Dear Reader, Please Place Your Vote

This is an update encouraging Sementivae's visitors to take a few seconds to vote on the poll on the right hand side-bar of this site.

The poll is Which is the biggest threat to bio-diversity?

Sementivae will run the poll until the New Year when we hope to have a sizable number of votes to have meaningful data.

The rather charming young couple in the photograph are much more endearing and persuasive, so I shall leave it to them to win your vote.

A good word for - and from - Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson ignores warnings over moving to Costa Rica, Mel Gibson has/has not fallen off the wagon, Mel Gibson has/has not fallen off the wagon (again), Mel Gibson arrested for drink driving, Mel Gibson implies saccharine qualities to female law-officer's mammaries, Mel Gibson's films are historically inaccurate says academic, Mel Gibson tells academic to fu...

Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson has received an iniquitous quota of negative press, which is a shame given that he has made two of the most challenging, contrary-to-the-sensibilities-of-Hollywood films in under a decade (The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto) and, amidst all the bad press, has participated in - seldom-publicised - philanthropic acts and gestures and has spoken out in favour of the preservation of Mayan Culture and rainforests.

From an interview on Star E-Central, Gibson is reported to have donated $500,000 to help protect El Mirador from logging and farming. As Gibson stated in the interview:

[T]he forest is threatened and it’s the last remaining rainforest in Central
America. If it burns and there are fires all around, it’s gone. People are
trying to encroach and log it. Once you put a road in there, it’s over. All 26
cities will go. You won’t find the libraries, the tombs or who walked across the
Baring Strait from Asia to get there.

Wise words and a noble campaign by Gibson, which I think are worth adding to Sementivae - Not only as counter-balance for Gibson's bad press, but also because - obviously - awareness needs to be raised as to which cultures and regions are under threat from relentless modernisation and the disregard of capitalism.

Carbon Credits: Paying For Indulgences?

For the record, I am, at the present time, neutral about going carbon neutral. Mainly because carbon-trading is currently a speculative economy and a lot of confusion and misinformation surrounds it. Carbon-trading is, in theory, quite a simple concept to grasp. However, the information about it has been poorly presented, and not without bias, that many - myself included - have wrested with the concept.

I hope to put it succinctly:

Carbon-trading is to start in 2008 under the second phase of the Kyoto protocol when businesses will be allocated a "carbon allowance".

By "carbon allowance" it is meant that a business is allowed to emit carbon-dioxide without penalty until its emissions reach a pre-determined threshold.

If the business exceeds the carbon emission threshold, it will be required to buy credits to compensate these excess emissions.

Likewise, if a business falls below its pre-determined threshold for carbon emissions then it acquires credits which it can sell to the businesses who are required to purchase carbon-credits to compensate their excess emissions.

In theory, the businesses that pollute less will generate more money than business that pollute more.

The theory is indeed sweet, as it predicts that carbon-inefficient businesses will, over the years, be required to divest its greenhouse-gas-spewing ways and modernise lest it ends up throwing millions of pounds into the wind(turbines).

The naysayers are rife. I have heard some silly opposition to carbon-trading: Carbon-trading implies possession of an unownable atmosphere. Though philosophically valid, the argument has little pragmatic value.

The most persuasive critique I have heard about carbon-trading is that it is, in essence, the same as the medieval Catholic practice of paying for indulgences (see photo, top right). Like the sinner, the excessive polluter would effectively be paying for their sins.

As such carbon-trading is not dealing with the excesses of environmental destruction, it is merely making the excess purchasable. Purchasing excess will, in turn, alleviate pressure (where in medieval Catholicism there was temporal guilt) as prescribed by the Kyoto protocol.

Carbon-trading is a compromise. It is an unwillingness to surrender the global capitalism framework and instead adapting environmental welfare to suit the framework. If this is so, the root-problem, the cause, of environmental-destruction is not solved rather it is negated.

Persisting with the Catholic indulgence analogy, carbon-neutralising may only by us temporal remittance and not a get-out-of-Hellish-eternity-free card.

Vote: Which is the biggest environmental threat?

On the right-hand side-bar, there is a (straw) poll on which you can cast your vote. The question is Which of these is the biggest threat to global bio-diversity? You may tick one or more of the answers provided.

The poll will run until the end of 2007, which, I hope, will allow enough time to accrue enough votes so as to have an accurate idea of what people think is the cause - or causes - of threat to bio-diversity.

Please take a few seconds to cast your vote - thank you!

Sementivae's First Post

This is, in some ways, a difficult time to begin a weblog devoted to environmental conservation & restoration. At a time when politicians and high-street chain-stores are jumping with equal verve onto the 'green' bandwagon, it is only reasonable to question anybody who now professes a concern for the welfare of the planet.

In the UK the Labour government have introduced taxes on flying supposedly to reduce carbon emissions. The Conservative opposition had morphed their familiar blue torch logo into a green tree and then into its current incarnation as a blue tree (seemingly uncertain of what balance of 'greenness' and 'blueness' is required to win over tired - no, narcoleptic - voters) .

High-street stores are now promoting environmentally-friendly shopping bags and are bidding to out-green their rivals. And what the shops dish-out, the consumers consume.

There is no shame in questioning the motives of going-green at-large. Politicians ultimately seem to be either stealth-taxing or voter-currying with environmental benefits as merely a by-product. High-street stores have found a new faddish identity to sell to the public. Again, whatever the environmental benefits, they are the equivalent to ricotta: A by-product of cheese.

Not that I mean to be overly-critical of the motives of the green neophytes, but it is difficult to believe they have their utmost concerns reserved for planet when their salaries depend on them being otherwise concerned (to paraphrase, somewhat clumsily, the oft-quoted Upton Sinclair).

My own credentials as an environmental-commentator have been cultivated through years of what I can only describe as being "empirically bothered" by the wanton destruction of our planet.

Everywhere I went it was impossible to escape the site of green and pleasant pastures being uprooted for yet another motorway, mountains half-eaten for the sake of a smoother commute, landfills like ziggurats dedicated to the God of Excess Plastic Wrapping, unsightly and unaesthetic concrete cubes and cuboids clogging up the horizon.

This being empirically bothered by environmental destruction has been present since my mid-teens (about twelve or thirteen years ago), but I had never known how to act upon my concerns and convictions.

In the last few months there has been a confluence of events that have compelled me to take some form of action. Namely, the critical endangerment of the Sumerian tiger and the (probable) extinction of the Yangtze dolphin in tandem with a recent coach trip I took along the M6 from London to Birmingham where customary road-widening works were pushing the countryside (and Britain's wildlife) into further retreat.

For a few weeks I felt constrained about what I could do - It would be rather impractical to tie myself to every tree about to be felled by a gnawing chain-saw (besides I have never been one for protests) - until I thought I'd give this blog a shot. I am comfortable both with writing and with the Internet, so this could be the perfect medium for communicating my concerns for Earth's welfare.

It must be stressed that I do not intend for words-instead-of-action but rather action-because-of-words. To this effect, I will maintain this blog with a view to disseminating information and articles about the conservation and restoration of Earth's bio-diversity. From this I hope to develop a readership - not least a community - with which to take concerted action.

I named this blog Sementivae after the Roman festival devoted to Ceres (the goddess of agriculture) and Tellus (Mother Earth, as depicted in the top-right photo) as I found it most fitting. Plus Sementivae has currently less than 1000 search results on Google, so it must be one of the very few single real words to achieve this. I hope this makes the blog somewhat unique as opposed to counter-productive in terms of accidental hits I may receive through search-engines. But I am optimistic that this blog won't be less often sought than found.