Once in a great while I come across something so profoundly touching that I am compelled to share it. I was astonished by a video of a woman interacting with an elephant seal in Gold Harbour on remote South Georgia island, located in the South Atlantic off the east coast of South America. In the video, she sits on the ground next to a seal; the animal gradually creeps closer and cuddles up to her, repeatedly reaching up to touch noses. It is the purest example of trust and affection between humans and animals I have ever seen. The video was removed just two days later and the owner’s YouTube account was closed, to the consternation of all who saw it and those who had not yet seen it but had heard the excitement over the footage. Later, it reappeared, posted by a different user. That account holder eventually had to take it down due to copyright infringement issues, but now it has again been posted here. I have no idea how long it will stay up, but for the moment I hope many people take the time to watch.

Commenters on the original YouTube video were split in their opinions about the woman’s actions. Some pointed out that an elephant seal can be aggressive and weigh up to 6,000 pounds, while others objected more vehemently, arguing that this type of interaction irrevocably alters the natural state of wild animals. Although I agree that we should never try to initiate this type of behavior, I also believe that animals – especially mammals – crave affection. In my opinion, if the animal initiates contact, interaction is acceptable. I do wonder about the original video. Was it removed because of the controversy (commenters in social media venues can be brutal) over her actions? Did the tour company find out about the footage and ask her to remove it? I guess we will never know, I am just grateful it’s back.

Efforts to improve the situation of indigenous peoples through restoration of the environment is one of the most intriguing stories to emerge from travel. One of the organizations doing important work in this field, the Environmental Educational Media Project, produced the documentary Hope In A Changing Climate, which promotes the enormous potential of restoration. Screened at the COP 15 climate change summit in Copenhagen last December and subsequently aired by the BBC, the film follows soil scientist John D. Liu, who for the past 15 years has been documenting changes on China’s remote Loess Plateau, where the local people have been transforming a barren plateau into a green and fertile one, reducing the effect of climate change. Liu explains:

“On the plateau, researchers realized that progressive degradation of the environment trapped the local population into a life of subsistence farming. It’s a process that has occurred across the globe, where poor agricultural communities find themselves overusing their land in order to survive, depleting its fertility and further impoverishing themselves. One thing that became apparent early on is the connection between damaged environments and human poverty. In many parts of the world there’s been a vicious cycle: continuous use of the land has led to subsistence agriculture and generation by generation, this has further degraded the soils.”

Shot on location in China, Rwanda and Ethiopia, Hope in a Changing Climate is a truly uplifting story of how ecosystem restoration helps stabilize climate, reduce poverty, and support sustainable agriculture.

Southwest Airlines has always been one of my favorite carriers, a position which was recently reinforced when they refused to charge the onerous $100 checked luggage fee being levied by other airlines. My confidence in Southwest escalated another notch today when I learned a “green plane” is being added to their fleet. Environmentally friendly materials used in the interior of the Boeing 737-700 will equate to a weight savings of almost five pounds per seat, saving fuel and reducing emissions while adding recyclable elements to the cabin interior and reducing waste. Elements of the plane include: Read the rest of this entry »

Trinkets and souvenirs rarely interest me when I travel, but I find it almost impossible to pass by a farm stand selling local honey. Each of the half dozen varieties lining my kitchen shelves has a particular use: a thick, full-bodied Blackberry honey from the Virginia hills is best drizzled over fresh fruit, while scarce honey from Sourwood tree blossoms found in the mountains of North Carolina is perfect on toast. However my most recent acquisition, Babcock’s Wilderness Nectar, had remained unopened since I purchased it from the gift shop at Crescent B Ranch in south central Florida.

Smaller alligator suns on a swamp log

I’d gone to the Crescent B to take a Swamp Buggy Eco-Tour of the ranch’s 90,000 acres of oak hammocks, pine woods, pastures, wetlands, and swamps, all located within the Babcock Wilderness Area. Swamps have always conjured images of black water, boot-sucking mud, and alligators submerged to their eyeballs, patiently waiting to chomp on a passing leg. To me these dank, dangerous places were devoid of beauty and to be avoided at all costs, thus it was with some trepidation that I boarded the old Bluebird school bus, long since painted in a khaki and olive drab camouflage, for my hour and a half tour.

Old Bluebird school bus grinds along rough sand tracks throughout the ranch

Our driver forced the rattletrap bus into gear and lurched onto a rough sand track. A moment later we sighted our first alligator, a foot long baby perched on a waterlogged branch in a drainage ditch. We rumbled across a brilliant chartreuse pasture and ducked into an unspoiled stand of moss-draped longleaf pine and Sawgrass Palmettos. On the other side, the forest opened onto a broad plain where cracker cattle Read the rest of this entry »

Computer generated image of Plastiki, courtesy of the Plastiki Expedition

David de Rothschild is a man on a mission – literally. Sometime this summer he and a crew of experts, scientists and creatives will sail 12,000 miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a 60-foot catamaran made from plastic bottles and recycled waste products. De Rothschild hopes the experiment, dubbed the Plastiki Expedition, will raise awareness about a throwaway mentality that has created environmental disasters like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas that is overloaded with floating trash, through which Plastiki will sail on its maiden voyage.

De Rothschild accepts the fact that plastic is probably with us to stay, commenting: “From the moment you’re born, the first thing that’s put on your wrist is a plastic bracelet, followed by a plastic bottle in your mouth. Throughout our entire lives we’re touching and feeling plastic in different forms and it would be impossible to ban plastics altogether, but what we can do is think about it in a smarter way.” In short, he wants us to begin thinking of waste as a resource.

Plans originally called for the voyage to begin in April of this year, but the vessel is still being constructed at Pier 31 in San Francisco. When completed, the Plastiki will be made of 12,500 two-liter plastic bottles; weigh 9 tons; and will Read the rest of this entry »

Often, my strong urge to travel has to do with seeing something before it disappears. For years I felt that way about going to Africa; I wanted to go on safari before it was too late to see the animals in the wild. I was painfully aware that in many areas of Africa where ecological consciousness is non-existent, poaching and loss of habitat have resulted in animals being added to the endangered species list, if not brought to the brink of extinction. Thus I was delighted last year to discover that the animal populations in Africa seemed to be thriving, at least in the areas where I visited.

I feel the same way about the shrinking rain forests around the globe. Researchers now tell us with certainty that climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100. Tropical highlands and polar regions may be the first to disappear, and large swaths of the tropics and subtropics will reach even hotter temperatures. I sometimes feel desperate to visit the great rain forests of the world before they are gone and so I was most interested to read about a project of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences at Cornell University that is attempting to restore the tropical rain forest ecosystems in Costa Rica.

Incredible biodiversity exists just ten short years after restoring a tropical rainforest on a parcel of played-out pasture land in Costa Rica

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As I drive from the southern border of our great country to the northern, I am painfully aware of my carbon footprint. Although I am somewhat comforted that my car gets 30 miles to the gallon, and that when I am home in Sarasota I walk everywhere, it doesn’t change the fact that travel is not an environmentally friendly activity.

Someday, we will have the technology to reduce fossil fuels; Virgin Air is currently testing a jet engine fuel that contains a high percentage of biofuels, and numerous manufacturers are bring electric vehicles to market. One of the latter, the “soleckshaw,” is a motorized cycle rickshaw that can be pedaled normally or run on a 36-volt solar battery.

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Stuff. What is it really? Where does it come from and where does it go when we are done with it? According to the experts, stuff moves through a system, from extraction, to production, to distribution, to consumption, and finally, to disposal. Altogether it’s called the “The Materials Economy“.

That’s the simplistic view we’ve been led to believe, but this view is incomplete. In reality, this system is in crisis because it is linear in nature; we live on a finite planet, and you simply cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely. All along the way it is bumping up against limits that are not readily apparent on a simplistic diagram. The hard truth is that we are using too much stuff. One-third of the earth’s natural resource base has been depleted – gone – and as U.S. citizens, we are responsible for the bulk of this destruction and consumption. Although we have only 5% of the world’s population, we use 30% of the world’s natural resources and create 30% of the world’s waste. There is a fabulous 20-minute film available on the Internet at The Story Of Stuff. It is a thought provoking look at our country’s out-of-control consumerism and the detrimental effects of our cravings.

For the past few years, I have been keenly aware of this propensity to consume in my own life. I lived in a big house and had lots of ‘stuff’ that I really didn’t need. Interestingly, the more stuff I got, the heavier and more trapped I felt. I finally realized that to be truly happy, Read the rest of this entry »

Nikolai Tesla was one of the world’s greatest inventors. Born in 1843 in Croatia, Tesla emigrated to the U.S. in 1891 at the age of 35 and immediately set up a lab in New York, where he began research in the fields of electromechanical engineering and electromagnetism, among others. Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Due to his invention of the light bulb, most of us think of Thomas Alva Edison as the father of electricity, but it was actually Tesla who insisted that our electric generating grid use alternating current (AC); Edison fought to the bitter vehemently direct current (DC) and only admitted that Tesla had been right on his deathbed.

In latter years, Tesla began working on a ‘teleforce’ weapon, or death ray, which was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. Although he unsuccessfully marketed the death ray to the U.S. War Department, after his death became known, the government took possession of his papers and property, declaring them top secret.

If Tesla was such a scientific genius – and I believe that this is indisputable – why is he virtually unknown today? Some say it is because he was blackballed by the country’s wealthiest magnates when he began researching ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances. Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning with discharges consisting of millions of volts. He fervently believed he could develop the ability to provide free energy to all. This, of course, would not have set well Read the rest of this entry »