Archive for category Ecology and Environment

How to Manage an Ecological Garden

Have you ever wanted to be able to grow your own fruit and vegetables, but have found that you don’t really have the time or aren’t entirely sure what to do, well the fact is that for ecological gardening, you don’t need too much time and you don’t even really need to know what you’re doing. In fact, anyone who has never grown food before may even be at an advantage. If you don’t know which rules to follow, then you just go with the flow, which is exactly the way nature intended.

Many traditional gardeners have a tendency to overwork the soil and use un-natural methods of gaining the results we require, and once in that rut, then it’s very difficult to get out. It may even be fear of the un-known, if you have a method that seems to work, then why change it, even if you may be changing it for the better, there is still that step to take into un-chartered territory. It’s losing that control that is difficult, where as in fact, letting go of that control and letting nature take control letting us work together with nature instead of against it, in the long run actually lets us gain more control by being able to grow more food more efficiently than before. Strange but true!!

By growing you vegetables in an ecological way, you not only save yourself time and effort but also money. Even a small area can provide you and your family with plenty of food and with nature helping you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it leaves you more time to spend doing other things. If this sounds like a good plan then Ecological gardening might be right up your street!

The first thing to do, however is to accept that there will be less for you to do, as you become more of an observer while the garden takes on a continual state of change as it progresses through the seasons. At first it’s hard to have faith that the garden can look after itself, but it’s been doing this kind of thing in nature for thousands of years, and we need to accept that. Sure we need to step in every now and then by providing it with useful plants to fill any gaps that may occur before it decides to put it’s own ideas into play, but once all the gaps are filled then nature will take its course. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Ecology of Forests

Forestry represents a sizable portion of man’s environment. It covers approximately 1/3 of the entire surface of the Earth and about the same of the continental United States of America. Unless man seriously disturbs or alters this cover, or there are serious catastrophic events, Forest continues to live on in an indefinite basis in a given area of land. The contribution of forests towards the economic stability of nature benefits many forms of life, and that includes man.

Ecology is also known as the science of the interrelationships between organisms in and to their complete environment. Forestry ecology is concerned mainly with the forest as a biological community. It deals with the interrelationships between the various trees and other living organisms comprising the community and with the interrelationships between these existing organisms and the physical environment in which they continue to exist. In other words, the study of the forest ecosystem is forest ecology.

The type of forest that we are talking about is going to be based on what are the predominant trees which are growing in a given site and that is used to classify a plant community. The ecological system or the ecosystem, it is the habitat than a forest survives in and the forest community.

Technically speaking, an ecosystem is a biological term applied to a part of nature, such as the forest, which includes both nonliving material and living organisms as part of the ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

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Protecting Nature – Ecological Offset Printing

Deinking of Paper – The opportunity to deink the paper – basically, to break ink and coatings from it – is crucial for sustainable recycling of it. Good deinkability is a prerequisite for using used paper to produce graphical papers and hygienic paper products. Effective ways can be found in these days for eliminating aqueous coatings and sheet-fed offset inks.

It is definitely more difficult to achieve good results with UV-cured inks and coatings, the liquid toner used in digital printing, and inkjet inks. Ink taken out of recycled pulp can be burned to generate energy to run the mill, or sold to make such useful substances as compost or gravel for roads. A single piece of paper may have new fibers along with fibers which have already been recycled once, twice, or several times. Paper-making fibers can typically be recycled 5-7 times before they become very short to be recycled again. Successful recycling needs clean recovered paper that’s free of pollutants such as food, plastic, metal, and other trash. Contaminated paper can introduce impurities and bacteria into the recycling procedure. Furthermore, different grades of paper – corrugated boxes, newspapers, and office paper – must be kept separate, because the different grades of recovered paper are used to create specialized types of recycled paper products.

Eco Inks and Coatings – A few of the pigments used in ink contain metallic compounds which are harmful to human health and the environment such as cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury. Standard printing inks are petroleum-based and used with alcohol-based solvents. As alcohol and petroleum evaporate Volatile Organic Compounds are emitted.Volatile Organic Compounds represent ecological pollution and a health hazard to press-room employees. In terms of atmospheric pollution, Volatile Organic Compounds react with nitrogen oxides in the existence of daylight to create ozone pollution or photochemical smog. Offset inks generally consist to 30 % of mineral oils. Using Eco-inks, also known as Eco-solvent inks and green inks, can cut down at the consumption of fossil fuels. These products use transformed vegetable oils instead, such as linseed or soy esters. Read the rest of this entry »

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