A group of activists and neighbors have made public the construction of a self-managed urban garden and a multipurpose popular space, available to the whole neighborhood. The almost ten thousand square meters of land belongs to CaixaBank and has been abandoned for more than twelve years
PUBLISHED: June 13, 2020 / Guillem Martí Guillem Martí guimmart
Located on the outskirts of the neighborhood of Sant Francesc, adjacent to the old town of Sant Cugat del Vallès, and at the beginning of the industrial estate of Can Magí, there is a plot of land that years ago had housed an old factory, according to aerial photographs of the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia, of which only the foundations remain.
They are 9,595 square meters in disuse, covered with tall grass and some trees, which, for more than twelve years, were hidden from view by sporadic pedestrians passing through the area by a long wall.
However, some neighbors say that the factory had been abandoned for more than fifteen years before going to the ground. Since 2012, the land has been owned by Servihabitat, CaixaBank’s real estate company, but for a few days now a group of activists has been working on it to build the Horta Alliberada de Sant Cugat, (Liberated Garden) which opened to the public on Saturday, June 13th.
The activists have been preparing the ground for a few days and creating the first terraces in the most fertile area, “to make it attractive to the neighborhood and to counter the pejorative image that can be had of the squatters,” says Pau, member of the garden assembly.
Supporters of the project and local entities have met in the early hours of Saturday morning to spread the project among the neighborhood, hang posters, hand out leaflets and make information pickets, and a press conference has been convened with local media where has read a manifesto. The first open assembly of the Garden will be held on Sunday, but always respecting the safety measures and restrictions imposed by phase two of decontamination.
“One of the goals of the garden that we have set ourselves from the beginning is to reach all sectors of the population,” explains Marta, also a member of the assembly.
“We have written the manifesto in three languages, including Arabic, to represent the cultural diversity of the neighborhood, unlike the City Council,” he added, referring to the segregation by cultural origin and origin that is it ends up generating among the users of other urban gardens of the municipality.
A Beginning Note–This post ought to keep the old farts busy for awhile slinging insults and spreading their manure……enjoy. The newest situation that has the lie machine working overtime is that of the Autonomous Zone in Seattle……a new way to protest….or is it?
Before let me give my reader a little context…..
The very term makes people with a history background think about 1871 and the Paris Commune….
The Paris Commune was a popular-led democratic government that ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. Inspired by the Marxist politics and revolutionary goals of the International Workingmen’s Organization (also known as the First International), workers of Paris united to overthrow the existing French regime which had failed to protect the city from Prussian siege, and formed the first truly democratic government in the city and in all of France.
The elected council of the Commune passed socialist policies and oversaw city functions for just over two months, until the French army retook the city for the French government, slaughtering tens of thousands of working-class Parisians in order to do so.
Modelling suggests climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than thought
Experts say the projections have the potential to be ‘incredibly alarming’.
Worst-case global heating scenarios may need to be revised upwards in light of a better understanding of the role of clouds, scientists have said.
Recent modelling data suggests the climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously believed, and experts said the projections had the potential to be “incredibly alarming”, though they stressed further research would be needed to validate the new numbers.
Compared with the last assessment in 2014, 25% of them show a sharp upward shift from 3C to 5C in climate sensitivity – the amount of warming projected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. This has shocked many veteran observers, because assumptions about climate sensitivity have been relatively unchanged since the 1980s.Advertisement
“That is a very deep concern,” Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “Climate sensitivity is the holy grail of climate science. It is the prime indicator of climate risk. For 40 years, it has been around 3C. Now, we are suddenly starting to see big climate models on the best supercomputers showing things could be worse than we thought.”
He said climate sensitivity above 5C would reduce the scope for human action to reduce the worst impacts of global heating. “We would have no more space for a soft landing of 1.5C [above preindustrial levels]. The best we could aim for is 2C,” he said.
Worst-case projections in excess of 5C have been generated by several of the world’s leading climate research bodies, including the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the EU’s Community Earth System Model.
Timothy Palmer, a professor in climate physics at Oxford University and a member of the Met Office’s advisory board, said the high figure initially made scientists nervous. “It was way outside previous estimates. People asked whether there was a bug in the code,” he said. “But it boiled down to relatively small changes in the way clouds are represented in the models.”
The role of clouds is one of the most uncertain areas in climate science because they are hard to measure and, depending on altitude, droplet temperature and other factors, can play either a warming or a cooling role. For decades, this has been the focus of fierce academic disputes.
Previous IPCC reports tended to assume that clouds would have a neutral impact because the warming and cooling feedbacks would cancel each other out. But in the past year and a half, a body of evidence has been growing showing that the net effect will be warming. This is based on finer resolution computer models and advanced cloud microphysics.
“Clouds will determine humanity’s fate – whether climate is an existential threat or an inconvenience that we will learn to live with,” said Palmer. “Most recent models suggest clouds will make matters worse.”
In a recent paper in the journal Nature, Palmer explains how the new Hadley Centre model that produced the 5+C figure on climate sensitivity was tested by assessing its accuracy in forecasting short-term weather. This testing technique had exposed flaws in previous models, but in the latest case, the results reinforced the estimates. “The results are not reassuring – they support the estimates,” he wrote. He is calling for other models to be tested in a similar way.
“It’s really important. The message to the government and public is, you have to take this high climate sensitivity seriously. [We] must get emissions down as quickly as we can,” he said.
The IPCC is expected to include the 5+C climate sensitivity figure in its next report on the range of possible outcomes. Scientists caution that this is a work in progress and that doubts remain because such a high figure does not fit with historical records.
Catherine Senior, head of understanding climate change at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said more studies and more data were needed to fully understand the role of clouds and aerosols.
“This figure has the potential to be incredibly alarming if it is right,” she said. “But as a scientist, my first response is: why has the model done that? We are still in the stage of evaluating the processes driving the different response.”
While acknowledging the continued uncertainty, Rockström said climate models might still be underestimating the problem because they did not fully take into account tipping points in the biosphere.
“The more we learn, the more fragile the Earth system seems to be and the faster we need to move,” he said. “It gives even stronger argument to step out of this Covid-19 crisis and move full speed towards decarbonising the economy.”
https://quillette.com/2019/11/07/climate-change-assessing-the-worst-case-scenario/Few actual climate scientists would go to that level of doomsaying. But the tendency to fantasize about societal impacts is evident. One recent study suggests that sea level may (in the worstcase) rise up to 2 meters by 2100: Such big sea level rises so soon would lead to nightmarish impacts, says Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol.
https://psmag.com/environment/are-we-headed-toward-the-worst-case-climate-change-scenarioA record number of Americans say they accept that global warming is happening, according to a new survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, and nearly three-quarters of them now say it’s an issue that’s personally important to them. Both numbers have risen sharply over the last few years—a shift that ….
Worst-case global heating scenarios may need to be revised upwards in light of a better understanding of the role of clouds, scientists have said.
Recent modelling data suggests the climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously believed, and experts said the projections had the potential to be “incredibly alarming”, though they stressed further research would be needed to validate the new numbers.
Modelling results from more than 20 institutions are being compiled for the sixth assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due to be released next year.
Football pitch-sized area of tropical rainforest lost every six seconds
Lagos, Nigeria (CNN)Protesters have taken to the streets in cities across Nigeria to demand urgent action to combat rape and sexual violence against women.In Lagos on Monday a coalition of rights groups marched to the state parliament calling for it to declare a state of emergency on rape and sexual violence. The march followed the gruesome death of 22-year-old student Uwaila Vera Omozuwa — and the rape and killing less than a week later of another student, Barakat Bello.
The short life and sudden death of the Share-a-Ton.
The Saturday after George Floyd was killed, Abu Bakr Bryant, a 29-year-old from Minneapolis, found himself walking dazedly among the charred remains of Chicago Avenue, the street where Floyd took his last breaths. Shops and restaurants smoldered. Windows had been boarded up.
A melted stoplight hung midair like a piece of abstract art. He had on his person the entirety of his worldly possessions: a change of clothes, his cellphone, and his wallet. Bryant had been living out of his car until the previous evening, when he went to protest. The protests turned into firestorms, and when he got back to his car, he found that it was on fire, too.
Nine blocks north of the intersection that had turned into a memorial to Floyd, Bryant passed by a former Sheraton hotel with handwritten signs saying “sanctuary” taped on the windows. With the exception of a couple holes from rocks thrown at the double-paned windows, the building was miraculously unscathed. He walked in and asked to use the bathroom. The people inside offered him food and a hotel room—for free. “I thought it was a joke,” he told me.
The 136-room hotel had been transformed into a pop-up homeless shelter of sorts, with no staff and virtually no rules. The hotel’s typical guests had been ordered to evacuate when the protests in Minneapolis heated up. In their place now were between 200 and 300 previously unhoused people—no one knew exactly how many—with more arriving each day to be put on a waitlist.
Thirty years ago today, one million people marched in the streets of New York City to protest the nuclear arms race in general and the policies of Ronald Reagan in particular. Organized around a “nuclear freeze” proposal, the demonstration was a watershed for a movement that seemed to come out of nowhere, not just in […]
Turkey imprisons 9 Kurdish feminists for singing “Feminicide is political” on Sunday, May 31, 2020 The women’s association Rosa (Rosa Kadın Derneği) shared the message of nine of its members arrested last week in Amed (Turkish: Diyarbakır). The nine women, including Kurdish politicians and elected officials, are among 12 people jailed last Sunday for “belonging to an illegal organization,” as part of an investigation opened by the Diyarbakır prosecutor’s office against the Rosa women’s association. .
From the Diyarbakir women’s prison, where they are detained, they sent this message, through their lawyers:
“Many thanks to all the women’s associations, our comrades, our lawyers and our elected officials who have shown solidarity with us, demonstrating the strength that is the struggle of women and how united we are. We know that no power cannot resist this solidarity and the struggle of women.
Let it be known that we will never stop singing: “Feminicide is political”, “Women want peace”, “Women are life, do not kill life” “Because we know how fair our struggle is. The future will be better. Don’t worry, we’re fine.”
The Free 