Greener burial options are sprouting up. In earlier posts, I’ve shared information about composting human remains. But the process leaves the family with a cubic yard of soil, way too much for an urn or plastic-lined box. The New York start up, Transcend, wants to turn your body into a tree.
An illustration demonstrating the tree burial concept. The body is surrounded by wood chips, soil and a mix of fungi, designed to help compost the human remains and encourage the tree above to take up the body’s nutrients. Image: Transcend
Customers choose a tree species suitable for their preferred burial site, on land owned by the company. When the client dies, their body is prepared in biodegradable flax linen and buried surrounded by a mixture of wood chips, local soil and fungi to facilitate composting. Planted over the body is a two-to-four-year-old tree, capable of absorbing the rich…
Demonstrators gather at Habima Square in Tel Aviv on 20 March to attend a televised video address by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Israeli Knesset (AFP)
Vanessa Beeley
Zionism has deep roots in Ukraine. Jews were a significant element in the settler colony of Odessa.
Along with a range of non Jewish colonizers they settled on land from which Muslims and others had been expelled in the settlement around Khadjibey in 1794. Ukraine, especially Odessa, was a key locus of the rise of the Zionist movement in the twentieth century.
The Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky hailed from Odessa. Zionist ambivalence about Ukrainian nationalism continues to this day. A few Ukrainian Zionists have warned of the rise of Nazi movements in Ukraine. But more generally, in the Zionist movement today there has been a concerted attempt to minimize the presence and political influence of Nazis in Ukraine.
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR): Press Release | July 22, 2023 The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) unjustified commission of two separate murders yesterday that left two Palestinian civilians dead, including a child, in Nablus and Ramallah in the West Bank, as part of IOF’s extrajudicial […]
Israeli soldiers abducted, on Sunday, six Palestinians, including a woman from the occupied Jerusalem and Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, according to local sources. In the occupied city of Jerusalem, soldiers stormed and searched the home of a former prisoner, identified as Mamdouh Amira before abducting him. In the Jabal al-Mokabber neighborhood of […]
A large army force invaded, on Monday at dawn, the Nour Shams refugee camp, east of Tulkarem in the northwestern part of the occupied West Bank, local sources reported. Dozens of military vehicles, including an armored D-9 military bulldozer, stormed the camp, and cordoned off the entire area, while operating UAV reconnaissance planes overhead. The […]
As Africa Loses Forest, Its Small Farmers Are Bringing Back Trees
The loss of forests across Africa has long been documented. But recent studies show that small farmers from Senegal to Ethiopia to Malawi are allowing trees to regenerate on their lands, resulting in improved crop yields, productive fruit harvests, and a boost for carbon storage.
For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation of Africa. And they are true — the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making.
‘Africa is still colonized. All they do is invent a lot of money and lend it to doubtful ‘leaders’ in artificial ex colonies – Then cash in for ever from the CASH COW interest of the odious impossible debt. Sure your pension fund isn’t still sucking Africa dry?‘ TheFree
But the trees? Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields..
Across the continent — from Senegal and Niger in the west, to Ethiopia in the east, and Malawi in the south — smallholder farmers are rejecting government advice that trees should be expunged from fields because they get in the way of growing crops. Instead, they are allowing previously suppressed trees to regenerate on their land — to improve soils and crop yields; to provide harvests of fruit, fuelwood, and fodder for their livestock; and ultimately to achieve a better life for their families.
As large areas of farmland across Africa turn from brown to green, the results are also good for local economies, offering an easy and cheap way to intensify their farming and increase output, as well as benefiting biodiversity and the global climate. An acre of growing trees on farmland captures and stores up to 4 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, researchers say.
A study published last month found at least 29 percent of tree cover in Africa is “outside areas previously classified as forest.”
The latest published evidence of Africa’s resurgent farmland trees comes in the first ever detailed analysis of satellite images of the continent carried out at a scale that can identify individual large trees outside forests. Florian Reiner, a remote-sensing analyst at the University of Copenhagen, working with an international team of colleagues, reported in Nature Communications last month that at least 29 percent of tree cover in Africa is “outside areas previously classified as forest.” continues below…
‘Farmers are plant breeders and seed savers, soil conservators and soil builders, water preservers and water keepers. Farmers are food producers. While using only 30 percent of the world’s resources, small-scale farmers provide 70 percent of the planet’s food. Small-scale famers, farming families, and gardeners feed us.‘
There’s only one plausible explanation for continuing silence on excess deaths: governments, media and regulators are frightened of what the research may uncover
During the pandemic, the challenge for each of us was to maintain critical distance: spurning both the tribalism of those insisting Covid was a hoax and the counter-tribalism of those who demanded complete acquiesence to a corporate-political agenda dictated by Big Pharma under the mantle of “Follow the science”.
Fear of living under Big Brother or of dying from plague drove many people not only into the arms of one of these two oppositional camps but fuelled a pandemic mania in which reason and compassion were replaced with either extreme cynicism or extreme compliance.
We are still living with the consequences.
There has been a spate of “excess deaths” over the past two years across the West – well above what would normally be expected – and yet this sustained trend is being universally ignored by governments, establishment media and medical bodies.
No one is protesting. The cult of compliance is still in the ascendant.
More on that in a moment.
But it is worth first revisiting briefly the climate of intolerance and willed ignorance that predominated at the height of the pandemic, as I documented in real time in a series of essays that upset more of my readers than any I had written before.
It was always unwarranted to press for vaccine mandates, if only because they violated the critically important principle of bodily autonomy.
But the demand became completely unhinged once it was clear – as it was much earlier than publicly let on by Big Pharma, the World Health Organisation and national regulators – that the vaccines were doing little to halt virus transmission.
Similarly, it was always unethical to insist that children should be routinely given the vaccine and boosters when it was evident that the virus posed no threat to the overwhelming majority of them – and all the more so given that the mRNA vaccines were based on a new technology whose development had been rushed through on an emergency licence.
By definition, no one could know the long-term effects of mRNA vaccines on humans because there had been no long-term studies.
Excess mortality in Finland, Norway, Denmark and UK. Look closely at the graphs. Not random change but manmade and caused by the horrific corona-crisis handling with ignorant lockdowns aso. Every number has a name #ExcessDeathspic.twitter.com/86Fo4fC4x4
The science was built on a wing and a prayer, which is part of the reason the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations, demurred for so long, and despite huge political pressure, on recommending vaccination for children.
The Free 