'Unseen' News and Views
(Greenpeace International)* — Last year, the city of Cape Town narrowly averted day zero – the day the city’s water taps would run dry. Many of the city’s four million residents patiently joined lines to receive their water ration, as the city desperately worked to restrict water usage in the weeks leading up to day zero.
21 March 2019 (FAO)* — Water is essential for agricultural production and food security. It is the lifeblood of ecosystems, including forests, lakes and wetlands, on which our present and future food and nutritional security depends. Yet, our freshwater resources are dwindling at an alarming rate.
It takes 70 litres to produce one apple! When we throw out food we are also wasting the resources that went into producing it. ©Orest lyzhechka/Shutterstock.com | Photo from FAO.
Do you know anyone who genuinely loves their job, greeting each new work day with focused energy and joyful anticipation? Do you know others who dread going to work, can’t wait for the weekend and cringe at the sound of the alarm clock on Monday morning?
Marilyn Langlois
What is it that makes work enjoyable and rewarding for some, while for others it is a torment? And why are so many people unemployed or underemployed, living under the constant stress of not knowing how they will manage from day to day?
Ten key components to job satisfaction include:
.
There has been a “serious regression” in the political power of women across the world in recent years, UN General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa told delegates to the annual summit of women activists at UN Headquarters in New York on Tuesday [12 March 2019].
The former Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Affairs who leads the 193-member world body, pointed out that in 2105 it would have taken 30 years to close the gender gap, but now, she told the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), if current trends continue, gender parity will not be reached for “107 years”.
A group of seven United Nations rights experts issued a clarion call on Tuesday [5 March 2019] to break the taboo around menstrual health for women and girls that persists in many parts of the world and take concrete action to end “disempowering” discrimination.*
FAO launches the first-ever global report on the state of biodiversity that underpins our food systems
ROME, 22 February 2019 (FAO)* – The first-ever report of its kind presents mounting and worrying evidence that the biodiversity that underpins our food systems is disappearing – putting the future of our food, livelihoods, health and environment under severe threat.
Only immediate climate action can save the future. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world are on the horizon.
John Scales Avery
Here is a recent statement by Jakob von Uexküll, founder of the World Future Council:
“Today we are heading for unprecedented dangers and conflicts, up to and including the end of a habitable planet in the foreseeable future, depriving all future generations of their right to life and the lives of preceding generations of meaning and purpose.
2019 is the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. Therefore it might be appropriate to look at his life, and his message for today’s world.
.
If humans are ever to achieve a stable global society in the future, they will have to become much more modest in their economic behavior and much more peaceful in their politics. For both modesty and peace, Gandhi is a useful source of ideas.
The problems with which he struggled during his lifetime are extremely relevant to us in the 21st Century, when both nuclear and ecological catastrophes threaten the world.
15 February 2019 — The students in the Tanzanian town of Bagamoyo once had to decide between getting sick or being thirsty all day long.*
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 