Thousands of books have been written on the thousands of benefits of exercise so here’s just one factoid to pique your interest: Research studies have found consistent moderate intensity physical activity may reduce a person’s risk for developing type 2 diabetes by 40% to 60%.  “Exercise is the fountain of youth.”

Two thirds of Americans say they are likely to seek help for stress and 54% of Americans are concerned about the level of stress in their everyday lives. Here are 12 ways a stressed but Earth-friendly human find inner peace without the stress of substantially deepening her/his carbon footprint.

At 98.7° (body temperature), animal fat is solid (think: pork chop) while plant fat (think: olive oil) is liquid. Not surprisingly, the risk of death from heart attack for the average American is 50%. For a vegan: 4%.

The above steps can value our bodies and our minds. More abstractly, we can green our minds in a few other ways, like mindfulness, interdependence, awareness, and speaking out. As some guy named Proust once said: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

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Air pollution index levels exceeded a measurement of 400 points at several stations, even though 100 or above is classified as “very high” and comes with the advice that people who are sensitive to pollution should reduce outdoor activities. Anything above 200 is considered “severe,” and can lead to coughing, phlegm and sore throats, the authorities warned. The previous record was 202, set in July 2008.

High air pollution levels are often cited by international companies as a major drawback of doing business in the city, and the extreme levels on Monday, though highly unusual, may hinder the city’s efforts to bolster its image as a desirable place to live.

The current high levels were partly caused by a sandstorm in northern China, which has been moving south, the Hong Kong environment department said. The sandstorm, the nation’s worst in more than a year, has affected 270 million people across 16 provinces and offers a sign of the worsening problem of desertification in the north, according to scientists and meteorologists. On Monday, Beijing was blanketed in a yellow haze of sand and grit.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that there are two dozen sandstorms a year, six times the number 50 years ago, according to China Daily, an official English-language newspaper. The sand has mostly blown in from the deserts of the province of Inner Mongolia and the country of Mongolia, on China’s northern border. China has about 1.6 million square kilometers of desert; about 80,000 square kilometers of grasslands became desert in the last few decades, China Daily reported, citing a deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences.

But environmental advocates said roadside pollution was also key to explaining the record levels.

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The scale of the problems we face can make many of us feel helpless, and yet each of us has the power to make changes in our lives that can have a meaningful impact on the future.

Less pollution

Depending on where and how it is produced the FAO estimates that the livestock industry is responsible for between 13.5 and 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the UK livestock are responsible for around 8.5 per cent of GHG emissions. Some of these are from the methane emitted from livestock. Methane is 23 times more powerful as a global warming gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). Other emissions such as nitrous oxide come from the manure produced by ruminants and other animals such as poultry and pigs. Nitrous oxide – has 298 times the global warming potential of CO2. Still more GHGs come from the fertilisers used to grow animal feed, and from processing storage and transport of meat products as well as from the clearing of rainforest to make room for livestock. Beef is the most energy intensive of all the meats we eat. According to environmental group Greenpeace eating 1kg of beef (the average weekly intake of meats of all types in the UK is between 1kg and 1.6 kg) represents roughly the same greenhouse emissions as flying 100km of a flight, per passenger; this is twice the carbon footprint of eating pigs or poultry.

Researchers at the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, agree. In 2007 they found that producing 1kg of beef results in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by the average car over a distance of 250 kilometres.

Making a political statement

Politicians follow. They don’t lead. And because of meat’s association with affluence and the fear that asking people to eat less meat might make them unpopular, most politicians shy away form this issue. Unlike oil, the price of meat has remained relatively stable for many years. It is unlikely, due to the heavy subsidies given to livestock farmers, that big price rises will force consumers into eating less – in the way that they have been used to prod us into driving less. So the best hope for change lies in average people becoming more aware of the true costs of industrial meat production and taking action themselves.

Alleviating world hunger

Meat producers are hoping to double the global production of meat by 2050. But this is not inevitable – or desirable. Animals convert plant protein and energy into meat protein and energy inefficiently; it takes 8 kg of grain, for instance, to produce 1kg of beef. This means that anyone who consumes large amounts of meat – pretty much the whole of the industrialised world – may be consuming a disproportionate amounts of the world’s available nutrients.

Currently some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, while the majority of corn and soya grown in the world – which could be feeding them, goes to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. By some estimates 20 vegetarians can be fed on the amount of land needed to feed one person consuming a meat-based diet.

Growing crops to feed animals means there is less land on which to grow crops for humans. The knock-on effect of any increase in meat production is likely to reduce the land and resources available for producing other foodstuffs and push future food prices further beyond the limits of affordability for the world’s poorest people.

Better health

Most of us eat more meat and other protein rich foods than we need to stay healthy. In 2007 the World Cancer Research Fund report recommended limiting the consumption of red meats such as beef, pork ad lamb because of a ‘convincing’ link with colorectal cancer. Links have also been found between high meat diets and obesity and heart disease.

Remember also that climate change is a threat to our future health. As the world warms up it is likely that levels of air pollution, and thus allergies and respiratory diseases, will rise, as will the rate of infectious diseases.

Protecting animal rights

According to the Worldwatch Institute, globally some 56 billion animals are raised and slaughtered for food each year. Of these 67 per cent are grown on industrial ‘factory’ farms. Factory farms are sources of cruelty and waste on scales unimaginable to most of us. These facilities rely on commercial breeds of animals that gain weight quickly on unnatural diets of high-protein feeds. Here animals live in  crowded, stressful and often unhygienic conditions. Many of the world’s 17 billion chickens, for instance, each live in an area that is less than the size of a sheet of paper. Cattle in such farms often stand knee-high in their own waste.

Under such conditions, animals are kept ‘healthy’ with regular doses of antibiotics – traces of which can remain in the meat we eat, and which have been associated with the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria in animals and humans.

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But for dairyman John Fiscalini, the dung on his farm is renewable gold: He’s converting it into electricity.

At his farm outside Modesto, a torrent of water washes across the barn’s concrete floor several times a day, flushing tons of manure away from his herd of fuzzy-faced Holsteins and into nearby tanks. There, bacteria consume the waste and release methane, which is then burned in a generator capable of producing enough power to run Fiscalini’s 530-acre farm, his cheese factory and 200 additional homes.

Fiscalini’s resourcefulness should be drawing accolades, considering that state mandates are requiring California industries to boost renewable energy use and slash greenhouse gas emissions sharply over the next 10 years.

But efforts to convert cow pies into power have sparked controversy. State air quality control regulators say these “dairy digester” systems can generate pollution themselves and, unless the devices are overhauled, are refusing to issue permits for them.

The standoff underscores how conflicting regulatory mandates are making it hard for California to meet its green-energy goals.

“We didn’t expect this,” said Michael Gallo, chief executive of Joseph Gallo Farms in Atwater, Calif., whose family has spent “a lot of money” to get its dairy digester system compliant.

The idea of turning biological waste — whether manure, trash or grass clippings — into fuel has been around for centuries. Technologies vary, but the idea is to extract methane from decomposing organic material, remove impurities and burn it for heat, light or transport. Interest boomed after the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on climate change. Methane, considered by many scientists and environmentalists to be as damaging a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, was among the key six pollutants targeted.

Today, the European Union is leading the global charge to turn waste into watts; more than 8,000 biogas operations are up and running in Europe, and thousands more are slated to open in the next decade. The United States, which has not ratified the Kyoto accord, has only about 150 digester projects operating at livestock farms nationwide, said Chris Voell, a manager of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AgStar program, which works with farmers to get such systems up and running.

The concern: NOx.

Air district officials said they’re just doing their jobs. Combating smog, not climate change, is the agency’s mission.

“The board has been clear that when we’re faced with these sorts of trade-offs between reducing greenhouse gases and reducing NOx, we’re going to choose NOx,” said Dave Warner, director of permit services for the San Joaquin Valley air quality district.

The farmers “should have checked in with us first, before buying their equipment,” he added.

Last year, six dairy digesters were shut down because of regulatory or financial problems. One of them is at Ron Koetsier’s dairy in Visalia.

Koetsier shut the system down. Now the equipment is collecting dust.

“They have a point. I want clean air,” Koetsier said. “But it doesn’t make financial sense for me keep doing this. I don’t see how they can turn methane gas into electricity in California, given these rules.”

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The amounts are small and, so far, only found in a region of the atmosphere known as the free troposphere, at an altitude of two to five miles, but the development could complicate U.S. efforts to control air pollution.

Though the levels are small, they have been steadily rising since 1995, and probably longer, said lead author Owen R. Cooper, a research scientist at the University of Colorado attached to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“The important aspect of this study for North America is that we have a strong indication that baseline ozone is increasing,” said Cooper. “We still don’t know how much is coming down to the surface. If the surface ozone is increasing along with the free tropospheric ozone, that could make it more difficult for the U.S. to meet its ozone air quality standard.”

The study is the first link between atmospheric ozone over the U.S. and Asian pollution, said Dan Jaffe, a University of Washington-Bothell professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry.

He contributed data from his observatory on top of Mount Bachelor in Oregon to the study.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering lowering the current limit on ozone in the atmosphere by as much as 20 percent, and has been working with China to lower its emissions of the chemicals that turn into ozone.

Ozone is harmful to people’s respiratory systems and plants. It is created when compounds produced by burning fossil fuels are hit by sunlight and break down. Ozone also contributes to the greenhouse effect, ranking behind carbon dioxide and methane in importance.

Ozone is only one of many pollutants from Asia that reach the United States. Instruments regularly detect mercury, soot, and cancer-causing PCBs.

Jaffe said it was logical to conclude that the increasing ozone was the result of burning more coal and oil as part of the Asia’s booming economic growth.

The next step is to track the amounts of Asian ozone reaching ground levels on the West Coast, said Cooper.

Work will start in May and end in June, when air currents produce the greatest amounts of Asian ozone detected in the U.S. Weather balloons and research aircraft will be launched daily to measure ozone closer to ground, where it affects the air people breathe, Cooper said.

The study to be published in Nature looked at thousands of air samples collected between 1995 and 2008 and found a 14 percent increase in the amount of background ozone at middle altitudes in springtime. When data from 1984 were factored in, the rate of increase was similar, and the overall increase was 29 percent.

When ozone from local sources was removed from the data, the trend became stronger, Cooper said. Using a computer model based on weather patterns, the ozone was traced back to southeastern Asia, including the countries of India, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The ozone increases were strongest when winds prevailed from southeastern Asian, Cooper said.

In a commentary also published in Nature, atmospheric chemist Kathy Law of Universite de Paris in France said the study was “the most conclusive evidence so far” of increasing ozone over the Western United States.

Law noted that natural sources of ozone could contribute to the increases, and there were limitations to the computer model used to trace the sources of the increases, but the study remained a “vital benchmark” that could be used to test climate change models, which have been unable to reproduce increases in ozone.

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“If you were to leave it out in the open overnight, you could see small black particles, like from barbecue charcoal, in the morning,” Bogicevic said.

Having lived in this heavily industrialized Croatian town all his life, he no longer notices the foul smell caused by emissions of hydrogen sulphide from the nearby oil refinery.

Geographically, Sisak is less than 50 km (31 miles) away from the tidy capital Zagreb, but environmentally it is a world away and even further when compared to Croatia’s sparkling Adriatic coast or the pristine wilderness of its mountains.

Sisak looks like a barren planet, filled with putrid dust and plumes of smoke.

It has had a long and turbulent history but is now mostly notorious in Croatia for its foul air.

“It is kind of okay during the week, but Saturdays and Sundays … it is impossible, unbearable,” said Arid Medvedovic, a retired refinery worker.

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ON BOARD L’ASTROLABE, Southern Ocean – As Captain Benoit Hebert steers the icebreaker l’Astrolabe on Monday through a stormy Southern Ocean heading for Antarctica his thoughts will soon turn to the dangers of icebergs.

Large icebergs have recently been spotted floating hundreds of kilometers (miles) north of Antarctica — a sign of the accelerating melt of East Antarctica due to climate change.

Hebert has been sailing the icy seas around Antarctica and the Arctic for more than 15 years and has seen first hand the effects of global warming.

“Climate change is a lot more visible in the north in the Arctic rather than in the Antarctic. The Arctic is made up of pack ice which is melting,” he said.

Total summer ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was only about half the level it was in 1950, according to the International Panel on Climate Change.

- – - -

TUV AIMAK, Mongolia – Otgonsuren Perenlei, 27, and her husband moved back to the steppe from Mongolia’s capital city, Ulan Bator, a few years ago, attracted by cleaner air and a more eco-friendly nomadic lifestyle.

Solar panels pitched atop tents allow families to charge their phones, power energy-saving light bulbs and even watch a couple of hours of television in the evening. The panels are complemented by dried animal dung, courtesy of the cattle that are integral to nomads’ livelihood, to provide heat in winter.

Still, she says, climate change is making it more difficult for nomads like her to make a living.

“The global warming issue has made grazing very difficult these days. The grass hardly grows,” she told Reuters Television. “When I was a child I do not remember having to use fodder to feed the calves. Then, we had enough grass. Now, there is just not enough grass and there is less rain.”

Those who head to the city face air pollution levels reaching almost 10 times allowed rates during winter, according to Mongolia’s Air Quality Agency. The mountains surrounding the city trap the pollution, making it hard for everyone to breathe.

“There is thick smoke every evening. We burn coal too so it’s smoky outside. You can’t see your surroundings clearly,” she says nonchalantly.

- – - -

CHICAGO – Authorities scooped up poisoned fish floating to the surface of a Chicago-area waterway on Thursday in an operation designed to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes and prevent an ecological disaster.

So far, none of the prolific two species of Asian carp, the Bighead carp and the Silver carp, have turned up in the huge fish kill that began overnight.

Some 200,000 pounds (90 metric tons) of dead fish are expected to be collected, weighed, inventoried, and dumped in a landfill. Most scooped up so far have been native carp and shad.

Silver carp and the Asian Bighead, which can grow to 5 feet, have come to dominate sections of the Mississippi and its tributaries.

Authorities fear that if the carp swim up to the Great Lakes, the largest fresh-water resource in the world, they could create an “ecological disaster” by consuming the bottom of the food chain and ruining the lakes’ $7 billion fishery.

Since 1990s floods allowed the carp to escape into rivers from research facilities and commercial fish ponds in the South, where they were introduced to clear weeds and other detritus, the carp have multiplied and become a “nuisance species,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

- – - -

HONG KONG – One need look no further than the river that runs through Shangba to understand the extent of the heavy metals pollution that experts say has turned the hamlets in this region of southern China into cancer villages.

The river’s flow ranges from murky white to a bright shade of orange and the waters are so viscous that they barely ripple in the breeze. In Shangba, the river brings death, not sustenance.

“All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you’ll get rashes and a terrible itch,” said He Shuncai, a 34-year-old rice farmer who has lived in Shangba all his life.

“Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s.”

The river’s waters are contaminated by cadmium, lead, indium and zinc and other metals.

Every year, an estimated 460,000 people die prematurely in China due to exposure to air and water pollution, according to a 2007 World Bank study.

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The Top Ten list includes commonly discussed pollution problems like urban air pollution as well as more overlooked threats like car battery recycling. The problems included in the report have a significant impact on human health worldwide and result in death, persistent illness, and neurological impairment for millions of people, particularly children. Many of these deaths and related illnesses could be avoided with affordable and effective interventions.

Our goal with the 2008 report is to increase awareness of the severe toll that pollution takes on human health and inspire the international community to act. Remediation is both possible and cost-effective. Clean air, water and soil are human rights.” Richard Fuller, founder of Blacksmith Institute.

Blacksmith Institute’s World’s Worst Pollution Problems list is unranked and includes:

• Indoor air pollution: adverse air conditions in indoor spaces. An estimated 80% of households in China, India, and Sub Saharan Africa burn biomass fuels in improperly ventilated spaces for their cooking energy. IAP contributes to three million deaths annually and constitutes 4% of the global burden of disease.
• Urban air quality: adverse outdoor air conditions in urban areas. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 865,000 deaths per year worldwide can be directly attributed to outdoor air pollution. Leaded gasoline (in countries where it is still used) and the combustion of fossil fuels, especially coal and diesel fuel, play a major role in air pollution.
• Untreated sewage: untreated waste water. WHO estimates that 1.5 million preventable deaths per year result from unsafe water, inadequate sanitation or hygiene.
• Groundwater contamination: pollution of underground water sources as a result of human activity. Fresh drinking water makes up only 6% of the total water on Earth and only 0.3% is usable for drinking.
• Contaminated surface water: pollution of rivers or shallow dug wells mainly used for drinking and cooking. Almost 5 million deaths in the developing world annually are due to water related diseases, much of this being preventable with adequate supplies of safe water.
• Artisanal gold mining: small scale mining activities that use the most basic methods to extract and process minerals and metals. Mercury amalgamation, a by-product of artisanal and small-scale mining affects up to 15 million miners, including 4.5 million women and 600,000 children.
• Industrial mining activities: larger scale mining activities with excessive mineral wastes. Unless a major accident occurs, the effects are often chronic in nature3 and include irritation of eyes, throat, nose, skin; diseases of the digestive tract, respiratory system, blood circulation system, kidney, liver; a variety of cancers; nervous system damage; developmental problems; and birth defects.
• Metals smelting and other processing: extractive, industrial, and pollutant-emitting processes. Steel production alone accounts for 5-6% of worldwide, man-made CO2 emissions.
• Radioactive waste and uranium mining: pollution resulting from the improper management of uranium mine tailings and nuclear waste. Of the ten largest producers of uranium, seven are in areas where industrial safety standards do not always correspond to the best industrial practices: Kazakhstan, Russia, Niger, Namibia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and China. There is no ‘safe’ level of radiation exposure. High exposures can result in death within hours to days to weeks. Individuals exposed to non-lethal doses may experience changes in blood chemistry, nausea, fatigue, vomiting or genetic modifications.
• Used lead acid battery recycling: smelting of batteries used in cars, trucks and back-up power supplies. Blacksmith Institute estimates that over 12 million people are affected by lead contamination from processing of used lead acid batteries throughout the developing world.

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