Monthly Archives: September 2016

Happiness – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted: September 8, 2016 at 6:31 am

Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.[1] Happy mental states may also reflect judgements by a person about their overall well-being.[2] A variety of biological, psychological, economic, religious and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources. Various research groups, including positive psychology and happiness economics are employing the scientific method to research questions about what "happiness" is, and how it might be attained.

The United Nations declared 20 March the International Day of Happiness to recognise the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals.

Philosophers and religious thinkers often define happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion. Happiness in this sense was used to translate the Greek Eudaimonia, and is still used in virtue ethics. There has been a transition over time from emphasis on the happiness of virtue to the virtue of happiness.[3] Since the turn of the millennium, the human flourishing approach, advanced particularly by Amartya Sen has attracted increasing interest in psychological, especially prominent in the work of Martin Seligman, Ed Diener and Ruut Veenhoven, and international development and medical research in the work of Paul Anand.[citation needed]

A widely discussed political value expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776, written by Thomas Jefferson, is the universal right to "the pursuit of happiness."[4] This suggests a subjective interpretation but one that nonetheless goes beyond emotions alone.[citation needed]

Happiness is a fuzzy concept and can mean many different things to many people. Part of the challenge of a science of happiness is to identify different concepts of happiness, and where applicable, split them into their components. Related concepts are well-being, quality of life and flourishing. At least one author defines happiness as contentment.[5] Some commentators focus on the difference between the hedonistic tradition of seeking pleasant and avoiding unpleasant experiences, and the eudaimonic tradition of living life in a full and deeply satisfying way.[6]

The 2012 World Happiness Report stated that in subjective well-being measures, the primary distinction is between cognitive life evaluations and emotional reports.[7] Happiness is used in both life evaluation, as in How happy are you with your life as a whole?, and in emotional reports, as in How happy are you now?, and people seem able to use happiness as appropriate in these verbal contexts. Using these measures, the World Happiness Report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness.[citation needed]

Since the 1960s, happiness research has been conducted in a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including gerontology, social psychology, clinical and medical research and happiness economics. During the past two decades, however, the field of happiness studies has expanded drastically in terms of scientific publications, and has produced many different views on causes of happiness, and on factors that correlate with happiness,[8] but no validated method has been found to substantially improve long-term happiness in a meaningful way for most people.

Sonja Lyubomirsky concludes in her book The How of Happiness that 50 percent of a given human's happiness level is genetically determined (based on twin studies), 10 percent is affected by life circumstances and situation, and a remaining 40 percent of happiness is subject to self-control.[citation needed]

The results of the 75-year Grant Study of Harvard undergraduates show a high correlation of loving relationship, especially with parents, with later life wellbeing.[9]

In the 2nd Edition of the Handbook of Emotions (2000), evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby say that happiness comes from "encountering unexpected positive events". In the 3rd Edition of the Handbook of Emotions (2008), Michael Lewis says "happiness can be elicited by seeing a significant other". According to Mark Leary, as reported in a November 1995 issue of Psychology Today, "we are happiest when basking in the acceptance and praise of others". Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt say that "happiness" may be the label for a family of related emotional states, such as joy, amusement, satisfaction, gratification, euphoria, and triumph.[10]

It has been argued that money cannot effectively "buy" much happiness unless it is used in certain ways.[11] "Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortably feed, clothe, and house themselves, having more money - even a lot more money - makes them only a little bit happier."[according to whom?] A Harvard Business School study found that "spending money on others actually makes us happier than spending it on ourselves".[12]

Meditation has been found to lead to high activity in the brain's left prefrontal cortex, which in turn has been found to correlate with happiness.[13]

Psychologist Martin Seligman asserts that happiness is not solely derived from external, momentary pleasures,[14] and provides the acronym PERMA to summarize Positive Psychology's correlational findings: humans seem happiest when they have

There have also been some studies of how religion relates to happiness. Causal relationships remain unclear, but more religion is seen in happier people. This correlation may be the result of community membership and not necessarily belief in religion itself. Another component may have to do with ritual.[15]

Abraham Harold Maslow, an American professor of psychology, founded humanistic psychology in the 1930s. A visual aid he created to explain his theory, which he called the hierarchy of needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological, and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid, he reaches self-actualization. Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as peak experiences, profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. This is similar to the flow concept of Mihly Cskszentmihlyi.[citation needed]

Self-determination theory relates intrinsic motivation to three needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Cross-sectional studies worldwide support a relationship between happiness and fruit and vegetable intake. Those eating fruits and vegetables each day have a higher likelihood of being classified as very happy, suggesting a strong and positive correlation between fruit and vegetable consumption and happiness.[16] Whether it be in South Korea,[17] Iran,[18] Chile,[19] USA,[20] or UK,[21] greater fruit and vegetable consumption had a positive association with greater happiness, independent of factors such as smoking, exercise, body mass index, or socio-economic factors.

Religion and happiness have been studied by a number of researchers, and religion features many elements addressing the components of happiness, as identified by positive psychology. Its association with happiness is facilitated in part by the social connections of organized religion,[22] and by the neuropsychological benefits of prayer[23] and belief.

There are a number of mechanisms through which religion may make a person happier, including social contact and support that result from religious pursuits, the mental activity that comes with optimism and volunteering, learned coping strategies that enhance one's ability to deal with stress, and psychological factors such as "reason for being." It may also be that religious people engage in behaviors related to good health, such as less substance abuse, since the use of psychotropic substances is sometimes considered abuse.[24][25][26][27][28][29]

The Handbook of Religion and Health describes a survey by Feigelman (1992) that examined happiness in Americans who have given up religion, in which it was found that there was little relationship between religious disaffiliation and unhappiness.[30] A survey by Kosmin & Lachman (1993), also cited in this handbook, indicates that people with no religious affiliation appear to be at greater risk for depressive symptoms than those affiliated with a religion.[31] A review of studies by 147 independent investigators found, "the correlation between religiousness and depressive symptoms was -.096, indicating that greater religiousness is mildly associated with fewer symptoms."[32]

The Legatum Prosperity Index reflects the repeated finding of research on the science of happiness that there is a positive link between religious engagement and wellbeing: people who report that God is very important in their lives are on average more satisfied with their lives, after accounting for their income, age and other individual characteristics.[33]

Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Centre and the Pew Organisation conclude that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being "very happy" than the least religiously committed people.[34] An analysis of over 200 social studies contends that "high religiousness predicts a lower risk of depression and drug abuse and fewer suicide attempts, and more reports of satisfaction with sex life and a sense of well-being. However, the links between religion and happiness are always very broad in nature, highly reliant on scripture and small sample number. To that extent there is a much larger connection between religion and suffering (Lincoln 1034)."[32] And a review of 498 studies published in peer-reviewed journals concluded that a large majority of them showed a positive correlation between religious commitment and higher levels of perceived well-being and self-esteem and lower levels of hypertension, depression, and clinical delinquency.[35] A meta-analysis of 34 recent studies published between 1990 and 2001 found that religiosity has a salutary relationship with psychological adjustment, being related to less psychological distress, more life satisfaction, and better self-actualization.[36] Finally, a recent systematic review of 850 research papers on the topic concluded that "the majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being (life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and higher morale) and with less depression, suicidal thoughts and behaviour, drug/alcohol use/abuse."[37]

However, there remains strong disagreement among scholars about whether the effects of religious observance, particularly attending church or otherwise belonging to religious groups, is due to the spiritual or the social aspectsi.e. those who attend church or belong to similar religious organizations may well be receiving only the effects of the social connections involved. While these benefits are real enough, they may thus be the same one would gain by joining other, secular groups, clubs, or similar organizations.[38]

Terror management theory maintains that people suffer cognitive dissonance (anxiety) when they are reminded of their inevitable death. Through terror management, individuals are motivated to seek consonant elements symbols which make sense of mortality and death in satisfactory ways (i.e. boosting self-esteem).

Research has found that strong belief in religious or secular meaning systems affords psychological security and hope. It is moderates (e.g. agnostics, slightly religious individuals) who likely suffer the most anxiety from their meaning systems. Religious meaning systems are especially adapted to manage death anxiety because they are unlikely to be disconfirmed (for various reasons), they are all encompassing, and they promise literal immortality.[39][40]

Whether emotional effects are beneficial or adverse seems to vary with the nature of the belief. Belief in a benevolent God is associated with lower incidence of general anxiety, social anxiety, paranoia, obsession, and compulsion whereas belief in a punitive God is associated with greater symptoms. (An alternative explanation is that people seek out beliefs that fit their psychological and emotional states.)[41]

Citizens of the world's poorest countries are the most likely to be religious, and researchers suggest this is because of religion's powerful coping abilities.[42][43] Luke Galen also supports terror management theory as a partial explanation of the above findings. Galen describes evidence (including his own research) that the benefits of religion are due to strong convictions and membership in a social group.[44][45][46]

Happiness forms a central theme of Buddhist teachings.[47] For ultimate freedom from suffering, the Noble Eightfold Path leads its practitioner to Nirvana, a state of everlasting peace. Ultimate happiness is only achieved by overcoming craving in all forms. More mundane forms of happiness, such as acquiring wealth and maintaining good friendships, are also recognized as worthy goals for lay people (see sukha). Buddhism also encourages the generation of loving kindness and compassion, the desire for the happiness and welfare of all beings.[48][49][unreliable source?]

Happiness or simcha (Hebrew: ) in Judaism is considered an important element in the service of God.[50] The biblical verse "worship The Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs," (Psalm 100:2) stresses joy in the service of God.[citation needed] A popular teaching by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a 19th-century Chassidic Rabbi, is "Mitzvah Gedolah Le'hiyot Besimcha Tamid," it is a great mitzvah (commandment) to always be in a state of happiness. When a person is happy they are much more capable of serving God and going about their daily activities than when depressed or upset.[51]

The primary meaning of "happiness" in various European languages involves good fortune, chance or happening. The meaning in Greek philosophy, however, refers primarily to ethics. In Catholicism, the ultimate end of human existence consists in felicity, Latin equivalent to the Greek eudaimonia, or "blessed happiness", described by the 13th-century philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas as a Beatific Vision of God's essence in the next life.[52] Human complexities, like reason and cognition, can produce well-being or happiness, but such form is limited and transitory. In temporal life, the contemplation of God, the infinitely Beautiful, is the supreme delight of the will. Beatitudo, or perfect happiness, as complete well-being, is to be attained not in this life, but the next.[53]

While religion is often formalised and community-oriented, spirituality tends to be individually based and not as formalised. In a 2014 study, 320 children, ages 812, in both public and private schools, were given a Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire assessing the correlation between spirituality and happiness. Spirituality and not religious practices (praying, attending church services) correlated positively with the child's happiness; the more spiritual the child was, the happier the child was. Spirituality accounted for about 326% of the variance in happiness.[54]

The Chinese Confucian thinker Mencius, who 2300 years ago sought to give advice to the ruthless political leaders of the warring states period, was convinced that the mind played a mediating role between the "lesser self" (the physiological self) and the "greater self" (the moral self) and that getting the priorities right between these two would lead to sage-hood. He argued that if we did not feel satisfaction or pleasure in nourishing one's "vital force" with "righteous deeds", that force would shrivel up (Mencius,6A:15 2A:2). More specifically, he mentions the experience of intoxicating joy if one celebrates the practice of the great virtues, especially through music.[55]

Al-Ghazali (10581111) the Muslim Sufi thinker wrote the Alchemy of Happiness, a manual of spiritual instruction throughout the Muslim world and widely practiced today.[citation needed]

The Hindu thinker Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutras, wrote quite exhaustively on the psychological and ontological roots of bliss.[56]

In the Nicomachean Ethics, written in 350 BCE, Aristotle stated that happiness (also being well and doing well) is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake, unlike riches, honor, health or friendship. He observed that men sought riches, or honor, or health not only for their own sake but also in order to be happy. Note that eudaimonia, the term we translate as "happiness", is for Aristotle an activity rather than an emotion or a state.[57] Thus understood, the happy life is the good life, that is, a life in which a person fulfills human nature in an excellent way. Specifically, Aristotle argues that the good life is the life of excellent rational activity. He arrives at this claim with the Function Argument. Basically, if it's right, every living thing has a function, that which it uniquely does. For humans, Aristotle contends, our function is to reason, since it is that alone that we uniquely do. And performing one's function well, or excellently, is one's good. Thus, the life of excellent rational activity is the happy life. Aristotle does not leave it that, however. For he argues that there is a second best life for those incapable of excellent rational activity.This second best life is the life of moral virtue.[citation needed]

Many ethicists make arguments for how humans should behave, either individually or collectively, based on the resulting happiness of such behavior. Utilitarians, such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, advocated the greatest happiness principle as a guide for ethical behavior.[citation needed]

Friedrich Nietzsche savagely critiqued the English Utilitarians' focus on attaining the greatest happiness, stating "Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does." Nietzsche meant that the making happiness one's ultimate goal, the aim of one's existence "makes one contemptible;" Nietzsche instead yearned for a culture that would set higher, more difficult goals than "mere happiness." Thus Nietzsche introduces the quasi-dystopic figure of the "last man" as a kind of thought experiment against the utilitarians and happiness-seekers; these small, "last men" who seek after only their own pleasure and health, avoiding all danger, exertion, difficulty, challenge, struggle are meant to seem contemptible to Nietzsche's reader. Nietzsche instead wants us to consider the value of what is difficult, what can only be earned through struggle, difficulty, pain and thus to come to see the affirmative value suffering and unhappiness truly play in creating everything of great worth in life, including all the highest achievements of human culture, not least of all philosophy.[58][59]

According to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, man's last end is happiness: "all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness."[60] However, where utilitarians focused on reasoning about consequences as the primary tool for reaching happiness, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that happiness cannot be reached solely through reasoning about consequences of acts, but also requires a pursuit of good causes for acts, such as habits according to virtue.[61] In turn, which habits and acts that normally lead to happiness is according to Aquinas caused by laws: natural law and divine law. These laws, in turn, were according to Aquinas caused by a first cause, or God.[citation needed]

According to Aquinas, happiness consists in an "operation of the speculative intellect": "Consequently happiness consists principally in such an operation, viz. in the contemplation of Divine things." And, "the last end cannot consist in the active life, which pertains to the practical intellect." So: "Therefore the last and perfect happiness, which we await in the life to come, consists entirely in contemplation. But imperfect happiness, such as can be had here, consists first and principally in contemplation, but secondarily, in an operation of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions."[62]

Common market health measures such as GDP and GNP have been used as a measure of successful policy. On average richer nations tend to be happier than poorer nations, but this effect seems to diminish with wealth.[63][64] This has been explained by the fact that the dependency is not linear but logarithmic, i.e., the same percentual increase in the GNP produces the same increase in happiness for wealthy countries as for poor countries.[65][66][67][68] Increasingly, academic economists and international economic organisations are arguing for and developing multi-dimensional dashboards which combine subjective and objective indicators to provide a more direct and explicit assessment of human wellbeing. Work by Paul Anand and colleagues helps to highlight the fact that there many different contributors to adult wellbeing, that happiness judgement reflect, in part, the presence of salient constraints, and that fairness, autonomy, community and engagement are key aspects of happiness and wellbeing throughout the life course.

Libertarian think tank Cato Institute claims that economic freedom correlates strongly with happiness[69] preferably within the context of a western mixed economy, with free press and a democracy. According to certain standards, East European countries (ruled by Communist parties) were less happy than Western ones, even less happy than other equally poor countries.[70]

However, much empirical research in the field of happiness economics, such as that by Benjamin Radcliff, professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, supports the contention that (at least in democratic countries) life satisfaction is strongly and positively related to the social democratic model of a generous social safety net, pro-worker labor market regulations, and strong labor unions.[71] Similarly, there is evidence that public policies that reduce poverty and support a strong middle class, such as a higher minimum wage, strongly affects average levels of well-being.[72]

It has been argued that happiness measures could be used not as a replacement for more traditional measures, but as a supplement.[73] According to professor Edward Glaeser, people constantly make choices that decrease their happiness, because they have also more important aims. Therefore, the government should not decrease the alternatives available for the citizen by patronizing them but let the citizen keep a maximal freedom of choice.[74]

It has been argued that happiness at work is one of the driving forces behind positive outcomes at work, rather than just being a resultant product.[75]

Several scales have been used to measure happiness:

The UK began to measure national well being in 2012,[83] following Bhutan which already measured gross national happiness.[citation needed]

A positive relationship has been found between the volume of gray matter in the right precuneus area of the brain and the subject's subjective happiness score.[84] Interestingly meditation, including mindfulness, based interventions have been found to correlate with a significant gray matter increase within the precuneus.[85][86][87][88][89]

In 2005 a study conducted by Andrew Steptow and Michael Marmot at University College London, found that happiness is related to biological markers that play an important role in health.[90] The researchers aimed to analyze whether there was any association between well-being and three biological markers: heart rate, cortisol levels, and plasma fibrinogen levels. Interestingly, the participants who rated themselves the least happy had cortisol levels that were 48% higher than those who rated themselves as the most happy. The least happy subjects also had a large plasma fibrinogen response to two stress-inducing tasks: the Stroop test, and tracing a star seen in a mirror image. Repeating their studies three years later Steptow and Marmot found that participants who scored high in positive emotion continued to have lower levels of cortisol and fibrinogen, as well as a lower heart rate.[citation needed]

In Happy People Live Longer (2011),[91] Bruno Frey reported that happy people live 14% longer, increasing longevity 7.5 to 10 years and Richard Davidson's bestseller (2012) The Emotional Life of Your Brain argues that positive emotion and happiness benefit long-term health.[citation needed]

However, in 2015 a study building on earlier research found that happiness has no effect on mortality.[92] "This "basic belief that if you're happier you're going to live longer. That's just not true."[93] Consistent results are that "apart from good health, happy people were more likely to be older, not smoke, have fewer educational qualifications, do strenuous exercise, live with a partner, do religious or group activities and sleep for eight hours a night."[93]

Happiness does however seem to have a protective impact on immunity. The tendency to experience positive emotions was associated with greater resistance to colds and flu in interventional studies irrespective of other factors such as smoking, drinking, exercise, and sleep.[94][95]

Despite a large body of positive psychological research into the relationship between happiness and productivity,[96][97][98] happiness at work has traditionally been seen as a potential by-product of positive outcomes at work, rather than a pathway to success in business. However a growing number of scholars, including Boehm and Lyubomirsky, argue that it should be viewed as one of the major sources of positive outcomes in the workplace.[75][99]

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Happiness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Stem Cell 100 – Powerful Rejuvenation and Anti-Aging …

Posted: at 6:31 am

Stem Cell 100 is formulated to rejuvenate your body and slow the aging process to help you feel and function more like a young person. This can help you feel better, look younger and improve your health. Most of the cells in your body lose function with age. Everyone has special cells called adult stem cells which are needed to rejuvenate damaged and old tissues, but adult stem cells themselves are also aging. Until now there was not much you could do about it. Stem Cell 100 rejuvenates adult stem cells and their micro-environments. Stem Cell 100+ is a more advanced and faster acting version of Stem Cell 100.

Developed by experts in the anti-aging field, patent-pending Stem Cell 100 is the only supplement proven to double maximum lifespan of an animal model. No other product or therapy including caloric restriction even comes close.

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Harness the Power of Your Own Stem Cells

Millions of people suffer from chronic conditions of aging and disease. Based on international scientific studies in many academic and industry laboratories, there is new hope that many of the conditions afflicting mankind can some day be cured or greatly improved using stem cell regenerative medicine. Stem Cell 100 offers a way to receive some of the benefits of stem cell therapy today by improving the activity and effectiveness of your own adult stem cells.

Stem Cell 100 Helps to Support:

The statements above have not been reviewed by the FDA. Stem Cell 100 is not a preventive or treatment for any disease.

Help Rejuvenate Your Body by Boosting Your Own Stem Cells

As a child, we are protected from the ravages of aging and can rapidly recover from injury or illness because of the ability of the young regenerative stem cells of children have a superior ability to repair and regenerate most damaged tissues. As we age, our stem cell populations become depleted and/or slowly lose their capacity to repair. Moreover, the micro-environment (i.e. niches) around stem cells becomes less nurturing with age, so cell turnover and repair are further reduced. This natural progression occurs so slowly that we are barely aware of it, but we start to notice the body changes in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and especially after 50 years of age. Stem Cell 100 helps adults regain their youthful regenerative potential by stabilizing stem cell function.

Stem Cell 100 works differently than other stem cell products on the market

You may have seen a number of products that are advertised as stimulating or enhancing the number of stem cells. Each person only has a limited number of stem cells so using them up faster may not be a good strategy. Stem Cell 100 is about improving the effectiveness and longevity of your stem cells as well as preserving the stem cell micro-environment. That should be the goal of any effective stem cell therapy and is what Stem Cell 100 is designed to do and what other stem cell products cannot do.

Stem Cell 100 Extends Drosophila (Fruit Fly) Lifespan

In extensive laboratory testing Stem Cell 100 greatly extended both the average and maximum lifespan of Drosophila fruit flies. The study (see Charts below) included three cages of Drosophila fruit flies that were treated with Stem Cell 100 (Cages T1 to T3) and three cages which were untreated controls (Cages C1 to C3). Each cage started with 500 fruit flies including 250 males and 250 females. The experiment showed that median lifespan more than doubled with a 123% increase. While fruit flies are not people they are more like us than you might think. Drosophila have a heart and circulatory system, and the most common cause of death is heart failure. Like humans and other mammals (e.g. mice), it is difficult to increase their lifespan significantly. These observed results outperform every lifespan enhancing treatment ever tested - including experiments using genetic modification and dietary restriction.

The longest living fruit fly receiving Stem Cell 100 lived 89 days compared to the longest living untreated control which lived 48 days. It is possible that the single longest living fruit fly lived longer for other reasons such as genetic mutation, however, there were many others that lived almost as long so it was not just an aberation. The oldest 5% of the treated fruit flies lived 77% longer than the oldest 5% of the control group. It is also important that the study showed an improved ability of the fruit flies to survive stress and illness at all ages not just during old age. Even after the first few days of the study there were already more of the Stem Cell 100 treated fruit flies alive that survived youth than the control group of untreated fruit flies. For additional information about the study please go to our Longevity page.

Supplement Facts

Stem Cell 100 is a Patent-Pending Life Code Nutraceutical. All Life Code products are nutraceutical grade and provide the best of science along with the balance of nature.

All Life Code products are nutraceutical grade and provide the best of science along with the balance of nature.

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Stem Cell 100 Plus+ is a more powerful and faster acting version of Stem Cell 100.

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Serving Size: One type O capsule

Servings Per Container: 60 Capsules

Recommended Use: Typical usage of Stem Cell 100 is two capsules per day, preferably at meal times. While both capsules can be taken at the same time, it is preferable to separate the two capsules by at least 4 hours. Since Stem Cell 100 is a potent formulation, do not take more than three capsules per day. One capsule per day may be sufficient for those below 110 pounds.

Recommended Users: Anyone from ages 22 and up could benefit from Stem Cell 100. Those in their 20s and 30s will like the boost in endurance during sports or exercise, while older users will notice better energy and general health with the potential for some weight loss.

Active Ingredients in Stem Cell 100: There are ten herbal components that make up the patent-pending combination in Stem Cell 100. The herbal components are highly extracted natural herbs that are standardized for active components that promote adult stem cells and lower inflammation:

1) Polysaccharides, flavonoids, and astragalosides extracted from Astragalus membranaceus, which has many positive effects on stem cells and the cardiovascular and immune systems.

2) Proprietary natural bilberry flavonoids and other compounds from a stabilized nutraceutical grade medicinal Vaccinium extract. Activate metabolic PPARS and helps produce healthy levels of cholesterol and silent inflammation. Also has anti-fungal and anti-viral activity.

3) Flavonoids and oligo-proanthocyanidins (OPCs) extracted from Pine Bark, which greatly reduce oxidative stress, DNA damage, and inflammation.

4) L-Theanine, which is a natural amino acid from Camellia sinesis that reduces mental stress and inflammation while improving cognition and protecting brain cells from ischemic or toxic injury.

5) Pterocarpus Marsupium, which contains two stable resveratrol analogs which promote stem cells, lower inflammation, and stabilized metabolism.

6) Polygonum Multiflorium stem stem is a popular Chinese herbal tonic that fights premature aging and promotes youthfulness. Polygonum is reported to enhance fertility by improving sperm count in men and egg vitality in women. Polygonum is also widely used in Asia to strengthen muscle and is thus used by many athletes as an essential tonic for providing strength and stamina to the body. Modern research has supported Polygonum multiflorium stem in that animal studies have proven that it can extend lifespan and improve the quality of life. Polygonum appears to protect the liver and brain against damage, perhaps by improving immune and cardiovascular health. The stem sections of Polygonum multiflorium are also calming to the nervous system and promote sounder sleep. Life Code uses a proprietary Polygonum multiflorium stem extract.

7) Schisandra Berry is used by many Chinese women to preserve their youthful beauty. For thousands of years, Schisandra has been prized as an antiaging tonic that increases stamina and mental clarity, while fighting stress and fatigue. In Chinese traditional medicine, Schisandra berry has been used for liver disorders and to enhance resistance to infection and promote skin health and better sleep. Schisandra berry is classified as an adaptogen, which can stimulate the central nervous system, increase brain efficiency, improve reflexes, and enhance endurance. Modern research indicates that Schisandra berry extracts have a protective effect on the liver and promote immunity. A double-blind human trial suggested that Schisandra berry may help patients with viral hepatitis, which is very prevalent in China. Recent work indicates that the liver is protected by the enhanced production of glutathione peroxidase, which helps detoxify the liver. Life Code uses a proprietary Schisandra berry extract.

8) Fo-Ti Root (aka He-Shou-Wu) is one of the most widely used Chinese herbal medicines to restore blood, kidney, liver, and cardiovascular health. Fo-Ti is claimed to have powerful rejuvenating effects on the brain, endocrine glands, the immune system, and sexual vigor. Legend has it that Professor Li Chung Yun took daily doses of Fo-Ti to live to be 256 and is said to have outlived 23 wives and spawned 11 generations of descendents before his death in 1933. While it is unlikely that he really lived to such an old age there is scientific support for Fo-Ti as beneficial for health and longevity. Like the Indian Keno bark, Fo-ti contains resveratrol analogs and likely acts by various mechanism, which includes liver detoxification and protection of skin from UVB radiation. Life CodeTM uses a proprietary Fo-Ti root extract.

9 ) Camellia sinensis has many bioactive polyphenols including the potent epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG). A 2006 Japanese study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that adults aged 40 to 79 years of age who drank an average of 5 or more cups of tea per day had a significantly lower risk of dying from all causes (23% lower for females and 12% lower for males). The study tracked more than 40,000 adults for up to 11 years and found dramatically lower rates of cardiovascular disease and strokes in those drinking 5 or more cups of tea. Many studies have found that adults drinking 3 or more cups of tea per day have significantly less cancer. Other studies have found that green tea helps protect against age-related cognitive decline, kidney disease, periodontal disease, and type 2 diabetes. Green tea also promotes visceral fat loss and higher endurance levels. Summarizing all of the thousands of studies on tea and tea polyphenols that have been published, it can be concluded that tea polyphenols preserve health and youth. This conclusion is backed up by gene studies showing that tea polyphenols decrease insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), which is a highly conserved genetic pathway that has been strongly linked to aging in yeast, worms, mice, and humans. If everyone could drink 4 to 5 cups of green tea each day, they could enjoy these important health benefits, but for most people drinking that much green tea can disturb their sleep patterns. Life Code uses a nutraceutical grade green tea extract that has 98% polyphenols and 50% ESCG that provides the polyphenol and ESCG equivalent of 4 to 5 cups of green tea with only 2% of the caffeine. Thus, most or all of the benefits of green tea are provided without concerns about disturbing sleep.

10) Drynaria Rhizome is used extensively in traditional Chinese medicine as an effective herb for healing bones, ligaments, tendons, and lower back problems. Eastern martial art practitioners have used Drynaria for thousands of years to help in recovering from sprains, bruises, and stress fractures. Drynaria has also helped in many cases of bleeding gums and tinnitus (ringing in the ears). The active components of Drynaria protect bone forming cells by enhancing calcium absorption and other mechanisms. Drynaria is also reported to act as a kidney tonic and to promote hair growth and wound healing. Life Code uses a proprietary Drynaria rhizome extract.

Active Ingredients in Stem Cell 100+ There are 11 herbal extracts in Stem Cell 100+ along with two nutraceutical grade vitamins Methyl Folate (5-MTHF) and Methyl B12 that are bioavailable vitamin supplements that are highly potent but rarely found. The highly extracted natural herbs are standardized for active components that promote adult stem cells and lower inflammation and have been tested as a synergistic herbal formulation with the proper dosage of each component:

1) Polysaccharides, flavonoids, and astragalosides extracted from Astragalus membranaceus, which has many positive effects on stem cells and the cardiovascular and immune systems. Astragalus has been used for thousands of years in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to promote cardiovascular and immune health. Astragalus is also known as a primary stimulator of Qi (Life Force). Life Code uses a high quality proprietary TCM extract that tested highest in our longevity experiments.

3) Flavonoids and oligo-proanthocyanidins (OPCs) extracted from Pine Bark, which promote the vascular system and reduce oxidative stress, DNA damage, and inflammation.

4) L-Theanine, which is a natural amino acid from Camellia sinesis that reduces mental stress and inflammation while improving cognition and protecting brain cells from ischemic or toxic injury. Life Code tested supplement with Mass Spec to verify high purity.

5) Genistein, which is an isoflavone phytoestrogen, activates telomerase, metabolic PPARs, autophagy (cell waste disposal), and smooth muscles. It also inhibits DNA methylation and the carbohydrate transporter GLUT1. Life Code tested supplement with Mass Spec to verify high purity.

6) Harataki Extract (aka Terminalia chebula) contains rejuvenating tannin flavonoids that have doubled human cell longevity in culture while maintaining telomere length. In Traditional Indian Medicine, Harataki has been used to treat skin disorders and heart disease, among many other uses.

7) Two stable resveratrol analogs from extracts of Pterocarpus Marsupium, which promote stem cells, less silent inflammation, and better metabolism. Life Code uses a highly purified proprietary source that is only available to Indian doctors. Life Code does not recommend taking resveratrol supplements or synthetic analogs, as these supplements are inherently unstable.

8) He-Shou-Wu is one of the most widely used Chinese herbal medicines to restore blood, kidney, liver, and cardiovascular health. He-Shou-Wu is claimed to have powerful rejuvenating effects on the brain, endocrine glands, the immune system, and sexual vigor. Legend has it that Professor Li Chung Yun took daily doses to live to 256 years and is said to have outlived 23 wives and spawned 11 generations of descendants before his death in 1933. While it is unlikely that he really lived to such an old age, there is scientific support for He-Shou-Wu as beneficial for health and longevity. Life Code uses a proprietary TCM He-Shou-Wu root extract.

9) Schisandra Berry is used by many Chinese women to preserve their youthful beauty. For thousands of years, Schisandra has been prized as an antiaging tonic that increases stamina and mental clarity, while fighting stress and fatigue. In TCM, Schisandra berry has been used for liver disorders and to enhance resistance to infection and promote skin health and better sleep. Schisandra berry is classified as an adaptogen, which can stimulate the central nervous system, increase brain efficiency, improve reflexes, and enhance endurance. Life Code uses a proprietary TCM extract.

10) Drynaria Rhizome is used extensively in TCM as an effective herb for healing bones, ligaments, tendons, and lower back problems. Eastern martial art practitioners have used Drynaria for thousands of years to help in recovering from sprains, bruises, and stress fractures. The active components of Drynaria protect bone forming cells by enhancing calcium absorption and other mechanisms. Drynaria is also reported to act as a kidney tonic and to promote hair growth and wound healing. Life Code uses a proprietary TCM Drynaria rhizome extract.

11) BioPerine is a proprietary brand of peperine extracted from black pepper. BioPerine has been shown to enhance bioavailability of herbal extracts. Piperine has been shown in rats to have cognitive enhancing effects and to help control silent inflammation.

Safety: The extracts in Stem Cell 100 and Stem Cell 100+ are nutraceutical grade and have been individually tested in both animals and humans without significant safety issues. Those with pre-existing conditions of diabetes or hypertension should coordinate this product with your doctor, as lower blood glucose or reduced blood pressure can result from taking the recommended dose of this product.

Warnings: may lower glucose and/or blood pressure in some individuals. The supplement is not recommended for pregnant, lactating, or hypoglycemic individuals.

References

1. Yu, Q., Y.S. Bai, and J. Lin, [Effect of astragalus injection combined with mesenchymal stem cells transplantation for repairing the Spinal cord injury in rats]. Zhongguo Zhong Xi Yi Jie He Za Zhi, 2010. 30(4): p. 393-7.

2. Xu, C.J., et al., [Effect of astragalus polysaccharides on the proliferation and ultrastructure of dog bone marrow stem cells induced into osteoblasts in vitro]. Hua Xi Kou Qiang Yi Xue Za Zhi, 2007. 25(5): p. 432-6.

3. Xu, C.J., et al., [Effects of astragalus polysaccharides-chitosan/polylactic acid scaffolds and bone marrow stem cells on repairing supra-alveolar periodontal defects in dogs]. Zhong Nan Da Xue Xue Bao Yi Xue Ban, 2006. 31(4): p. 512-7.

4. Zhu, X. and B. Zhu, [Effect of Astragalus membranaceus injection on megakaryocyte hematopoiesis in anemic mice]. Hua Xi Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao, 2001. 32(4): p. 590-2.

5. Qiu, L.H., X.J. Xie, and B.Q. Zhang, Astragaloside IV improves homocysteine-induced acute phase endothelial dysfunction via antioxidation. Biol Pharm Bull, 2010. 33(4): p. 641-6.

6. Araghi-Niknam, M., et al., Pine bark extract reduces platelet aggregation. Integr Med, 2000. 2(2): p. 73-77.

7. Rohdewald, P., A review of the French maritime pine bark extract (Pycnogenol), a herbal medication with a diverse clinical pharmacology. Int J Clin Pharmacol Ther, 2002. 40(4): p. 158-68.

8. Koch, R., Comparative study of Venostasin and Pycnogenol in chronic venous insufficiency. Phytother Res, 2002. 16 Suppl 1: p. S1-5.

9. Rimando, A.M., et al., Pterostilbene, a new agonist for the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha-isoform, lowers plasma lipoproteins and cholesterol in hypercholesterolemic hamsters. J Agric Food Chem, 2005. 53(9): p. 3403-7.

10. Manickam, M., et al., Antihyperglycemic activity of phenolics from Pterocarpus marsupium. J Nat Prod, 1997. 60(6): p. 609-10.

11. Grover, J.K., V. Vats, and S.S. Yadav, Pterocarpus marsupium extract (Vijayasar) prevented the alteration in metabolic patterns induced in the normal rat by feeding an adequate diet containing fructose as sole carbohydrate. Diabetes Obes Metab, 2005. 7(4): p. 414-20.

12. Mao, X.Q., et al., Astragalus polysaccharide reduces hepatic endoplasmic reticulum stress and restores glucose homeostasis in a diabetic KKAy mouse model. Acta Pharmacol Sin, 2007. 28(12): p. 1947-56.

13. Schafer, A. and P. Hogger, Oligomeric procyanidins of French maritime pine bark extract (Pycnogenol) effectively inhibit alpha-glucosidase. Diabetes Res Clin Pract, 2007. 77(1): p. 41-6.

14. Kwak, C.J., et al., Antihypertensive effect of French maritime pine bark extract (Flavangenol): possible involvement of endothelial nitric oxide-dependent vasorelaxation. J Hypertens, 2009. 27(1): p. 92-101.

15. Xue, B., et al., Effect of total flavonoid fraction of Astragalus complanatus R.Brown on angiotensin II-induced portal-vein contraction in hypertensive rats. Phytomedicine, 2008.

16. Mizuno, C.S., et al., Design, synthesis, biological evaluation and docking studies of pterostilbene analogs inside PPARalpha. Bioorg Med Chem, 2008. 16(7): p. 3800-8.

17. Sato, M., et al., Dietary pine bark extract reduces atherosclerotic lesion development in male ApoE-deficient mice by lowering the serum cholesterol level. Biosci Biotechnol Biochem, 2009. 73(6): p. 1314-7.

18. Kimura, Y. and M. Sumiyoshi, French Maritime Pine Bark (Pinus maritima Lam.) Extract (Flavangenol) Prevents Chronic UVB Radiation-induced Skin Damage and Carcinogenesis in Melanin-possessing Hairless Mice. Photochem Photobiol, 2010.

19. Pavlou, P., et al., In-vivo data on the influence of tobacco smoke and UV light on murine skin. Toxicol Ind Health, 2009. 25(4-5): p. 231-9.

20. Ni, Z., Y. Mu, and O. Gulati, Treatment of melasma with Pycnogenol. Phytother Res, 2002. 16(6): p. 567-71.

21. Bito, T., et al., Pine bark extract pycnogenol downregulates IFN-gamma-induced adhesion of T cells to human keratinocytes by inhibiting inducible ICAM-1 expression. Free Radic Biol Med, 2000. 28(2): p. 219-27.

22. Rihn, B., et al., From ancient remedies to modern therapeutics: pine bark uses in skin disorders revisited. Phytother Res, 2001. 15(1): p. 76-8.

23. Saliou, C., et al., Solar ultraviolet-induced erythema in human skin and nuclear factor-kappa-B-dependent gene expression in keratinocytes are modulated by a French maritime pine bark extract. Free Radic Biol Med, 2001. 30(2): p. 154-60.

24. Van Wijk, E.P., R. Van Wijk, and S. Bosman, Using ultra-weak photon emission to determine the effect of oligomeric proanthocyanidins on oxidative stress of human skin. J Photochem Photobiol B, 2010. 98(3): p. 199-206.

25. Haskell, C.F., et al., The effects of L-theanine, caffeine and their combination on cognition and mood. Biol Psychol, 2008. 77(2): p. 113-22.

26. Owen, G.N., et al., The combined effects of L-theanine and caffeine on cognitive performance and mood. Nutr Neurosci, 2008. 11(4): p. 193-8.

27. Yamada, T., et al., Effects of theanine, a unique amino acid in tea leaves, on memory in a rat behavioral test. Biosci Biotechnol Biochem, 2008. 72(5): p. 1356-9.

28. Jia, R.Z., et al., [Neuroprotective effects of Astragulus membranaceus on hypoxia-ischemia brain damage in neonatal rat hippocampus]. Zhongguo Zhong Yao Za Zhi, 2003. 28(12): p. 1174-7.

29. Nathan, P.J., et al., The neuropharmacology of L-theanine(N-ethyl-L-glutamine): a possible neuroprotective and cognitive enhancing agent. J Herb Pharmacother, 2006. 6(2): p. 21-30.

30. Nobre, A.C., A. Rao, and G.N. Owen, L-theanine, a natural constituent in tea, and its effect on mental state. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr, 2008. 17 Suppl 1: p. 167-8.

31. Murakami, S., et al., Effects of oral supplementation with cystine and theanine on the immune function of athletes in endurance exercise: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Biosci Biotechnol Biochem, 2009. 73(4): p. 817-21.

32. Kawada, S., et al., Cystine and theanine supplementation restores high-intensity resistance exercise-induced attenuation of natural killer cell activity in well-trained men. J Strength Cond Res, 2010. 24(3): p. 846-51.

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William Hill Casino Club – Up To 150 Casino Bonus

Posted: September 6, 2016 at 8:26 am

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Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and A Rough Ride to the …

Posted: at 8:20 am

Roboy, a humanoid robot developed by the University of Zurich's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Photograph: Erik Tham/Corbis

The Culture novels of Iain M Banks describe a future in which Minds superintelligent machines dwelling ingiant spacecraft are largely benevolent towards human beings and seem to take pleasure from our creativity and occasional unpredictability. It's a vision that I find appealing compared with many other imagined worlds. I'd like to think that if superintelligent beings did exist they would be at least as enlightened as, say, the theologian Thomas Berry, who wrote that once we begin to celebrate the joys of the Earth all things become possible. But the smart money or rather most of the money points another way. Box-office success goes to tales in which intelligences created by humans rise up and destroy or enslave their makers.

If you think this is all science fictionand fantasy, you may be wrong. Scientists including Stephen Hawking and Max Tegmark believe that superintelligent machines are quite feasible. And the consequences of creating them, they say, could be either the bestor the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. Suppose, then, we take the proposition seriously. When couldit happen and what could theconsequences be? Both Nick Bostromand James Lovelock address these questions.

The authors are very different. Bostrom is a 41-year-old academic philosopher; Lovelock, now 94, is a theorist and a prolific inventor (his electron capture detector was key to the discovery of the stratospheric ozone hole). They are alike in that neither is afraid to develop and champion heterodox ideas. Lovelock is famous for the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that life on Earth, taken as a whole, creates conditions that favour its own long-term flourishing. Bostrom has advanced radical ideas on transhumanism and even argued that it is more than likely we live inside acomputer-generated virtual world.

As early as the 1940s Alan Turing, John von Neumann and others saw that machines could one day have almost unlimited impact on humanity and the rest of life. Turing suggested programs that mimicked evolutionary processes could result in machines with intelligence comparable to or greater than that of humans. Certainly, achievements in computer science over the last 75 yearshave been astonishing. Most obviously, machines can now execute complex mathematical operations many orders of magnitude faster than humans. They can perform a range of tasks, from playing world-beating chess to flying a plane or a car, and their capabilities are rapidly growing. The consequences from machines stealing your job to eliminating drudgery to unravelling the enigmas of cancer toremote killing are and will continue to be striking.

But even the most sophisticated machines created so far are intelligent in only a limited sense. They enactcapabilities that humans have envisaged and programmed into them. Creativity, the ability to generate new knowledge and generalised intelligence outside specific domains seem to be beyond them. Expectations that AI would soon overtake human intelligence were first dashed in the 1960s. And the notion of a singularity the idea, advanced first by Vernor Vinge and championed most conspicuously by Ray Kurzweil, that the sudden, rapid explosion of AI and human biological enhancement is imminent and will probably with us by around 2030 looks to be heading for a similar fate.

Still, one would be ill-advised to dismiss the possibility altogether. (It took 100 years after George Cayley first understood the basic principles of aerodynamics to achieve heavier-than-air flight, and the first aeroplanes looked nothing like birds.) Bostrom reports that many leading researchers in AI place a 90% probability on the development of human-level machine intelligence by between 2075 and 2090. It is likely, he says, that superintelligence, vastly outstripping ours, would follow. The central argument of his book goes like this: the first superintelligence to be created will have decisive first-mover advantage and, in a world where there is no other system remotely comparable, it will be very powerful. Such a system will shape the world according to its "preferences", and will probably be able to overcome any resistance that humans can put up. The bad news is that the preferences such an artificial agent could have will, if fully realised, involve the complete destruction of human life and most plausible human values. The default outcome, then, is catastrophe. In addition, Bostrom argues that we are not out of the woods even if his initial premise is false and a unipolar superintelligence never appears. "Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion," he writes, "we humans are like small children playing with a bomb."

It will, he says, be very difficult but perhaps not impossible to engineer a superintelligence with preferences that make it friendly to humans or able to be controlled. Our saving grace could involve "indirect normativity" and "coherent extrapolated volition", in which we take advantage of an artificialsystem's own intelligence to deliver beneficial outcomes that we ourselves cannot see or agree on in advance. The challenge we face, he stresses, is "to hold on to our humanity: to maintain our groundedness". He recommends research be guided and managed within a strict ethical framework. Afterall, we are likely to need the smartest technology we can get our hands on to deal with the challenges we face in the nearer term. It comes, then, to a balance of risks. Bostrom's Oxford University colleagues Anders Sandberg and Andrew Snyder-Beattie suggest that nuclear war and the weaponisation ofbiotechnology and nanotechnology present greater threats to humanity than superintelligence.

For them, manmade climate change is not an existential threat. This judgment is shared by Lovelock, who argues that while climate change could mean a bumpy ride over the next century or two, with billions dead, it isnot necessarily the end of the world.

What distinguishes Lovelock's new book from his earlier ones is an emphasis on the possibility of humanity as part of the solution as well as part of the problem. "We are crucially important for the survival of life on Earth," hewrites. "If we trash civilisation by heedless auto-intoxication, global war or the wasteful dispersal of the Earth's chemical resources, it will grow progressively more difficult to begin again and reach the present level of knowledge. If we fail, or become extinct, there is probably not sufficient time for a successor animal to evolve intelligence at or above our level." Earth now needs humans equipped with the bestof modern science, he believes, to ensure that life will continue to thrive. Only we can produce new forms clever enough to flourish millions of years in the future when the sun gets hotter and larger and begins to make carbon-based life less viable. Lovelock thinks superintelligent machines are a distant prospect, and that technology will remain our slave.

What to believe and to predict? Perhaps better to quote. In his 1973 television series and book The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski said: "We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than reflex. Knowledge is our destiny." To this add a few words of Sandberg's: "The core problem is overconfidence The greatest threat is human stupidity."

To order these titles with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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8 Mystical Herbs and Legal Psychedelics For … – LonerWolf

Posted: at 8:19 am

As a Shamanic Practitioner Im often asked to recommend substances that get you high (which is slang for enteringnon-ordinary states of consciousness)legally.

While I encourage people to carefully and mindfully explore the recesses of their minds, unfortunately there are many websites out there that advocate the use of legal psychedelics such as nutmeg, datura and morning glory seeds which all have dangerous side effects and even deadly consequences.

Its this type of misguidance that has lead to so many bad experiences, accidents and such a negative outlook on psychedelicdrugsin society, as though all mind-altering substances are one-and-the-same. Weve come to group paint thinner in the same basket as Ayahuasca but just because something can alter your consciousness doesnt mean it shares the same spiritual value.

However, there is a group of entheogens known as Oneirogens (from the Greek oneiros meaning dream and genmeaning creating), which produce and also enhance dream-like states of consciousness. These herbs and roots have been used for thousands of years for prophetic divination through dreams, out-of-body experiences, and to consciously awaken you during dream states (Lucid Dreaming).

Oneirogens represent only one specific class of entheogens that can be exclusively used for lucid dreaming, but there are many other types and classes of entheogens that can be used for other specific life purposes. I will expand on these other substances in future articles.

The following legal psychedelics can be safely consumed having minimal effect on waking consciousness, and will only exhibit their effects when you fall into a natural state of sleep.

Calea is perhaps the best known of all Dream herbs. The Chontal Indians of Mexico used this shrub traditionally for lucid dreaming. I personally prefer growing mine as the fresher the herb is, the better. Calea can be consumed in tea (the flavor is pungent and bitter) or by smoking the dried leaves. A combination of smoking and drinking an infusion of the herb before bed, setting intention and focusing on ones heartbeat creates the ideal conditions for dream-time spiritual journeying.

Effects: Apart from the intensification of visual imagery during sleep, you may find yourself feeling a sense of well-being, light-headedness and clarity the day after.

Use:Taking at least five grams of this herb is required to be really effective for most people. Drink the herb before bed, keep an intent in mind before falling asleep (e.g. I want to meet my Spirit Guide) and repeat for several nights until lucid dreaming occurs.

Mugwort has long been used by many cultures for prophetic dreaming and astral traveling (its Paiute name translates literally to Dream Plant). Smoking the herb directly into the lungs, or burning it as incense in the afternoon, assists with lucid dreaming. Drinking the calming, liver cleansing tea before sleep may also keep you longer in a conscious dream state (REM sleep). This herb often helps one heal while dreaming. Some users report having darker dreams that reveal hidden insights and core wounds, helping them to find closure.

Caution: Avoid this herb if you are pregnant. Mugwort relaxes the uterus in women and should never be drunk, smoked or even touched by expectant mothers. Mugwort is also potentially allergenic to people sensitive to plants in the Asteraceae (daisy) family.

Effects: Apart from the intensification of prophetic visual imagery during sleep, this herb magnifies the brilliance of your dreams and overall duration of your sleep. It is also popular among herbalists to aid in relieving menstrual pains, joint pains and headaches.

Use: 1 teaspoon per cup. Pour boiling water over the herb, cover, and steep for 10 minutes. Drink or smoke before going to bed (Mugwort has a floral taste when smoked).

This plant was called Sinicuichi (or Sun Opener) by the Aztecs and is still used by Mexican shamans as a trance divination catalyst. This herb is regarded as sacred in that it enables vivid recollection of past distant events. Some users I have worked with have even reported the remembrance of pre-birth events!

Effects: Apart from the intensification of prophetic visual imagery during sleep, Sun Opener causes a yellowing of the vision and altered acoustic perception.

Use:Traditionally, fresh leaves are collected and allowed to wilt. The leaves are then put into a cup or jar, cool water is added, and the mixture is placed in the sun to brew and ferment for at least 24 hours. It is said that during the fermentation process, the knowledge of the sun is embedded into the potion, creating the elixir of the sun (hence the name).

Celastrus paniculatus is a shrub used in Ayurvedic medicine in India. Celastrus seeds and oil have long been regarded in India as beneficial to the intellect and memory which makes it a wonderful supplement in dream recollection. Apart from its effectiveness as a dream enhancer, Celastrus is a great mental stimulant, ornootropic, that increasesyour mental sharpness.

Effects: Apart from the intensification of visual imagery during sleep, Celastrus is an effective brain tonic.

Use: Take 5-10 seeds one hour before bedtime for 3 to 5 days until vivid dreaming occurs.

Silene is regarded by the Xhosa people of Africa as a sacred plant. Its roots are traditionally used by shamans to promote lucid dream states in healers and other shamans during initiation ceremonies. It is noted as a teaching plant that is considered highly sacred.

Effects: Intensification of visual imagery during sleep.

Use: Mix this herb in small amounts in water and consume prior to sleeping. Silene also makes an interesting tasting tea but it can be bitter, so the extracted shot form is recommended.

Although it is nicknamed the Blue Egyptian Lotus, the Nymphaea Caerulea herb is actually a Water Lilly thatshares no connection to the actual lotus flower. Nymphaea was used as a sacrament in ancient Egypt as a mild sedative. Today, the herb is used by herbalists to treat insomnia, but it has also been reported to induce lucid dreaming.

Effects: Improves quality of sleep and may intensify visual imagery.

Use:This herb is typically consumed in teas, elixir extracts, or by smoking it. If you have trouble dreaming or if you find yourself frequently waking up during dreams, blue lotus is a great supplement to use alongside one of the other substances mentioned in this article.

Tian Men Dong is one of the worlds top adaptogens and is also know as the Wild Asparagus Root in English, and Shatawari in Ayurvedic medicine. The Chinese word for wild asparagus root is Tian Men Dong, or heavenly spirit herb, as it was cherished by shamans, monks, and yogis for its heart-opening effects. Chinese Taoist monks placed much value on dream work, nicknaming Wild Aspagarus as The Flying Herb; they found it effective to help one fly through the universe at night, achieving magnificent dreams and moving in alignment with the spirit.

Effects: Improves quality of sleep, induces relaxation and stress relief, serves as a good anti-depressant and stimulates flying dreams.

Use: 1 to 3 grams per day in a concentrated form.

Traditionally used in African medicine to induce vivid dreams and enable communication with the spirit world, Entada facilitates entry into the dream world, and promotes increased REM awareness.This makes iteasier for the sleeper to realize that they are dreaming and thus gives them an edge in achieving lucidity. Entada contains several active compounds, essential oils and alkaloids.

Effects: Improves sleeping states by increasing depth, length and awareness.

Use: The inner meat of the seed is consumed directly, or the meat is chopped, dried, mixed with other herbs and smoked just before sleep to induce the desired dreams.

If you plan on smoking any of the plants listed in this article, I would highly encourage you to use a vaporizer for your own health. The right herb grinder can also do wonders in making the process easier.

I always recommend that you research very well any substance that you plan to consume and preferably grow them yourself. Keep in mind that the type, quality, age, storage and care of these herbs are all factors that will influence your experience with them.

Not only that, but the set, substance, setting and right dosage, along with creating a strong enough intention are all essential elements that must be carefully considered before exploring the depths of your mind. I plan to explore this topic more in future articles.

Have you ever tried any of the legal psychedelics above, and if so, what has been your experience with them? Let me know in the comments below.

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Sustainability – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted: at 8:14 am

In ecology, sustainability (from sustain and ability) is the property of biological systems to remain diverse and productive indefinitely. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. In more general terms, sustainability is the endurance of systems and processes. The organizing principle for sustainability is sustainable development, which includes the four interconnected domains: ecology, economics, politics and culture.[1]Sustainability science is the study of sustainable development and environmental science.[2]

Sustainability can also be defined as a socio-ecological process characterized by the pursuit of a common ideal.[3] An ideal is by definition unattainable in a given time/space but endlessly approachable and it is this endless pursuit what builds in sustainability in the process (ibid). Healthy ecosystems and environments are necessary to the survival of humans and other organisms. Ways of reducing negative human impact are environmentally-friendly chemical engineering, environmental resources management and environmental protection. Information is gained from green chemistry, earth science, environmental science and conservation biology. Ecological economics studies the fields of academic research that aim to address human economies and natural ecosystems.

Moving towards sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism. Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms from reorganizing living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, eco-municipalities and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture), using science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy and sustainable fission and fusion power), or designing systems in a flexible and reversible manner,[4][5] and adjusting individual lifestyles that conserve natural resources.[6]

Despite the increased popularity of the use of the term "sustainability", the possibility that human societies will achieve environmental sustainability has been, and continues to be, questionedin light of environmental degradation, climate change, overconsumption, population growth and societies' pursuit of indefinite economic growth in a closed system.[7][8]

The name sustainability is derived from the Latin sustinere (tenere, to hold; sub, up). Sustain can mean maintain", "support", or "endure.[9][10] Since the 1980s sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability as a part of the concept sustainable development, that of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations on March 20, 1987: sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.[11][12]

The 2005 World Summit on Social Development identified sustainable development goals, such as economic development, social development and environmental protection.[15] This view has been expressed as an illustration using three overlapping ellipses indicating that the three pillars of sustainability are not mutually exclusive and can be mutually reinforcing.[16] In fact, the three pillars are interdependent, and in the long run none can exist without the others.[17] The three pillars have served as a common ground for numerous sustainability standards and certification systems in recent years, in particular in the food industry.[18][19] Standards which today explicitly refer to the triple bottom line include Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade and UTZ Certified.[20][21] Some sustainability experts and practitioners have illustrated four pillars of sustainability, or a quadruple bottom line. One such pillar is future generations, which emphasizes the long-term thinking associated with sustainability.[22]

Sustainable development consists of balancing local and global efforts to meet basic human needs without destroying or degrading the natural environment.[23][24][25] The question then becomes how to represent the relationship between those needs and the environment.

A study from 2005 pointed out that environmental justice is as important as is sustainable development.[26] Ecological economist Herman Daly asked, "what use is a sawmill without a forest?"[27] From this perspective, the economy is a subsystem of human society, which is itself a subsystem of the biosphere, and a gain in one sector is a loss from another.[28] This perspective led to the nested circles figure of 'economics' inside 'society' inside the 'environment'.

The simple definition that sustainability is something that improves "the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems",[29] though vague, conveys the idea of sustainability having quantifiable limits. But sustainability is also a call to action, a task in progress or journey and therefore a political process, so some definitions set out common goals and values.[30] The Earth Charter[31] speaks of a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. This suggested a more complex figure of sustainability, which included the importance of the domain of 'politics'.

More than that, sustainability implies responsible and proactive decision-making and innovation that minimizes negative impact and maintains balance between ecological resilience, economic prosperity, political justice and cultural vibrancy to ensure a desirable planet for all species now and in the future.[32] Specific types of sustainability include, sustainable agriculture, sustainable architecture or ecological economics.[33] Understanding sustainable development is important but without clear targets an unfocused term like "liberty" or "justice".[34] It has also been described as a "dialogue of values that challenge the sociology of development".[35]

While the United Nations Millennium Declaration identified principles and treaties on sustainable development, including economic development, social development and environmental protection it continued using three domains: economics, environment and social sustainability. More recently, using a systematic domain model that responds to the debates over the last decade, the Circles of Sustainability approach distinguished four domains of economic, ecological, political and cultural sustainability. This in accord with the United Nations Agenda 21, which specifies culture as the fourth domain of sustainable development.[37] The model is now being used by organizations such as the United Nations Cities Programme.[38] and Metropolis[39]

Integral elements of sustainability are research and innovation activities. A telling example is the European environmental research and innovation policy. It aims at defining and implementing a transformative agenda to greening the economy and the society as a whole so to make them sustainable. Research and innovation in Europe are financially supported by the programme Horizon 2020, which is also open to participation worldwide.[40]

Resiliency in ecology is the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic structure and viability. Resilience-thinking evolved from the need to manage interactions between human-constructed systems and natural ecosystems in a sustainable way despite the fact that to policymakers a definition remains elusive. Resilience-thinking addresses how much planetary ecological systems can withstand assault from human disturbances and still deliver the services current and future generations need from them. It is also concerned with commitment from geopolitical policymakers to promote and manage essential planetary ecological resources in order to promote resilience and achieve sustainability of these essential resources for benefit of future generations of life?[41] The resiliency of an ecosystem, and thereby, its sustainability, can be reasonably measured at junctures or events where the combination of naturally occurring regenerative forces (solar energy, water, soil, atmosphere, vegetation, and biomass) interact with the energy released into the ecosystem from disturbances.[42]

A practical view of sustainability is closed systems that maintain processes of productivity indefinitely by replacing resources used by actions of people with resources of equal or greater value by those same people without degrading or endangering natural biotic systems.[43] In this way, sustainability can be concretely measured in human projects if there is a transparent accounting of the resources put back into the ecosystem to replace those displaced. In nature, the accounting occurs naturally through a process of adaptation as an ecosystem returns to viability from an external disturbance. The adaptation is a multi-stage process that begins with the disturbance event (earthquake, volcanic eruption, hurricane, tornado, flood, or thunderstorm), followed by absorption, utilization, or deflection of the energy or energies that the external forces created.[44]

In analysing systems such as urban and national parks, dams, farms and gardens, theme parks, open-pit mines, water catchments, one way to look at the relationship between sustainability and resiliency is to view the former with a long-term vision and resiliency as the capacity of human engineers to respond to immediate environmental events.[45]

The history of sustainability traces human-dominated ecological systems from the earliest civilizations to the present time.[46] This history is characterized by the increased regional success of a particular society, followed by crises that were either resolved, producing sustainability, or not, leading to decline.[47][48]

In early human history, the use of fire and desire for specific foods may have altered the natural composition of plant and animal communities.[49] Between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, agrarian communities emerged which depended largely on their environment and the creation of a "structure of permanence."[50]

The Western industrial revolution of the 18th to 19th centuries tapped into the vast growth potential of the energy in fossil fuels. Coal was used to power ever more efficient engines and later to generate electricity. Modern sanitation systems and advances in medicine protected large populations from disease.[51] In the mid-20th century, a gathering environmental movement pointed out that there were environmental costs associated with the many material benefits that were now being enjoyed. In the late 20th century, environmental problems became global in scale.[52][53][54][55] The 1973 and 1979 energy crises demonstrated the extent to which the global community had become dependent on non-renewable energy resources.

In the 21st century, there is increasing global awareness of the threat posed by the human greenhouse effect, produced largely by forest clearing and the burning of fossil fuels.[56][57]

The philosophical and analytic framework of sustainability draws on and connects with many different disciplines and fields; in recent years an area that has come to be called sustainability science has emerged.[58]

The United Nations Millennium Declaration identified principles and treaties on sustainable development, including economic development, social development and environmental protection. The Circles of Sustainability approach distinguishes the four domains of economic, ecological, political and cultural sustainability. This in accord with the United Nations Agenda 21, which specifies culture as the fourth domain of sustainable development.[37]

Sustainability is studied and managed over many scales (levels or frames of reference) of time and space and in many contexts of environmental, social and economic organization. The focus ranges from the total carrying capacity (sustainability) of planet Earth to the sustainability of economic sectors, ecosystems, countries, municipalities, neighbourhoods, home gardens, individual lives, individual goods and services[clarification needed], occupations, lifestyles, behaviour patterns and so on. In short, it can entail the full compass of biological and human activity or any part of it.[59] As Daniel Botkin, author and environmentalist, has stated: "We see a landscape that is always in flux, changing over many scales of time and space."[60]

The sheer size and complexity of the planetary ecosystem has proved problematic for the design of practical measures to reach global sustainability. To shed light on the big picture, explorer and sustainability campaigner Jason Lewis has drawn parallels to other, more tangible closed systems. For example, he likens human existence on Earth isolated as the planet is in space, whereby people cannot be evacuated to relieve population pressure and resources cannot be imported to prevent accelerated depletion of resources to life at sea on a small boat isolated by water.[61] In both cases, he argues, exercising the precautionary principle is a key factor in survival.[62]

A major driver of human impact on Earth systems is the destruction of biophysical resources, and especially, the Earth's ecosystems. The environmental impact of a community or of humankind as a whole depends both on population and impact per person, which in turn depends in complex ways on what resources are being used, whether or not those resources are renewable, and the scale of the human activity relative to the carrying capacity of the ecosystems involved. Careful resource management can be applied at many scales, from economic sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and industry, to work organizations, the consumption patterns of households and individuals and to the resource demands of individual goods and services.[63][64]

One of the initial attempts to express human impact mathematically was developed in the 1970s and is called the I PAT formula. This formulation attempts to explain human consumption in terms of three components: population numbers, levels of consumption (which it terms "affluence", although the usage is different), and impact per unit of resource use (which is termed "technology", because this impact depends on the technology used). The equation is expressed:

Sustainability measurement is a term that denotes the measurements used as the quantitative basis for the informed management of sustainability.[66] The metrics used for the measurement of sustainability (involving the sustainability of environmental, social and economic domains, both individually and in various combinations) are evolving: they include indicators, benchmarks, audits, sustainability standards and certification systems like Fairtrade and Organic, indexes and accounting, as well as assessment, appraisal[67] and other reporting systems. They are applied over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.[68][69]

Some of the best known and most widely used sustainability measures include corporate sustainability reporting, Triple Bottom Line accounting, World Sustainability Society, Circles of Sustainability, and estimates of the quality of sustainability governance for individual countries using the Environmental Sustainability Index and Environmental Performance Index.

According to the 2008 Revision of the official United Nations population estimates and projections, the world population is projected to reach 7 billion early in 2012, up from the current 6.9 billion (May 2009), to exceed 9 billion people by 2050. Most of the increase will be in developing countries whose population is projected to rise from 5.6 billion in 2009 to 7.9 billion in 2050. This increase will be distributed among the population aged 1559 (1.2 billion) and 60 or over (1.1 billion) because the number of children under age 15 in developing countries is predicted to decrease. In contrast, the population of the more developed regions is expected to undergo only slight increase from 1.23 billion to 1.28 billion, and this would have declined to 1.15 billion but for a projected net migration from developing to developed countries, which is expected to average 2.4 million persons annually from 2009 to 2050.[70] Long-term estimates in 2004 of global population suggest a peak at around 2070 of nine to ten billion people, and then a slow decrease to 8.4 billion by 2100.[71]

Emerging economies like those of China and India aspire to the living standards of the Western world as does the non-industrialized world in general.[72] It is the combination of population increase in the developing world and unsustainable consumption levels in the developed world that poses a stark challenge to sustainability.[73]

At the global scale, scientific data now indicates that humans are living beyond the carrying capacity of planet Earth and that this cannot continue indefinitely. This scientific evidence comes from many sources but is presented in detail in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the planetary boundaries framework.[74] An early detailed examination of global limits was published in the 1972 book Limits to Growth, which has prompted follow-up commentary and analysis.[75] A 2012 review in Nature by 22 international researchers expressed concerns that the Earth may be "approaching a state shift" in its biosphere.[76]

The Ecological footprint measures human consumption in terms of the biologically productive land needed to provide the resources, and absorb the wastes of the average global citizen. In 2008 it required 2.7 global hectares per person, 30% more than the natural biological capacity of 2.1 global hectares (assuming no provision for other organisms).[53] The resulting ecological deficit must be met from unsustainable extra sources and these are obtained in three ways: embedded in the goods and services of world trade; taken from the past (e.g. fossil fuels); or borrowed from the future as unsustainable resource usage (e.g. by over exploiting forests and fisheries).

The figure (right) examines sustainability at the scale of individual countries by contrasting their Ecological Footprint with their UN Human Development Index (a measure of standard of living). The graph shows what is necessary for countries to maintain an acceptable standard of living for their citizens while, at the same time, maintaining sustainable resource use. The general trend is for higher standards of living to become less sustainable. As always, population growth has a marked influence on levels of consumption and the efficiency of resource use.[65][77] The sustainability goal is to raise the global standard of living without increasing the use of resources beyond globally sustainable levels; that is, to not exceed "one planet" consumption. Information generated by reports at the national, regional and city scales confirm the global trend towards societies that are becoming less sustainable over time.[78][79]

Romanian American economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a progenitor in economics and a paradigm founder of ecological economics, has argued that the carrying capacity of Earth that is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels is bound to decrease sometime in the future as Earth's finite stock of mineral resources is presently being extracted and put to use.[80]:303 Leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly, a student of Georgescu-Roegen, has propounded the same argument.[81]:369371

At a fundamental level energy flow and biogeochemical cycling set an upper limit on the number and mass of organisms in any ecosystem.[82] Human impacts on the Earth are demonstrated in a general way through detrimental changes in the global biogeochemical cycles of chemicals that are critical to life, most notably those of water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.[83]

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is an international synthesis by over 1000 of the world's leading biological scientists that analyzes the state of the Earths ecosystems and provides summaries and guidelines for decision-makers. It concludes that human activity is having a significant and escalating impact on the biodiversity of world ecosystems, reducing both their resilience and biocapacity. The report refers to natural systems as humanity's "life-support system", providing essential "ecosystem services". The assessment measures 24 ecosystem services concluding that only four have shown improvement over the last 50 years, 15 are in serious decline, and five are in a precarious condition.[84]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the current harmonized set of seventeen future international development targets.

The Official Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted on 25 September 2015 has 92 paragraphs, with the main paragraph (51) outlining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and its associated 169 targets. This included the following seventeen goals:[85]

As of August 2015, there were 169 proposed targets for these goals and 304 proposed indicators to show compliance.[103]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expired at the end of 2015. The MDGs were established in 2000 following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations. Adopted by the 189 United Nations member states at the time and more than twenty international organizations, these goals were advanced to help achieve the following sustainable development standards by 2015.

According to the data that member countries represented to the United Nations, Cuba was the only nation in the world in 2006 that met the World Wide Fund for Nature's definition of sustainable development, with an ecological footprint of less than 1.8 hectares per capita, 1.5, and a Human Development Index of over 0.8, 0.855.[104][105]

Healthy ecosystems provide vital goods and services to humans and other organisms. There are two major ways of reducing negative human impact and enhancing ecosystem services and the first of these is environmental management. This direct approach is based largely on information gained from earth science, environmental science and conservation biology. However, this is management at the end of a long series of indirect causal factors that are initiated by human consumption, so a second approach is through demand management of human resource use.

Management of human consumption of resources is an indirect approach based largely on information gained from economics. Herman Daly has suggested three broad criteria for ecological sustainability: renewable resources should provide a sustainable yield (the rate of harvest should not exceed the rate of regeneration); for non-renewable resources there should be equivalent development of renewable substitutes; waste generation should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment.[106]

At the global scale and in the broadest sense environmental management involves the oceans, freshwater systems, land and atmosphere, but following the sustainability principle of scale it can be equally applied to any ecosystem from a tropical rainforest to a home garden.[107][108]

At a March 2009 meeting of the Copenhagen Climate Council, 2,500 climate experts from 80 countries issued a keynote statement that there is now "no excuse" for failing to act on global warming and that without strong carbon reduction "abrupt or irreversible" shifts in climate may occur that "will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with".[109][110] Management of the global atmosphere now involves assessment of all aspects of the carbon cycle to identify opportunities to address human-induced climate change and this has become a major focus of scientific research because of the potential catastrophic effects on biodiversity and human communities (see Energy below).

Other human impacts on the atmosphere include the air pollution in cities, the pollutants including toxic chemicals like nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, volatile organic compounds and airborne particulate matter that produce photochemical smog and acid rain, and the chlorofluorocarbons that degrade the ozone layer. Anthropogenic particulates such as sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere reduce the direct irradiance and reflectance (albedo) of the Earth's surface. Known as global dimming, the decrease is estimated to have been about 4% between 1960 and 1990 although the trend has subsequently reversed. Global dimming may have disturbed the global water cycle by reducing evaporation and rainfall in some areas. It also creates a cooling effect and this may have partially masked the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming.[111]

Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface. Of this, 97.5% is the salty water of the oceans and only 2.5% freshwater, most of which is locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet. The remaining freshwater is found in glaciers, lakes, rivers, wetlands, the soil, aquifers and atmosphere. Due to the water cycle, fresh water supply is continually replenished by precipitation, however there is still a limited amount necessitating management of this resource. Awareness of the global importance of preserving water for ecosystem services has only recently emerged as, during the 20th century, more than half the worlds wetlands have been lost along with their valuable environmental services. Increasing urbanization pollutes clean water supplies and much of the world still does not have access to clean, safe water.[112] Greater emphasis is now being placed on the improved management of blue (harvestable) and green (soil water available for plant use) water, and this applies at all scales of water management.[113]

Ocean circulation patterns have a strong influence on climate and weather and, in turn, the food supply of both humans and other organisms. Scientists have warned of the possibility, under the influence of climate change, of a sudden alteration in circulation patterns of ocean currents that could drastically alter the climate in some regions of the globe.[114] Ten per cent of the world's population about 600 million people live in low-lying areas vulnerable to sea level rise.

Loss of biodiversity stems largely from the habitat loss and fragmentation produced by the human appropriation of land for development, forestry and agriculture as natural capital is progressively converted to man-made capital. Land use change is fundamental to the operations of the biosphere because alterations in the relative proportions of land dedicated to urbanisation, agriculture, forest, woodland, grassland and pasture have a marked effect on the global water, carbon and nitrogen biogeochemical cycles and this can impact negatively on both natural and human systems.[115] At the local human scale, major sustainability benefits accrue from sustainable parks and gardens and green cities.[116][117]

Since the Neolithic Revolution about 47% of the worlds forests have been lost to human use. Present-day forests occupy about a quarter of the worlds ice-free land with about half of these occurring in the tropics.[118] In temperate and boreal regions forest area is gradually increasing (with the exception of Siberia), but deforestation in the tropics is of major concern.[119]

Food is essential to life. Feeding more than seven billion human bodies takes a heavy toll on the Earths resources. This begins with the appropriation of about 38% of the Earths land surface[120] and about 20% of its net primary productivity.[121] Added to this are the resource-hungry activities of industrial agribusiness everything from the crop need for irrigation water, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to the resource costs of food packaging, transport (now a major part of global trade) and retail. Environmental problems associated with industrial agriculture and agribusiness are now being addressed through such movements as sustainable agriculture, organic farming and more sustainable business practices.[122]

The underlying driver of direct human impacts on the environment is human consumption.[123] This impact is reduced by not only consuming less but by also making the full cycle of production, use and disposal more sustainable. Consumption of goods and services can be analysed and managed at all scales through the chain of consumption, starting with the effects of individual lifestyle choices and spending patterns, through to the resource demands of specific goods and services, the impacts of economic sectors, through national economies to the global economy.[124] Analysis of consumption patterns relates resource use to the environmental, social and economic impacts at the scale or context under investigation. The ideas of embodied resource use (the total resources needed to produce a product or service), resource intensity, and resource productivity are important tools for understanding the impacts of consumption. Key resource categories relating to human needs are food, energy, materials and water.

In 2010, the International Resource Panel, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), published the first global scientific assessment on the impacts of consumption and production[125] and identified priority actions for developed and developing countries. The study found that the most critical impacts are related to ecosystem health, human health and resource depletion. From a production perspective, it found that fossil-fuel combustion processes, agriculture and fisheries have the most important impacts. Meanwhile, from a final consumption perspective, it found that household consumption related to mobility, shelter, food and energy-using products cause the majority of life-cycle impacts of consumption.

The Sun's energy, stored by plants (primary producers) during photosynthesis, passes through the food chain to other organisms to ultimately power all living processes. Since the industrial revolution the concentrated energy of the Sun stored in fossilized plants as fossil fuels has been a major driver of technology which, in turn, has been the source of both economic and political power. In 2007 climate scientists of the IPCC concluded that there was at least a 90% probability that atmospheric increase in CO2 was human-induced, mostly as a result of fossil fuel emissions but, to a lesser extent from changes in land use. Stabilizing the worlds climate will require high-income countries to reduce their emissions by 6090% over 2006 levels by 2050 which should hold CO2 levels at 450650ppm from current levels of about 380ppm. Above this level, temperatures could rise by more than 2C to produce catastrophic climate change.[126][127] Reduction of current CO2 levels must be achieved against a background of global population increase and developing countries aspiring to energy-intensive high consumption Western lifestyles.[128]

Reducing greenhouse emissions, is being tackled at all scales, ranging from tracking the passage of carbon through the carbon cycle[129] to the commercialization of renewable energy, developing less carbon-hungry technology and transport systems and attempts by individuals to lead carbon neutral lifestyles by monitoring the fossil fuel use embodied in all the goods and services they use.[130]Engineering of emerging technologies such as carbon-neutral fuel[131][132][133] and energy storage systems such as power to gas, compressed air energy storage,[134][135] and pumped-storage hydroelectricity[136][137][138] are necessary to store power from transient renewable energy sources including emerging renewables such as airborne wind turbines.[139]

Water security and food security are inextricably linked. In the decade 195160 human water withdrawals were four times greater than the previous decade. This rapid increase resulted from scientific and technological developments impacting through the economy especially the increase in irrigated land, growth in industrial and power sectors, and intensive dam construction on all continents. This altered the water cycle of rivers and lakes, affected their water quality and had a significant impact on the global water cycle.[140] Currently towards 35% of human water use is unsustainable, drawing on diminishing aquifers and reducing the flows of major rivers: this percentage is likely to increase if climate change impacts become more severe, populations increase, aquifers become progressively depleted and supplies become polluted and unsanitary.[141] From 1961 to 2001 water demand doubled agricultural use increased by 75%, industrial use by more than 200%, and domestic use more than 400%.[142] In the 1990s it was estimated that humans were using 4050% of the globally available freshwater in the approximate proportion of 70% for agriculture, 22% for industry, and 8% for domestic purposes with total use progressively increasing.[140]

Water efficiency is being improved on a global scale by increased demand management, improved infrastructure, improved water productivity of agriculture, minimising the water intensity (embodied water) of goods and services, addressing shortages in the non-industrialized world, concentrating food production in areas of high productivity, and planning for climate change, such as through flexible system design. A promising direction towards sustainable development is to design systems that are flexible and reversible.[4][5] At the local level, people are becoming more self-sufficient by harvesting rainwater and reducing use of mains water.[113][143]

The American Public Health Association (APHA) defines a "sustainable food system"[144][145] as "one that provides healthy food to meet current food needs while maintaining healthy ecosystems that can also provide food for generations to come with minimal negative impact to the environment. A sustainable food system also encourages local production and distribution infrastructures and makes nutritious food available, accessible, and affordable to all. Further, it is humane and just, protecting farmers and other workers, consumers, and communities."[146] Concerns about the environmental impacts of agribusiness and the stark contrast between the obesity problems of the Western world and the poverty and food insecurity of the developing world have generated a strong movement towards healthy, sustainable eating as a major component of overall ethical consumerism.[147] The environmental effects of different dietary patterns depend on many factors, including the proportion of animal and plant foods consumed and the method of food production.[148][149][150][151] The World Health Organization has published a Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health report which was endorsed by the May 2004 World Health Assembly. It recommends the Mediterranean diet which is associated with health and longevity and is low in meat, rich in fruits and vegetables, low in added sugar and limited salt, and low in saturated fatty acids; the traditional source of fat in the Mediterranean is olive oil, rich in monounsaturated fat. The healthy rice-based Japanese diet is also high in carbohydrates and low in fat. Both diets are low in meat and saturated fats and high in legumes and other vegetables; they are associated with a low incidence of ailments and low environmental impact.[152]

At the global level the environmental impact of agribusiness is being addressed through sustainable agriculture and organic farming. At the local level there are various movements working towards local food production, more productive use of urban wastelands and domestic gardens including permaculture, urban horticulture, local food, slow food, sustainable gardening, and organic gardening.[153][154]

Sustainable seafood is seafood from either fished or farmed sources that can maintain or increase production in the future without jeopardizing the ecosystems from which it was acquired. The sustainable seafood movement has gained momentum as more people become aware about both overfishing and environmentally destructive fishing methods.

As global population and affluence has increased, so has the use of various materials increased in volume, diversity and distance transported. Included here are raw materials, minerals, synthetic chemicals (including hazardous substances), manufactured products, food, living organisms and waste.[155] By 2050, humanity could consume an estimated 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year (three times its current amount) unless the economic growth rate is decoupled from the rate of natural resource consumption. Developed countries' citizens consume an average of 16 tons of those four key resources per capita, ranging up to 40 or more tons per person in some developed countries with resource consumption levels far beyond what is likely sustainable.[156]

Sustainable use of materials has targeted the idea of dematerialization, converting the linear path of materials (extraction, use, disposal in landfill) to a circular material flow that reuses materials as much as possible, much like the cycling and reuse of waste in nature.[157] This approach is supported by product stewardship and the increasing use of material flow analysis at all levels, especially individual countries and the global economy.[158] The use of sustainable biomaterials that come from renewable sources and that can be recycled is preferred to the use on non-renewables from a life cycle standpoint.

Synthetic chemical production has escalated following the stimulus it received during the second World War. Chemical production includes everything from herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers to domestic chemicals and hazardous substances.[159] Apart from the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, chemicals of particular concern include: heavy metals, nuclear waste, chlorofluorocarbons, persistent organic pollutants and all harmful chemicals capable of bioaccumulation. Although most synthetic chemicals are harmless there needs to be rigorous testing of new chemicals, in all countries, for adverse environmental and health effects. International legislation has been established to deal with the global distribution and management of dangerous goods.[160][161] The effects of some chemical agents needed long-term measurements and a lot of legal battles to realize their danger to human health. The classification of the toxic carcinogenic agents is handle by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Every economic activity produces material that can be classified as waste. To reduce waste, industry, business and government are now mimicking nature by turning the waste produced by industrial metabolism into resource. Dematerialization is being encouraged through the ideas of industrial ecology, ecodesign[162] and ecolabelling. In addition to the well-established reduce, reuse and recycle, shoppers are using their purchasing power for ethical consumerism.[64]

The European Union is expected to table by the end of 2015 an ambitious Circular Economy package which is expected to include concrete legislative proposals on waste management, ecodesign and limits on land fills.

On one account, sustainability "concerns the specification of a set of actions to be taken by present persons that will not diminish the prospects of future persons to enjoy levels of consumption, wealth, utility, or welfare comparable to those enjoyed by present persons."[163] Sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity.[27] Sustainability economics represents: "...a broad interpretation of ecological economics where environmental and ecological variables and issues are basic but part of a multidimensional perspective. Social, cultural, health-related and monetary/financial aspects have to be integrated into the analysis."[164] However, the concept of sustainability is much broader than the concepts of sustained yield of welfare, resources, or profit margins.[165] At present, the average per capita consumption of people in the developing world is sustainable but population numbers are increasing and individuals are aspiring to high-consumption Western lifestyles. The developed world population is only increasing slightly but consumption levels are unsustainable. The challenge for sustainability is to curb and manage Western consumption while raising the standard of living of the developing world without increasing its resource use and environmental impact. This must be done by using strategies and technology that break the link between, on the one hand, economic growth and on the other, environmental damage and resource depletion.[166]

A recent UNEP report proposes a green economy defined as one that improves human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities: it "does not favor one political perspective over another but works to minimize excessive depletion of natural capital". The report makes three key findings: that greening not only generates increases in wealth, in particular a gain in ecological commons or natural capital, but also (over a period of six years) produces a higher rate of GDP growth; that there is an inextricable link between poverty eradication and better maintenance and conservation of the ecological commons, arising from the benefit flows from natural capital that are received directly by the poor; "in the transition to a green economy, new jobs are created, which in time exceed the losses in brown economy jobs. However, there is a period of job losses in transition, which requires investment in re-skilling and re-educating the workforce.[167]

Several key areas have been targeted for economic analysis and reform: the environmental effects of unconstrained economic growth; the consequences of nature being treated as an economic externality; and the possibility of an economics that takes greater account of the social and environmental consequences of market behavior.[168]

Historically there has been a close correlation between economic growth and environmental degradation: as communities grow, so the environment declines. This trend is clearly demonstrated on graphs of human population numbers, economic growth, and environmental indicators.[169] Unsustainable economic growth has been starkly compared to the malignant growth of a cancer[170] because it eats away at the Earth's ecosystem services which are its life-support system. There is concern that, unless resource use is checked, modern global civilization will follow the path of ancient civilizations that collapsed through overexploitation of their resource base.[171][172] While conventional economics is concerned largely with economic growth and the efficient allocation of resources, ecological economics has the explicit goal of sustainable scale (rather than continual growth), fair distribution and efficient allocation, in that order.[173][174] The World Business Council for Sustainable Development states that "business cannot succeed in societies that fail".[175]

In economic and environmental fields, the term decoupling is becoming increasingly used in the context of economic production and environmental quality. When used in this way, it refers to the ability of an economy to grow without incurring corresponding increases in environmental pressure. Ecological economics includes the study of societal metabolism, the throughput of resources that enter and exit the economic system in relation to environmental quality.[174][176] An economy that is able to sustain GDP growth without having a negative impact on the environment is said to be decoupled. Exactly how, if, or to what extent this can be achieved is a subject of much debate. In 2011 the International Resource Panel, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), warned that by 2050 the human race could be devouring 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year three times its current rate of consumption unless nations can make serious attempts at decoupling.[177] The report noted that citizens of developed countries consume an average of 16 tons of those four key resources per capita per annum (ranging up to 40 or more tons per person in some developed countries). By comparison, the average person in India today consumes four tons per year. Sustainability studies analyse ways to reduce resource intensity (the amount of resource (e.g. water, energy, or materials) needed for the production, consumption and disposal of a unit of good or service) whether this be achieved from improved economic management, product design, or new technology.[178]

There are conflicting views whether improvements in technological efficiency and innovation will enable a complete decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation. On the one hand, it has been claimed repeatedly by efficiency experts that resource use intensity (i.e., energy and materials use per unit GDP) could in principle be reduced by at least four or five-fold, thereby allowing for continued economic growth without increasing resource depletion and associated pollution.[179][180] On the other hand, an extensive historical analysis of technological efficiency improvements has conclusively shown that improvements in the efficiency of the use of energy and materials were almost always outpaced by economic growth, in large part because of the rebound effect (conservation) or Jevons Paradox resulting in a net increase in resource use and associated pollution.[181][182] Furthermore, there are inherent thermodynamic (i.e., second law of thermodynamics) and practical limits to all efficiency improvements. For example, there are certain minimum unavoidable material requirements for growing food, and there are limits to making automobiles, houses, furniture, and other products lighter and thinner without the risk of losing their necessary functions.[183] Since it is both theoretically and practically impossible to increase resource use efficiencies indefinitely, it is equally impossible to have continued and infinite economic growth without a concomitant increase in resource depletion and environmental pollution, i.e., economic growth and resource depletion can be decoupled to some degree over the short run but not the long run. Consequently, long-term sustainability requires the transition to a steady state economy in which total GDP remains more or less constant, as has been advocated for decades by Herman Daly and others in the ecological economics community.

A different proposed solution to partially decouple economic growth from environmental degradation is the restore approach.[184] This approach views "restore" as a fourth component to the common reduce, reuse, recycle motto. Participants in such efforts are encouraged to voluntarily donate towards nature conservation a small fraction of the financial savings they experience through a more frugal use of resources. These financial savings would normally lead to rebound effects, but a theoretical analysis suggests that donating even a small fraction of the experienced savings can potentially more than eliminate rebound effects.[184]

The economic importance of nature is indicated by the use of the expression ecosystem services to highlight the market relevance of an increasingly scarce natural world that can no longer be regarded as both unlimited and free.[185] In general, as a commodity or service becomes more scarce the price increases and this acts as a restraint that encourages frugality, technical innovation and alternative products. However, this only applies when the product or service falls within the market system.[186] As ecosystem services are generally treated as economic externalities they are unpriced and therefore overused and degraded, a situation sometimes referred to as the Tragedy of the Commons.[185]

One approach to this dilemma has been the attempt to "internalize" these "externalities" by using market strategies like ecotaxes and incentives, tradeable permits for carbon, and the encouragement of payment for ecosystem services. Community currencies associated with Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), a gift economy and Time Banking have also been promoted as a way of supporting local economies and the environment.[187][188]Green economics is another market-based attempt to address issues of equity and the environment.[189] The global recession and a range of associated government policies are likely to bring the biggest annual fall in the world's carbon dioxide emissions in 40 years.[190]

Treating the environment as an externality may generate short-term profit at the expense of sustainability.[191]Sustainable business practices, on the other hand, integrate ecological concerns with social and economic ones (i.e., the triple bottom line).[192][193] Growth that depletes ecosystem services is sometimes termed "uneconomic growth" as it leads to a decline in quality of life.[194][195] Minimizing such growth can provide opportunities for local businesses. For example, industrial waste can be treated as an "economic resource in the wrong place". The benefits of waste reduction include savings from disposal costs, fewer environmental penalties, and reduced liability insurance. This may lead to increased market share due to an improved public image.[196][197] Energy efficiency can also increase profits by reducing costs.

The idea of sustainability as a business opportunity has led to the formation of organizations such as the Sustainability Consortium of the Society for Organizational Learning, the Sustainable Business Institute, and the World Council for Sustainable Development.[198] The expansion of sustainable business opportunities can contribute to job creation through the introduction of green-collar workers.[199] Research focusing on progressive corporate leaders who have integrated sustainability into commercial strategy has yielded a leadership competency model for sustainability,[200][201] and led to emergence of the concept of "embedded sustainability" defined by its authors Chris Laszlo and Nadya Zhexembayeva as "incorporation of environmental, health, and social value into the core business with no trade-off in price or quality in other words, with no social or green premium."[202] Laszlo and Zhexembayeva's research showed that embedded sustainability offers at least seven distinct opportunities for business value creation: a) better risk-management, b) increased efficiency through reduced waste and resource use, c) better product differentiation, d) new market entrances, e) enhanced brand and reputation, f) greater opportunity to influence industry standards, and g) greater opportunity for radical innovation.[203] 2014 research further suggested that innovation driven by resource depletion can result in fundamental advantages for company products and services, as well as the company strategy as a whole, when right principles of innovation are applied.[204]

One school of thought, often labeled ecosocialism or ecological Marxism, asserts that the capitalist economic system is fundamentally incompatible with the ecological and social requirements of sustainability.[205] This theory rests on the premises that:

Thus, according to this analysis:

By this logic, market-based solutions to ecological crises (ecological economics, environmental economics, green economy) are rejected as technical tweaks that do not confront capitalisms structural failures.[214][215] Low-risk technology/science-based solutions such as solar power, sustainable agriculture, and increases in energy efficiency are seen as necessary but insufficient.[216] High-risk technological solutions such as nuclear power and climate engineering are entirely rejected.[217] Attempts made by businesses to greenwash their practices are regarded as false advertising, and it is pointed out that implementation of renewable technology (such as Walmarts proposition to supply their electricity with solar power) has the effect opposite of reductions in resource consumption, viz. further economic growth.[218]Sustainable business models and the triple bottom line are viewed as morally praiseworthy but ignorant to the tendency in capitalism for the distribution of wealth to become increasingly unequal and socially unstable/unsustainable.[209][219] Ecosocialists claim that the general unwillingness of capitalists to tolerateand capitalist governments to implementconstraints on maximum profit (such as ecotaxes or preservation and conservation measures) renders environmental reforms incapable of facilitating large-scale change: History teaches us that although capitalism has at times responded to environmental movements . . . at a certain point, at which the systems underlying accumulation drive is affected, its resistance to environmental demands stiffens.[220] They also note that, up until the event of total ecological collapse, destruction caused by natural disasters generally causes an increase in economic growth and accumulation; thus, capitalists have no foreseeable motivation to reduce the probability of disasters (i.e. convert to sustainable/ecological production).[221]

Ecosocialists advocate for the revolutionary succession of capitalism by ecosocialisman egalitarian economic/political/social structure designed to harmonize human society with non-human ecology and to fulfill human needsas the only sufficient solution to the present-day ecological crisis, and hence the only path towards sustainability.[222] Sustainability is viewed not as a domain exclusive to scientists, environmental activists, and business leaders but as a holistic project that must involve the whole of humanity redefining its place in Nature: What every environmentalist needs to know . . . is that capitalism is not the solution but the problem, and that if humanity is going to survive this crisis, it will do so because it has exercised its capacity for human freedom, through social struggle, in order to create a whole new worldin coevolution with the planet.[223]

Sustainability issues are generally expressed in scientific and environmental terms, as well as in ethical terms of stewardship, but implementing change is a social challenge that entails, among other things, international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism.[224] "The relationship between human rights and human development, corporate power and environmental justice, global poverty and citizen action, suggest that responsible global citizenship is an inescapable element of what may at first glance seem to be simply matters of personal consumer and moral choice."[225]

Social disruptions like war, crime and corruption divert resources from areas of greatest human need, damage the capacity of societies to plan for the future, and generally threaten human well-being and the environment.[225] Broad-based strategies for more sustainable social systems include: improved education and the political empowerment of women, especially in developing countries; greater regard for social justice, notably equity between rich and poor both within and between countries; and intergenerational equity.[73] Depletion of natural resources including fresh water[226] increases the likelihood of resource wars.[227] This aspect of sustainability has been referred to as environmental security and creates a clear need for global environmental agreements to manage resources such as aquifers and rivers which span political boundaries, and to protect shared global systems including oceans and the atmosphere.[228]

A major hurdle to achieve sustainability is the alleviation of poverty. It has been widely acknowledged that poverty is one source of environmental degradation. Such acknowledgment has been made by the Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future[229] and the Millennium Development Goals.[230] There is a growing realization in national governments and multilateral institutions that it is impossible to separate economic development issues from environment issues: according to the Brundtland report, poverty is a major cause and effect of global environmental problems. It is therefore futile to attempt to deal with environmental problems without a broader perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and international inequality.[231] Individuals living in poverty tend to rely heavily on their local ecosystem as a source for basic needs (such as nutrition and medicine) and general well-being.[232] As population growth continues to increase, increasing pressure is being placed on the local ecosystem to provide these basic essentials. According to the UN Population Fund, high fertility and poverty have been strongly correlated, and the worlds poorest countries also have the highest fertility and population growth rates.[233] The word sustainability is also used widely by western country development agencies and international charities to focus their poverty alleviation efforts in ways that can be sustained by the local populace and its environment. For example, teaching water treatment to the poor by boiling their water with charcoal, would not generally be considered a sustainable strategy, whereas using PET solar water disinfection would be. Also, sustainable best practices can involve the recycling of materials, such as the use of recycled plastics for lumber where deforestation has devastated a country's timber base. Another example of sustainable practices in poverty alleviation is the use of exported recycled materials from developed to developing countries, such as Bridges to Prosperity's use of wire rope from shipping container gantry cranes to act as the structural wire rope for footbridges that cross rivers in poor rural areas in Asia and Africa.

According to Murray Bookchin, the idea that humans must dominate nature is common in hierarchical societies. Bookchin contends that capitalism and market relationships, if unchecked, have the capacity to reduce the planet to a mere resource to be exploited. Nature is thus treated as a commodity: The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.[234]Social ecology, founded by Bookchin, is based on the conviction that nearly all of humanity's present ecological problems originate in, indeed are mere symptoms of, dysfunctional social arrangements. Whereas most authors proceed as if our ecological problems can be fixed by implementing recommendations which stem from physical, biological, economic etc., studies, Bookchin's claim is that these problems can only be resolved by understanding the underlying social processes and intervening in those processes by applying the concepts and methods of the social sciences.[235]

A pure capitalist approach has also been criticized in Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change to mitigation the effects of global warming in this excerpt ...

the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.[236][237]

Deep ecology is a movement founded by Arne Naess that establishes principles for the well-being of all life on Earth and the richness and diversity of life forms. The movement advocates, among other things, a substantial decrease in human population and consumption along with the reduction of human interference with the nonhuman world. To achieve this, deep ecologists advocate policies for basic economic, technological, and ideological structures that will improve the quality of life rather than the standard of living. Those who subscribe to these principles are obliged to make the necessary change happen.[238] The concept of a billion-year Sustainocene has been developed to initiate policy consideration of an earth where human structures power and fuel the needs of that species (for example through artificial photosynthesis) allowing Rights of Nature.[239]

1. Reduce dependence upon fossil fuels, underground metals, and minerals 2. Reduce dependence upon synthetic chemicals and other unnatural substances 3. Reduce encroachment upon nature 4. Meet human needs fairly & efficiently[240]

One approach to sustainable living, exemplified by small-scale urban transition towns and rural ecovillages, seeks to create self-reliant communities based on principles of simple living, which maximize self-sufficiency particularly in food production. These principles, on a broader scale, underpin the concept of a bioregional economy.[241] These approaches often utilize commons based knowledge sharing of open source appropriate technology.[242]

Other approaches, loosely based around New Urbanism, are successfully reducing environmental impacts by altering the built environment to create and preserve sustainable cities which support sustainable transport. Residents in compact urban neighborhoods drive fewer miles, and have significantly lower environmental impacts across a range of measures, compared with those living in sprawling suburbs.[243] In sustainable architecture the recent movement of New Classical Architecture promotes a sustainable approach towards construction, that appreciates and develops smart growth, architectural tradition and classical design.[244][245] This in contrast to modernist and globally uniform architecture, as well as opposing solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl.[246] Both trends started in the 1980s. The concept of Circular flow land use management has also been introduced in Europe to promote sustainable land use patterns that strive for compact cities and a reduction of greenfield land take by urban sprawl.

Large scale social movements can influence both community choices and the built environment. Eco-municipalities may be one such movement.[247] Eco-municipalities take a systems approach, based on sustainability principles. The eco-municipality movement is participatory, involving community members in a bottom-up approach. In Sweden, more than 70 cities and towns25 per cent of all municipalities in the countryhave adopted a common set of "Sustainability Principles" and implemented these systematically throughout their municipal operations. There are now twelve eco-municipalities in the United States and the American Planning Association has adopted sustainability objectives based on the same principles.[240]

There is a wealth of advice available to individuals wishing to reduce their personal and social impact on the environment through small, inexpensive and easily achievable steps.[248][249] But the transition required to reduce global human consumption to within sustainable limits involves much larger changes, at all levels and contexts of society.[250] The United Nations has recognised the central role of education, and have declared a decade of education for sustainable development, 20052014, which aims to "challenge us all to adopt new behaviours and practices to secure our future".[251] The Worldwide Fund for Nature proposes a strategy for sustainability that goes beyond education to tackle underlying individualistic and materialistic societal values head-on and strengthen people's connections with the natural world.[252]

Application of social sustainability requires stakeholders to look at human and labor rights, prevention of human trafficking, and other human rights risks.[253] These issues should be considered in production and procurement of various worldwide commodities. The international community has identified many industries whose practices have been known to violate social sustainability, and many of these industries have organizations in place that aid in verifying the social sustainability of products and services.[254] The Equator Principles (financial industry), Fair Wear Foundation (garments), and Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition are examples of such organizations and initiatives. Resources are also available for verifying the life-cycle of products and the producer or vendor level, such as Green Seal for cleaning products, NSF-140 for carpet production, and even labeling of Organic food in the United States.[255]

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Sustainability - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Test automation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted: at 8:14 am

In software testing, test automation is the use of special software (separate from the software being tested) to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes.[1] Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is critical for continuous delivery and continuous testing.

Some software testing tasks, such as extensive low-level interface regression testing, can be laborious and time-consuming to do manually. In addition, a manual approach might not always be effective in finding certain classes of defects. Test automation offers a possibility to perform these types of testing effectively. Once automated tests have been developed, they can be run quickly and repeatedly. Many times, this can be a cost-effective method for regression testing of software products that have a long maintenance life. Even minor patches over the lifetime of the application can cause existing features to break which were working at an earlier point in time.

There are many approaches to test automation, however below are the general approaches used widely:

Test automation tools can be expensive, and are usually employed in combination with manual testing. Test automation can be made cost-effective in the long term, especially when used repeatedly in regression testing.[citation needed]

In automated testing the Test Engineer or Software quality assurance person must have software coding ability, since the test cases are written in the form of source code which, when run, produce output according to the assertions that are a part of it.

One way to generate test cases automatically is model-based testing through use of a model of the system for test case generation, but research continues into a variety of alternative methodologies for doing so.[citation needed] In some cases, the model-based approach enables non-technical users to create automated business test cases in plain English so that no programming of any kind is needed in order to configure them for multiple operating systems, browsers, and smart devices.[2]

What to automate, when to automate, or even whether one really needs automation are crucial decisions which the testing (or development) team must make. Selecting the correct features of the product for automation largely determines the success of the automation. Automating unstable features or features that are undergoing changes should be avoided.[3]

A growing trend in software development is the use of testing frameworks such as the xUnit frameworks (for example, JUnit and NUnit) that allow the execution of unit tests to determine whether various sections of the code are acting as expected under various circumstances. Test cases describe tests that need to be run on the program to verify that the program runs as expected.

Test automation mostly using unit testing is a key feature of agile software development, where it is known as test-driven development (TDD). Unit tests are written to define the functionality before the code is written. However, these unit tests evolve and are extended as coding progresses, issues are discovered and the code is subjected to refactoring.[4] Only when all the tests for all the demanded features pass is the code considered complete. Proponents argue that it produces software that is both more reliable and less costly than code that is tested by manual exploration.[citation needed] It is considered more reliable because the code coverage is better, and because it is run constantly during development rather than once at the end of a waterfall development cycle. The developer discovers defects immediately upon making a change, when it is least expensive to fix. Finally, code refactoring is safer when unit testing is used; transforming the code into a simpler form with less code duplication, but equivalent behavior, is much less likely to introduce new defects when the refactored code is covered by unit tests.

Many test automation tools provide record and playback features that allow users to interactively record user actions and replay them back any number of times, comparing actual results to those expected. The advantage of this approach is that it requires little or no software development. This approach can be applied to any application that has a graphical user interface. However, reliance on these features poses major reliability and maintainability problems. Relabelling a button or moving it to another part of the window may require the test to be re-recorded. Record and playback also often adds irrelevant activities or incorrectly records some activities.[citation needed]

A variation on this type of tool is for testing of web sites. Here, the "interface" is the web page. However, such a framework utilizes entirely different techniques because it is rendering HTML and listening to DOM Events instead of operating system events. Headless browsers or solutions based on Selenium Web Driver are normally used for this purpose.[5][6][7]

Another variation of this type of test automation tool is for testing mobile applications. This is very useful given the number of different sizes, resolutions, and operating systems used on mobile phones. For this variation, a framework is used in order to instantiate actions on the mobile device and to gather results of the actions.[8][bettersourceneeded]

Another variation is script-less test automation that does not use record and playback, but instead builds a model[clarification needed] of the application and then enables the tester to create test cases by simply inserting test parameters and conditions, which requires no scripting skills.

API testing is also being widely used by software testers due to the difficulty of creating and maintaining GUI-based automation testing. It involves directly testing APIs as part of integration testing, to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.[9] Since APIs lack a GUI, API testing is performed at the message layer.[10] API testing is considered critical when an API serves as the primary interface to application logic since GUI tests can be difficult to maintain with the short release cycles and frequent changes commonly used with agile software development and DevOps.[11][12]

Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate.[13][14] For Continuous Testing, the scope of testing extends from validating bottom-up requirements or user stories to assessing the system requirements associated with overarching business goals.[15]

Testing tools can help automate tasks such as product installation, test data creation, GUI interaction, problem detection (consider parsing or polling agents equipped with oracles, defect logging, etc., without necessarily automating tests in an end-to-end fashion.

One must keep satisfying popular requirements when thinking of test automation:

A test automation framework is an integrated system that sets the rules of automation of a specific product. This system integrates the function libraries, test data sources, object details and various reusable modules. These components act as small building blocks which need to be assembled to represent a business process. The framework provides the basis of test automation and simplifies the automation effort.

The main advantage of a framework of assumptions, concepts and tools that provide support for automated software testing is the low cost for maintenance. If there is change to any test case then only the test case file needs to be updated and the driver Script and startup script will remain the same. Ideally, there is no need to update the scripts in case of changes to the application.

Choosing the right framework/scripting technique helps in maintaining lower costs. The costs associated with test scripting are due to development and maintenance efforts. The approach of scripting used during test automation has effect on costs.

Various framework/scripting techniques are generally used:

The Testing framework is responsible for:[16]

Test automation interface are platforms that provide a single workspace for incorporating multiple testing tools and frameworks for System/Integration testing of application under test. The goal of Test Automation Interface is to simplify the process of mapping tests to business criteria without coding coming in the way of the process. Test automation interface are expected to improve the efficiency and flexibility of maintaining test scripts.[17]

Test Automation Interface consists of the following core modules:

Interface engines are built on top of Interface Environment. Interface engine consists of a parser and a test runner. The parser is present to parse the object files coming from the object repository into the test specific scripting language. The test runner executes the test scripts using a test harness.[17]

Object repositories are a collection of UI/Application object data recorded by the testing tool while exploring the application under test.[17]

Tools are specifically designed to target some particular test environment, such as Windows and web automation tools, etc. Tools serve as a driving agent for an automation process. However, an automation framework is not a tool to perform a specific task, but rather an infrastructure that provides the solution where different tools can do their job in a unified manner. This provides a common platform for the automation engineer.

There are various types of frameworks. They are categorized on the basis of the automation component they leverage. These are:

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News | Automation | The Car Company Tycoon Game

Posted: at 8:14 am

After a bit less than two weeks in open beta with seven bugfix updates, most things have been sorted out and we are ready for the main release of this big update

Below you will find an overview of the main new features.

Buyer Demographics & Market Regions

You now get direct feedback on what your car is good and how many people can afford to buy it in 60 different demographics that all have distinctly different tastes and budgets. Optimize your cars to become the most competitive throughout the game.

A first rough implementation of three different, fictional, static markets for you to try and conquer with your designs. Every region has plenty of characteristics that influence buyer choices, even in this incomplete stage of their development.

Rear-Engined Cars

Finally you can put engines on or behind the rear axle of your cars, but watch out for that massive oversteer coming your way.

V6 Turbo Engines & Plenty of Little Things

Wanted to put a twin-turbo system on your V6 designs? Now you can!

That is of course not the only changes to the game, there have been plenty of additions, just some of them are:

A big thank you to everyone who helped find and report bugs in the open beta phase of this update cycle! In the next days we will give you news on what the next subproject will include in a Little Dev Update.

Thank you for your patience and have fun with this update. Cheers!

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Automation – The Car Company Tycoon Game on Steam

Posted: at 8:14 am

PLEASE, do not simply see my "not recommended" and assume I'm saying this is a bad game.

The concept behind this is absolutely amazing, and I want this game to be finished so badly. The way things are set up (so far) are very easy to learn, and work well. The creation system is basically broken down into a series of many choices, with explanations for the impacts of your choices when the option is moused over. The fluidity of the system thus far only makes me more anxious to play the finished product.

Now, to the point. I do not recommend this game to anyone, as it currently exists. I have been burned quite a few times by early access games, and I usually take a stance of not buying them under any circumstances. My excitement for this concept got the better of me, and I just had to know if it was good.

As of the time of this writing, the tycoon/campaign mode has not been implemented. All you can do is create cars/engines etc. It is entertaining for a little while, but not enough to be worth the price. That is why I don't recommend this. I do recommend that you keep a very close eye on this one, if this concept interests you, and consider buying it when the tycoon mode has been added.

If the devs do this right, this could be an absolutely amazing game. My advice is simply to wait and see how they do with the first major addition to this game.

I will update/change this review as updates are released for the game.

EDIT (23 June 2015): I just hopped on again to test it out since I haven't touched this one in a while, and I still stand by what I said. The bug fixes and improvements made since my review are very apparent. The whole car making process is very smooth, and still fun. It appears the devs are trying to get the creation process completely done before implementing the campaign/tycoon. I regularly check the announcements, and haven't heard them mention anything about that mode coming anytime soon. I find this particularly strange, considering they're in the open beta stage of the game. Why would they consider the game to be in the beta phase when not a single piece of the main game mode has been implemented, or even said to be coming soon? Personally, I think the creation mode is in a good enough state where they could easily get to work on tycoon mode, and throw small bug fixes and content updates here and there. Every time I play this game, I find myself disappointed when I reach the end of the creation process and then have to say "well...I guess that's it." and then go play something else. For me, at least, it feels like a waste of time to make a car, and not be able to do anything with it.

Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game on Steam

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EVA Automation

Posted: at 8:14 am

A letter from our founder

Friends of EVA,

I am beyond thrilled to announce that we have acquired Bowers & Wilkinsin my opinion, the absolute quality and design leader in high-end audio equipment. Ive personally been a huge fan and loyal customer of Bowers & Wilkins for decades and truly admire and respect their Chairman, Joe Atkins. What he and his team have created over the past 30 years is simply inspiring.

Since I founded EVA Automation two years ago, we have been working hard to create fantastic home A/V user experiences. When it was time to seek out partners for our journey ahead, Bowers & Wilkins was unquestionably our #1 choice, and after I met Joe and his team, it was immediately clear that we share the same long term product vision and sincere passion for home entertainment.

To my new friends at Bowers & Wilkins: I cant wait to meet all of you! Your brand and heritage are second to none, and we at EVA are excited to operate as one combined company under the Bowers & Wilkins name. Joe Atkins has graciously agreed to remain the CEO of our combined company, while I will be our Executive Chairman. There are very few leaders in home A/V as experienced, respected and successful as Joe, and I look forward to partnering with and learning from himand all of you.

One of the most important parts of our acquisition is that Joe is maintaining a significant equity stake in our combined company and will be joining our board of directors, further aligning all of our interests.

We will have much, much more to announce when the time is right about our vision and our products. In the meantime, we will continue to work hard on developing a truly special, highly integrated, and easy to use home A/V experience that I know youll love.

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