Communism and the Environment Spring 2012

Just wanted to thank everyone for a great semester. Our blog, over the course of the semester, had over 1,000 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics. These visitors came from 78 different countries or territories, from all continents except Antarctica. The top ten, in order: U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, France, Philippines, Poland, India, with Bulgaria, [...]

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I recently found this site and thought it was very interesting. You can see current and past environmental problems which I honestly think is great.  http://www.globalstewards.org/issues.htm

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This may be a tad late relating to when i went to this event, but i remeber attending Professor Jacksons rush hour sometime in march or april. Professor Jackson was very interesting as he presented eco-friendly housing ideas. I though it was very interesting to see solar panels and other eco-friendly materials for the house [...]

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http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/01/urban_farming_and_lots_of_it_i.html I was stumbling around cleveland.com (I’m from there) and I found this article talking about urban agriculture in Cleveland. I didn’t even know this was going on so I did a little more digging and apparently Cleveland has some of the best urban agriculture laws in the country. They passed a zoning law that set [...]

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Although Yugoslavia is not a direct topic for this course, it certainly could be. Yugoslavia was always a maverick in the so-called Second World of communist countries, and had much closer ties to the “West”. This was due partly to its history, as the country became communist largely independently in the aftermath of World War [...]

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http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0315/macedonia-seeds-hope-in-5-million-new-trees Macedonia goes through fires every year, apparently caused by a mixture of human causes and the European heat waves of the last decade. In response, they’ve developed annual tree-planting festivals where literally millions of trees are planted in one day. The first year, 150,000 volunteers planted 2 million trees–1 for each citizen, a symbolic [...]

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I was at the movies friday and saw this interesting trailer based on Chernobyl, I know this story has only the event of the Chernobyl disaster as the context but I thought it was interesting to see it in the media for entertainment.

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In response to Professor Bell’s question on if Bolivia can balance environmental protection with economic development… I believe that this will be a difficult task for Bolivia given the history of the country, they have been heavily dependent on extractive industries for their economic stability. Bolivia has also had a history in exploitation, the Spanish for many [...]

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The article written by Richard Caddell explains Estonia’s relationship with the environment through out recent history. While the country was apart of the Soviet Union it still advocated for a conservation program. Something intresting about this article was Estonia’s efforts to preserve its environment was because of bird migration. Estonia has set up many laws [...]

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In the article by Raymond Dominick I found it interesting how West Germany, the capitalist region, creates the “indestructible detergent”. West Germany, “hoping to gain a competitive advantage in the scramble for markets” invents a soap detergent whose suds spread through washing cycles, and into every body of water throughout this region. Dominick also notes an [...]

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