Nowadays all the politicians, from Obama, to Harper, to Campbell, talk so easy about billions or trillions of dollars for this or that..

To understand the magnitude of a billion and a trillion, lets put them in time terms:

By the Numbers:

One billion figure is 1,000,000,000 ( nine zeroes)

One trillion figure is 1,000,000,000,000 ( twelve zeroes)

One billion minutes is about 1,902 years

One billion minutes ago Jesus was alive

One billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age

One trillion seconds equals to 32,000 years

One trillion minutes is about 1,901,369 years. It was the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, Earth was covered with ice

One trillion hours ago our direct ancestors were rat-like nocturnal insectivores hiding in cozy daytime burrows from allosaurs and raptors. It was the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs were at their most diverse. Africa and South America just separated, forming the Atlantic Ocean.

One trillion days ago there were no animals at all, but bacterial collectives had begun working together in communities that that would one day be called protozoa. It was the Archean geologic eon. There was virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere, the sun was 1/3 dimmer than it us now, and life consisted of non-nucleated single-celled organisms.

Society & Technology

4 Voting Reform Made in BC
The most important outcome of the May 12th BC provincial election will not be which party forms the government, but the results of BC’s second referendum on changing to a proportional voting system

14 From ‘Know How’ to ‘Do Now’
Herman Daly on the growth economy

26 Playing the Party Game
Election coverage: A comparison of key environmental elements in the three main BC political parties

by Briony Penn

This summer a long, detailed and beautifully illustrated report came out called Taking Nature’s Pulse: The Status of Biodiversity in British Columbia, (See www.biodiversitybc.org). On the front cover is a Taylor checkerspot butterfly, a coho salmon, a bumblebee, a spirit bear and an ensatina salamander. The report is a labour of love and science put out by Biodiversity BC, a coalition of fifty scientists from both environmental organizations and the provincial government.

What struck me most is that I haven’t seen a document like this for nearly 15 years. Not since BC took a huge leadership role by being the first to sign the UN Convention of Biodiversity at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 has there been such a concerted effort to bring together all the people observing the natural

The recently published Post Carbon Institute Manifesto talks about both peak oil and climate change crises at the same time. They also talk about limits to growth. Then they present a Post-Carbon Transition, where they talk about green collar jobs, a New Economy, reducing consumerism, relocalization, food security, etc. They also talk about their role towards a transition to a post-growth, post-fossil fuel, climate-changed world will include research and communicating new development on energy, climate, food systems, land use, green building construction, biodiversity and ecological restoration, water, and more. They will also highlight green-leader cities, business, Transition Town initiatives and ecovillage developments, local energy coops, and more.

The key message they offer is:
"How is this different from what is already happening? Most if not all of the relevant information we are concerned with already exists, much of it on the Internet. There are magazines devoted to various aspects of the "alternatives" movement, and there are organizations doing good work in these areas. But what's lacking is a unified vision of both the challenges and solutions that sees all of these fields as interrelated."

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