Declining Insect Populations - Spell Doom?

Bug Populations Are In Peril

 We may not like 'em but we can't do without 'em. There's something terribly essential about 'em.
-- apologies to the Muppet Show for the damage to their lyrics.

Bug populations are declining. Of that there's no doubt. Thirty years ago when people started muttering alarm about amphibian population decline, it occurred to me that as a kid decades earlier, I'd used grasshoppers as a fishing bait because fish loved them - and where I fished, there were also frogs. . .

At the time of coming to this realisation, I was again fishing, this time in a seaside beach. One of the places I fished as a kid was also seaside, and also had a freshwater river feeding a handful of small lakes and pools before finally joining the oceans, and this place was similarly at a river mouth with small lakes and entirely similar climate and vegetation. It was however a river that a capital city sat astride. And there was a real paucity of insects. 

I reasoned that where there were freshwater fish there were freshwater frogs, and where there were grasshoppers there were also other insects - and both fish and frogs found a lot of their protein from insects. I reckoned that if you found out what was killing grasshoppers and other bugs, you'd fix the frog decline, and I saw no - zero - discussion about insects anywhere I looked. 

How had these insect populations shrunk so much in twenty years? Was it climate change, or was it because of the city producing city toxins and byproducts? 

Turned out it was both. I headed out farther and farther on either side of the city and found what seemed to be clean environments similar to my childhood idyll, and where once I'd been able to swing a butterfly net and be sure of catching one or more grasshoppers as they startled into the air, now I had to spend ten - fifteen minutes to startle a 'hopper and then hand catch them. 

TBH I went farther afield because I liked the odd feed of fish and the city beaches and rivers were always over-fished - but IF I caught a 'hopper I discovered that I always had success. So I was bot in search of more fish and more insects, and not finding as many insects. And I began to get an inkling of why. . .

Out came the maps and - sure enough - the places that had the least insects had intensive farming upstream of them. Back then, market gardens tended to cluster close to their markets (well duh) and that probably meant that silt and pesticides would be flowing into the waterways, down to the coast - and insects too need water. I had no equipment to test the hypothesis, also I had a day job and family obligations and a social life so I could only plan trips a few times a year and take guesses at the grasshopper population. 

For some reason I tended to think that grasshoppers were a good indicator of insect populations and maybe they were. I swear my interest in them wasn't only for use as bait, I actually fished rarely in those days anyway, and as an adult I could afford proper bait.

I wrote a letter to the editor at some newspaper or other - it's so far back I really can't remember - and it vanished never to be seen again nor even replied to. This was back in the days before the Internet, and most newspapers didn't use BBS netmail, so good old 'stick-a-stamp-on-and-post-it' snail mail was the acme of communications. After wasting 12c on a stamp I was blowed if I was going to waste more money on a trunk call to follow up and ask why. And so one of my first acts of climate activism disappeared down the plughole of editorial apathy. . .

But to me the evidence was beyond reasonable doubt, our activity was poisoning fresh and sea waters, reducing the numbers and average ages of fish populations, drastically reducing the numbers of insects, and I did try to mention the insect issue as often as I could reasonably work it into conversation without being labelled a conspiracy theory style nutcase.

Grashoppers were 'insect hipsters' they vanished before it was cool to.

But Bugs ARE a Vanishing Population

Okay - this article has just rattled my cage again, this time in a 'tolja so!' kind of a way. It talks about how the "...combination of climate change and heavy agriculture..." are taking their toll on insect life. I'm inclined to agree with them but - by making it sound as though agricultural areas and climate change were the only regions affected by and being drivers of the catastrophe, they minimise the problem. 

And that doesn't drive the issue home nearly enough. THIRTY years ago I noticed this. And I'm by no means a scientist nor an exceptionally observant cit-sci (citizen scientist) but it was obvious to me, and it scared the shit out of me back then already. Now I'm frankly terrified. 

But not enough people are even more than dimly aware of these issues, so much so that it's taken (First Dog On The Moon link alert!) scientists glueing themselves to things to draw attention to how terrified these people are, people who KNOW what's happening and are helplessly watching the rest of us ignore everything they've made very public, to the point of now taking such desperate measures as civil disobedience. 

Just the fact that such events have been largely ignored by mainstream media and hugely overreacted to by police should give you some idea of how important it is to large corporations and government to suppress these issues. Imagine the effect on economies if we all came to our senses! 

Yeah. It all comes down to money. 

And this isn't 'woke-ism'. It's just commonsense. We've tied our lives to the idea of an abstract thing that has been substituted for real wealth, and yet by its own rules also IS wealth. In fact, real wealth is healthy land, healthy animal, plant, insect, and microbial  populations, and the living they afford us. But with the creep of money and how it's completely divorced from this real wealth, it has come to BE wealth and access to real wealth. 

Can YOU afford a nice plot of land and a house and clean energy to sustain yourself? Most of us couldn't. But only because a handful of people decide on the 'value' of those things and how much 'value' you yourself have.

---

I'm always saying it - get involved! Search online for such articles, decide for yourself, write to the Editor, to the Chairman, the CEO, the CFO, the local government Ministers and Senators and Parliamentarians, write to the head f your country. Action is need now, not the protection of corporate earnings and shareholder interests,

Subscribe to my newsletter here. It's only once a week and is full of my posts like this and other subjects. Or visit my News Stand to see what my other blogs look like. Also you can sponsor my writing and my fees for leasing servers online at my Ko-Fi site. If you take out a monthly subscription there for the equivalent of a few cups of coffee, you'll be helping me immensely. Or donate directly by Paypal. 

Is Salt Good For Us?

 Salt Intake And You

We're often warned against salt. But how much salt is too much? Is salt even necessary?

Long story short, we do need salt in our diet, but not too much salt. Our bodies use osmotic effect to move nutrients in and out of cells to feed and cleanse them, (look up "osmosis" online if you'd like to understand more) and that's why we need a certain amount of it in our diets. 

Like everything else it's a balance we need. Usually the natural whole foods that formed our diet included the right quantity of salt that we needed for optimal functioning, and that wasn't a lucky fluke - we evolved over the course of hundreds and even thousands of generations to make best use of the amounts of salt in our diet. 

Now we're in the perfect state for that but we've changed our diets, and processing foods adds way more salt that natural whole foods contain. Because we tend to concentrate those foods when we process them to produce nutrient-dense foodstuffs, and/or add salt to preserve the foods from bacterial decomposition, we end up with processed foods that contain multiple times as much salt, sugar, and fats than source food.

Too much salt creates problems with fluids crossing cell walls  and the osmotic pressure can rupture cells in extreme cases. Yes you can die from too much salt, and a slightly lower dose can make you very sick. For instance, drinking soya sauce (a highly salted ferment soybean liquid) has landed people in hospital and killed at least one. (Okay left braindead but that's the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Don't follow fad diets or stupid dares!)

But the main point, also made in this article, is that if we eat more made from scratch meals and avoid processed foods, that brings our salt intake down to levels our bodies can manage. Our ancestors evolved to utilise the salt in a more down to Earth diet, and our descendants will evolve to tolerate and use higher salt levels. But this takes space over hundreds of generations and is no good to us.

What Can We Do?

At its simplest, be aware that a can of soup (for example) has been made from a LOT of fresh ingredients, so instead of eating two carrots, two potatoes, a chunk of meat, half a cup of peas, a stick of celery, and assorted other ingredients (which most of us couldn't manage in a single meal) it's all been condensed so that you're getting all the salt, all the sugar, and all the fats, but in a cupful of soup that's easy to manage. 

So in effect you've eaten two meals in that one cup.

This is one reason why the best health advice is to avoid processed foods and cook from scratch, eat more raw fruits and vegetables, and use less salt in your cooking. Note also that the other thing processed foods have is salt, which is added as a preservative to - burst the cell walls of bacteria and kill then in order to preserve the food from their spoiling effects... 

And let's face it - home cooked food made from scratch always tastes better. If you can, grow some kind of herbs and vegetables wherever you are and use them. It adds flavour so you'll need less salt, has better nutrients than processed foods, and will make you healthier in the long run. 

As I always say at the end of these things - get exercised, get angry that our food system's been allowed to get so broken, sign petitions, write to your MPs and company CEOs. Subscribe to my newsletter, donate a cup of coffee or just Paypal me, join a local action group and get involved. And see you next post!

Flushing the Horse After the Lake's Been Burned

We Cross Now To Captain Obvious:

In news that shouldn't surprise anyone anymore, it turns out that legally requiring ships to decontaminate their ballast water before entering closed lake ecosystems, reduces the harm caused to that lake ecosystem from invading species in the ballast water.

That this should have been done from the first sighting of an invasive native-species-destroying life-form goes without saying, that it didn't happen is/was down to the pure profit-driven nature of the early shipping companies. 

To Infi.. - *To Mars And Beyond!*

Now we want to go to Mars and colonise. Besides then becoming an invasive species ourselves, imagine our surprise when we set up habitats there and discover that some overlooked little microbe on one of the rover robots got there before us and found Mars to be the dream home... 

"WTF? How come there are clumps of goo growing everywhere?" 

Because we never figured bacteria on the outside of spacecraft would survive a trip in space but surprise - we actually know now that it does. 

Best of luck with the accidental terraforming when we finally get there.

Second item:

What do you do if a North Korean hacker group phishes you? You hack right on back. The video describes how a white hat in the States ( or the West, at any rate) got basically phished and then hacked some NK infrastructure.

Know what shits me? All the relentless pressure to "let the three letter agencies take care of it" and not get in the way. No. No, no, no. If everyone politely held back - "oh no FBI, I insist you go first" "nononono NSA, you rally should get first lick at the blighters!" - not a whole lot of cyberwarfare would actually happen. From this side . . . 

If you see a hole, you pump attacks through it. And if that mucks up the next person's plan of attack well tough titties as Sheela said. (If you're wondering about her, check the link...) The point is, cyber tactics can't really be coordinated like that and generally aren't. So please shut-up whingeing woosies. 

... I'll just get going now shall I?

Test Case

The Awakening, after twelve years. 

Here's hoping I'm still writing in another twelve.

Thought Of The Day #1,923,287

Just a very sudden thought has occurred to me: People who use sites like Gumtree and Freecycle are all organ donors - right?

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Recycle and Reuse CD/DVD Jewel Cases (greenliving.suite101.com)

Big Boats Give Way To Smaller. So There.

I don't think I can support a government which applies laws asymmetrically.  They chivvied and harassed the Sea Shepherd people when they were bothering the Japanese fleet, now they need to show the same kind of testicular fortitude and recover the cost of one high tech yacht from the Whaling Wall.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Compare.

Google.

Skynet.

Hmmmmm......

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Bloom Boxes - Great, or Blooming Disasters?

I said I'd been in IT, Systems Admin, and security long enough to be permanently affected.  And I stand by that. Who else, on reading a piece of seemingly excellent news like this, would then immediately (well, okay, it took me about six minutes to see the Dark Side...) have reservations?

On the surface, you'd have to agree that this is a positively brilliant bit of news.  A large scale fuel cell electric generator cheap enough to power homes, scaleable enough to power data centers and office blocks.  Not only that but it's clean.  It takes in oxygen and fuel, and cleanly turns that into electricity.  If this gizmo is the biz fer shiz, then humanity is saved, hurrah! The Earth is saved, hurrah! And Global Warming is no more, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! (Launch into a rousing chorus of "ding dong the witch is dead!")

So why am I not convinced? What bloody Dark Side?  Ah sweet innocent and gullible customer, let me count the ways:

• It's a Business that's producing this.  Businesses have traditionally not given a pink and purple spotted flying jump at the moon for the Earth, or the People of Earth, but in fact only care about The Money Of The People Of Earth.
• Being that the Bloom Box is being produced by a Business, there is going to be a Price To Pay.
• Aside from the glib "black dye" and "green dye" explanations, no explanation what making those chemicals costs in environmental terms.
• No word on how long the "black dye" and "green dye" last before needing replacing.
• No word on what happens to the oxygen that goes in one side - gone forever? Turned into water vapour? 
• No word on what the "fuel" will consist of.  Is it easy to produce?  Costly in environmental terms?
• No word on how much "fuel" it will consume.  Lots?  Sips?
• No word on where the "fuel" will come from?  Is it by chance a "secret sauce" of Bloom and therefore they can name their price for it? 

It's always in the glaring omissions, isn't it?  These boxes are no good at all if they can't be produced en masse by a multitude of manufacturers, in a multitude of sizes, and burn the least environmentally damaging renewable and commonly available fuel.  

But that's just my natural skepticism talking, what do I know about the Real World?

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

We Could Always Eat Johnson, Sir!

I must be having a fractious day. All sorts of things are irking me today. Such as this article which ends with this paragraph:

"Intelligence Only Seen in Great Apes and Humans

In terms of numerical skills, elephants outperform primates and human children. When researchers tested elephants' ability to differentiate two quantities of objects placed in buckets, they performed very well: Equally as good determining between five and six objects as between one and two.

Professor Dick Byrne of St Andrew's University said elephants have "proved to have abilities which have only been found elsewhere in the great apes and humans. We're a bit limited by how little we know about elephants, but the off glimmers we get seem to be rather remarkable.""

Now excuse me my nitpicking but this is precisely what other biologists have said about cetaceans like whales or dolphins, and about octopuses, and about a whole range of other animals. Isn't it time they just lumped all these species into a classification of "highly intelligent" and be done with it?  It's indicative of our elitism and self-obsession, that even our scientists can't just come out and say it like it is.

This also calls into question the human reaction to intelligence and basic rights.  When the world was still a very new place to us, other races were considered unintelligent and only worth enslaving.  Then most of the world got it, and all races are now afforded the basic rights of intelligent beings anywhere.  (Of course, the majority of people still don't bother to learn a language other than their own, and we still have extremely racist views on the whole.  But this is a damn sight better than the "kill 'em or chain 'em" attitude we had only a few generations ago...)

So as a whole, we accept that others' viewpoints are as valid as our own, we accept that other races have as much right to live as we do.  But practically, we don't share our wealth with the people who need it more than we do, we don't decrease our prodigious consumption of resources so that others might live better, and we're generally still very hypocritical of others' rights.

And now we know that all these other species are as intelligent as us but in different ways, I wonder how long before we extend basic rights to them?  And no I'm not kidding here - there was the chimp in Austria for whom the people were seeking "person" status, and I believe a few others have also made that legal journey.

But of course, elephants are so much nicer if we keep them in zoos to look at, and whales (apparently, ask the japanese,) are delicious, and octopuses make good bait, and monkeys and apes make us laugh cos they're so cute like "little people."  Oh bugger - it's all too hard, let someone else deal with these rights issues another time.  And I'm not kidding here, either.  Sadly, we'll probably go on mistreating all these others because we don't understand what they're saying...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Who Cries Over Closed Coal Plants?

Mark Wilson, I think you're a fuckwit.  What's so depressing about one of the most polluting power sources known to man being shut down?  I also looked for any sign of irony in your termination phrase where you're encouraging people to buy a new piece of technology rather than live a bit frugally and responsibly - but I suspect my first analysis of you was right....

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Space Time Shaking News.

I won't republish it all here, just go read it.  It should change your life.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Quick roundup of the week

So I've given my favourite businesses a big nod in another article, what's left to talk about?  At 2AM Sunday morning we actually had a rain shower that had me outside taking washing down and re-hanging it under cover - and stopped as soon as I'd done that... But if it actually registers on the gauge, then it'll be the end to one of the driest starts to summer pretty much in recorded history.  Anyone that wants to be a climate change denier needs to tell that shit to my plants...

We've had a "bring out yer dead" kerbside rubbish collection, or as I prefer to call them, "materiel relocation events."  I can't help myself, I generally have a dozen projects on the go here at the cottage and they are generally waiting on only one or two items to finish them.  And of course then I find something else as I go checking stuff out so then I have another project started...

I also took the opportunity to throw out what I consider rubbish - the remnants of a small petrol scooter I have every useable part off, (and most already in use,) a washing machine ditto, a lawn mower ditto.  Trish observed that when I throw out rubbish, it really IS rubbish.  I have to concur.  I don't see how throwing out material that was harvested or dug out of the Earth and then manufactured at great energy costs, is a good thing in any way shape or form.  If you can squeeze one more use out of it, that's better than buying something new to fulfill that one use.  

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Perth Goes More Local

Nice to see slow and local food values appearing.  Well done Perth peoples!

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

A site that deserves more attention

Gumtree.com.au is an Australian version of craigslist, and best of all it's entirely free.  I just thought I'd mention this because it seems many people don't know about it.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Site Added

I've added a lowly Drupal out of the box site at home at http://faroc.dnsalias.com/drupal/ which I'll be putting some farming and gardening info on, and which one day may hope to migrate to a flashy server somewhere.  For now I ask you to be kind because I have a very expensive mobile broadband connection and can't afford too many hits.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Blackout

I can't exactly black out my site for a week but I can direct you to http://www.internetblackout.com.au/ to reflect on what a repressive government could do...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Dental Ninja!

If you're ever in Mandurah and you have a toothache, please let me introduce a great dental practice.  Seriously, I blogged recently about how one well known practice couldn't give me any straight answers, asked me to jump through a series of hoops and basically called me a fuckwit when I asked why I was authorising CenterLink to supply details on me electronically and yet the practice wanted me to go to CenterLink and bring them a Letter which would say the same thing.  Oh and when I asked for a ballpark figure, they procrastinated and prevaricated and couldn't actually tell me anything.

I walked into Platinum Smile Dental Practice and asked the same questions, got given the same release for CenterLink form, and they were taken back with no further questions, and my appointment was booked.  When I asked what it would cost me, the receptionist gave me the standard gap I'd have to pay on my pension, and the average I might have to go to if it was something other than a plain vanilla extraction.

I rang DB back and told the receptionist I'd spoken to that I wanted to cancel the appointment there.  She asked why and I told her it was because she'd been very stupid and evasive.  She started to try and talk me into keeping the appointment and at one stage I ventured that she was still being stupid.  She kept going for another three minutes, and finally I cut her off and asked her to cancel the appointment already.  "Oh - and you've just proven how stupid you are" I finished with, "you could have saved ten minutes of your time and effort by doing what me, the customer, asked you, the employee, to do - way back at the beginning there..."

Days before my appointment, Platinum Smile phoned me and advised me they'd had a cancellation and was I interested, which of course I was, so next day I was sitting in that scary chair, Dr Eugene Khoo looked in my mouth and said he could pull the tooth right now, complete with abscess and unpredictable results, or I could take a course of antibiotics and rebook.  I think that was a very polite and considerate thing to do, it gave me the option of "right now!" if I couldn't stand it or a gentler procedure in a week.  I'm a wussie, I chose the latter.

So Wednesday I arrived for my appointment, every other dentist I've ever had doing an extraction has taken between five and ten minutes of hard work on my tooth and jaw, I've lost count of how many of the handful of extractions I've had have actually splintered the jawbone.  I sat down, Dr Khoo took a look at the tooth and then said something about time for the local, at which I quailed again, because my first experience with local was when I was nine and had to go to the dentist alone (parents on the farm , I had to take time off school to do this) wasn't great either.

The nurse held my head steady standing to my left and behind me, the good doctor injected anesthetic, and the nurse squeaked and stepped back.  Doddering old fart had pushed the needle right out through my cheek and sprayed his load all over her pinafore...   That's set the scene for most of my dental encounters, in fact.  Incompetence arrogance and a kind of stupidity that I'm sure had to have been a Uni course....

Back to the present:  Dr Khoo started the injections and I started to cringe - but... hang on!  Where was the heaps and heaps of sharp pains, the needle scraping along the jawbone?  In fact, only one or two of the dozen or so sites experienced discomfort, and not much at that.  While he explained the post op stuff I'd have to do, bits of my face started vanishing off the tactile radar.  He got up, pricked a few spots and I felt - nothing.

Then he picked up an Evil Gizmo and clamped it on the tooth, and reefed it around a few times, only once I felt a dull thing and wanted to raise my left hand but it stopped before it got anywhere near the Pain scale.  Then my mild mannered dentist picked up a huge gizmo and clamped it onto the tooth, gave it a wiggle to see how hard it would be to pull.  I braced myself, this was going to hurt! and heard the sound of my tooth being dropped in the tray...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have met a true Dental Ninja!  Even if you're in Perth, I reckon it would be worth driving down here to see Dr Khoo!

Oh and post-op?  Anesthetic wore off hours later, and I took a panadol and an ibuprofen just to be sure,  but it's really only throbbing mildly, because he worked so quickly (I estimate under 90 seconds all up) that there wasn't a long drawn out trauma to the jawbone.  I think by tomorrow I'll be pain free altogether, and give me three days I'll be eating steaks again...

Platinum Smile Dental Centre
U3/55 Murdoch dve
Greenfields
(08) 9534 7946

Yes that's definitely a recommendation!

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Checks And Balances, Boom And Bust

Sometimes, nature's checks and balances appear to be magical, leading some people to pluck up truisms about "God works in mysterious ways."  The most obvious checks and balances are those that are cyclical but not related to weather cycles.  Animal populations rise until they are in proportions that the environment can no longer sustain, and then those populations crash hard.  At some time in the future, if the species was hardy enough, rinse and repeat.

Our forebears may not always have known what caused the cycles, but they did know enough to look for patterns.  "Grass has failed along the south slope, we won't have many mountain goats to hunt in two years." That they managed to observe such things and correlate them shouldn't come as a surprise, because that's how we survived, by being attuned to these kinds of cycles.  I'd go as far as to say that our brains are hard-wired for correlating data, because it does this at its most efficiently when we meditate or sleep.

So when a friend of mine twenty years ago pointed out a seemingly amazing fact, I let it percolate in my subconscious for a while.  The amazing fact is that, as a political/population unit, humans are able to predict wars with a seemingly great deal of accuracy.  From 12 - 18 years before a major war onwards, the balance between males and females is disturbed, and as if on some cosmic signal, more males are born in order to be at the peak of their fighting prowess for the war.

It's not really so, as my reflections led me to see.  A more acid composition of human body chemistry leads to selection in the woman's vagina and uterus, disabling more female sperm and thereby allowing more male sperm to succeed, across an average population.  So it's really just a simple body chemistry change.  But what triggers this change?

It turns out that stress and unrest and physical stress from lower food supplies can cause a marked change in our body chemistry towards the acid end of the scale.  So this "check and balance" is something that can be explained quite well.

In a region, the population of humans grows slowly until it's filled the niches and is beginning to exceed the supportable population.  There is increased bickering and fighting over ever more scarce resources, and some strength is needed in order to prevail.  Therefore, the genes of parents whose response to such stress is the bearing of more male children will survive more readily to the next generation.  Those that don't, get killed in the time between the birth of their girls and the end of the Big Fight.

Because, of course, when you have a few hundred extra testosterone-laden young men in the area, there is going to be violence and barbarism and if you're lucky, they'll remember that they're your son and not kill you out of hand along with everyone else.  The fact is that when this occurs in a larger region, then war results.  War kills and clears out a lot of the excess population, so instead of the population crashing in an uncontrolled way due to natural famines or whatever, it's a more controlled cull.  


And you don't even have to know about how this works - all you have to do is to be able to make more boy children than girl children in times of stress, and then be able to hang in there for about 15 years...


So now here's another application of that checks and balances system that seems obvious to me.  On the one hand we have Global Warming, building up inexorably year after year, each year taking away another previously arable strip of land here, a water body there, reducing the capacity of the land to support us all.  It's a situation that would stress the calmest of bodies, and in fact for a while now, male births have begun to outnumber female births all over the globe.  


For a bit more proof that one of those descents has begun, look no further than your TV news - senseless violence, disregard for others' lives, a rising population of young men with no outlet for their combined testosterone storm.  We're somewhat more civilised now than we were a few hundred years ago, and war has become a business proposition with risk analyses and plans that take into accoutn factors such as Mutually Assured Destruction.  


So our young men, instead of dying in a melee that is designed to ensure the survival of the strongest and fastest, are still out there, only not quite so young any more.  The psychological changes have already been triggered but have no outlet, and there are regions of the world under survival stress right now that would have no hesitation in unleashing their young men in order to ensure their own branch survival - if only they could get to us.  


Also, please note that with the restraint we began exercising in the last millennium with regard to war, we've shifted much of the survival value away from lightning-quick, brawny, but not very intelligent humans to a human much more inclined to use brain power to solve their problem.  And one of the things that this brainpower has given us is nuclear weapons.  Now we sit on this cleft stick, where we have the means to end a large proportion of the world's races and populations - but at the expense of losing a great many of "our own..."


The population/resources imbalance gets worse with every year that passes, with every increase in world population, with every 0.5 degree C rise in average temperature every few years.  Oh and did we mention that a use of nuclear weapons would cause a definite nuclear winter?

So let me get this straight: We're at the mercy of global warming, caused because too many people are exploiting too many of the resources of the planet, and we have a device here which could reduce large numbers of the population in a very short time - and as a "bonus," it could reduce global temperatures within a week?  Only - it's indiscriminate and will kill anyone and everyone?  And that's keeping our fingers off the big red button?

And now, a lot of those countries that have been itching to send their young men into our country but were unable to afford to do so, they have the same kinds of devices, which they can send into our country?  But we're all holding off because of the M.A.D. scenario and the fact that we're civilised humans?  We're civilised, oh yes.  We'd never lob a handful of nukes out at other nations' major population centres because that way we'd be the ones with the largest population and the highest chance of our race surviving the 5 to 15 years of nuclear winter, oh no...

I need only remind you that in the last few weeks, Haiti has descended into anarchy because there was a natural disaster and now the people there are willing to do anything to get their hands on food and water and medical help.  And leading statesmen have voiced the opinion that "if there's no food aside from what's in those shops, then it's not looting."  In other words, a relatively minor (on the global scale) disaster is considered justification enough to do whatever it takes in order to ensure your survival.

Really - what could possibly go wrong in the scenario?

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

"Send In The Architects" Just Doesn't Have The Same Ring To It

Fark!  Some nights the irritations just keep building up.  Fark u Treehugger for your publishing this, and far queue Lisa Rochon.

Cos, like, ummm - aren't real architects one of the reasons we have these totally energy inefficient heat islands we call cities in the first place? As far as I'm concerned - send in the clowns. They couldn't do a worse job than the real architects have done...

BTW anyone that has spotted that I may possibly think that "green architects" are a bunch of total self-obsessed tossers, well observed! I do try and hide it so much...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Not So Green Slab

What I like about this product: almost nothing.  Sorry.

• Cement, paper, and fly ash are not "low environmental impact" materials, no matter how you try and spin it.  They cost dearly to produce, and re-using them to make another thing that will enter the consumption chain and one day finish up as a not easily recyclable piece of landfill is not "low environmental impact" either.
• Due to the above, you can't claim you're "making it from nothing."  Don't people get it yet?  TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, you can't "make something from nothing" and there is no such things as "low environmental impact" unless you're talking about time travelling back to prevent yourself from being born, and even that would have some pretty hefty repercussions on the world I'd imagine.
• Shipping these slabs all over the country is not "low environmental impact" and you can't can't can't absolutely can't claim that it is, once you start working out the real environmental costs of that transportation.  You can't even franchise the procedure to more local centres because the material you use is highly specific to your location and it took you 18 months to learn how to deal with that combination of materials.
• You had to "develop a process" to make this stuff so hard and smooth, and there would be several chemicals (at the very least, a sealer) involved here as well, and that means some NOT "low environmental impact" factory making those chemicals.
• And lastly - what research have you done to ensure that the product you're shipping doesn't have really bad effects on the human body after a few years of exposure to food prepared on that slab?

Sad that so many things that seem green on first glance end up being just more greenwash.  People just don't think things through.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!