all. I did just six months in a Mexican secondary school and hated every day of it: I was too much of a softie to maintain discipline and my Spanish wasn't good enough to catch what students were up to. I knew I had a problem the day some kids in the class handed out a few ballons and started a conga line between the chairs, singing, "fiesta fiesta." A teacher from another class had to come in to tell them to stop - something of a low-point for my professional self-esteem tbh.

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they will mine and ship some 22 million tons of sand this year to shale drillers all around them in the Permian Basin, the hottest oil patch on Earth. It is a staggering sum of sand, equal to almost a quarter of total U.S. supply. And within a couple years, industry experts say, the figure could climb to over 50 million tons.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...lains-of-texas

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frack-sand

*fracking is a single-handed environmental disaster
*sand is undervalued where nature put it - it plays an important role in the ecosystems
*the process of mining itself both for the sand and shale and oil and natural gas are all burdensome unhealthy processes leaving behind huge amounts of pollutants
*removing 25% of the sand in the US in 1 year will destroy aquifers, upset water supplies- disrupt the movement of water underground increasing the likelihood of droughts and flooding and simply unpredictable weather patterns

From the Atlantic

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The World’s Worst Industrial Disaster Is Still Unfolding
In Bhopal, residents who survived the massive gas leak and those who arrived later continue to deal with the consequences.

If anyone wants to learn more about the Bhopal disaster and myriad of other horrific consequences of late stage capitalism I recommend this book

https://images.booksense.com/images/...1931498579.jpg

The Culture of Make Believe
by Derrick Jensen

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Writing with the same driven passion and intense intelligence as his critically acclaimed A Language Older Than Words, which examined the interconnections between personal and social violence, Jensen says this book "is more about racism and far more broadly hate as it manifests itself in our Western world." As in the earlier work, Jensen paints on a huge canvas he details American racism from the genocidal slave trade through lynchings to the 2000 murder of Amadou Diallo by NYC police, and covers a wide range of other cultural horrors as well: the massacres of Native American people, the Holocaust, the 8,000 deaths from the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in India, and the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq. The book is packed full of startling details South African apartheid laws were enacted at the direct request of the De Beers diamond company to facilitate business; aspects of Christian doctrine supported slavery until about 100 years ago. But the uniqueness and enormous power of Jensen's work is his ability to forge these events into an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structures of Western culture. Along with greed and globalization he says that the valuing of production over life and the abstract over the particular have set Western culture on a course that will end "really, with the end of the planet." While some readers might take umbrage at his more unsettling associations he compares Hitler's political language to Teddy Roosevelt's Jensen's intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy's Black Ship to Hell.

https://www.trilliontrees.org/sites/...on_final_1.pdf

https://www.trilliontrees.org/

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Trillion Trees is an unprecedented collaboration between three of the world’s largest conservation organisations - WWF, BirdLife International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society - to help end deforestation and restore tree cover. Our partnership is founded on our commitment to a shared vision, and the belief that working together we can achieve more than we can individually.

Tree cover is an essential part of what makes Earth a healthy and prosperous home for people and wildlife, but the global stock has fallen – and continues to fall – dramatically. In fact, we are still losing 10 billion trees per year.

The consequences? More carbon emitted and less absorbed, dwindling freshwater stores, altered rainfall patterns, fewer nutrients to enrich soils, weakened resilience to extreme events and climate change, shrinking habitat for wildlife and other biodiversity, insufficient wood supply to meet rising demand, harsher local climates, and harder lives for more than one billion forest-dependent peoples across the world.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The two key steps that will reverse these trends – keeping existing trees standing, and restoring trees to the places they once grew – are within our capabilities.

The Trillion Trees Vision

By mid-century, through concerted collective action by all sectors of society, one trillion trees have been re-grown, saved from loss and better protected around the world.

Deforestation has ended, significant numbers of trees have returned to areas where they were lost and large areas of existing trees are better protected. These trees, in forests, woodlots and farms, bring multiple social, economic and environmental benefits.

That’s a bad ass project!

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...faster-n892996

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The Aug. 1 date declared this year means that, for the final five months of the year, mankind is overdrawing natural resources. Framed another way, it would take 1.7 Earths to supply the resources needed to feed, clothe and sustain Earth's 7.6 billion people for a year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...urce=applenews

Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

I guess nothing is all bad.