How is Belgium governed ?

I will try to give a view of the present Belgian political crisis. In order to do that, I will give a bit background about the way Belgium is governed.

In Belgium, there are three national languages: in order of the quantity of the population speaking it: Dutch (mainly spoken in Flanders and somehow differing from the Dutch spoken in Holland), French (mainly spoken in Walloon) and German (spoken in the eastern-Walloon site of Belgium).

Belgium divided by the three languages

speaking, which are the basis for the three

communities. (Orange: dutch-speaking,

red: french-speaking, green: german-

speaking.)

We have six separated governments [these are: the federal government (national level), the Walloon regional one, Walloon community one, the Flemish one (where community and regional are put together), the regional Brussels government and the government of the German community. They are being controlled by parliaments, of which we have seven: the chamber of representants and the senate, the Flemish - and the Walloon parliament, the parliament of the Brussels region, the parliament of the German-speaking community, the parliament of the French-speaking community. The communities have the task to defend the interests of language-related aspects of the community they govern. The regional governments are charged with more economical aspects of the regions they govern.

So, every level of policy has his own elements to regulate, making it somehow a mess for the population to understand how their own country functions, let alone for outsiders…

Above some typical Belgian products: chocolates, 'Brusselse wafel' and beer.

famine due to climate change

CLIMATE CHANGE CONSEQUENCES



Only a few people, without the theoretical background relevant to climate science, realise that on the long-term we bring ourselves in danger because we are with 6 billion people needing food and fresh (sweet) water to survive.
When the climate will change further, the glaciers up the mountains providing our rivers with fresh water will melt. Consequently in the short term there will be floods at the fertil river side, destroying the harvests. On the long run, the consequences are even worser: the river's water level is going to shrink and one day it shall be dry which is devastating for the harvests.




Furthermore we lose fertile landscapes by the increasing sea level, which also increases the amount of salt in the bottom, making it unable to grow most food species.

Of course only the change of the climate itself is enough to do the trick...

So climate change will undoubtly raise pressures on our available food supply while our population is still raising.

In an interview to new scientists, James Lovelock states:

"

I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again."

Further in the article he gives, thank god, solutions to prevent the worst from happening.

But, I think this foodproblems can be solved partly by the vertical way of farming I wrote about in my previous post.

And as 67% (!) of the world fresh water amount was used by agriculture in 2005, vertical farming may be a solution here too.

Change the way we produce food

Since the moment people adapted a sedentary lifestyle, the way we produce food isn't dramatically altered. We have better machines, better techniques, and crops with better characteristics to survive plagues, extreme weather events and we were able to refine the tastes to our needs due selection. But fundamentally, the way we produce food is the same as it has always been in history.

Despite this, today our society is totally different. We have a far more greater population which is still raising almost exponentially and most people live concentrated in the big cities of our world. But this cities aren't suitable places for growing food because of loads of reasons: first, you need space to grow food and land is exactly the thing that is very scarce in the city. Second, there is a lot of pollution which is nefast for the growing of food and other green, thirdly, there also is a pressure on resources like for instance clean water, ... Ironically, these urban cities and metropoles are the places where food is most needed (speaking in terms of quantity). Most people live there and they of course don't have the space nor the time to grow food on their own. So the food has to come from the peripherial and other parts of the country with unbuilt land and other circumstances more suitable to grow food. This means that all this food, from everywhere over the world, has to be transported massively to all these cities, everyday or weekly over and over again... The quantities of energy we are just spilling by transporting all these food, are immense.

Happily, some people invented a solution for this and other problems and challenges associated with our agriculturing arises. The concept is called vertical farming. The idea is that you built a skycraper with diverse stores that instead of using for housing and organisations, can now be used to grow food! The advantages of this idea are enormous. First of all, this buildings can easily be integrated in the city without leading to a discomforting view of agricultural in the cities, because they won't pop-out between all skycrapres. Secondly, you may not have a lot of space, but you can multiply the amount of space you have because you built your farm in storages. Thirdly, the traffic for food transport from all over the world to the cities is no more necesarry since our vertical farm in the middle of the city can provide all the inhabitants, restaurants, hotels, magazines, markets, ... with food. Energy use and transport emissions can be reduced substantially this way. Figure: Possible outside view of a vertical farm, showing how benefits from a triangle piece of ground can be exponentially increased. Another advantage is undoubly the fact that our vertical farm can be hermetically closed from the outside influences, meaning that there is no chance of outside pollutions, organisms and other that can affect our destroy the harvest. Because the harvest is now unentrancable to viruses, bacterias and animals that can potentially have dramatic effects on the harvest, there is no more need to use agressive and toxic pesticides now! Which may drastically increase the health of the population and the environment. Figure: Inside, it may look like this. Even more important is that the ecologically negative consequences of our monocultural agriculture we use today can be disminished. I'm thinking of the salination of masses of land so they become unusable for most plants, the drying effect of the land by agriculture, the pesticides and other toxins coming into the water and polluting it, ... Because of course, when you have a totally hermetical farm, no drop of water has to get lost cause everything, energy and water can be recuperated and used again. This vertical farm can of course gets his energy from solar panels, making it green in all manners of speaking. Ultimately interesting, is that this way of agriculturing will make us, finally and for the first time since the existence of mankind, totally independent from the climatic and geographical circumstances for our food production. Meaning that every skycraper can ass well be planted in a country with water shortages and dry land such as is common in most African developing countries as in a country with a climate that's more suitable for food production. This implicates that this way of farming can be a giant step forwarth in finally banning food famine from the world.

Global change (climate change)

Scientific conclusions unmistakably point out that we are in an anthropogenic climate change which has negative effects on the diversity of the world's fauna and flora. Subsequently, they suggest preventing the world from further increases or even possible accelerations of climate change is not a too crazy idea.

Sadly enough, the debate about climate change has become the victim of pollution itself because there are many peoples or organisations who gain benefits if they can dempen or even contradict the conclusions of climate science. How this debate is being polluted you can read on this blog: http://jules-klimaat.blogspot.com .

Unwanting to discuss hard empircally based conclusions of the scientifical world but also avoiding a dogmatic vision, I would be gratified if people who deny the truthness of climate change provide me (and the academical world) with a peer-reviewed paper (*), which contradicts the present conclusions of climate science.

(*) Evidently, not funded by or related in any way to people or organisations that have proven to try frauding science or have particulair interests in changing the way the public and policemakers think about global change.

Introduction

Welcome on board!

I am honoured with your visit and hope to be able to provide you with some information that may be covering one or more of your interests.

In future, this will be a place where you can find some critical notes about the way our society lives, handles problems (or doesn't) and the way national and international politics react (not) and interact.

What I finally want to reach with this blog, is mirorred in the site-adress.
The way I want to do that, is step by step and my first goals aren't to high: just make a difference, that is positive in nature, for at least some people. :)

How this blog fits in this broader goal-defintion:
In order to make the world a better place, it is necesarry to get, create and spread knowledge all over the world about things that essentialy are going wrong. (A philosophical debate about what is wrong and what is right will be adressed later on in this blog. Now I'll stick to the why-question)
Without knowing what is wrong, you don't know what is in need of improvement. So giving constructive critics and ring the alarmbell on every topic that you notice society seems to handle wrong, is I think a first and very fundamental step to the possibility of executing positive changes.
But the problem is that as people we have limited resources of time and capacities and we can't be everywhere or see anything on our own, that's why it's important to have different peoples, with different history's, backgrounds, educational levels, life domains they are focusing on and different environments they are living in, perspectives. In this way, a problem where most politicians are unaware of may capture some attention which will enhance the chance that the way to handle this issue (at home, or in a country or even the world) will be changed .

[All these statements above may sound very naive and simplistic, but the broader theoretical foundation I did ent my assumptions (or conclusions?) on I will discuss later on in this blog, as noted earlier.]

P.S.: No day more appropiate to start this blog then the day Obama becomes president of the United States!