Hemp Will Save The Earth

[420]

The earth, our beautiful planet, contains many life forms that have in many ways been blessings to human beings and contributed to the evolution of living things. If one considers the earth as one organism, all of its animals, plants, minerals and micro-organisms, constitute its ecological network, and they have contributed to our prosperity and shared the evolution of the network. Our civilization is, however, now endangered on a global scale by our shortsighted sectionalism, environmental degradation caused by our social systems that focus on the oil industry, and the ill effects that these problems have on our bodies and minds. It has formed competitive societies based on harmful oil resources and has brought about unavoidable dispossession, warfare and confilct. In contrast, a symbiotic society based on infinite hemp and other biomas resources can produce a world of peace and sharing. As a first step, hemp, a natural material with many uses in key industries, has recently been highly evaluated worldwide.

It cannot be said that hemp alone will solve all of our environmental problems. However, the use of hemp and other natural resources can serve as a warning against excessive use of fossil fuels and hazardous chemicals, and contributed greatly to our movement toward a sustainable society. If each one of us becomes conscious of the need for environmental preservation and starts with what is possible, we can once again have the type of harmonious, cyclical society that existed in ancient times.

Hemp Paper

If hemp is cultivated on 12% of the European landmass, it can meet the entire world demand for paper, and thus eradicate the need to cut trees for paper. Hemp pulp, from which hemp paper is made, is as durable as wood pulp, and it needs only one quarter of the land required for producing wood pulp. While chlorine is used for bleaching in the wood-pulp manufacturing process, hemp pulp can be produced using the ASA pulp method, which hardly produces any pollutants. Moreover, hemp paper is of such high quality and durability that it hardly deteriorates, even after 200 years.

Hemp Bio-Plastic

Hemp stems can be used to produce biodegradable plastic that does not produce harmful substances and is highly antibacterial. It can be freely molded and used for car bodies, building materials and all existing plastic products. Only a few of its many features are sufficient to prove that it has great potential as an ecological plastic that can solve the problems of environmental impact and waste disposal.

To give and example, the American company Ford started using hemp for automobile manufacturing in 1929. The results of their research were published in Popular Mechanics Magazine in 1941 along with the catch-phrase "Organic car born from the Earth". All of the parts except the frames were made of hemp, and hemp seed oil was used instead of light oil. The car had one-third the weight and ten times the impact tenacity of conventional cars of the same type.

Hemp, a Natural Resource

Hemp is a human-friendly natural resource - it can adjust the temperature and humidity of houses because walls made of hemp can breathe. Hemp houses provide a comfortable atmosphere - cool in summer and warm in winter. It is an all-weather composite building material that can save energy for air-conditioning. Hemp board bends and curves easily, and has the same strength as concrete. It is very light and resistant to fire. As it is a natural resource, it is biodegradable. Hemp can totally change our views about housing and make us switch to environment-friendly houses, because it can be grown for a half a year and lasts for 100 years. Its use can result in the preservation of forests and the protection of living things, as well as the restroration of cyclical ecological system that includes human beings.

Hemp Fuel

One of the main causes of global warming is the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal. Oil from hemp seeds and the cellulose of the hemp stem can produce methanol, ethanol and other kinds of fuel that have the same ignition temperature as diesel oil. Hemp fuel does not produce heavy metals or sulfur, so it does not cause acid rain or air pollution. As hemp is a plant, it reduces carbon dioxide to oxygen as it grows. It has three to four times the reducing power as a deciduous tree. If hemp is cultivated on only 6% of the North American landmass, it can meet all the fuel demand in the U.S.

A running test project of bio-diesel cars using hemp oil was established in the U.S. in July 2001. A car started from Washington on July 4, the anniversary of Independence Day, and was driven one thousand miles over a period of three months. In Japan, a car started from Takigawa City in Northern Hokkaido on April 29, 2002 and was driven 12, 500 km over a period of four months until September 11. The test used 2, 600 liters of hemp oil.

Health

Hemp seeds and their oil are excellent foods that are good for human health. The oil can be used for cooking, massage, lubrication, cosmetics, and as dietary supplement. Hemp oil contains many elements that retail humidity, so it can be used for making soap, shampoo and environment-friendly cosmetics. Hemp seeds contain a protein similar to that of soy beans, which is easily digested and absorbed into the human body. They also contain eight kinds of essential amino acids that cannot be produced by the human body, so they are an ideal food that has perfectly balanced nutrients.
The nutrients in hemp seeds have many beneficial effects on human health. They balance and control cholesterol, purify blood and help it to flow smoothly in the body, thus preventing arteriosclerosis and increasing immunity. Hemp seeds can keep human bodies young and healthy, they are effective in preventing aging and promoting longevity.
Human bodies have many receptors that take in the medical components of hemp. When the components enter our bodies, melatonin, a beneficial hormone, is secreted, stimulating an auto-therapy mechanism. While melatonin is secreted, a-waves and c-waves occur in the brain, causing people to relax as if they were in a state of meditation. Hemp has long been used as a herb because of its medical effects, and it will gain importance in the future.

Textiles- Hemp and Cotton

Cotton requires the use of pesticide for its cultivation, and a huge volume of chemicls in its manufacturing process. Hemp, however, never requires the use of these harmful substances, a fact that makes it cheaper to produce. Hemp textile is four times more durable than cotton, and its productivity per unit of land area is three to five times higher than that of cotton. In France and Germany, insulation materials made of hemp and hemp board are already in use. Wooden buildings using oil resources have given rise to the so called "sick-house sydrome" that causes cancer and abnormal environmental hormones. These building catch fire easily and do not decompose. Many buildings are constructed of wood that is several decades old and last only 30 years.

Hemp Technology for Healing

Hemp can be used to produce 25,000 to 50,000 kinds of industrial products. It is an annual grass that can be grown in 100 to 200 days. It is useful for preventing deforestation and global warming b ecause it has a high capacity for reducing carbon dioxide to oxygen. A very adaptable plant that can be grown in most environments other than deserts, snowfields and tundra zones, it does not require the use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers or deplete the soil of nutrients.

Hemp fabric does not generate static electricity. Since it is highly resistant to insects and has an antimicrobial effect, herbicides and insecticides are not required for its cultivation. Accordingly, the soil can be improved and it is possible to prevent ground water from being contaminated. It has been reported if one root of hemp is planted, the surrounding 30 meter area becomes electrically neutral.
From the energy perspective, hemp is a healing plant that harmonizes with the environment. It has been attracting a great deal of attention because of its potential to neutralize electromagnetic waves, radioactive rays, ultraviolet rays, etc. Hemp fabric neutralizes electromagnect waves generated from electrical products and toxic substances. The material and its technology shall be required in many fields, such as architectural materials and health care products.

Traditional Arts

Hemp fabric has been used in Japan for imperial rituals, traditional events, Shinto religious services, shrines etc. since ancient times. In the same way, it has been used for rituals and traditional ceremonies in other countries all over the world.

In ancient times, the Japanese grew hemp as part of a lifestyle based on coexistence with nature. Hemp is an annual plant, and thus fits into the earths basic one-year environmental cycle. Cultivated every year, it is part of an ecosystem in which everything is connected, like a circular, harmonious society with no beginning or end. Hemp can help us to remember what we have forgotten about the wonder of the natural world. It is generally known that hemp can be used effectively in various industries and that it is an environment-and human friendly material. Whether we will use hemp and take advantage of its features depends on our attitude and our way of life. Japan is a nation that has strong connections to hemp in every aspect. Through our study of hemp we have come to understand why it is a plant that Japanese people have loved from ancient times - it represents a spirit of harmony.

Delta Magazine
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Published on Sunday, September 2, 2007 by Inter Press Service
The New Utopia, Keeping the World As It Is
by Julio Godoy

VIENNA - Utopias have always inspired humankind — from the defence of enlightenment against religious fanaticism during the Middle Ages, to reconstruction after last century’s wars, to the end of colonialism.

Those were imperious, even grandiloquent utopias, corresponding to the excesses of the times. A new utopia is a conservative, apparently modest one — a titanic, nonetheless: keep the world as it is, environmentally speaking.

This utopia’s deceptively modest demands have been made clear again in Vienna this week at the new UN conference on global warming to prepare for the next global round of talks due in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

This utopia’s goals sounds uninspiring bureaucratic: reduce greenhouse gases emissions by 50 percent by the middle of this century relative to 1990 levels in order to limit average temperature rises to less than two degrees Celsius by 2050. Otherwise, many scientists say, the environmental, social, and economic consequences of global warming would transform earth into an inhabitable place.

While government officials, scientists and environmental experts gathered at the Vienna International Centre to discuss how market measures can transform capping greenhouse gas emissions into commercially attractive tools, representatives from developing countries were making clear what global warming actually means.

“Each year hurricanes in the Caribbean become stronger and stronger,” said Eduardo Reyes, deputy director of Panama’s Environmental National Authority. “And each time the economic losses caused by them are higher and higher.” Stronger hurricanes are considered by several scientists to be a consequence of global warming.

Reyes told IPS that the world has become aware of the consequences of environmental catastrophes provoked by global warming because insurance payments do not match real economic losses.

“The hurricane Katrina of August 2005 provoked economic losses of some 126 billion dollars, but the insurances only paid 60 billion,” Reyes said.

The scenario ahead could get more difficult in many ways.

“In the debates on global warming, a maximum average rise of global temperature of two degrees by 2050 is considered as acceptable, and is officially given as a target to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said.

“But such qualifications are highly subjective. Such an increase in global temperatures might well provoke a sea level rise enough to make some South Pacific atoll islands disappear.” Such as Tuvalu, the tiny Pacific archipelago of nine atolls and reefs, with the highest point just five metres above sea level.

Small island developing states (SIDS) like Tuvalu are extremely vulnerable to the impact of climate change and to rising sea levels. The SIDS are 51 countries which together produce less than one percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

But, while for the SIDS and other nations in the developing world, whatever happens on the global warming front in the industrialised countries is of existential importance, in European and North American capitals decisions are being made on the basis of returns on investment.

“Whatever the targets on global warming and greenhouse gases emissions reductions are, what we need are the lowest cost solutions,” says Bill Kyte, advisor on sustainable development and climate change at the European electricity provider EON.

At the same time, Kyte warned that reluctance from policy makers in the industrialised world to set the framework within which new technology investments are to be decided would increase the difficulties of coping with global warming.

Kyte referred specifically to energy generation. “Some 1.5 billion people in the developing world alone do not have electricity,” he told IPS. “We certainly need a new energy sources mix, from renewable sources to nuclear power, that is carbon free, to attain the targets of halving GHG emissions by 2050, and to satisfy the world’s energy demands.”

Environmentally wrong investment decisions such as power plants fuelled with coal “would create new technology with a lifetime of 30 to 40 years, locking capital in and creating new sources of emissions,” he said.

The utopia here is to create a new energy sector that is carbon free, and can readily meet needs for economic growth.

Kyte said that practically all technologies needed for halving emissions are already available, and that there is no time for developing new ones. “New inventions need a long time to become feasible, and we are running out of natural and human resources, such as engineers, steel, and energy itself, to conceive them.”

Scientists have estimated that without fundamental changes in the global environmental policy, carbon emissions would double by 2050, raising its concentration in the atmosphere from some 300 parts per million (ppm) today, to almost 1,000 ppm in 2060. This would increase global warming significantly.

In order to avoid such a concentration, “we have to avoid emitting the equivalent seven to eight billion tonnes during the next 50 years. This is a titanic task,” Kyte told IPS.

“For instance, to avoid emitting one billion tonnes of carbon, the world would have to double the present nuclear energy generation from 700 gigawatts, or multiply by 700 the present solar energy installed capacity, or multiply by seven the present world crops to produce bio fuels.”

© 2007 Inter Press Service

The New Utopia, Keeping the World As It Is - CommonDreams.org

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Published on Sunday, September 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Al Gore, James Hansen, and Civil Disobedience
by Gordon Clark

In his recent global warming op-ed in the New York Times (“The Big Melt,” August 16, 2007) , Nicholas Kristof reported on a conversation with Al Gore in which the former Vice-President said: “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers, and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.” His comment was a reaction to the ever-quickening pace of polar ice meltoff, with all its catastrophic implications, and the huge role played by coal-fired power plants in advancing our demise through global warming.

Gore’s comment was also strikingly similar to a recent quote from Dr. James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA: “It seems to me that young people, especially, should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty (no CCS) coal-fired power plants.”

What does it mean when one of the top scientific leaders ringing the alarm on global warming, along with a top political leader, both suggest, in so many words, nonviolent direct action (or civil disobedience) to confront the challenge of climate change?

Clearly both men must realize the importance of nonviolent resistance in social change efforts of this magnitude and agree, if only subconsciously, with historian Howard Zinn’s observation that “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy. It is absolutely essential to it.” (Dr. Hansen, for his part, goes on to quote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution at some length.)

Gore and Hansen must both know that nonviolent direct action has been a significant catalyst in nearly every major social change movement in U.S. (and world) history, starting in this country with the Boston Tea Party and extending through the anti-slavery, woman’s suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, environmental and anti-war movements. Nonviolent direct action can dramatize an injustice or danger to the general public as few other actions can. It both provokes other people to act and speak - often people who had previously been silent - and it opens up political space for them to do so. Nonviolent actions are acts of courage that inspire others to follow. They are acts of leadership.

The twin quotes also reflect the extraordinary urgency of our predicament. As Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, notes in Kristof’s column, “Over and over again, we’re finding that models correctly predict the patterns of change but understate their magnitude.”

Or their speed. According to the May 2007 report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, polar ice is melting significantly faster than computer models of climate calculate, and the Arctic Sea could be free of summer ice by 2020 - 30 years earlier than the recent prediction by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Clearly, we are running out of time.

What is strikingly curious about the quotes, however, is the suggestion by both men that “young people” need to be doing this. Clearly young people will have to suffer the disastrous effects of global warming longer than older people. But that does not make the responsibility any less on the older heads among us to take any and all actions necessary to stop the planet-destroying calculus of carbon emissions. Indeed, one would think that those who are older are more culpable for the current condition of our planet than those who are younger, and therefore more responsible for taking dramatic action to confront the crisis.

I would also imagine that young people (and I can only imagine, being middle-aged myself) are, while grateful for recognition of their vital role in the movement, probably less than enthusiastic to have this particular imperative dumped on them and them alone.

Personally, I pray for and will gladly follow leadership from any quarter and age group. But I expect it from those in the climate change movement who are older, more experienced, and more influential. Especially when it comes to nonviolent resistance. I know, for instance, that when I or younger activists organize nonviolent direct actions, a relative few people will hear and join us, and we are lucky to get more than a few stories outside the independent media. If Al Gore were to actually call for and lead such an action it is likely that thousands would join him, and the story would be splashed across the mainstream media for all of America to see.

None of this should be read as criticism of Mr. Gore’s incredible efforts on global warming. He has arguably been the single most effective (and active) person on the planet in raising the clarion call. But perhaps now his leadership is requiring even more of him. After all, if you truly recognize the extreme emergency and catastrophic danger inherent in global warming, how long can one wait before taking the most dramatic, effective and necessary actions in response - as opposed to wondering out loud why those younger and less influential than yourself aren’t doing so?

Of course, this is a question that everyone who understands the reality of global warming needs to be asking themselves right now. How long can any of us wait? As with all revolutionary changes, forging a new, sustainable society will require us to take risks, make sacrifices, and endure suffering - all hallmarks of nonviolence. And nonviolent blockades of coal-fired power plants, Mr. Gore and Dr. Hansen are correct in noting, would be an excellent place to start.

Gordon Clark is the convener of the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance,

Al Gore, James Hansen, and Civil Disobedience - CommonDreams.org

[User]

[CoZmO]

Wow what great info, thanks for posting this guys.

[zolar]

wonder if we could use the patriot act to legalize hemp to defund the muslim fanatics with oil money....

[southflorida]

its sad what the gov't will keep from its own people so they dont have to admit they were once wrong. not to mention they are leading humanity into an inescapable torrent of shit.

[420]

bump

[DaMagoMan]

methanol from the plant matter
and instant, burnable Oil from seed.

Free the Weed, Save the World !!!