How do you say Paul in Chinglish?

When I was in England, my relatives were constantly correcting my and my mother's English. It was really annoying; it's not like these people are speaking the Queen's English, they're just regular folk with their own accents and mispronunciations. Finally I said to my cousin, "Isn't it weird? It's almost like we're from another country!" I mean, get over it. You speak your English and we speak ours. I know in theory there has to be a "right way" that we all aspire to but American English is a recognized language.

Eventually, I figured we were in their country and we can make an effort to say things the way they do. We didn't ask anyone where the restroom or the bathroom but every one of my relatives brought it up anyway. "RESTroom?" they'd say, "who's doing any RESTING in there?" "BATHroom? How ridiculous, there's no BATH in there!" Yes, we'd say, shaking our heads in agreement at how stupid our language (and presumably, our country) is, "I know." Forget trying to explain that for whatever reason, in America we don't like to talk about the toilet because we consider it to be dirty and disgusting and it's much more polite, say at dinner, to ask the waiter where the restroom is. Come to think of it, it used to be called a washroom which might be more accurate. The difference, of course, is that in England, the toilets in the old houses were in their own room (hence, the water closet or WC) and the sink is in the same room as the shower. But I digress.

I was ready to forgive them for making me feel like I don't have the right to my own language when, while at my hair salon, I had a similar interaction with a Brit here in San Francisco. While I was paying, a guy came in. My hairdresser, looking at the appointment book, asked him how to pronounce his name.

"Paul," he replied.

"Oh, it says B-A-U-L in the book!" she said and we both laughed.

I remembered a good friend of mine named Paul who once complained about having such a common name and I lightly remarked, "I bet that's never happened before!"

"Actually," he said, "only about four times per day."

Huh? You see, British Paul refuses to pronounce his name is a way that any American would understand.

"Oh," I said, because you say "Paul" (pronouncing his name in my best British accent).

"Paul" he replied, correcting me.

"That's what I said."

"No," he said without a shred of humor, "it isn't."

Unbelievable! This guy would rather walk around his life in San Francisco with a stick up his ass about his name, correcting all of us stupid and ignorant Americans who can't speak, than just have a friendly interaction with a couple of nice and (actually) interesting women. I thought it about it all the way home. My name is French but I've never insisted that people pronounce it so. I don't particularly want it truncated but that's a different story. When I go to Italy, I introduce myself as "An-JEL-ica." To Spanish speakers, even in the U.S., I'm happy to be called "An-HELL-ica." Some Europeans pronounce it the French way and I love that. I see nothing wrong with people changing it to suit their language, especially in their own country.

Would Paul chastise people in Italy if they called him Paolo? Or in Spain for calling him Pablo? Or is it just because we speak English here that he thinks we should pronounce it HIS way, the ENGLISH way, the CORRECT way? I find it hard to believe that even in England, everyone would say it to his satisfaction. And what about in Australia? Same story or is it just us Americans that they are so disgusted with? According to a YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph in May, 35% of the British think the United States is a "force for evil." I suppose because of our president's bad speech, they assume the two go hand in hand. I wonder how they'll feel in 2020 when, according to Wired, only 15% of English speakers will be native to the language. The Chinese are quickly eclipsing the rest of the world in English speakers and are inventing their own version of it as we speak. I'd love to be a fly on the wall when Paul gets his English corrected by a Chinese non-native speaker!

Don't they have the Internet in Alaska?

In a couple of weeks, my little map covered in red dots is going to be archived. It will have been a year since it was started and they have to start over. I've had around 8,000 visits in the last year and before the map went away, I wanted to document where the dots are.


The majority of visits are from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia with a couple of other sizable dots in Iran (that's Sam's cousin!), India, and Indonesia (that's daysofturmoil).

Here’s where the rest of the dots appear with the notable absences in parentheses:

Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Guyana, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Mexico (No Cuba)

Hawaii and Newfoundland (No Alaska)

South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Canary Islands, Guinea, Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius (all major cities or capitols of those countries) and Morocco

Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, (One dot in China), (Only two dots in Russia: Moscow and Siberia), (One dot in Kyrgyzstan and no other former Soviet “stans”)

Pakistan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Bangladesh, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon and Jordan (No Afghanistan)

I find it fascinating. It's a potentially good indication of the prevalence of the Internet (or at least Blogger) around the world. In the case of China, it's especially indicative: only one dot for a country that has more Internet users than any other and for a blog that mentions China in 22 (make that 23) posts.

All eyes on China

I got a request to blog more frequently. It very sweet and it made me smile but in order to do it, I’ll have to post more of my silly thoughts while I chew on those that surround my days and weeks and sometimes months, like what I’m thinking right now about China.

This month’s issue of National Geographic is all about China, every page. It's excellent. I love the timing of this magazine and I think they’re right on; in the very near future, the whole world is going to be looking at China. Not just the Chinese government that suppresses rights and imprisons those that speak out against it and not just the China that’s buying the world’s debt, investing in resources in Africa and South America and not just the China that’s hosting the Olympics.

I have yet to find someone who agrees with me but I’ll even go one further. Not only will the world be all about China and the Chinese people, soon, it will no longer be all about the United States. It’s already happening in conversations with friends, relatives and my parents. I can’t get into any conversation without someone bringing up what China is doing. All of a sudden, they’re in everyone’s country and everyone’s business.

There's a great article on WorldChanging about a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel at FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in Rome. Their presentation follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in Africa. The photos of Chinese running factories and building local economies and Chinese being taught by Africans in their classrooms are amazing. You can see all the photos from China's Wild West under stories, on Paolo Wood's website:


China is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. They are by far the most populous country, making up 20% of the world’s population. There are more people on the Internet in China than in any other country, including the U.S. They are expected to overtake us as the world’s largest economy in less than 10 years. Over 30% of the population call themselves religious and that number is growing. 45% of women say they don't want to give up their careers to have children.

They are the world leaders in manufacturing, and in a few short decades, they have grown a rich class and an enormous middle class with healthy appetites for domestic and foreign goods and resources. They have quickly embraced the West’s competition for success and all the stress and malaise that goes with it. They still cannot freely surf the Internet or speak their mind but those days are numbered. As they continue to embrace technology, art and imported culture, they’ll find themselves in a much more visible role in the world struggle for human rights.

Most Chinese in school are now studying English and their English speakers outnumber those in the United States. There’s a mass migration going on of people from the country to the city and with increased wealth and population density comes a frenzy of information sharing and a demand for more freedom. I predict that in the next few years China will have a cultural explosion, exporting and importing people and culture with the same voracity that they have adopted everything else.

China is dealing with the issues we’re all dealing with, except in all cases their situation is already more dire. They need to provide healthcare for the biggest baby boomer population in the world, a generation that has less children to provide for them due to the one-child policy. They have the highest statistic for air pollution related deaths, have built more mega dams than anywhere in the world, and have deforested and leveled mountains to the point of serious environmental erosion. They’re only now beginning to embrace archeological digs and animal conservation. They’re dealing with a rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor, massive urbanization, and a serious shortage of natural resources.

Natural disasters are a constant but this time the Chinese are starting to ask questions like why so many schools collapsed in the recent earthquake. We’re already seeing a comparison between how China handled their rescue efforts compared to the disasters in the rest of the world. The incredible level of humanitarian aid offered by regular citizens has put the government in an uncomfortable position. No longer a closed society, there are at least three Flickr groups with photos from the earthquake: china 512 earthquake, Sichuan Earthquake 2008 and Just The News (were you there? - if not, don't add!)

They’ve turned the spotlight on themselves by bidding to host the Olympics and I’m afraid it isn’t going off for a while. I predict that the era of all eyes on America is coming to an end. The question is, will American eyes remain closed to the outside world or will we begin to learn by observing others?

More protests please!

Last week, I was chatting with a friend about going to watch the Olympic Torch relay here in San Francisco. Following the protests in London and Paris, there were rumors of a similar reception here. I didn’t go, ultimately, because of the confusion over the route and because wasn’t sure what to make of the protests. While Skyping with a friend in Europe about it, he said “throw a stone for me.” Throw a stone? At whom? One of the runners? I can support boycotts. I know I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, I remember when we boycotted “Made in China” products and I don’t really recall what kind of human rights improvements China made to get off that list but I didn’t hear anyone complaining at the register of Target or heard anyone pressuring their favorite designers even though they’ve all set up shop in China or another country with much worse treatment of workers – and charging the same ridiculous prices.

I can support peaceful protest. After all, that’s what the Dalai Lama always preaches. We all know the torch relay is a huge media event and I fully support Free Tibet and Amnesty International using the coverage as a way to get their message seen and heard. But what I can’t understand is why the thing needs to be stopped: flame snuffed, athletes mobbed, bus blocked. Again, it’s not that I don’t support the causes; it’s just that the reason isn’t clear and as always I think from a marketing perspective, it doesn’t win you friends. Less informed Americans will just be baffled and defensive, even if they pay more attention it’s now going through a filter of confusion. “Why do Tibetans hate the Olympics?” someone is bound to think. But actually, I worry more about the Chinese. We have to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people just as we would expect others to do of us here in the U.S. The Chinese are very excited and proud to host the Olympics.

In San Francisco, a false relay route was published so no one could disrupt, or even witness the relay. What the heck? Isn’t the whole POINT is to support international solidarity and unity? Perusing photos on Flickr, it seems that only various protesters showed and the only thing they saw was each other. BBC news published several “man on the street” interviews with people in China to get their reaction. Their reactions are actually very balanced – “yes, we have problems but many people are misinformed about China and should take this opportunity for increased dialogue not shutting us out.” Hear, hear! They very aptly ask, what about the U.S. human rights violations? I have to raise my eyebrows at that and think, yeah, what about Guatanamo, Iraq, 1 in 35 adult black men in prison, the death penalty, depriving people of medical care, homicide, Native Americans, homelessness? We may not be beating monks or imprisoning writers but we’re certainly not perfect.

Yes, we should express ourselves. Yes, we should take a stand. Yes, we should protest and boycott whatever we don’t agree with. And yes, we should pay more attention to China but we should not feel that we are superior and we should consider the best way to being a dialogue with the people of China. Each and every one of us purchases items from China on a regular basis, so we always have the option to make a statement through boycott. It’s just not as sexy as laying down in front of a bus on national television.

In a couple of weeks, a defense contractor hired by the federal government, using funds from Homeland Security (read the Huff Post article!), is going to begin spraying the Bay Area to eradicate a harmless moth. This campaign is scheduled to continue for years despite protests from our representatives, expert etymologists, farmers and citizens, and despite the fact that the chemical being sprayed is not necessary and unsafe. Do you think any of the protesters from the torch relay will show up at City Hall on April 28 for the peaceful protest? No, I don’t think we should protest less, I think we should protest more.

I think I'm turning Chinese, I really think so

There are a couple of things I've been thinking about a lot lately - China and Christianity. They come up in conversation constantly and I really feel like these two monoliths will shape our global future more than anything besides global warming in the next fifty years. I've started several rambling essays on paper about one or the other, essays that never make it to the computer I think for the simple reason that I can't write on paper! Part of the generation that grew up on computers, typing is part of my thought pattern. It's kind of scary, really, but I can barely put two sentences together when I'm not typing. But I digress...

I won't pretend to know anything about China but the awareness of their significance in the world, and their potential threat to our future, is very real and something I hear expressed by people in causal conversation all the time. This is what blows me away: Nothing about what we used to hate/fear/oppose about China has changed. They still have gross human rights violations and they're still Communist. But they're very smart and they won our hearts through commerce. They catered to a greedy capitalist society, buying us for dirt cheap. In return, the Chinese got McDonald's, the Internet and cars. But it's a false world they've built, it looks like freedom but it's not. Their citizens are still monitored, imprisoned and killed for "anti-government activities." The Dalai Lama is one of their top terrorists, an enemy of the state who preaches peace and threatens the stability of the Chinese empire.

In 2007 though, instead of boycotting Chinese products like we did in the 80's, we'll be going there for the Olympics! We've allowed them to purchase our national debt, destroy their land, poison their rivers and still we encourage them to buy cars and live like us. Our president honors the Dalai Lama but doesn't take a photo with him after the Chinese threaten it will sour relations between the two countries. The argument is that China needs us as much as we need them but it doesn't stand up to logic. Twenty years ago we didn't need China at all so clearly the scale is not tipping in our favor. Rumor has it that Microsoft silenced a corporate blogger to satisfy the Chinese. As soon as the long arm of censorship can reach across the world to the US, we're doomed. The moment we start taking orders from the Chinese, the scale will have tipped...over.

Innovation starts on the inside

Wired and National Geographic’s cover stories this month are about biofuel. For every unit of energy used to produce ethanol from corn, it yields 1.3 units. Ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil and other South American countries, by contrast, yields 8 units. We can’t grow sugar cane in the Midwest, though, we grow corn. Corn and soy (used to make biodiesel - yielding 2.5 units) are now our two biggest crops.

The downside: It’s not cost efficient, it uses oil to produce and it gets fewer miles to the gallon than gasoline. The government has to subside it and we need to get clever about how to reduce the harmful emissions producing it creates. On the up side, it’s a step towards reducing our dependence on oil, it’s a boon for farmers and an even bigger boon for big companies that have invested in this technology.

But it only makes a dent in our energy production, like every other alternative source, and it’s a food product. We won’t be feeding it to cows or using it to make human food, it’s going to run our cars. People are starting to get worried that we’ll be using all our farmland to make fuel. What happens then? What happens when China and India do the same thing? China is already planning to pave over a lot of their farmland to accommodate their growing hunger for cars.

Is it possible to be so ignorant that we could literally starve ourselves by driving our food instead of eating it? Another article in National Geographic about emissions get nitty gritty about what we need to change and how fast it needs to change. The article ends with a note of hope but the rest of it is pretty grim. It says we need to change almost everything about our lifestyle, our economy, our government, and we'll have to do it practically overnight, to survive. When in the history of humankind have we ever witnessed that much change? Never, really, and that’s the real gist of the article. It’s possible but not likely.

I suggested to some friends that in the future I could see the west going to war with the east over resources, after we've made all these changes and they haven’t (I say we because I hope – ha ha ha – that the US will adopt the changes Europe has been making). Our water, air and food will be at stake and we might have to fight for it, not that it will make a difference. They thought it was a grim idea and didn’t like me for saying it so I’ll defer to the "optimistic" end of the National Geographic article:

In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of live? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively – and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.

Wired tends to be more optimistic, believing that technology will save us! (I love the description of Wired on Treehugger). Their article pins our hope on cellulose technology that (if we can develop it) will tap our energy from the tiny little plants that started this whole wonderful world. An enormous amount of money is being spent on developing those solutions - ones that don't require that we change our lifestyle. But I think in this case, it's not technology but our ability to innovate and change ourselves, that will save us.

Getting wired on cocktails

This weekend, I went for drinks one night and dinner another night with a co-worker and some of her friends. In an unprecedented series of moments, I got to reference my beloved Wired magazine with two people, actually involved in the issues, not just watching from the sidelines like me. The first was an attractive guy who had just returned from China. I had literally just told a friend of mine that it was unlikely that I would meet the kind of guy that would interest me, in a bar. He blew that theory out of the water in the first 15 seconds. “Why were you in China?” I ask, to make the kind of small talk that I know I’m supposed to make, not thinking it would lead to actual conversation. I don’t remember exactly what he said, something about going to scope out a project he might be working on, something to do with the environment. Oh, I say excitedly, “China is building a green city, on a wetlands” and I go on to describe in as much detail as I can recall, an article in Wired that I blogged about. Yeah, he says, that’s the company I’m hoping to work for, on that project specifically. So I get to hear about it, from someone who actually knows!

The next night, we met up again and this time my co-worker had brought another couple of friends, married to each other, both doctors. They were beautiful and nice and smart - the kind of people you fall in love with immediately. He’s a neurologist, she’s a dermatologist, but not the kind that gives fat injections and acid peels, unless you’re a burn victim or someone in an equally dire situation. She works in a hospital, helping people who really need it. I get to talking with the neurologist and I get to ask about all kinds of things I’m super excited about: Jared Diamond (who teaches at UCLA where my new friend went to medical school), Oliver Sacks (he worked with him at Columbia) and of course, Wired magazine! I mentioned an article I’d read about these electrodes that are surgically implanted in the brain to stimulate tiny nerves. They’re used to treat Parkinson’s and other diseases where drugs have been ineffective. I learned much more from the doctor, however, and it was more fascinating that you can imagine. He described himself as a mechanic, if the brain was the engine of a car, and said his job was to diagnose the problem and get the thing running again or running properly. He’s a technical person, not prone to the kind of work that involves a lot of guesswork or lack of precision. When I asked him how he chose neurology, he said it was the most intellectual of the medical sciences and he’s a thinker. A thinker working on brains, how apropos! So these little nodes attach to a nerve and are triggered, electronically, to stimulate on a regular pulse. They’re powered by a battery, which is connected by a wire. The wire runs down the inside of the neck, from the brain, to a place in the chest where this small battery that lasts about 12 years in implanted. In the chest!

I never imagined that reading Wired would make such interesting cocktail conversation. Either I’m moving in smarter circles or I’ve moved to San Francisco (or they're the same thing).

Pavement, it's what's for dinner

The three biggest issues of the next 50 years, as I see it, are clean drinking water, renewable resources and transportation. Although the rate of population growth has been on the decline since the late sixties (perhaps due to the women’s right to choose movement) the population is still increasing exponentially and is estimated to reach 10 billion worldwide by 2050, up from 6.6 million today.

The production for passenger vehicles is rapidly growing as well. Already half of the vehicles in the U.S. are SUVs and light trucks and, at this rate, it will be true worldwide by 2030. Increasing an estimated 9 million per year from 41 million in 2003, auto production is giving population growth a run for its money with the most demand coming from China.

While over half of the 539 million vehicles worldwide are registered in the U.S. (where there are 1.2 more cars than licensed drivers), China and other developing nations are anxious to catch up. Let’s do the math.

China has 1.3 billion people compared to 300 million in the U.S. and are projected to grow by 500 million people in the next 50 years. Their car ownership could easily triple that of the U.S. but unlike the U.S., China’s people and cropland share the same one third of the country’s land mass. Roads and freeways are typically built on farmland putting countries like China at risk of paving over their food supply. And pavement is permanent. As environmentalist Rupert Cutler once noted, “Asphalt is the land’s last crop.”

So why are our brightest minds working on transportation to space and stealth bombers that cost two billion dollars each? Why not spend that money building ways to move goods and people in a way that’s more attractive, efficient, enjoyable and better for the environment? I, for one, am tired of determining my social schedule by time spent in the car, sitting in traffic, looking at ugly pavement and wondering why most humans think they are capable of driving.

With the second highest population in America, The Greater Los Angeles Area has 18 million people over 500 square miles (compared to 18.8 million in the 330 square miles of The New York Metropolitan area). A patchwork of cities as dense as San Francisco and Paris, the majority of the population, jobs and businesses are clustered along the major corridors making the entire area (excluding the San Fernando Valley) dense enough for light rail.

Freeway expansion projects go on for years only to yield one or two more lanes and a UC Berkeley study showed 90 percent of new highway capacity fills up within five years of being built! Another new study showed that the only thing that keeps people off the roads is congestion. It seems like there’s never enough road, never enough parking, and never enough pavement. If our pavement were its own state, it would be the 24th largest at 61,000 square miles, beating out Georgia.

In the past 20 years the population of California’s metro areas increased 20 percent but the amount of driving increased 59 percent. We’re driving more because of the way we build our communities with affordable housing in one direction and jobs in another. In the years between 1950 and 1990, the population of urban areas grew by 92% but the land area used grew by 245%. Increased suburbanization has meant bigger houses, farther apart, taking up more farmland, requiring more roads and greater energy consumption. Suburbanites drive bigger cars and rack up many more miles.

Clearly, we have to think of something else. The solution, at least in Los Angeles, seems to be easy. The city was built around the streetcar. In the twenties, we had the largest electric trolley system in the country with 6,000 trains running on 144 routes in four counties. (If you want to know what happened to them, rent Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

Los Angeles has actually been piecing together a public transportation system over the last twenty years and our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is committed to joining existing rail and subway lines and building new ones. Even though only 6.6% of Angelenos take public transportation to work, it’s higher than the national average of 4.7%. Nationwide, 9 out of 10 people drive to work, 77% by themselves. For many, it’s still the easiest way to travel but it isn’t cheapest. Not for the driver, not for the city.

One study put the annual cost of owning and operating a vehicle at $7,000 - $10,000 per year. That doesn't take into account the subsidized costs: highway patrol, traffic management, police work on auto accidents and theft, street maintenance, parking enforcement, and "free" parking paid by higher rents, property taxes and lower wages. We’re starting to pay for the invisible costs as well: air pollution, loss of open space and habitat, global warming, war in the Middle East. Conservative estimates put the cost of those subsidies at 22 cents a mile. If we had to pay for them, we’d pay a gas tax of $6.60 per gallon!

Over the last decade, the fastest-growing cities are suburbs while industrial cities, once the biggest in the country, are shrinking. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Buffalo have steadily declining populations. New York and California are the only two major cities still growing, which is why a lot of cities are looking to Los Angeles for leadership on the mass transit issue.

But we’re still a long way off from a future where the majority of people use public transportation. As it is now, the buses use the same roads, take twice as long and are noisy as hell. We built a subway, but the most traveled east/west corridor has never been tunneled. If we’re really want to encourage drivers to use public transit, why are we digging under ground? Why not build light electric rail on the existing roads and highways, surrounded by trees and beautiful platforms for catching the train? Hey and while we’re at it, let’s build bike lanes along the same routes!

I got a request to send email to the governor about maintaining the budget for planning the high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles (an overwhelmingly obvious choice). Of course I sent it but then I wondered, why have we been PLANNING it for ten years? What's it going to take to get us into the future? Seriously, in every futuristic movie you've ever seen, were people taking mass transit or driving cars? Think about it.

Science, meet nature

I blogged a while back about an article in Wired detailing the new HD camera techniques used to capture the extraordinary footage in BBC's Planet Earth (watch clips here). I then noticed a curious trend. In every issue of Wired, there's an article on the same subject in the corresponding month's National Geographic.

In April, Wired published a column on disappearing fish reporting that 96% of all wild fish considered edible, are endangered. The amount of marine fish captured has remained virtually the same since 1995 despite increasingly aggressive tactics. To make up for the difference, and equal amount of fish is being raised on farms. The biggest change for the consumer is the kind of fish we're eating. Fish that are easier to grow like carp and tilapia (which can literally be raised in a bucket of water) are more prevalent. (Mmmm, me like bucket fish.)

That same month, National Geographic published a special report on the vanishing ocean dwellers. Sixty-six pages of photos and articles detailing the state of our oceans in an explosive mix of cruelty, hope and despair. 40 million sharks per year are killed, definned alive and then left to die to support the taste for sharkfin soup in Asia. Recently banned in some countries, heavy iron doors scrape the sea bed for trawling nets where 50-80% of the haul is discarded as "bycatch." Urchins, fish, rays, suffocate aboard the vessel before being thrown overboard. Longline fishing unintentionally traps loggerhead turtles, marine mammals and albatross which make up a 30% bycatch. Shrimp, cod and sole, the intended targets, are becoming harder and harder to find sending fishing boats further offshore for longer periods of time.

The majestic giant bluefin tuna, a fish that can live for 30 years, grow up to 12 feet in length and weigh 1,500 pounds, can dive a half mile to swim at a speed of 25 miles per hour. This large swimmer is easily tracked by sonar and helicopter. Spotters in the air call to boats to tell them where the tuna is traveling, they are captured and kept in offshore cages to be fattened for sushi markets before being shot and slaughtered. Five-million dollar boats are equipped with nets that can encircle 3,000 adult tuna. Caught while they are spawning, or before they can, the species is on the brink of collapse. International laws are weak and easily flouted, more than twice the legal limit of fish is being extracted from the sea.


While nearly two-thirds of the earth is ocean, only .01 percent is protected to 12% of the world's land and despite protection, recovery is slow if not impossible. A hundred years after a ban on hunting bowhead whales, among the largest and longest lived animals on earth, they are still endangered. Entire communities have been devastated by the sudden depletion of fish and in Africa fisherman sell what they catch to Europeans leaving locals to starve or purchase the remaining carcasses for food. Ironically, it was this article, rather than Wired's that illustrated how technology has almost single-handedly led to the ocean's exhaustion.

The next month, I read in National Geographic about factory cities in China that sprout up in a matter of months drawing thousands of workers from rural areas looking for work. Traveling performers come through town to entertain the amassing population and the government shows free outdoor movies in the streets. Within a year, middle-income families have moved into high-rise housing in the area built by razing hundreds of hilltops.

Yet it was Wired that reported on the world's first "green city" being built in China as an experimental response to the environmental devastation sustained by the country for the last sixty years. In a 1940 speech, Mao Tse-tung urged China to conquer nature in order to reach its industrial future. Since then 90% of the trees in some provinces have been razed. For decades, Chinese families smelted steel in their backyards until the untreated waste turned their rivers black. It wasn't until last year that the government calculated what the environmental damage was costing the country: 10% of their GDP or $200 billion a year. Unsafe drinking water, air pollution and vast deserts that have caused flooding and other damage, are the result.

The thrilling challenge of building the world's first eco-city belongs to the international engineering firm, Arup, and their newly recruited star designer who believes the proposed metropolis, Dongtan, "was a rare chance to demonstrate that growth could happen a different way." Elaborate calculations determine how high to build, how dense to populate and ultimately, how much land is green.

A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.

Next, the city needed green power. But the planning process grew complicated. A city is a huge mess of dependent variables. The right recycling facility can turn trash into kilowatts. The right power plant can convert waste energy into heat. The right city map will encourage people to walk to the store instead of drive. "These are things people don't normally plan together," Gutierrez says.

This month, both magazines feature articles on the Noah's Ark of seeds, the Svalbard seed vault. National Geographic reports that The Global Crop Diversity Trust is spearheading a project with funding from Norway to preserve up to three million different seeds from key plants. The mostly food seeds are being kept in an arctic vault for the day when humanity has wiped out the majority of life on this planet - a day fast approaching. While seed vaults already exist, they are incomplete, vulnerable to damage or mismanaged.

Wired details the technology used in this massive undertaking by laying them out like something from Ocean's 11. The vault is guarded by bight lights, motion sensors, cameras and guards in a control tower. At the end of a tunnel that bores 400 feet into a mountain, are two airlocked chambers and protected against fragmenting rock by a steel sheath. The shelves inside the vault are a third of a mile long and hold envelopes with unique serial numbers each containing 500 seeds protected by a five-layer composite material, housed in plastic boxes and chilled to 0 degrees Farenheit, preserving them for centuries. The "living institution" is meant to preserve the means to grow food. One study showed that of 8,000 crop varieties grown in the US in 1903 had dwindled to only 600 in 1983.

The collective consciousness has become so saturated in environmental issues that you can't do, think or say anything without wondering about its impact on the world. I was recently working on a little video timeline of the century for a friend and it occurred to me that things change very quickly. We can change them for the better but the concern is that without conscious effort to do so, we can also very quickly change them for the worse. In the words of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."