Disappearing as we write: polar ice caps greenhouse gas, whilst the rest of us are plugged into heat, food and water shortage below.
Our government, however, seems intent on ignoring the very serious message from Tyndale that the world's present addiction to air travel is wholly unsustainable.
minister Elliot Morley simply responded by saying 'Rationing travel is not a feasible solution'
So Airport expansion and tax breaks for airlines are to continue, keeping flights so frequent and prices so low as to encourage people to use and overuse the most polluting form of transport possible. Just one return flight from London To Japan, for instance, emits a massive 2.8 tons of COL.
In addition, no serious investment in alternative renewable energy sources is occurring in the UK In fact, these presently account for only 3% of fuel supply.
Unfortunately, such damaging and disastrous policies are typical of all our major political parties and their big business cronies.
Profit driven economies necessarily result in vast over-production and waste. Instead, planning for people's needs would enable far-reaching energy efficiency and conservation measures, bringing beneficial changes to our present way of live.
So within organisations like Respect we need to continue working out, together and with other environmental campaigners, radical red/green alternatives and strategies for achieving them.
Meanwhile all of us need to campaign in our schools, colleges, workplaces, unions and communities to make the December demonstration a huge success. The call for a muchneeded extension on Kyoto chimes with growing protests. Instead of a meagre five per cent reduction by 2012 we need drastic cuts in emissions of up to eighty per cent by 2050, along with a massive switch to renewables.
We need a big, powerful movement demanding this, at the same as fighting for a halt to the strophic, ecocidal policies of our present political leaders and their big business triends. Kathy Lowe The hunger strike of detainees in prison camps at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has reached crisis point. Amnesty International have stated that the prisoners condition is critical.
According to the men's lawyers, 210 of over 500 Guantanamo detainees held as "suspected terrorists" began starving themselves in early August.
Several are now reportedly in comas and near death.
The protest has grown steadily and represents a remarkable show of courage and solidarity. Most prisoners at Guantanamo have been held without charge for more than three years in conditions the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as "tantamount to torture".
The hunger strikers insist they Protest outside Downing Street highlights plight of Guantanamo prisoners are being force-fed.
The US government, already condemned by human rights organisations worldwide for failing to respect the Guantanamo detainees' rights under the Geneva Convention, clearly would prefer to avoid the embarrassment of prisoner deaths.
During the hunger strike information about the history of resistance and self-organisation of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay has emerged.
The men's lawyers in the US and Britain say detainees have used protests and hunger strikes since 2002 to demand humane treatment and a fair hearing. These actions have become progressively more serious.
Several prisoners were hospitalised in a dangerous condition and force-fed in an earlier hunger strike in June-July of this year.
Grievances then, as now,
The central demands of all those detained at Guantanamo remain the same: release or full legal representation and immediate trial.
A US Supreme Court ruling in 2004 opened the door for them to challenge the lawfulness of their imprisonment in federal court. Yet the Bush-appointed judiciary and US detence department officials have so far managed to fend off lawyers' attempts to obtain the promised hearings.
The US Administration, meanwhile, continues to claim that as most Guantanamo inmates are held as enemy combatants and are therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention.
The other route to securing the release of detainees is for governments to request the freedom of their nationals held at Guantanamo and to demand full access for lawyers to all prisoners there.
In September an Afghan inmate Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, was sent home at the request of Afghan presiaent namla Narzal
Tony Blair continues to resist all calls on him by human rights campaigners, lawyers and the detainees' families to intervene on behalf of the eight British residents still held at Guantanamo.
With hunger strikers now on the brink of death there has never been a more urgent need for these calls to be renewed, for independent investigators to be given access to the prison camps and for international public pressure to be brought to bear on the US authorities. Piers Mostyn In the 1970s the British state introduced internment without trial in the North of Ireland. It was an attempt to crush the nationalist rebellion led by the IRA.
Internees were officially recognised as political prisoners with full rights to associate, organise and wear their own clothes. But the repres sion had the opposite effect than intended.
So the government bought back trials conducted by judges without juries. The convicted prisoners were branded as "criminals", their political status was removed and they were told to wear a prison uniform.
The prisoners fought this, at first by refusing to wear prison uniform. The authorities retaliated by stopping them leave their cells or "slop out" their toilets. It became known as the dirty protest.
In desperation the prisoners went on a hunger strike in 1980. This was ended after they were falsely promised significant concessions.
A second hunger strike was organised in 1981, led by IRA volunteer Bobby Sands with one prisoner at a time refusing food. Support was mobilised in a mass campaign across Ireland and internationally that politicised the nationalist community and challenged the militarism of the republican struggle. One result was Sand's election as MP at a byWhen he died, after over two months of refusing food, his funeral was attended by 100,000 people (equivalent, proportionately, to well over a million in Britain).
Nine more prisoners died over an agonising six months before the strike was called off. The demands were never explicitly conceded, but the "criminalisation" strategy was left in tatters by the mass mobilisations in support of the prisoners.