A preview of Muhammad Yunus: Banker to the Poor – one of a series of 16 DVDs created by Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. Dr. Yunus, recently awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, describes his three-decade-long effort to extend micro-credit (small loans for self-employment). Grameen Bank, his creation, now makes small loans to seven million families in Bangladesh, and has helped almost half of them work their way out of poverty. This is the story of his life-long struggle and accomplishments, told in his own words. Produced by Rooy Media LLC for Ashoka. To purchase the films, visit dvd.ashoka.org.
I like lakes, you like lakes, Luke Luck likes lakes, you get the picture but when lakes leak with little or lack of warning, there’s a lot less to like. This look at 10 drained lakes of the past and present shows the gravity of the situation when Mother Nature – or, on occasion, the errant hand of Man – suddenly decides to pull the plug.
Tempe Town Lake is a 2-mile long artificial lake that runs through the center of Tempe, Arizona, USA. The lake sits within the bed of the Salt River, which is almost always dry due to diversion of the river’s water for agricultural use at various points upstream.
The lake is only about 13 feet deep on average and is held in place by innovative inflatable dams at either end. The Dams allow the Salt River to flow along its natural course at times when storms and flooding create an unusually high level of water in the river bed.
On July 20, 2010, the west side of Tempe Town Lake’s outflow dam suffered (for want of a better term) a blowout that allowed most of the lake’s water to quickly drain into the Salt River. Most of the approximately 10,000 fish living in the lake were swept downstream and an alligator named Tuesday was released into the remaining pools of water to eat what fish remained.
The Delhi Dam, on the Maquoketa River south of Delhi, Iowa, was built over a 7-year period from 1922 to 1929. Lake Delhi was created behind the dam and over the succeeding decades proved to be a much-desired location for recreational boating, fishing, and lakeside summer housing.
Call it a dammed shame, but many say the failure of the Delhi Dam was an accident waiting to happen. Flooding in 2008 had caused a half-million dollars worth of damage to the dam and exceptionally heavy rains (approximately 10 inches in 12 hours) caused the swollen lake to overtop its southern embankment on July 24, 2010.
Rapid erosion of the embankment sped up the outflow and by the next day, Lake Delhi was no more. As the lake and the Delhi Dam were owned by the Lake Delhi Recreation Association, it’s uncertain whether state or federal funds will be used to help rebuild the dam and restore the lake. If not, those who invested in former lakefront property will be out of luck AND lake.
If residents of Lake Delhi are searching for some hope, they may find it in Wisconsin’s Lake Delton. Like Lake Delhi, Lake Delton is a man-made lake created in the 1920s as a way to attract visitors to the Wisconsin Dells tourist and vacation area. The lake – more of a reservoir, actually – is only about 10 feet deep and has a surface area of around 260 acres… at least it did, until June 9th of 2008.
Heavy rains had raised the level of Lake Delton and put tremendous pressure on the dikes that separated the lake from the Wisconsin River 800 feet away. The sudden collapse of a 400-ft section of County Highway A that ran on top of the containment dike caused a deluge that completely drained Lake Delton in a matter of hours. Several lakefront homes also collapsed though there was no loss of life. Here’s a short video showing the state of the former Lake Delton 2 weeks after the water drained out:
Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle quickly announced the state would be repairing the lake and indeed, by Memorial Day of 2009 Lake Delton was re-opened with great fanfair.
Iceberg Lake, a glacial lake in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains area of Alaska, leads a precarious existence by regularly filing and draining, sometimes catastrophically as it did in 1999. The lake is also remarkably responsive to weather conditions as it is pinned between two glaciers whose level of annual advancement and melting decide the fate of the lake.
Scientists exploring the exposed bottom of Iceberg Lake discovered that distinct layers of sediment deposited on after another provided them with a detailed record of the area’s climate that could be traced back to the year 442 AD. Among other findings, the researchers were able to discern the Iceberg Lake did not drain at all during the Medieval Warm Period, a several centuries long warm interlude that existed up until the advent of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from approximately 1600 to 1850 AD.
Lake Haramaya was a freshwater lake in Ethiopia that was around 30 feet deep and whose shoreline stretched for about 10 miles – not an especially large lake but one that provided residents of the city of Harar with drinking water and farmers & fisherman with livelihoods. The keyword is “was”… overuse by residents, farmers and commercial enterprises caused the lake to drain completely in roughly a decade.
Lake Haramaya is not the only lake in Africa’s volcanic Rift Valley to run dry, and human use (and abuse) is not the only factor involved. Climatologists have noted an increased frequency of droughts over the past several decades and it’s thought that increasing human exploitation of the lake in recent years was enough to tip the balance.
Scott Lake is a 291-acre natural lake in Lakeland, Florida, 30 miles east of Tampa. Like Lake Delhi, Scott Lake is owned by the surrounding homeowners who are once again asking state authorities to refill the lake and preserve their property values. Yes, “once again” – Scott Lake has drained before, in the early 1970s, caused by sinkholes opening up in the porous limestone bedrock that lies beneath the lake.
In June of 2006, as many as 4 sinkholes suddenly opened in the lakebed and before you could say “Great Scott!”, Scott Lake was drained. Since then a heated controversy has arisen over demands from wealthy owners of lakeside property that water from Florida’s freshwater aquifer be used to refill the lake. This wasn’t a problem in 1974 but today, water is in short supply as Florida’s population puts increasing strain on the state’s fresh water supplies.
In May of 2005, residents of the village of Bolotnikovo near Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, were shocked to find that most of the water in White Lake had mysteriously vanished. No explanation could be offered for the sudden and silent loss of roughly a million cubic meters of water. “It looks like somebody has pulled the plug out of a gigantic bath,” said a correspondent fr Russia’s NTV. Though an official from a nearby village speculated that the lake’s water flowed into an underground river, others had their own suspicions, believing that “outside forces” were responsible. One man was quoted as stating “I think that America got us here.” It seems that in rural Russia at least, the Cold War never really ended.
Lake located above a salt mine? Scary. Oil drilling in and around said lake? Crazy! But then, we all know that the right hands at big oil companies (we’re looking at you, BP) sometimes don’t know what their left hands are up to… or down to, and in the case of Texaco’s drilling rig in Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur, that would be down to 1,300-odd feet below the bottom of a 10-ft deep lake. When the 14-inch wide drill bit broke through the roof of the mine, the results were predictable yet still spectacular.
Thirty years before the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, carelessness on an oil rig created a chain reaction of events that saw the 1,125 square acre lake (plus several barges, trees and 65 acres of shoreline land) quickly drain into the underlying Jefferson Island salt mine.
This video from The History Channel shows some of the events connected with the catastrophic drainage of Lake Peigneur, filmed by eye-witnesses at the time:
So, what have we learned from the Lake Peigneur disaster? Considering the salt dome beneath the now saline lake is being used as a storage for pressurized natural gas while oil drilling continues in the area, the answer is “not much”.
Once the 4th largest inland body of water in the world, the Aral Sea now ranks at just 10th – and falling. A victim of misguided agricultural policies enacted by a nation (the USSR) that is no more, the Aral Sea itself may soon be no more since its main inlet rivers have been dammed to provide water for cotton farms. As the lake shrinks, its waters become more and more saturated with salt , fertilizer and pesticides to the point that an estimated 75 million tons of toxic dust and salts are blown across Central Asia each year. Images of the Aral Sea’s shocking retreat taken from orbiting satellites and spacecraft are, in a word, tragic.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are the successor states to the USSR in which the toxic Aral Sea now lies, and although no longer bound by decrees from the Kremlin, the 2 states cannot agree on how to preserve or even restore the Aral Sea. In the meantime, the loss of over 90 percent of the sea has caused the entire region’s climate to become more extreme, and exposure to poisonous, windblown dust from the exposed lake bed has created a health crisis of immense scope. The shocking image above dates from the summer of 2009.
There is, however, new hope for the Aral Sea as the Kazakh government and the World Bank are working to restore the lake to at least a semblance of its former size. As the images above show (2004 on the left, 2010 on the right), the Aral Sea’s surface area has rebounded 30 percent and depths in some areas have grown from 98 feet to over 130 feet.
Picture a lake with a surface area of 3,000 square miles containing 500 square miles of water, blocked by an ice dam that is actually an arm of a retreating glacier. This precarious image once existed, in western Montana, about 13,000 years ago and is known today as Lake Missoula. When the ice dam was breached and the lake began to drain westward towards the Pacific Ocean, a flood of biblical proportions ensued.
Not only is it estimated that it took only about 48 hours for the lake to drain completely, this nightmarish scenario is thought to have taken place as many as 40 times over a 2,000 year period. The repeated series of cataclysmic floods scoured vast stretches of eastern Oregon and Washington states into the Channeled Scablands. The remains of an enormous waterfall three times the height and width of Niagara Falls can be seen above top.
Gigantic potholes, gargantuan ripple marks, dry waterfalls and other large-scale geologic features state unequivocally the incalculable power of rushing water – and lots of it. These features show some similarities to features found on the planet Mars and it’s now thought that our neighboring planet was subject to massive flooding events in its younger, wetter days.
Lakes, especially larger lakes, seem to be permanent fixtures of the landscape they occupy. In the geological big picture, however, this isn’t necessarily so and when change comes, it often comes suddenly and strikingly. Water tends to seek its own level under the influence of gravity, that’s just the way nature is… and nature knows no timetable and acts without regard to the works or wishes of Mankind.
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Preview of Muhammad Yunus: Building Social Business Ventures – one of 16 DVDs created by Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. Dr. Yunus, recently awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, shares his strategies for building businesses dedicated to the social good. He describes the founding and structure of Grameen Bank, Grameen Phone and other companies he has created on behalf of the poor. Produced by Rooy Media LLC for Ashoka. To purchase the films, visit dvd.ashoka.org.
This is a compilation of different processes of microfinance organizations that are working with Kiva. From taking picture of the beneficiary to uploading the profiles. For more info: www.intocontext.org For Kiva: www.kiva.org
There is not one thing on this site, or anywhere, that requires you to send stuff. Letters are THE MOST requested thing by these Soldiers. So, all you need do is send a normal letter in a normal envelope with a normal stamp.
Good ideas: If you want, put your email address in your letter, many Soldiers can and prefer to reply that way. What to write? Too easy: like you are talking to a friend, because that is what that Soldier is going to be real quick. It is also VERY helpful if you leave your full return address as part of your letter, envelopes tend to get trashed quickly.
Amazingly bizarre creatures are still being discovered around the world practically every week, and it wasn’t that long ago that we thought Komodo dragons, giant squid and platypi were mythical beasts. So is it possible that a lightening-spitting giant worm, a slimy river imp or a fat walking snake really exist? These 14 ‘cryptids’, creatures that have been reported but never confirmed, range from the seemingly possible to the laughably absurd.
What’s so special about the Mongolian Death Worm that makes cryptozoologists spend their life savings blowing up the desert in search of it? Well, it can supposedly shoot lightening out of its rectum long-distance, for one. The blood-red, acid-spitting cryptid is said to be up to five feet long with spikes protruding from both ends. Mongolian nomads have reported on its existence for centuries, but despite night-vision goggles and camera-equipped ultralight planes, it has never been confirmed as a real creature.
What’s big as a whale and furry all over – with an elephant trunk? You might guess ‘mammoth’, except for the fact that this particular cryptid has the tail of a lobster and swims underwater. Trunko is the affectionate nickname given to the “fish like a polar bear” which was reportedly sighted in South Africa in 1924. The strangely bloodless carcass washed up on Margate Beach and despite being there for 10 days, no scientist ever investigated it. One explanation is that the specimen was a whale or shark that appeared furry due to decay.
Everybody knows about Bigfoot and Yetis, but have you ever heard of a Yowie? Australia’s furry man-like creature has been a part of Aboriginal legend for centuries and is said to be 7-8 feet tall with bright red eyes and a body odor problem. Is it some undiscovered primate? Nobody knows for sure – one supposed “sighting” turned out to merely be a particularly hairy naked man running across the highway.
What’s killing livestock in places like Puerto Rico, Chile and Mexico? Maybe it’s local predators like coyotes – or maybe it’s the Chupacabra, a persistent cryptid that supposedly sucks the blood of animals like goats. The so-called ‘bizarre’ mutilations of these dead animals has never been confirmed and though many a captured specimen has been declared to finally be a real Chupacabra, they’ve inevitably been identified as raccoons, possums and other everyday animals rendered hairless by skin disease.
It looks sort of like a child, but with the glistening skin of a frog and unusually thin, gangly limbs. The Kappa is one of Japan’s most famous cryptids, an amphibious creature that leaves a trail of slime wherever it goes. In 1984, a specimen was supposedly spotted at the edge of a river in Tsushima and the slime taken to a lab for analysis, but the sample was too small to be useful. Another reported encounter involved bizarre footprints in a home that left a gooey mess that even paint thinner couldn’t tackle.
First, it invaded the body of an ill man as a lump of ice in the heart. Soon enough, the man would turn black with frostbite, begin vomiting ice and develop an insatiable craving for human flesh. In some northern Algonquin-speaking Native American tribes, the “windigo” was the unfortunate result of a man gone completely insane. Sometimes, the transformation was said to have been caused by cannabalism. But in nearly all cases, the man was said to turn into a gigantic nocturnal beast all too eager to feed upon the innocent.
What sort of creature could kill multiple pit bulls and drain their blood? Why, it could only be a hulking vampire creature resembling a cross between a wolf and a bear, of course. The Bladenboro Beast, named after the area it has reportedly terrorized since the 1950s, was spotted by a number of locals, one of whom described its “round face, shiny eyes and large teeth.” While locals still claim to catch glimpses of it today, some who believe the story think it might actually be a big cat – which are also a sort of cryptid, at least in this area. Reports of panthers in North Carolina have never been confirmed, either.
This sketch of the ‘Dover Demon’ of Massachusetts is so alien-like, it’s easy for skeptics to dismiss reports of its existence as utter hogwash. But believers say this bizarre hairless creature with a watermelon-shaped head and orange eyes might have been some kind of mutant – and some believe that it really was an alien. One witness wrote next to a sketch he created “I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature.” Others seeking a scientific explanation wonder if it could have been a newborn moose – do you see any resemblance?
Could the mythical minhocao of South America’s forests be a gigantic subspecies of caecilians – amphibians that look like earthworms? The minhocao (“big earthworm” in Portuguese), which is said to burrow underground, is believed to be a relic of the dinosaur age. Sightings were mostly reported in Brazil during the 19th century. Some people think that minhocaos are still spotted but accidentally reported as another cryptid, the giant anaconda.
Is the creature seen in this jar some kind of undiscovered animal, an abnormal fetus or just a hoax? Dubbed the “gnome of girona”, it was captured by campers in Spain and supposedly lived for a few days before it was preserved in formol by parapsychologist Angel Gordon and shown all over Spanish television. According to Wikipedia, “The connection between the pictures and how they reached the media is obscure, qualifying the whole story as a hoax of dubious authority.” Some experts believe it may be the fetus of a cow.
Perhaps the photos that supposedly show a creature known in Japan as the tsuchinoko are just a case of mistaken identity. Some argue that what you see here is just a snake digesting a huge meal, or an escaped exotic pet. But tsuchinokos have been reported since the 7th century, and considering some of the other bizarre creatures that have been confirmed as real lately, it wouldn’t be too surprising if this were really an undiscovered species. Japanese legend only serves to muddy the issue, however, with claims that the creature talks, with a propensity for lying and a love for alcoholic beverages.
Okay, so the Beast of Gevaudan doesn’t really have bizarre metal scales as portrayed in the movie Brotherhood of the Wolf. But the cryptozoological animal that the movie’s antagonist is based upon is known as a vicious man-eating wolf with huge teeth and longer-than-normal tails. The creature is blamed for attacks in the French village of Gevaudan between 1764 and 1767, with a death toll of over 200 people. Some say it could have been a wolf-dog hybrid, and others believe it was actually a werewolf.
When a frightening-looking corpse washed up on the beach of Montauk, New York in 2008, onlookers joked that maybe it came from Plum Island, where the USDA runs an animal disease center. The corpse was likely bloated from its time in the water, but speculation has deemed it everything from a turtle without its shell to a raccoon to a dog. The current location of the body is unclear, making some people wonder whether the whole thing was a hoax.
What creatures make up the biggest chunk of cryptids? Sea monsters, of course – there are so many of them, we could easily make a list that consisted of nothing but these mysterious underwater creatures that may or may not exist. It’s understandable – the sea is a strange and somewhat frightening place packed full of creatures that seem like they couldn’t possibly be real. Notable maybe-real-or-maybe-not water monsters include the infamous Loch Ness Monster, Chessie, Isshi, Kraken… the list goes on and on.
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From the dialects of the prairie dog to the inaudible rumbles of elephants, animal communication serves many practical purposes, all the while amazing. 1 Comment – Click Here to Read More
This summer, my garden has provided me with such pleasure. I’m not a great gardener. Heck, I’m not even a good gardener. But somehow, herbs managed to grow as well as some carrots, tomatoes and…weeds. Lots of weeds. Here’s a young girl who took her gardening a bit more seriously:
Alexandra Reau, of Petersburg, Mich., tended to her rainbow chard.
Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs.
While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
Read more at The New York Times
We might tend to think of passive home design and environmentally-friendly cooling methods as qualities of modern “green” construction. But natural cooling techniques have been used for as long as humans have been building homes; after all, the modern air conditioner is a relatively recent invention. These homes were all built to take advantage of simple, natural cooling methods – no air conditioner required.
Ancient desert-dwellers knew better than anyone that the best way to keep a home cool was to keep it from getting hot in the first place. This is why many hot-climate homes were built close together and finished with light-colored exteriors: both of these methods helped keep the heat out. But even more amazing is the windcatcher, a passive cooling device that has been used in Asia and the Middle East for many centuries.
The windcatcher is essentially a tower that “catches” the prevailing wind in its open side, then directs it down into the building to keep the air flowing and thus keeping the home cool. This Persian invention can be seen in many locations around the Middle East and surrounding areas, where daytime temperatures are typically very hot.
Windcatchers are sometimes used in conjunction with underground water canals to cool buildings. Hot air is drawn into the underground canal, where the water is kept cool because it is so far beneath the surface. The air is cooled by passing over the water, then it is directed up into the building. A similar method used in windless environments is the solar chimney, which forces hot air out through the top of the windcatcher and traps the cooler night-time air inside, keeping the home at a comfortable temperature.
The same type of natural air conditioning can be seen in Western architecture as well. Transoms, or tiny windows above doorways, were used to keep interiors cool and ventilated before air conditioning became commonplace. Trees and shrubs are used for shade to keep the sun from creating too much heat inside homes, and exterior porches are used to keep windows protected from the harshest of the summer rays.
These passive cooling methods and others are used in the most innovative and forward-thinking eco-friendly home designs of today, but they are all based on design elements that were developed long ago. Contemporary passive home designs are using these ancient passive methods in thoroughly modern homes to keep residents cool in the most classical, Earth-friendly way.
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People show their appreciation of nature and the ecosystem in different ways; some people join a commune and begin a sustainable, vegan existence, while others simply signify their love for nature by tattooing it onto their back. Some people do all of these things. Here are some of the coolest, and in some cases, most random animal tattoos you’ve never seen:
Wolves are a classic image of untamed nature. Favored by loners who are proud of their ability to howl out their emotions at the moon, it’s also great for those who have more of a pack mentality, and like how this animal is fierce and independent, but works closely and loyally in a group. It also has beautiful features and frightening teeth. These examples show there are a lot of ways to go with your wolf tattoo.
Giraffes would not be my first guess for an animal tattoo, but apparently they hold powerful meaning for some people. I have to say my favorite is the connect the dots example (the red lines are marker… the tattoo typically just looks like dots), though I’d worry about too much interaction from strangers itching to draw on your leg to see what it reveals.
Elephants have held much significance in a lot of cultures, but any nature lover can appreciate their intelligence, power, and loyalty to one another. If you’ve ever seen elephants mourning over a fallen comrade, it’s heart wrenching. You have to have a lot of room and a great artist to pull this off well, but the results can be well worth it.
I originally thought a cow tattoo would be incredibly strange, imagining the image in the second photo as the only possible outcome of that train of thought. The beauty and quality of the first tattoo changed my attitude, however, as it’s beautifully done. If you want to show serenity, or loyalty to a home state known for its’ cheese, just be sure you get an inspired tattoo artist to do the work.
Bats are frightening, unique, and if you walk three feet in a library you’ll find yourself tripping over a book that features their mythology prominently. Whether you’ve decided to get tattooed with a bat because of your love of vampires, or it’s entirely because of your love for that particular animal, you have to be careful of what conclusions people will jump to. Regardless of the meaning behind it, bat tattoos have a lot of room to be amazing.
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Animal suicide is seemingly easy to dismiss on the surface but merits more thought when considering how captivity, depression and other factors can affect animals. 2 Comments – Click Here to Read More
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