The true cost of everything

A friend of mine recently had to take her daughter to the emergency room for stitches. After the procedure, the doctor gathered up the metal utensils she'd used and threw them in the trash. My friend, a very environmentally conscious young lady, was horrified and questioned the doctor about it. "Yeah," she shrugged, "it's cheaper for us to throw them away than it is to sterilize them." How is this possible, my friend wondered? Surely there must be someone in the world that could use this metal. "Did it get recycled? I asked. She said it went right into the garbage, medical waste. "That shit gets buried," she said. Wow.

In this month's National Geographic is an article about "The real price of gold." This metal, that has nearly no uses other than ornamentation, has been soaring in price since 9/11. As the economy of the world becomes more uncertain, people up their hoarding of gold. The article says that all of the nuggets of gold in the world have been mined or are totally inaccessible. What's left is dust. One of the largest commercials mines in the world digs for particles of dust so small that 200 would fit on a pinhead. Technology has made it possible for man to separate these tiny particles from rock but at great cost to our environment.

On one island in Indonesia, a volcano, once 1,800 feet tall, is now a gold mine a mile deep. To mine one ounce of gold (the amount used for the average gold ring), 250 tons of rock have to be relocated. To accommodate that rock, hundreds of acres of virgin forests are razed. The chemical runoff is dumped into the ocean. The company that operates this mine pays the local government to offset the environmental damage but everyone knows that in 20 years, the gold will be gone and so will the funds flowing into their homes, churches, schools and hospitals. What will be left is total environmental devastation.

That doesn't even take into account the human devastation that these industries are causing already. 25% of the world's gold is mined by enterprising individuals who camp in mountains by the thousands without any sanitation. They pour buckets of mercury-tainted water into the rivers even as the deadly element cuts their own life short. I can't help but think that the reason it's cheaper to throw metal into a landfill in America is because the true cost is being absorbed by someone less fortunate. Only when the cost of this devastation reaches our shores will it be too expensive for us to waste.

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?

Intelligence is in the mind of the beholder

There’s a fantastic article in National Geographic this month about animal intelligence, which apparently is a pretty recent concept. Alex, an African Gray Parrot, knows that what’s the same between a green cup and a green key is their color and he knows that what’s different is their shape. Betsy, a Border Collie, knows 15 people by name and can link photographs with objects they represent. The male African Cichlid, a fish with a brain the size of a pea, will disguise itself as a female to steal food from another male’s territory. The Asian Elephant sees itself in a mirror and will touch a part of its head with its trunk when it sees a spot painted on it that doesn’t belong. The Ring-tailed Lemur can repeat arbitrary sequences and gets better each time, learning how to learn.

Does anyone else find it astoundingly arrogant that humans came up with the idea of intelligence, defined its characteristics and then proceeded to assign an abundance of it to ourselves and claim that other animals are merely responding to a series of instincts, not really thinking? Our brains are the biggest so we must be the smartest! We also decided that many of these dumb beasts also don’t experience fear and pain; a tragic miscalculation for most animals we come into contact with.

We’ve spent even less time wondering if plants have intelligence even though they literally transformed a ball of lava and toxic gas into a lush paradise, making it possible for all of us to live here. In fact, I’d say we’ve spent far more time and money looking for intelligence in outer space, on the desolate moon and the red hot Mars, than we have on our own planet.

I blame the Bible and its story of Eden that teaches people we are God’s special creatures and everything else is here for our exploitation. Again, isn’t it unbelievably arrogant to assert a single creation myth? Every civilization that’s ever lived has boasted one just as glorious and awe-inspiring, many not resembling the one in the Bible at all!

In a discussion with a friend yesterday about our religious upbringing – he’s Irish Catholic, I was raised an atheist – I told him that after years of exploration and experimentation, I decided that I believe in nature. Every living thing on this planet is made of DNA, a blueprint to create all living matter. We still know so little (and yet claim to know so much!) that we’ve deemed 80-90% of our own DNA as “junk.” Which means, in yet another arrogant move, that we don’t know what it does so it must not do anything. Also interesting is that some creatures that we consider far simpler are made up of a lot more DNA. (In their universe, they must think they’re smarter than us because they have more DNA).

That we all share this incredibly complex code is proof enough for me that we are all part of the same thing. There is overwhelming evidence that each living being’s presence and activity on this planet affects every other living being’s experience. We are not living ON this planet, we ARE this planet and this planet is all of us; it changes constantly and always has.

If we really are the most intelligent creatures, shouldn’t we be able to figure out a way to stop global warming? In fact, we should be able to at least agree that a) we have a considerable impact on this planet and everything on it and b) we have choices as to what that impact is. I don’t think the majority of people have accepted those things yet. If they believed in nature instead of God, maybe they would.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in one of my PopTech! lectures talks about what he calls "epistemic arrogance," which describes how we focus only on what we know and what we think we know and ignore everything else, which as it turns out, is most things. It's the reason that we are lousy as forecasting everything. Our world, our brains, even our own bodies are far too complex for us to fully comprehend.

In another really good PopTech! lecture by Dan Gilbert, he says we aren’t equipped mentally to deal with global warming. He says we have an enormous capacity for change and can mobilize against a common enemy with swift force. The problem in this situation is defining the common enemy.

These are his four reasons that we will fail to do so:
1) It doesn’t have a human face. We’re obsessed with humans; we see their faces in clouds and other abstract objects. Global warming isn’t human enough.
2) We aren’t morally repulsed by it. It’s bad, it’s yucky but it doesn’t literally make us sick the way abortion, torture, the death penalty, child abuse and gay marriage do to some. Those are hot issues for a reason.
3) We tend to think about the future but live in the present. We can't react to that is going to happen in the same way as what is happening now, like ducking when someone throws a baseball your head. We have the capacity to recognize future threats but still lack the brainpower to react to them.
4) We react to relative change and, ironically, environmental changes aren't happening fast enough. We have enough time to adjust and think that drying coral, trees, and animals are the way things are.

President Bush had all of those things on his side when he took us to war:
1) A human face – Osama bin Laden
2) Moral revulsion – “freedom haters,” people who oppress women, blow themselves up and train kids to be killers
3) Present threat – 9/11
4) Relative change – laws passed to tap our phones, get our library records, detain people without cause, long lines at the airport

This ties back into my earlier post about how we just need better marketing and PR for global warming. But first, I might have to start the church of nature and start proselytizing!

Kingo the lowland gorilla

Last week I had to make a trip to L.A. I took my National Geographic on the plane and I was reading an article about the Western Lowland Gorilla, a truly magnificent beast. Kingo has a family of ten, four “wives” and their children. He spends a lot of time to himself, sitting in a swamp sometimes for hours eating the tiny green roots of a water plant. His kids rough house while their mothers nap and together and independently they roam an area about 6 miles in diameter, looking for fruit to eat or a good place to nap and play, traveling over a mile a day. One morning the research team found them 100 feet up in a tree having their breakfast!


The article said we didn’t know much about them because it takes years for a human to gain their confidence enough to observe them. Despite their size, it took a team of four local trackers to find Kingo and his family but it took six years for Diane Doran-Sheehy (responsible for saving this piece of the forest that Kingo and his family live in) to originally find and name them.

Then I came across this sentence, “Even though all gorillas found in zoos around the world are western gorillas, little is known about their behavior in the wild.” I just started weeping, right there on the plane. The image of this complex and incredible animal in a concrete cage, without his family, without his swamp and trees, without his six miles to roam and wander, without the peace and privacy to take his daily nap, just broke my heart. We don't even know enough about his behavior in the wild to even ATTEMPT to replicate his environment. How, I ask myself, how do we justify that? I had to force myself to try to think of something else, anything that would keep me from crying.

A few days later I was reading an article about the natural science museum finally opening this year in Golden Gate park. It's an impressive and beautiful building with a living green roof and solar panels, it's being touted as a highly responsible ecological building and yet, they are going to feature 38,000 animals in their aquariums. Granted they're growing coral and using local seawater but still, a space the size of this building must surely be much smaller than their complex and vast natural habitat, the ocean. I understand that we want to educate people about animals but I just haven't seen the data to support the theory that animals in captivity on display have helped any in the wild. By my count, the wild animals of this world are vanishing at an extremely alarming rate.

Then I was in Berkeley with a friend of mine. We passed an older hippie guy on the street with a clipboard. He was wearing the kind of socks that have toes in different colors, and Birkenstocks. He was collecting signatures for a farm bill; I know the one because I’ve already signed it and because I’m a Humane Society member. I thanked him and walked on. Another guy passed him and I heard the hippie ask him to sign a petition for a bill that would allow farm animals to move around in their cages. The guy just shook his head and moved on.

About an hour later, we were in a furniture store while my friend was looking for a bed. I heard the hippie in my head asking for help so the animals could “move around in their cages.” It made me sick, I thought it’s like asking for less torture, more humane captivity, the irony is ridiculous. I can’t believe we have to fight for this, that we have to try to convince people to care enough to not torture their animals before they kill them. I was overwhelmed with grief and had to leave the store. I couldn’t stop crying and my friend didn’t even believe me when I said it was because of the animals.

A few weekends ago, I almost volunteered to be that person collecting signatures. Can you imagine? What would someone do if they didn’t sign the petition and I started crying? I wonder. So today I was reading an interesting article in The New York Times Magazine about morality. The author says that we are genetically moral creatures. That we universally believe in certain principles that are possibly biologically motivated to keep us alive. Universally, we feel that it is wrong to harm others, we believe in fairness, we value community and loyalty, we respect authority and we revere purity. Where it gets tricky, however, is in the ranking and weight of those morals.

There are instances, for example, where certain cultures allow harm to those who are considered impure. Or where fairness is denied to those who disrespect authority. The upholding of these morals can be wildly divergent even if the basic motivation is the same. Liberals, for example, tend to rank fairness much higher than purity or loyalty. Also very interesting, was the fact that certain behaviors cycle in and out of morality.

Smoking has become morally bad since the emphasis on second-hand smoke whereas getting a divorce is more or less accepted as a fact of life. And certainly we have widened the net of who deserves humane treatment as time goes on. Slavery, once an acceptable economic practice, is now reviled pretty much the world over. I have a dream, in the words of our Martin Luther King, Jr. that someday we’ll consider keeping an animal in a cage as barbaric as selling a man on an auction block.

A McKinsey survey published in The Economist showed that out of 15 major issues of the next five years, the environment is number 1 globally but the top issues after the environment are safer products, retirement benefits, health-care benefits and affordable products. These are pretty much the same things we've always been concerned about. Ethically produced products is near the bottom of the list and I assume that the welfare of animals falls in that category. So we want to protect the environment, meaning that we don't want to die, but aren't really concerned about everything else dying? I think we feel that we can't care about everything, that we have to pick our battles.

So I’ve learned that there isn’t anything wrong with me and there isn’t anything wrong with everyone else for that matter. It’s just that our moral barometers are all set differently. Looking at my five spheres of morality, by far the largest would be harm, followed by purity, which I think is where my love of nature comes from. The spheres of fairness, loyalty and authority are there but much smaller. If I had to choose between having money for retirement and seeing animals roam free, I'm afraid I'd choose the animals over myself.

Scaling the walls

On Christmas day, a Siberian tiger escaped its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and attacked three teenage boys, killing one, before police shot and killed it. The zoo claims the teen and his friends were throwing things, harassing the tiger, and had evidence of drugs in their car. But the real concern seems to be whether the walls should be higher; clearly the public isn’t safe around a caged wild animal.

Yesterday, the paper reported that since the attack, in two separate incidents, a 600-pound polar bear scaled the wall of her enclosure and nearly escaped and a snow leopard, while being moved between enclosures, chewed a 4-inch hole in the mesh cage and stuck its head and paw through. The zoo administrator denied these reports as escape attempts or anything to be worried about. Of course, they mean that we don't have to worry about ourselves. We should still be worried about the animals.

Most of the animals that people like to see in zoos are mammals. Mammals are the only species that need touch from other mammals to survive. Our social structures are built around that touch – how and when and who can touch us. These majestic animals that we love to look at - gorillas, tigers, lions, elephants and polar bears – have incredibly complex social structures like our own. Think about your life. How many people you see on a daily basis, how many you talk to, how many are your friends and your family. Think about how many miles you travel, all the different kinds of foods you eat and the places you go and look at.

Now imagine that you instead you spent your whole life in an apartment with one person you don’t even know and might not even like. Your keepers expect you to mate and have children with that person! Should you actually like this person enough to do so, it's very probable that they'll take your child or sell you to another zoo. They feed you the same thing every day. You never leave, you never see anyone different, you weigh twice as much as you do now, and you sleep all the time because you’re depressed.

Now imagine that six days a week visitors came to look at you. They yell at you, pound on your windows, take pictures of you and sometimes throw things. They want you to do something entertaining, to make them laugh or smile but they get to leave and you will always be there. Would you regard that life as anything but torture? Wouldn’t you also scale a wall or chew a hole through your cage and attack someone? Wouldn’t you do anything you could to get out of that situation?

I have said before that PETA is too extreme but on this issue, I agree with them one hundred percent. Zoos are pitiful prisons and they should be closed. All of them. The position of the Humane Society, whom I normally support, is pathetic and contradictory:

The Humane Society of the United States strongly believes that under most circumstances wild animals should be permitted to exist undisturbed in their natural environments. However, we recognize the widespread existence of zoos and acknowledge that some serve a demonstrable purpose in the long-term benefit of animals, such as the preservation and restoration of endangered species, and the education of people to the needs of wild animals and their role in ecosystems. [Emphasis mine]

But then they go on to say that not only is it impossible to simulate an animal's natural environment, only 10% of facilities are accredited to humane standards - and even that doesn't ensure humane treatment! Their focus is to work for better treatment of animals in zoos. It reminds me of the tobacco companies who, when their sales are dropping, ask how they could get people smoking more and never question whether they should even be making cigarettes. That's what we should be asking here, why are there zoos?

Zoos fail at everything they claim to do. They don't educate. Where's the education is seeing an animal in a cage? It's not going to do anything it does in the wild and people don't want to learn anyway, they want to be entertained. Zoos don't preserve species. Even if they breed endangered species, those animals can never be released into the wild because if they're raised in captivity, they aren't really wild animals! In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond says that the animals that are domesticated are domesticated because it was possible, because it was easy. Wild animals are not meant to be raised by humans.

How many people, I wonder, after learning that an animal they've seen in the zoo is endangered, like the Siberian Tiger that killed the teenager, go home a write a check for preservation, or find out what they can do to help that species, get involved or write a letter? Are people really more concerned about poaching and encroachment and loss of habitat when they've just seen a majestic animal pacing in a cage like a creature that's lost its mind? Clearly it only sends a message that it's acceptable to torture animals.

"But the kids LOVE the zoo!" No, kids don't love zoos, they love animals. They come out of the womb loving animals but they have to be taught to love the zoo. Whenever I’ve gone with my nephew, we spend more time trying to get him excited about the exhibits than anything else. “Look Jonathan, look over here!” we yell while he seems perfectly fine to look at the plants, climb on a rock or watch other people.

Our pets are treated ten times better than these animals. They're domesticated for one thing, so human company is something they choose and enjoy. (Except for some states like North Carolina that allow ownership of wild animals including tigers.) They get to eat all different kinds of foods, or whatever food they want. They get out into the world, get to socialize with other animals, get love and affection and new experiences. Even so, we've all seen what happens when a dog is tied up and neglected. They're mean, they bark and bite and attack. Why? Because it's inhumane to restrict an animal's movement and deprive them of social interaction. Even domesticated animals have been known to escape from the slaughter house.

So I find it really sad that people love zoos. A Google search of "I love zoos" turned up 225,000 results while "I hate zoos," only 26,400. Ten times more people find the idea of building bigger walls and restricting the animals even more to be preferable over closing the zoo altogether. We put people in prisons as a punishment but what did the animals do to us? I say if you really like animals, boycott the zoo, donate to WWF, watch animal shows like Planet Earth, buy your kids a subscription to National Geographic Kids and take them hiking where you can see wild animals in their own habitat.

Here's the way kids should enjoy lions!

A place worth fighting for

I've been asked by so many people since I've moved here why I gave up acting. They ask the question as if talking about something I loved to do and got to do all the time but just grew tired of, like drawing. In Los Angeles, no one asks you why you're giving up acting, and I doubt any really believes you until you move away. See, it's not ACTING that anyone gives up, it's the PURSUIT of acting, which is really a completely different animal.

The pursuit of acting is like gambling. It requires a huge investment, over a long period of time with very poor odds that it will ever pay out. The more money and support an actor has from their family (and you'd be surprised to learn how many are being supported by husbands, wives and parents) the better their chances. They can make more bets, bigger bets and can afford to stay in the game longer. But that doesn't take into account the enormous emotional toll being in the game takes.

Some don't have the courage to play at all and just sit on the sidelines waiting for someone to discover them, or for the right moment. Those who do throw in their chips, eventually win but the wins are usually small and only justify the playing. If you gamble $50 in an hour but win $5 back, you keep playing because you've proven that you CAN win. I remember thinking it was funny when I first met someone in L.A. who described herself as a recovering actress. I had no idea what she meant.

People who haven't lived it find it to be funny and I guess it is in an ironic sort of way. At its best, it's exhilarating. An entire town of people with stars in their eyes, singing, dancing and acting their hearts out day after day, hoping to hit the jackpot. At it's worst, it's a town of junkies so desperate for a fix that they'll do anything to get it. So surrounded by their own kind that they don't notice their condition. The masses of those who accomplish nothing are so thick that a couple of lines on a little watched TV show for a few hundred bucks are enough to garner great accolades and envy from one's friends.

I "quit acting" because I couldn't afford to play any more. It just wasn't fun. Those little victories, a few bucks after a year of gambling for two lines on a TV show, were depressing instead of thrilling. And the promise of bigger fortune seemed more and more like the bright lights, air conditioning and lack of windows at the casinos in Vegas that keep you gambling all night because you lose track of time. How much time was I willing to lose for this jackpot?

So around the same time that I was fielding this question from well-meaning new friends, I read an article in National Geographic. I love that magazine for publishing an article around Christmas about what a disaster Bethlehem is and about how few Christians are left in the birthplace of Jesus. One family that's leaving has been there since before the birth of Christ and can trace their ancestors to the Bible! The ones that have stayed describe themselves as punching bags in between Israel and Palestine.

The Israelis talk about their children tucking their legs under them on the bus to keep from being blown off like a school friend of theirs, or finding their teenagers bludgeoned to death in a cave. The Palestinians complain of a twenty foot wall that divides their city, and of two-three hours lines they must wait in to be allowed to get to the other side and tend their own land. Encroachment, violence, bankruptcy, and more violence and yet when asked why they don't leave, they say "because I love it," or "because this is where I belong."

It's amazing to me that "place" can have such a draw. I couldn't help but make the comparison to Hollywood. I know it's not the same, I know actors aren't getting their legs blown off in Hollywood and yet, despite so many perils, so many obvious reasons to leave, to go somewhere else, to do something else, they don't. Thousands of people from all over the world move to Hollywood every day to pursue their dream and while some of them eventually leave, many never leave. They just can't. No matter what humiliation or poverty they suffer, no matter how they are taken advantage of, they still love it. Even celebrities, the lottery winners, who can afford to leave - Gene Hackman lives a secluded life in New Mexico, Clint Eastwood runs a ranch in Carmel - still, overwhelmingly stay in L.A. They're as much a part of the game as anyone. They just high-rollers now - the stakes are higher and they're treated a hell of a lot better while they're winning.

A different kind of animal lover

This friend of mine wanted to set me up with a guy she thought I might like. A cute Midwesterner with a great sense of a humor and a sweet “aw shucks” demeanor but, she stalled; there’s something else. She laughed nervously and a slew of dreadful attributes ran through my brain: he used to date men, he’s terrible in the sack, or he has a psycho ex-wife and two kids. “He’s a hunter,” she said, waiting for the vegetarian’s horrified reaction. “Oh!” I said, “I have no problem with hunters.”

I actually, weirdly, have a lot of respect for them. The main reason that I’m vegetarian is as a protest against factory farming and the cruelty and disgusting toxicity associated with the commercial raising of animals, the over fishing of the oceans and reckless destruction of nature in pursuit of profits. The second reason is because I love animals and think that anyone who eats meat should be able to raise it, kill it and prepare it. I couldn’t. With our level of technological development, we have the ability to eat better than any generation prior. I am vegetarian because I have a choice.

I surprise even myself sometimes with my seemingly contradictory beliefs. I’m part of what's referred to in Applebee’s America as the Tipping Tribe because I hold mixed beliefs. Take the quiz for yourself! But I had this conversation years ago with a guy who bow-hunted elk. He described to me how difficult it is to do, and the passion for hunting required to do it successfully impressed me. While these hunters might mount the head of their kill on their wall, they also eat nearly the entire animal. They’re connected at the purest level to the value of the animal’s life, experiencing where food comes from more than other meat eaters. They are aware of the seasons and our affect on nature and the populations of the animals they hunt. Compare that to the person eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger for lunch everyday because it’s cheap and easy, with no awareness of the low quality of meat they’re eating and of the kind of life that animal had before becoming their meal.

Of course there are people who shoot animals for fun or kill animals in cruel ways for sport, but I think of a hunter as someone closer to nature than most of the population, someone with the discipline to track an animal for days at a time and with a love of animals that while different from mine, is no less strong. In this month’s National Geographic, an article describes how the conservation of public land is in jeopardy partly because of the lack of the new generation's interest in and appreciation for hunting. You see, hunters contribute billions of dollars, to ensure the preservation of natural lands and help maintain a balance in species when other human factors cause them to go out of whack.

I knew that Theodore Roosevelt dedicated millions of acres of land in his presidency as National Parks but didn't know he was inspired by a hunting trip to Yellowstone. He believed it was critical to ensure the future of the magnificent animals he liked to hunt. Today, Yellowstone is still home to bison, grizzlies, wolves, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, bobcats and moose and hunters have always played a role in maintaining the balance of these populations. Now how could I have a problem with that? It goes back to the fact that I tend to look at things as a whole and the world is messy, it isn't black and white. It's like my views on PETA. Someone needs to have the laser focus they have in protecting animals because that's how things get done, but it's the sum of the parts that makes the world go round.

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.

Erupting at the speed of sound

National Geographic continues to be the coolest most relevant magazine to what's actually going on in our world. I swear, news and TV shows just seem flip and meaningless compared to the soulful exploration of National Geographic. Growing up, I was fascinated by it because it took me to distance lands that I wanted to visit, to the highest peaks and the lowest depths of the ocean, places that I could never visit. Then starting in the nineties, it seemed like every article was about pollution, over-population and other plights of our time. It made me sad and I felt our beautiful world was coming to an end and realized, I had only enjoyed it on paper.

I still wish I had chosen a career that enabled or required worldwide travel as I am still fascinated by other cultures and countries. But I have been pleased to discover that National Geographic is again inspiring me although, and maybe this says more about me than the magazine, it's a more mature relationship. The articles still celebrate the human spirit and beauty of nature within the context of a modern world - but in a less abrasive way - as if we're all better suited to digest these complex issues.

Last month, I read that Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history and that not even a "massive and endless national commitment" to the safety of New Orleans is enough to secure it. The area has always been environmentally vulnerable, it is put under water about every eleven years. The letter from the editor suggests that it's foolish for anyone to live there, foolish for the government to spend money trying to keep people there and wouldn't we all be better off if they paid people to start anew somewhere else and let nature reclaim the wetlands?

This month, the magazine ran an awesome article about Naples and the area surrounding Mt. Vesuvius, home to about the same number of people as the New Orleans area. There have been seven eruptions over the last 25,000 years, a frequency far less than that of devastating hurricanes in New Orleans, but each blast has destroyed all life in the area for several hundred years.

Scientists say the area should expect another blast any day. There is no way to predict it before it happens. There is no way for an area of that size to be evacuated safely. There is no way to survive it. And yet a thriving population continues to live in the shadow of and on the slopes of the deadliest volcano in the world with the faith that they will survive. The article is worth reading for the description of how a blast like that will unfold, a cataclysmic event equal to a nuclear explosion. Here the government, instead of spending money to build artificial protections, pays people to leave.

The pressure building from below will blow a hole in the mountain that will hurl "100,000 tons a second of superheated rock, cinders, and ash into the stratosphere," breaking the sound barrier and causing a sonic boom. This liquid rock will shoot 22 miles in the air, far higher than cruising altitude for commercial jets, and spreading out like an umbrella before flying back to earth at 95 miles an hour.

Then an avalanche of debris will explode sideways from the volcano sending a cloud of powder and ash outward, a "hot, choking wind, advancing at about 240 miles (386 kilometers) an hour" at a temperature of 900°F (482°C). If it passes quickly, and your clothing and flesh aren't vaporized, you can survive the heat for a few seconds. But you'll certainly suffocate on the fine powder in the air which will accumulate up to "65 feet (20 meters) deep at a distance of three miles (five kilometers) from the crater to about ten inches (25 centimeters) thick at a distance of 15 miles (24 kilometers). Eight inches (20 centimeters) of ash is enough to cause modern roofs to collapse."

Anyone or anything left will be washed away by the rivers of mud created by liquid ash and thunderstorms. Volcanologists estimate that an eruption nearly four thousand years ago unleashed that cycle of destruction six times in a 24-hour period. I don't know, it kind of makes me laugh to think that we spend so much time devising ways to inflict that kind of damage on each other when nature is happy to do it for us.

We live in a malarious world

I was reading the new National Geographic at my last chiropractor appointment today. After six months of treatment, my neck is now 14mm off center. Normal is 5-10mm and when I started, I was at 20mm. “We live in a malarious world,” I replied when Dr. Adam asked me what was new in National Geographic. I remember reading about malaria several years ago in the magazine. It said then that a minute amount of DDT would save hundreds of thousands of the million Africans now dying from the disease every year but because of the ban, it had become nearly impossible to procure.

In the 1930's millions of cases of malaria had been recorded in the United States, mostly in the humid south. In 1948, a Swiss chemist created a compound called DDT that was nothing short of a miracle. Microscopic amounts could kill and continue to kill malarial mosquitoes for months, and it was cheap. In 1955, the World Health Organization launched a program to eradicate the disease worldwide in ten years. More than a billion dollars were spent and it was possibly the most elaborate international health initiative ever undertaken.

In the United States, it had already been wiped out. Windows were screened, swamps were bulldozed, wetlands drained and sprayed with DDT and everyone had access to a doctor and treatment. In addition, the species of mosquito transmitting it preferred cows over humans. The WHO program achieved some success, virtually destroying it in Brazil, the Caribbean, South Pacific, Europe and Asia. But this intelligent parasite persisted in the deep tropics and the program was abandoned in 1969. It immediately roared back to life in India and Sri Lanka and although it had never been abated in Africa, the ban of DDT due to overuse, caused incidences there to triple.

The malaria parasite is one of the world's oldest diseases. It's believed that it afflicted dinosaurs! It attacked animals long before there were men and affects mice, birds, snakes, bats, flying squirrels and monkeys. It has played a role throughout history, possibly killing Alexander the Great, weakening the armies of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, and ending the life of Dante, the Italian poet. It afflicted so many in Washington D.C. including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, that one physician proposed erecting a giant wire screen around the city. A million soldiers in the civil war died of it. In fact, some scientists guess that as many as half of everyone who has ever lived on the planet, died of malaria. It devastates countries and economies, killing and weakening entire populations. A survivor of malaria will suffer its effects their entire life.

There has never been a vaccine for a parasite. Viruses and bacterias, yes, but the polio virus for example has only 11 genes compared to malaria's 5000. It is a complex and rapidly evolving organism built to multiply at astronomical rates, destroy everything and mutate to resist drugs. After decades of neglect, people with money have started to care again about malaria. It now threatens more people than ever, half of the world's population. Three thousand children die of the disease every day and even with the hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Bill Gates to help eradicate what he has called “the worst thing on the planet” and 1.2 billion pledged by the Bush Administration, the allies of malaria continue. Lack of education, limited access to health care, the constant threat of war, and a weak infrastructure present formidable challenges to distributing prevention techniques and treatments.

Ninety-five percent of the malaria deaths are caused by the most virulent of the four species. It attacks the brain and does so with such speed that it can literally kill overnight. Even victims who are lucky enough to survive, likely do so with permanent neurological damage. Ninety teams around the world are working on some aspect of a vaccine but only one company is dedicated to it. Its CEO, Stephen Hoffman, has spent the thirty-four years of his life in this pursuit. In 1984, a headline in The New York Times read “MALARIA VACCINE IS NEAR” in response to the success of the company Hoffman then worked for. In 1991, the paper's headline read “EFFORT TO FIGHT MALARIA APPEARS TO HAVE FAILED.”

It isn't likely that this millions of year old parasite will go easily but we must not give up the fight. Global warming has increased the range of the malarial mosquito, increasing the temperature and allowing it to live in places once too cold. There are three things we have to combat malaria: Nets (to prevent bites), treatment drugs and DDT (to kill the mosquitoes).

Here's what we can do: Donate to organizations that provide bed nets and other supplies to malaria-ridden countries. Malaria No More and Nothing But Nets are two such organizations. And purchase the hip (Red) products that support Global Fund which fights AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, the world's three deadliest diseases.

An underground forest

I'm sorry for the absence of regular posts. The job hunt has taken most of my time and zapped my creativity. It's been an interesting, enlightening and at times, treacherous search. I'll write more about it later. Today I was reminded of something else I wanted to write about.

Something that I am very keen on is perspective. Nothing is more fascinating to me than the powerful and intensely personal idea of perspective. No one sees any one thing the same way. There are very few absolutes in this world. Einstein theorized that we don't even experience time the same way. I love anything that makes me experience this shift in perspective. An article, a book, a movie, a photograph, a trip, a relationship - all of these things have at one time profoundly revealed a new way of experiencing my reality.

There was an article in National Geographic a few months ago about the prairie in the Flint Hills of Kansas. A pull quote reads "See the tallgrass prairie for itself, and you begin to suspect that grasses are what hold this world together." I love how the quote doesn't read "see the prairie for yourself" it says "itself." The vastness of plains belies the hidden complexity of this vital ecosystem. It reminded me of the Planet Earth episode on The Great Plains.

"The plains of our planet support the greatest gatherings of wildlife on earth," says David Attenborough in his delicious accent. "At the heart of all that happens here is a single living thing, grass. This miraculous plant covers a quarter of all the lands of the earth...and feeds more wildlife than any other plant."

The article starts with looking over the plain, what do you see? The answer might be nothing. The reason that grass is almost impossible to kill is because it lives under the ground with roots reaching up to eight feet below the soil. Grazing and fire are a natural part of the lifecycle of grasses, clearing away debris and allowing more light to warm the soil, fueling growth. While our instinct is to look out over a plain, to actually see the plain, you have to look down.

"Imagine the prairie upside down - the leaves and stems growing downward into the soil and the roots of all these species growing skyward. You are suddenly walking through a dense, tenacious thicket of roots. The horizon is gone because you are over-ears in plant fibers, some spreading and slender, some tall, with strange bulbous growths on them. It is as though you were walking through a forest of veins and capillaries, each species finding a different niche - a different height, a different strategy - in the competition for resources."

"The tallgrass prairie also reminds us how we should think about the life that surrounds us. Our old habits of seeing find in all of this a familiar simplicity, the kind you push past on your way to a more human future. But in the ancient prairie...there is a new way of seeing waiting to be found."

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."

From the gut of a kangaroo (and other ridiculous ideas)

I love a good burger as much as anyone, even though as a former vegetarian and current animal rights supporter I feel terribly guilty about even the little mostly farm-raised beef that I do eat. The fact is, beyond the whole "cows have feelings and are really cute and the way we treat them is horrific" argument, there are many more economic and environmental reasons not to eat beef.

A vegan ex-roommate of mine has no particular soft spot for animals but boycotts animal products because a) killing is avoidable and unnecessary (and as we continue to evolve into more humane creatures, might be wrong) and b) the industries of producing animals for consumption is both wasteful and damaging to our environment.

In both the June 2007 issues of National Geographic and Wired, there appear small articles that reference problems created by cattle. I use the term cattle to denote herds raised for consumption rather than a cow here and there that an individual farmer or landowner might keep. And yet, neither article even hints at the obvious solution, let's stop raising cattle.

In National Geographic, the problem is the black-footed ferret (which is also very cute). A popular pet in some states, this is North America's most endangered mammal. There are less than 1,000 in existence and they live in the Badlands of South Dakota. Now I know the people of South Dakota have got it rough. A former co-worker from there has told me about the hard times her ranching family has come upon.

However, here we have a curious chain of events - perhaps caused by global warming - that affects our subsistence on cattle that in order to maintain will require even more tinkering. There's a drought in South Dakota so less grass is growing. The cattle have less grass to eat and are competing more now with the prairie dog, who also eats the grass. Ranchers want to poison the prairie dogs but guess who needs to eat them to survive? The cute little ferret!


Wired's story presents a much more serious problem. Cows produce 300 lbs. per day of methane gas, each, by burping. Methane is 20x worse for the atmosphere than CO2 but dissipates almost immediately. All we have to do to stop the damage is stop the methane.

The solutions proposed sound like the top ten list on Letterman:
1) The Aussies are working to extract a bacteria from the gut of the kangaroo, who also eats grass but doesn't produce as much methane, and inject it into the cow.

2) A California inventor came up with a "gas mask" that the cows would wear containing methane-consuming microbes.

3) We could put (yet even more) additives in their food, this one shown to cut methane by 20% but also causes cancer and is expensive.

4) Australia and New Zealand are already working on a "burp vaccine" to eliminate the methane producing bacteria in the cow's gut.

5) Canada proposed carbon credits (the "politically palatable" version of an earlier methane tax) for ranchers. Not sure how this one works...

Now, take the methane gas the cows are making and the effect it has on global warming and go back to the National Geographic story. See? The cows are making the grass dry up but now we're going to kill some animals that will in turn kill even more animals so these animals that we're going to kill have something to eat. Is it just me or is that totally nuts?