User:Wiki User 68/My Portal
Wiki User 68/My Portal
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Wiki User 68 hails from the Great British Isles specifically England which is a country that is part of the United Kingdom.[1][2][3] Its inhabitants account for more than 83% of the total UK population,[4] whilst its mainland territory occupies most of the southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain. England shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west and elsewhere is bordered by the North Sea, Irish Sea, Celtic Sea, Bristol Channel and English Channel. The capital is London, the largest urban area in Great Britain, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most, but not all, measures.[5]
England became a unified state in the year 927 and takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled there during the 5th and 6th centuries. It has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world[6] being the place of origin of the English language, the Church of England, and English law, which forms the basis of the common law legal systems of countries around the world. In addition, England was the birth place of the Industrial Revolution and the first country in the world to industrialise.[7] It is home to the Royal Society, which laid the foundations of modern experimental science.[8] England is the world's oldest parliamentary system[9] and consequently constitutional, governmental and legal innovations that had their origin in England have been widely adopted by other nations.
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The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program for unemployed men, focused on natural resource conservation from 1933 to 1942. As part of the New Deal legislation proposed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), the CCC was designed firstly, to aid relief of high unemployment stemming from the Great Depression and secondly, carry out a broad natural resource conservation program on national, state and municipal lands. Legislation to create the program was introduced by FDR to the 73rd United States Congress on March 21, 1933, and the Emergency Conservation Work Act, as it was known, was signed into law on March 31, 1933.[10] The CCC became one of the most popular New Deal programs among the general public and operated in every U.S. state and territories of Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The separate Indian Division was a major relief force for Native American.
Members lived in camps, wore uniforms, and lived under quasi-military discipline. At the time of entry, 70% of enrollees were malnourished and poorly clothed. Very few had more than a year of high school education; few had work experience beyond occasional odd jobs. The peace was maintained by the threat of "dishonorable discharge." There were no reported revolts or strikes. "This is a training station we're going to leave morally and physically fit to lick 'Old Man Depression,'" boasted the newsletter of a North Carolina camp.
The total of 200,000 black enrollees were entirely segregated after 1935 but received equal pay and housing. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes pressured Director Fechner to appoint blacks to supervisory positions such as education directors in the 143 segregated camps.
Initially, the CCC was limited to young men age 18 to 25 whose fathers were on relief. Average enrollees were ages 18-19. Two exceptions to the age limits were veterans and Indians, who had a special CCC program and their own camps. In 1937, Congress changed the age limits to 17 to 28 years old and dropped the requirement that enrollees be on relief.
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Deforestation is the logging or burning of trees in forested areas. There are several reasons for doing so: trees or derived charcoal can be sold as a commodity and are used by humans while cleared land is used as pasture, plantations of commodities and human settlement. The removal of trees without sufficient reforestation, has resulted in damage to habitat, biodiversity loss and aridity. Also deforested regions often degrade into wasteland.
Disregard or unawareness of intrinsic value, and lack of ascribed value, lax forest management and environmental law allow deforestation to occur on such a large scale. In many countries, deforestation is an ongoing issue which is causing extinction, changes to climatic conditions, desertification and displacement of indigenous people.
In simple terms, deforestation occurs because forested land is not economically viable. Increasing the amount of farmland, woods are used by native populations of over 200 million people worldwide.
The presumed value of forests as a genetic resources has never been confirmed by any economic studies [11]. As a result owners of forested land lose money by not clearing the forest and this affects the welfare of the whole society [12]. From the perspective of the developing world, the benefits of forest as carbon sinks or biodiversity reserves go primarily to richer developed nations and there is insufficient compensation for these services. As a result some countries simply have too much forest. Developing countries feel that some countries in the developed world, such as the United States of America, cut down their forests centuries ago and benefited greatly from this deforestation and that it is hypocritical to deny developing countries the same opportunities: that the poor shouldn’t have to bear the cost of preservation when the rich created the problem [13].
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The Seawater Greenhouse is an established technology with the potential to create surplus fresh water from seawater, using a novel form of greenhouse that also provides suitable food-growing conditions in arid regions. Three such units have been built so far. The technique is applicable to only a very limited number of world sites due to the topographic elements essential to the process. The technology won the Tech Museum Award for a 2006 project in Oman,[14] and was a finalist in the 2007 St Andrews Prize for the Environment.[15]
Proposals for the Seawater Greenhouse include the Sahara Forest Project[16][17][18], a scheme that aims to provide fresh water, food and renewable energy in hot arid regions as well as re-vegetating areas of uninhabited desert. This ambitious proposal combines the Seawater Greenhouse and concentrating solar power (CSP) to achieve highly efficient synergies. CSP is increasingly seen as a promising form of renewable energy, producing electricity from sunlight at a fraction of the cost of photovoltaics. By combining these technologies there is huge commercial potential to create a sustainable source of energy, food and water.
The scheme is proposed at a significant scale such that very large quantities of seawater can be evaporated. By using a location that lies below sea level, this can be achieved without pumping and there is an opportunity to capture some of the substantial volumes of residual humidity that leave the greenhouses. A 20,000 hectare area of Seawater Greenhouses will evaporate a million tonnes of seawater per day. If the scheme were located upwind of higher terrain then the air carrying this ‘lost’ humidity would rise and contribute to forming mist, cloud and dew. It would then be possible to harvest this precipitate using fog-nets that can supply tree saplings with water and thereby reverse the process of desertification, returning barren land to forest[19].
The scheme was first publicly proposed to a group of energy specialists at the third Claverton Energy GroupConference held at the Headquarters of Wessex Water Plc on April 13 2008 updated [20]
In the news
- 20 November 2024 – 2024 United Kingdom farmers' protests
- Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner dismisses concerns brought on by protests in London from United Kingdom farmers against new agricultural inheritance taxation policies as "scaremongering". (Sky News)
- 19 November 2024 – 2024 United Kingdom farmers' protests
- Thousands of British farmers protest at the Houses of Parliament in London, United Kingdom, against a new inheritance tax on land ownership that includes farms. (Al Jazeera) (BBC News)
- 6 November 2024 – Protests against Donald Trump
- Just Stop Oil protesters spray orange paint on the outside of the American Embassy in London, United Kingdom, following Donald Trump's re-election in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. (The Independent)
Selected Biography
Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American lawyer and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president in U.S. history. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004. (Full article...)
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for United States Senate in 2004. Obama's unexpected landslide victory in the March 2004 U.S. Senate primary made him a rising star in the national Democratic Party, with his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 further raising his visibility. He was elected by a landslide margin to the U.S. Senate in November 2004.
After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major African American candidate for President. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican candidate John McCain and was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2009.
Selected Geography
The Black Sea is an inland sea bounded by southeastern Europe, the Caucasus and the Anatolian peninsula (Turkey) and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and various straits. The Bosporus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects it to the Aegean Sea region of the Mediterranean. These waters separate eastern Europe and western Asia. The Black Sea also connects to the Sea of Azov by the Strait of Kerch.
The Black Sea has a positive water balance, which results in a net outflow of water 300 km³ per year through the Bosphorus into the Aegean Sea (part of the Mediterranean Sea). Mediterranean water flows into the Black Sea as part of a 2-way hydrological exchange. The Black Sea outflow is less salinated and cool, therefore floats over the warm, relatively more salinated Mediterranean inflow. The Black Sea also receives river water from large Eurasian fluvial systems to the north of the Sea, of which the Don, Dnieper and Danube are the most significant.
In the past, the water level has varied significantly. Depending on the water level in the basin, more or less of the surrounding shelf and associated aprons are aerially exposed. At certain critical depths, it is possible for connections with surrounding water bodies to become established. It is through the most active of these connective routes, the Turkish Straits System (TSS), that the Black Sea joins the global ocean system. When this hydrological link is not present, the Black Sea is a lake, operating independently of the global ocean system. Currently the Black Sea water level is relatively high, thus water is being exchanged with the Mediterranean. The TSS connects the Black and Aegean Seas and comprises the Strait of Bosphorus Strait (Strait of Istanbul), the Marmara sea and the Strait of Dardanelles (Strait of Canakkale). The Black Sea also connects to the Sea of Azov via the Strait of Kerch
Categories
Selected quote
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
- scientist and writer (1920-1992)
Did you know?
- ...that optimistic estimations of peak oil production forecast the global decline will begin by 2020 or later, and assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a crisis, without requiring major changes in the lifestyle of heavily oil-consuming nations. These models show the price of oil at first escalating and then retreating as other types of fuel and energy sources are used?[21]
- ...that if the Greenland ice-sheet melted through global warming, it would raise the global sea level by 7 meters, or 22 feet?
Topics
Related portals
WikiProjects
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| WikiProject Africa | WikiProject Cape Verde | WikiProject Council |
Things to do
- Keep finishing off the various Portals that need creating/completing and start writing content on the relevant interested issues.
- Be bold. Wikipedia is for the people, by the people and needs YOU as a contributor to spread global knowledge.
Wikimedia
- ^ The Countries of the UK statistics.gov.uk, accessed 10 October, 2008
- ^ "Countries within a country". 10 Downing Street. Retrieved 2007-09-10.
The United Kingdom is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
- ^ "ISO 3166-2 Newsletter Date: 2007-11-28 No I-9. "Changes in the list of subdivision names and code elements" (Page 11)" (PDF). International Organisation for Standardisation codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions -- Part 2: Country subdivision codes. Retrieved 2008-05-31.
ENG England country
- ^ National Statistics Online - Population Estimates. Retrieved 6 June 2007.
- ^ The official definition of LUZ (Larger Urban Zone) is used by the European Statistical Agency (Eurostat) when describing conurbations and areas of high population. This definition ranks London highest, above Paris (see Larger Urban Zones (LUZ) in the European Union); and a ranking of population within municipal boundaries also puts London on top (see Largest cities of the European Union by population within city limits). However, research by the University of Avignon in France ranks Paris first and London second when including the whole urban area and hinterland, that is the outlying cities as well (see Largest urban areas of the European Union).
- ^ England - Culture. Britain USA. Retrieved 12 September 2006.
- ^ "Industrial Revolution". Retrieved 2008-04-27.
- ^ "History of the Royal Society". The Royal Society. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
- ^ "Country profile: United Kingdom". BBC News. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
- ^ Wirth, Conrad L. "Parks, Politics and the People" University of Oklahoma Press (1980) pp. 69-75.
- ^ Pierce, D.W. The economic value of forest ecosystems" Ecosystem Health 7:4 2001
- ^ Erwin H Bulte; Mark Joenje; Hans G P Jansen 200 "Is there too much or too little natural forest in the Atlantic Zone of Costa Rica"Canadian Journal of Forest Research; 30:3
- ^ Erwin H Bulte; Mark Joenje; Hans G P Jansen 200 "Is there too much or too little natural forest in the Atlantic Zone of Costa Rica"Canadian Journal of Forest Research; 30:3
- ^ Tech Museum Award 2006
- ^ St Andrews Prize for the Environment
- ^ The Sahara Forest Project http://www.exploration-architecture.com/section.php?xSec=35
- ^ "Seawater greenhouses to bring life to the desert". The Guardian. 2008-08-03.
- ^ Fourth World Conference on the Future of Science "Food and Water for Life" - Venice, September 24-27, 2008
- ^ The Sahara Forest Project - food, water, biomass from the uninhabited Sahara Desert http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/waterenergygroup/message/48
- ^ http://www.claverton-energy.com/the-sahara-forest-project-%E2%80%93-a-new-source-of-fresh-water-food-and-energy.html
- ^ "CERA says peak oil theory is faulty". Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). 2006-11-14. Retrieved 2008-07-27.