Lalith Gunaratne
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This was the final public message recorded by the late Sir Arthur C Clarke, which closed the global launch of the International Year of Planet Earth, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 13 February 2008. In his unique style, Sir Arthur connects the local with global, and traces the influence of space exploration on the global environmental movement. He ends calling for humanity to listen to the planet's distress call, and respond with knowledge, understanding and imagination. Read more...
This is a fascinating world 'clock' of a number of statistics (such as population, global temperature, oil pumped, forest lost, and so on). Click on 'now' to get the best view on how these numbers are clocking up.
SAGE (www.sagepub.com) publishes more than 485 journals in Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine. The SAGE Full-Text Collections are award-winning, discipline-specific research databases of the most popular peer-reviewed journals in Communication Studies, Criminology, Education, Health Sciences, Management & Organization Studies, Materials Science, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Urban Studies & Planning published by SAGE Publications and participating societies.
These comprehensive databases include more than 256 journals, 360,000 articles, book reviews, and editorials, with all the original graphics, tables, and page numbers. The Collections provide researchers and students with a research environment that is easy to use and complete with the most up-to-date content and backfiles back to volume 1, issue 1. Read more...
The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA) have announced Listen! – International Day for Sharing Life Stories, an international celebration of life stories to take place on May 16th 2008. They are launching the project website, www.ausculti.org, to assist with information sharing and coordination of the campaign. The goal of the campaign is to gain broad recognition of May 16 as an annual day for sharing, listening to, and gathering the stories of people's lives. Read more...
A friend of mine, Andrew Pieris, former police officer in Netherlands and now doing chartable work after the Tsunami, has worked tirelessly, especially to help children in Sri Lanka.
To raise funds for the tsunami orphans, he has initiated a project to sell Christmas postcards. There are nine different Christmas cards made of drawings done by the children themselves. Read more...
A few days ago I was woken up at about 5 in the morning with a power cut. The fan stopped circulating the air and the room got really hot. As I could not sleep anymore, I got out of bed and went to the lounge. Then I thought how dependent we have become on electricity, fans and air conditioning to keep us comfortable and how spoild we have become not being able to put up with the inconvenience of a power cut.
Then I pondered on the millions of people who have no electricity at all, but have a good night's sleep anyway without fans and air conditioning in a warm climate. I also thought how difficult it would be for the likes of us who live in first world conditions even in a developing country if and when things go awry with the environment and our comforts are taken away. Imagine how people in the industrialized west would survive if the comforts of electricity, artificial heating and cooling are taken away. An environmental crisis could do just that. Read more...
A few years ago a group of educators from BC, Canada set out to try to get an objective look at the state of the world. They wanted The Big Picture, not just this or that issue, but the most essential points of every important issue. The Executive Summary of the state of the planet. Read more...
