quarta-feira, 30 de junho de 2010

sexta-feira, 11 de junho de 2010

WORLD HUNGER

...
Biotechnology proponents have argued repeatedly that GM seeds are crucial to feed the world, using the same flawed reasoning that was advanced for decades by the proponents of the Green Revolution. Conventional food production, they maintain, will not keep pace with the growing world population. Monsanto's ads proclaimed in 1998: “Worrying about starving future generations won't feed them. Food biotechnology will.” As agroecologists Miguel Altieri and Peter Rosset point out, this argument is based on two erroneous assumptions. The first is that world hunger is caused by a global shortage of food; the second is that genetic engineering is the only way to increase food production.
In their classic study, World Hunger: Twelve Myths, development specialists Frances Moore Lappé and her colleagues at the Institute for Food and Development Policy gave a detailed account of world food production that surprised many readers. They showed that abundance, not scarcity, best describes the food supply in today's world. During the past three decades, increases in global food production have outstripped world population growth per 16 per cent.
The root causes of hunger around the world are unrelated to food production. They are poverty, inequality and lack access to food and land. People go hungry because the means to produce and distribute food are controlled by the rich and powerful: world hunger is not a technical but a political problem.

in “The Hidden Connections”, by Fritjof Capra
...

OUR HEALTH

...
depends upon the purity of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and it depends on the health of the soil from which our food is produced.

In the coming decades the survival of the humanity will depend on our ecological literacy – our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly.

www.ecoliteracy.org

in “The Hidden Connections”, by Fritjof Capra
...

SUSTAINABILITY

...
Humankind has the ability to achieve sustainable development
– THAT IS ... to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

in “The Hidden Connections”, by Fritjof Capra
...

sábado, 5 de junho de 2010

Yoga Retreat with Pedro Kupfer

...


It was a pleasure to hear the teachings of Pedro Kupfer, or should I say - the teachings of yoga, through him. As my teacher Shan Anand, Pedro Kupfer takes his studies and practice seriously, without making up new, ego centered, asanas or philosophies.

These teachers see and understand how deep and rich the teachings of the Vedas, Upanishads and other texts with more than 1.000 years old are. The information of these texts is not packaged in a modern kind of way, where everything must be prepared to be quickly consumed. These texts were written in a time when there was actually time - to think, to study, to observe, to reflect, to approach the subject of the meaning of life.

Today we are running faster and faster, conditioned to react, instead of acting. We need time to stop, to think, to clear our mind about our purpose and goals, only then can we get somewhere. But movements SLOW DOWN are appearing, as we cannot go faster eternally.

Thank you Pedro, thank you Shan, and thank you to all the people in the Portuguese yoga community I have been fortunate to meet.

As Pedro says, this community dedicates itself to yoga with love and the will to share, and not only business oriented. I am pleased to know many yoga teachers that even making a very small profit, work hard in order to take yoga to many around them.

For last, I would like to thank Pedro Kupfer and the YogaPro team for making a great deal of quality resources on yoga available to everyone, in http://www.yoga.pro.br (in portuguese only)