Category Archives: Musings

Pough Paree

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AvengersPatrick MacNee died today at the age of 93. A moment’s silence by fans who remember The Avengers from the 1960’s. His best known partner, Diana Rigg, a fine looking actress, is still with us. The two of them were the best of British tongue-in-cheek humor. MacNee played John Steed, an understated, imperturbable fighter of crime – some of his antagonists were strange. His partner played Emma Peel, an ever ready to assist martial arts expert who always dressed in a tight jumpsuit. Videos are available on the Internet and DVDs for those who want to travel through time.

Those were the days.

The Pope issued a statement that the world must heed the dangers of global warming, which he laid at the feet of humanity as the cause. Jim Inhofe (R) Oklahoma, had snide remarks. The republican candidate herd (is there another term we could use to specify 23 republicans running for President of the US? Suggestions welcome) to the last man and woman denounced Pope Frank’s statement for the most part saying (a) the Pope is not a scientist (b) the Pope should stick to religion and leave science to us!! (c) the Roman Catholic Church does not represent world opinion.

The trashing of the Pope – indeed that was what it was; none of the candidates were nice or polite and in a few cases could not rise above character assassination – shows the power of politics when it is comprised of large amounts of money, lack of statesmanship, and counting on gerrymandered voters in the primaries.

As if to deliberately counter this silliness, the Netherlands was ordered by a court in Hague to reduce carbon output by 25% of 1990 levels within five years – more than the Dutch government intention to reduce the amount by 14 to17 percent.

A UN climate secretariat article obliging states to do whatever is necessary to prevent dangerous climate change was also cited. So was the UN climate science panel’s 2007 assessment of the reductions in carbon dioxide needed to have a 50% chance of containing global warming to 2°C.

In local news, the mariner’s town has been subject to strategically timed thunderstorms and torrential rains (rain falls in inch increments). An earlier post referenced that he lost three old and stately trees during a bad storm. When the damaged trunks were dropped to the ground, the ground was so saturated the trunks left 6-8 inch trenches across the yard. Needless to say, these are full of water. In fact, half the backyard is underwater. Mosquitoes, gnats and pond bugs abound. If it ever stops raining, insecticide must be placed on the water’s surface to kill the bothersome insects. The lawn must be rebuilt from scratch.

The experience raised a conundrum for the mariner: How do pond-dependent insects and plants travel to his standing water? The closest open water is at the golf course about a mile away. In some manner, he has received a complete, ready-to-go swamp as if it were a kit from a swamp store. If the mariner had any trees left, he would hang some Spanish Moss on them and turn loose a few muskrats. To add insult to injury, just days before the trees were damaged, the mariner downloaded plans for a barred owl nest. The owls are plentiful in town and young rabbits are a treat. The nest would have overlooked the lawn in front of the flower garden. So much for that idea. Instead, the mariner may add a couple of caimans and a Cottonmouth water snake.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Where is Amos, Where is Chicken Little, and Where is John Malthus?

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The mariner is Amos. The mariner is Chicken Little. The mariner is John Malthus. Woe will be cast upon us! The Lord shall end the days of Israel! The sky is falling! There will be no food!

It seems no one cares that the Holocene extinction will end the existence of humans within the lifetime of three or four generations. As spoken before, the mariner is befuddled. Perhaps Stanford University, world class environmental scientists, Food and Water Watch, World Wide Fund for Nature and dozens of similar organizations around the world are wrong. Perhaps 90% of the world’s scientists are wrong. Perhaps 400 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere is nothing more than an empty fact. Perhaps the warmest decade since records began is good fortune. Perhaps the rising seas, rising at Fibonacci speeds every decade, are good for sea life. Perhaps depleted aquifers will be good for life in general. Perhaps longer droughts, especially in the US, will provide more sunny days for picnics.

The mariner suspects imminent extinction is too big a pill for mankind to swallow. The event is beyond imagination. It is more surreal than the silliest science fiction movie. Extinction is a confrontation that has no answer except to wait and see. And so we shall wait and see. And it will be too late.

Ancient Mariner

 

Gifting, Giving and Sharing

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Many years ago, the mariner gave a sermon on the values of gifting, giving and sharing. He had forgotten about that sermon until today when he had a shared moment with a friend.

To gift someone requires two entities that usually are not equal in some way. One may gift (bestow to) a child an automobile; one may gift (contribute to) a charity; one may gift (grant permission) internal organs; one may gift (enable) a jobless person by sponsoring them to a potential employer. The inequality is apparent. The inequality is usually what generates the act of gifting. Gifting is a good thing all of us should do more often. However, one can’t help but notice how procedural the experience is; participants don’t necessarily even know one another.

Giving is slightly different. While not necessary in every instance, the participants usually know one another because the difference between gifting and giving is the presence of empathy when one gives. Giving is a deliberate attempt to lend a hand in some personal way. Still, there’s a bit of protocol when one gives; perhaps it’s giving a birthday present or lending one’s second car to a neighbor. The giver must, in some manner, approach and present what is given. Many people have trouble accepting something given to them that was not earned. God bless Max Weber.

Sharing is not gifting. Sharing is not giving. Sharing requires a profound respect that requires no protocol. No one need say a word. Sharing requires some form of bonding. Nothing is expected; nothing is presented. There is no visible inequality. Sharing is highly sophisticated because each participant must be sensitive to what is required; empathetic to when to share and when not to share; understand that reciprocity is not based on protocol or is a way of “balancing things.”

When the mariner was taking a college class about theology, he learned that, in the New Testament, the ancient Greeks had three words for “love:” EROS, which is romantic love; PHILEO, love among friends; and AGAPAO, unconditional love. At a minimum, sharing requires phileo.

Good marriages – the ultimate in sharing – are based on agapao. Time steals a great deal of romanticism. Real life circumstances can put the marriage through some tough patches when friendship may be difficult to manage but if the bottom line is to be unconditionally supportive, the marriage will last.

Ancient Mariner

 

NASA Website

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A very interesting place to visit once in a while is the website of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). There are many articles shedding light on global conditions around the planet. The mariner lists three to whet the reader’s appetite:

(NASA) released a study of the Earth’s aquifers using new satellite technology that studied the 37 largest aquifers from 2003 to 2013. The study reported that one-third of the aquifers are stressed. The most stressed are in heavily populated and frequently poor areas. To see map and report go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwater-basins-in-distress

Another study reported that it would take 11 trillion gallons of water to replenish California’s loss during the four-year drought. Go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/december/nasa-analysis-11-trillion-gallons-to-replenish-california-drought-losses

Study shows increasing carbon emissions could increase US droughts. Droughts in the U.S. Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study. Two very good videos are available showing the drought regions:

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/february/nasa-study-finds-carbon-emissions-could-dramatically-increase-risk-of-us

There are many more NASA reports about the condition of the Earth. It’s worth a visit once in a while.

Ancient Mariner

 

Po Pouree

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Know Thyself – Read the Comics

Today, Sunday May 24, 2015, the mariner’s local newspaper defined him, in his entirety, with only two comic strips, one following the other on the same page. The first strip was Peanuts, a rerun from 1968; the second was Dilbert.

The mariner has maintained throughout his life that comic strips and single-pane cartoons are the most important section of the newspaper. The comics have a sly way of slipping through one’s prejudice, ignorance, and lack of emotional maturity to plant the seed of a new insight. Think for a moment how comics reflect basic angst that often affects each of us. Think for a moment how comics can reflect an entire segment of our culture in one cartoon. Think for a moment how narrow minded we would be if we could not laugh at ourselves. Simultaneously, comics are irreverent, biased, simplistic, insightful, hilarious and wise.

Each of us is a complex conglomeration of evolution that began billions of years ago. It is no exaggeration that we entered life as no more than a cluster of chemicals that could replicate and today we are warm blooded, mammalian, intelligent (relative to other creatures although we lack the skills they possess) and now we stand on the edge of a future that will allow us to manage our own evolution. God forbid.

We have brains that use deduction and induction in an unbelievably powerful way, reducing complex knowledge to a few simple terms; who defined motion across the entire universe with the formula E=MC2 ? Each of us can read a thousand words in a momentary facial expression. Each of us – well, most of us – can deduce years of history from a single cartoon. As complex as we are, each of us can be fully defined in one comic strip with faster speed and more acuity than if defined by a psychiatrist.

John Nash

Tragically, John Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in an automobile accident yesterday. Do you remember the movie A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe as John Nash? The mariner became a big fan of the movie, John Nash, and the subtleties of game theory. Nash won the Nobel Prize for Mathematics in 1994. Game theory studies interactive decision-making, where the outcome for each participant or “player” depends on the actions of all players individually. Consequently, whether an individual, business, government or sewing circle, we play game theory in virtually every activity – even buying groceries, a game between us, the market and the producers. Nash was able to prove mathematically that ‘equilibrium’ is an actual state of being at all times, like a chess board is always present no matter who wins the game or how they play it. However, the chess board limits squares in such a way that a player must consider what the opponent’s strategy is in order to make his or her own best move.

The most familiar demonstration of game theory is applied in virtually every cop show on television. It’s called The Prisoner’s Dilemma:

The police interrogate two suspects separately, and suggest to each that he or she should snitch on the other and turn state’s evidence. If the other does not snitch, then you can cut a good deal for yourself by giving evidence against the other; if the other snitches and you hold out, the court will treat you especially harshly. Thus, no matter what the other does, it is better for you to snitch than not to snitch — snitching is your uniformly best or ‘dominant’ strategy. This is the case whether the two of you are guilty or innocent. Of course, when both snitch, they both fare worse than they would have if both had held out; but that outcome, though jointly desirable for them, collapses in the face of their separate temptations to snitch.

The mariner apologizes for being pedantic; his dominant strategy was to share why John Nash is important to everyone. The mariner snitched.

Oh, Those Promiscuous Neandertals

The following is an excerpt from Scientific American letters to the editors. The mariner sent it to a few family members in an email. They just will have to read it again. He included the writer’s response because it shows how we can be caught up in our own value system without including peripheral knowledge simply because it doesn’t fit easily into our values:

When the mariner was in his thirties, the scientific explanation for red-headed Homo sapiens was due to occasional inter-species sex with neandertals. It has been proven by DNA studies that we do have a small piece of neandertal in us. However, “occasional inter-species sex” has been thrown out. Read the response to a woman who wrote of neandertal ‘dalliances’ in her February article in Scientific American.

“OUR MURDEROUS ANCESTORS
Kate Wong’s suppositions about what brought about neandertals’ extinction in “Neandertal Minds” are contrary to the known history of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (that is, us). Her assertions that neandertals were just out competed and that the 1.5 to 2.1 percent neandertal DNA within people outside of Africa is the result of occasional “dalliances” would be historically unlikely.

The most likely scenario would involve waves of immigrating anatomically modern humans taking over land and causing death by plunder and disease, as Europeans discovering the New World did. And it would be naive to think that our neandertal DNA was the result of consensual dalliances when rape went hand in hand with the pillage of every other civilization.

It would be wise for us to give up the notion that we are, or our ancestors before us were, a benevolent and sharing species.

ROBERT E. MARX
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine”

Ancient Mariner

 

 

The Brain Knows More than it can Handle

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Note that this post is in the musings category; neither advocacy nor nostalgia is present. Rather, it is the brain’s incapacity to integrate percentages with empirical reality that has always intrigued the mariner. He was reminded of this recently when the mariner and his wife sent a birthday card to our son advising him that every year that passes, he grows closer to the mariner’s age.

Empirically, this is not true – our ages remain the same number of years apart in arithmetic terms. However, convert the difference to a percentage and one can make the case that our ages are converging.

Hypothetically, let’s say the mariner’s son was born when the mariner was 20 years old. On the son’s 5th birthday, he is 20% as old as his father. On the son’s 10th birthday, the son is 33% as old as the mariner. On the son’s 40th birthday, he is 66% as old as his father. As a percentage, the son is growing old faster than his father!

Humans can understand percentage values only after their brains interpolate percentage values to an approximate empirical reality, that is, an absolute event. The mariner knew a person who believed that when the weather report said 30% chance of rain, it meant the person would receive 1/3 of all the rain that would fall – an absolute value.

This inability to rationalize probability in terms of absoluteness is what makes lotteries work. Simply say, “You gotta play to win,” And the brain thinks that if one plays, one wins. Never mind that as a probability, one may win once in 17 million tries. But even that is not guaranteed. One may win 17 million times or may never win at all or win any number in between. That’s the problem: probability is not empirically guaranteed. The brain is much more comfortable coping with the absoluteness of empirical reality.

The brain can override probability (percentages) very easily by replacing a percentage with one that is an unrelated empirical situation that has completely different probability. A common example is ignoring the probability of an automobile accident by responding to the empirical urge to answer a text on the cell phone. The odds that someone will be on the other end of the call are very high both empirically and statistically. The absoluteness of the texting seems more dependable than the absoluteness of having an accident. A fair trade off, wouldn’t you think?

The obvious conclusion is that the brain has difficulty evaluating percentages. The brain is much more comfortable comparing empirical relationships. True, over evolutionary time, the skill of evaluating empirical absoluteness is more useful, else, lions, tigers and panthers would have eaten all our ancestors while the ancestors calculate the probability of whether they actually will be eaten.

One may argue that the brain actually accepts percentages and alters empirical behavior. One can train oneself not to respond to the cell phone while driving. An intellectual victory but not an empirical one; a dog will accept heeling intellectually but, all things said empirically, would rather be running off doing what dogs like to do best – answer the cell phone.

Over the years, mariner has given countless presentations to managers, planners, project teams and others who must develop decisions that most graphically affect the empirical world but in the beginning are decisions based on percentages, statistics, base expectancy and gut feelings. Human society cannot live without probability. Still, probability is a foreign value until it is interpreted as an absolute event.

Think of all the things that face probability in your life – starting with the color of your eyes and hair and whether your middle finger is as long as your ring finger. What is the probability that you would meet the person you married? No judgment intended, what is the probability that you did not meet the person you should have married? How fortunate are you to have the job you have? You may never have had the chance for that job if you reacted to 30% of the rain that was going to fall on that fateful day.

The truth is, probability shapes our reality in every way – even to the fact that life would not exist without the moon. How fortunate we are that, against all probability, the pieces of Earth that formed the moon did not fly off into a scattered belt of asteroids – as percentages would have predicted. We are not conscious of the influence of probability because the brain does not notice probability until it is converted into an empirical event. What if you were told that the son’s age is 66% of his father’s age? Does that help with your understanding of the family relationship?

What is the probability that this post is important to the empirical circumstances of its readers? Probably not worth mentioning but the mariner had a good time writing it – a victory for empirical judgment in spite of probable value. Just don’t call him while he’s driving.

Ancient Mariner

 

Wheat, Rice and Corn

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Wheat, rice and corn are considered the three food sources that enabled humans to develop as a species, to establish advanced cultures, and to begin economic relationships. Wheat has been identified as a primary food source for Asia, Europe and the Middle East as long as 12,000 years ago. Ancient Egyptians became renowned bakers.

Rice was and is the mainstay food product that sustained the Far East and India since 4500 BC. In the Western Hemisphere, maize, an ancestor of corn, was a primary food source and a major trade item since prehistoric times.

Each of these starchy grains provided protein and carbohydrates that enabled our ancestors to live healthier lives and enabled surpluses to be traded, establishing early economic relationships long before anyone had an idea about starting a nation or hassling with trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Today, however, wheat is bad for one’s health. Corn in all its forms is bad for one’s health. Rice is bad for one’s health.

What happened? Have humans fooled themselves for thousands of years that these grass seeds were good for them?

The mariner is chary about dieticians and food standards. Dieticians have more in common with the weatherman then they may think. Folks like to point at overweight people, people with diabetes or intestinal issues and celiac simply to say we eat too much.

Many say supplements are necessary; others say supplements do nothing but pass expensive urine. Don’t eat red meat. Hasn’t the mariner been taught all his life that the protein from red meat is what allowed the prehistoric human brain to grow?

Now we must be vegetarians and vegans – huge rabbits. Rabbits don’t live very long. Ever try to eat a BLT without the bread? If we want to live longer, we could go to sea and eat what sea turtles eat. The record life span for a sea turtle is 152 years. There is speculation that people who eat sea turtles live longer.

New science completely obfuscates what we should eat. It is de rigueur to point to genetic causes, e.g., “Your family history is prone to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, peanut allergies, etc.” Some years ago, the mariner’s doctor suggested he did not process Magnesium very well and he should take a supplement. According to dieticians, halibut, mackerel, boiled spinach, bran breakfast cereal, and almonds are the richest sources of Magnesium. This seems an acceptable diet until one is told the amounts one would have to eat to meet minimum daily requirements. That’s another conundrum: minimum daily requirements. What happens to the mariner if he misses the minimum daily requirement for vitamin K? Is there a remedy?

Recently, anthropologists have sought out isolated societies where everyone lives to ages approaching 100 and beyond. Places like islands, northern Russia, and mountain cultures. There are no vitamin pills so a shortage of vitamin K can’t be too bad.

To be serious for a moment, the anthropologists agree on two points: If one’s ancestors, especially from both maternal and paternal histories, lived a long time, chances are he or she will live a long time, too. Secondly, if one lives in a stable culture without strife (unlike starting wars and crooked banks) and one has a legitimate purpose in the society well into one’s 80’s and 90’s, this reduces the stress on one’s sense of self. Scientists would translate this phenomenon into less production of oxidants, less anxiety and depression, and, of course, the advantage of one’s DNA bred under constrained circumstances.

Another theory about stretching one’s healthy life is that, as a species, our Paleolithic genetic structure suggests that we should be healthy and vigorous, no matter what we eat, until that time we call ‘midlife crisis’. From that point on, staying healthy becomes more and more difficult. The mariner muses that were there no medical industry, the death rate would jump in one’s forties and most would not see the age of 65. There are always a few who live to ripe old ages but statistically, they would be a rarity.

Forgetting all the snake oil salesmen and fitness narcissists, there seems to be something more important to our health than what we may eat. Given we are bound to our ancestral influences, and given age is an undeniable influence, it seems that the most influential element on our health is, for lack of a better word, “happiness”. We do not live in happy times. Our income is not secure; our role in life is not secure; prejudice abounds against each of us. The future is more unknown and threatening to our society than ever before. There is pressure on each of us to win or be tossed aside.

But that’s another post. The mariner is going back to the kitchen to finish his pancakes with berries and whipped cream – a bit of happiness.

Ancient Mariner

The Gardens

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It is mid April, now. Don’t put a lot of meaning into that as far as Iowa weather is concerned; Southern Iowa, in particular, is quite fickle. Planting zones generally classify Iowa as a zone 4. In reality, it is zone 2-6.

This spring is well behaved. The flower gardens are poking herbaceous noses through the soil – causing the mariner to think hard about whether or not he planted it and what is its name. This year the mariner built a table with grow lights for starting the annuals. Being warned about the probable rise in vegetable prices, the mariner plans to plant a full array of vegetable families from potatoes, shallots and beets to six different herbs, tomatoes, garlic, spinach, squash and some others he doesn’t remember. Does anyone remember “canning”?

The mariner knows gardeners who can name every plant, how many leaves it has, when it blooms, when it’s ripe and know the vagaries of fertilizers and watering schedules. All this is kept in ledgers. He is proud of these gardeners because they go the extra mile to turn their garden into a reason to engage in bookkeeping. Alas, the mariner is no bookkeeper. If he were, he would be fired.

The mariner takes the intuitive route. Some sweet yellow banana peppers with onions seems tasty. So he started several pots of banana peppers under the grow lights. Rhubarb always is a treat so it has a permanent place in the flower garden. Same with potatoes; they’re in the flower garden, too.

The apple and cherry trees are in full bloom. They give nice color to the back yard. The redbud looks better every year.

Last year, the mariner’s brother-in-law gave him an odd and somewhat flimsy plant that didn’t seem to be something one would notice among larger plants and flowers. Surprisingly, by autumn’s end, it had spread itself daintily among the roses, irises and marigolds that were near it. The mariner was pleased it took the Iowa winter in stride and this year already is spreading small dainty leaves. Even though the flowers also are small and dainty, they catch one’s eye (Indian feather plant (Gaura lindheimeri)).

In about three weeks, when all the desired plants have gained height and presence, the mariner will take on the task of hands-on cleaning of the gardens. No weed bothers him as much as Creeping Charlie! Every other weed seems more civil than Creeping Charlie. Then there are the rabbits; he mentioned that in another post. Putting up the fence is the next task as spring takes over. Just a reminder: the last frost date is May 8th. Cross your fingers, count your beads and do a good deed. Buy a voodoo doll – maybe we’ll make it.

Ancient mariner

Spring

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Spring is the season of hope because the Earth has come back for the summer. Spring, like fall, introduces a mountain of work. Spring cleaning, repairing and cleaning the house inside and out, taking a first look at your flower garden to see what’s left after the rabbits have used it for a cafeteria during the winter. How many shallots survived the squirrels?

In the mariner’s town, there are laws that say all dogs must be on a leash or well penned. Cats don’t settle in as unofficial vermin hunters like they do back on the farm. Coyotes are not encouraged; the largest owl is the barn owl – good for mice, voles, etc. but too small for rabbits and squirrels. One rabbit had the audacity to spend the winter in the flower garden leaving behind evidence of a small warren behind an Iris. A foot away, beside a pile of rabbit pellets is a Spirea eaten to the ground. By now, the Spirea should be four feet tall.

Consequently, the mariner must build a rabbit fence around the back yard. Squirrels are on notice – he owns a .177 caliber air rifle with a great scope set to 30 yards.

In his town, the Ash Borer wasp has invaded much like ISIS: take no prisoners. 80% of the trees in the town are old Ash Trees. The mariner has six. Three already are stressed.

The hardest work for these old sea legs is standing on a ladder. Painting, trimming trees, cleaning gutters, topping fruit trees, all are an accident waiting to happen. If the ladder would sway a bit, like a boat does, it would be much easier – but he does all the swaying. There definitely is opportunity for a chaotic moment!

The mariner bought a chain saw that is on the end of a shaft that can extend to ten feet. That makes incidental trimming possible. When he was training to be a sailor, he learned how to rig a bosun’s chair to climb the mast. He thinks this may not work among the branches of an Ash tree. The mariner may have to pay someone to drop the infected trees – something he would have done himself only a decade ago.

There is a phenomenon in his town. There is a constant hum of two-cycle gas engines every day, all day. It starts at 8:30am and is ceaseless until well after sunset. The source is lawnmowers, leaf blowers, trimmers, cultivators, chainsaws, and power washers. It started officially on April 11. The mariner’s good friend and neighbor started the season by cutting his lawn. The mariner walked over to him to complain that he has broken the silence and for the next five months, the two-cycle drone will be endless.

The neighbor acknowledged this with a grin and added, “I know. Now my next door neighbors will have to cut their lawns so they don’t look ragged next to mine.” He knew, of course, as all the mariner’s neighbors know, the mariner lets his grass grow to four or five inches because the mariner thinks grass should look like grass rather than someone’s living room carpet. The mariner has always suspected keeping grass under control is some form of psychological power; grass is easier to control than other things in life.

The King of droning noises is the dirt track at the Fairgrounds. Every weekend, modified street automobiles without mufflers race around the track all evening. It seems almost like a ritual. All week the two-cycles drone as if paying tribute to the raucous noise at the dirt track.

The mariner lived on a country farm too long. Then, one could actually hear birds singing during the day; on many days, he could actually feel the silence. What the mariner needs is a good passage sail – maybe from St. Croix to Barbados, stopping by St. Kitts and Martinique along the way.

Ancient Mariner

Water

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The mariner is a member of Food and Water Watch, an advocate for clean, fresh water around the world, making water available to all human beings, and opposed to privatized management of food and water policy, that is, food and water should be managed by governments, not corporations. Food and Water Watch (FWW) is a watchdog for all sorts of wasteful food and water practices, especially the pollution of the fresh water that is available and the unnecessary cost of  ‘bottled’ water. Corporate advertizing contends than bottled water is better for you than tap water – which is not true, and also has a high profit margin.

Last night he watched C-SPAN coverage of a FWW conference. The main speaker was Maude Barlow, who was instrumental in forming FWW in 2005. Ms Barlow is Chair of the Board of Directors. She has a remarkable reputation. Ms Barlow has a standing in food and water issues similar to that of Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights movement or Ralph Nader in auto safety.

The mission statement for FWW is:

“Food and Water Watch champions healthy food and clean water for all. We stand up to corporations that put profit before people, and advocate for a democracy that improves people’s lives and protects our environment.”

An environmental phrase often heard is climate change. Food and water issues are intertwined with climate change. For example, the excessive amount of carbon dioxide settles into the world’s oceans. This causes acidification of ocean waters that in turn kills just about everything that lives in the oceans. In her book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert points out that ocean acidification is the cause of the Permian extinction (third great extinction). 95% of all marine species went extinct. Coral reefs did not return for 10 million years.

Very much in the news is the debate over fracking (hydraulic fracturing) – the process of forcing natural gas to the surface by sending water underground at high pressure. Similar to the damage caused by strip mining for coal, the water doesn’t stay where it’s put and turns up in all the wrong places. Even the Great Lakes, the largest source of fresh water in the world, are not immune to fracking pollution. Many of us may have seen the news clip where a man could set his kitchen tap water on fire.

FWW looks into many food situations. In her presentation, Ms Barlow said everyone should stop eating meat because it is not an efficient use of water, given the amount of meat per unit of water the animals require.

FWW is an advocate of home grown organic vegetables. Have you planted your bell peppers yet?

The mariner could go on but everything you want to know – or in some cases would rather not know, is on the FWW website. The material is presented well and if the reader has never thought about the big issues in food and water, it will be enlightening.

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/about/

He ends with one statistic: Not counting the ‘permanent’ ice at the poles, only 1% of Earth’s water is drinkable.

Ancient Mariner