Stressed desserts

Today is World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. It aims to highlight the urgent need to curb desertification and combat drought across the world and to strengthen the visibility of this issue on the international environmental agenda.

This year, the Day’s slogan is “Enhancing soils anywhere enhances life everywhere”. As 2010 is the year of biodiversity the UN is educating the public on the relationship between desertification and the loss of biodiversity within the soil.

On their website they state: “Healthy soils produce life, and yet soil health depends a lot on how individuals use their land. What we do to our soils determines the quality and quantity of the food we eat and how our ecosystems serve us. Our increasing ecological interdependence also means enhancing soils anywhere enhances life everywhere.”

We have two inspiring videos that we urge you to watch today. The first was submitted in a contest, “U@50” by a 20 year old and is the opposite of a palindrome. A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward, but this exceptionally clever video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward.

Watch the video here

Our second video, My Paper Boat, is the story of a little boy in the heart of India who can no longer play with his boat due to drought. This video manages to portray a world of meaning in less than 2 minutes and without using words. Watch the video here

For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a garden with good soil why not start a vegetable garden today. You could start off with planting a few pots of herbs and begin to prepare your soil so that you can start to plant in Spring.