Notes From A Bear's Journey

Overseas    Apologies in advance, for not only am I overseas, but this is my first venture in keeping up with things using a tablet, and boy aren't they the finicky things?  Needless to say, my wife and I began this return trip to her home country by going the most direct route, which in this case was backwards, that is, going in the opposite direction first which would lead to a direct route over the poles and then voila, smack into the land of tea and biscuits (the English term for cookies, although I'm not sure if they carry that term over to computer spam as in, "filter out my spam biscuits, chaps").    Thus, our arrival went first to Los Angeles, likely the most grueling part of our trip since we had quite the wait, a mere five hours to kill (an odd and gruesome term, no matter it's origins).  So, there we were in the land of La-La and we thought, why not visit an old airport haunt and have a Cadillac marguerita.  It sounded good except, our...

Going Buggy, Part II    If you've just joined this discussion, the first part of this posting dealt with the amazing amount of food that the world simply wastes.  From harvesting to delivery trucks to restaurants to our homes, the volume of food spoiling or being tossed out is summed up in one word...sad.  So, producers and non-profits, corporations and enterprising humanitarians are all looking for solutions.  And one of the most promising offerings is in the air all around us...bugs!    Yuck, you might say.  But the truth is, eating bugs has quite a lengthy history, possibly dating as far back as 30,000 BC (based on cave paintings that appear to shown the collection of insects, and possibly because the tools for hunting hadn't yet appeared).  The term for it all --that of humans eating insects-- is entomophagy and is quite prevalent throughout the world.  Here's a sampling of what  National Geographic wrote in an article tit...

Going Buggy    We, especially those of us in the U.S. and Western Europe, are massive consumers, not only in material goods but also in other areas such as energy use and filling our tummies.  Four years ago, Bill Bryson wrote (in his wonderful book, At Home ):  Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American.  We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens.  One day--and don't expect it to be a distant day--many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield...The greatest possible irony, he adds, would be if in our endl...

A Quick RoundUp    No pun intended here (well, okay, a little bit of one).  So many issues from earlier postings have gotten updated data or criticisms that I felt it was time to let you decide which (if any) you wanted to  pursue.  So, let's start with Monsanto, the maker of Round Up (glyphosate).  Popular Science did a somewhat favorable piece on genetically modified crops , mentioning the many plus qualities of some of the resulting research, and while not directly mentioning the large producers such as Monsanto, the readers seemed to feel that their report was sub-par for this general science-type magazine, causing the editors to reply: We were not all all surprised that "Core Truths," our July feature about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), garnered a large response--nor were we shocked that much of it was critical.   The breakdown of comments they received was thus: Popular Science is a puppet for Monsanto (27%), You call that science?! (...

Bee Nice    I have always had a fascination with bees, despite my relatively recent (and somewhat severe) allergic reaction to their stings.  In the heat of summer I would place a planter dish of sugar water out on our deck railing and watch as all types of bees, even wasps and ants, would congregate in a cooperative drinking fest (if you do the same, try not to use too much water or the bees will be unable to get out and will easily drown).  There, I could study the black bees and the various honey bees and the occasional bumble bee (considered the gentlest of all the bee species), all with virtually no fear of being stung, even as I removed the dish to refill it with more sugar water.  It was a fascinating glimpse into this window of nature's cooperation when it came to survival.    But as you've likely read, our bees are having one heck of a tough time out there, perishing by the millions or perhaps billions.  And at first, this was though ...

Hitchcock's War    Just in case you missed it, a piece of history, terrible as it was, was shown on the PBS show, Frontline .  It was archival footage taken by soldiers, mostly American and British but some Russian, of the first days of arrival at the Nazi concentration camps.  In their rush to leave, the Nazi soldiers burned and destroyed as much as they could (including prisoners) in a futile effort to hide their atrocities.  And as difficult as it is to watch, it is indeed a part of history, captured in all of its horror of what humans can do to tarnish the word "humanity" (or perhaps define it).  The Frontline show titled Memory of the Camps will be available online for another month.    Film footage of the camps was already in circulation not long after the war, but somehow this footage was shelved for nearly 40 years before Frontline bought the rights and showed it for the first time in 1985.  Controversial to say the least, film...

Still Thirsty, Part III    With 97% of our water too salty to drink, but sitting out there lapping onto the shore, the oceans seem overly inviting.  The old phrase of water, water everywhere and not a drop to spare is temptingly close to our parched lands (the rising acidity of our ocean waters is another concern, the coral reefs being our "canaries in the mine" as they are among the most sensitive to the ph balance, the corals and the crustaceans).  So with so much water there, where do we stand with desalinization?    In the U.S., San Diego is is expected to complete its first desalinization plant sometime next year, one that should supply some 50 million gallons of fresh water each day to its residents, according to an article in Fast Company .   That's the good news.  The bad news is that 50 million gallons represents just 7% of what it's population uses.  I bring that up because in order to grasp our water situation, we need to first...

     As the water crisis, and indeed it appears to be turning into a crisis, continues, California is far from alone in its woes (one interesting fact about its almond industry, which supplies 4/5 of the world's almonds, is that elimination if that one industry alone would supply enough water to quench the thirst of 75% of California's population, according to The Week ).  Across the world, the situation is similar with misplaced crops developing into huge industries that become so powerful that they become subsidized and sustained by governments, despite their inefficiency.      One other example of this entrenched type of water usage came from Hawaii where early plantation owners diverted water from streams to feed their thirsty crops of sugar cane and pineapple.  Huge investments were made to build irrigation tunnels and reservoirs to bring water from the wet side of the islands to the dry sides (this continued even with public works projects,...

Thirsty?    Depending on where you are in the world, this year might have proved a mixed blessing giving your area far too much or far too little water.  The atmospheric and oceanic patterns have changed and scientists are leaning toward the change being one which might be unstoppable.  El Nino and cold ocean flows from the Poles are moving the high and low pressure points, thus moving the air flows and storms to different parts of the world...and it seems that drought conditions have arrived.    As one example, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, imposed a 25% cutback in its use of water; but those restrictions are meant only for residential use, a meager 15% of the state's water usage.  The oil industry and agriculture (and presumably, Silicon Valley industries) were all untouched.  And so was Nestle which bottled 50 million gallons of water from Sacramento's aquifers.  The fracking part of oil alone uses 2 million gallons of wate...

Two Kinds of Men    The title above is partially taken from the opening of the recent issue of Esquire (the magazine will post the link next month), a powerful short piece written by Lisa Taddeo and a feature of the magazine simply titled, "The Cold Open."  And the piece is dark, the death of her parents leading to a swirl of emotions as she moves a U-Haul into a wintery New York and happens to side-swipe a car, tearing off its mirror and leaving a definite gash and paint stripe down its side.  The car was a Maserati, the Quattroporte model, $100,000+.  And it belonged to a mobster.    The article balances the perceptions one would have of such a confrontation, one which could have gone a dozen ways.  The anger, the sobbing, the change of emotions, the attraction.  But mainly, it went the way of breaking the usual pattern.  A "great escape," if you will, the title of another recent piece in Smithsonian , detailing the efforts of Max...

Syzygy    If you happened to be awake early this morning (in my case, a little after 6 AM), you likely saw the full lunar eclipse, a "syzygy" of certain elements coming into alignment, in this case the full moon falling directly into the shadow of the earth.  The eclipse was able to be safely viewed across much of the world and lasted a few minutes.  And after a little over an hour, the moon was gone, our earth rotating past and sending the moon into the mountains beyond.    Also the other day, my friend suffered a serious accident, a woman pulling out directly and unexpectedly in front of her car as she leisurely traveled down a street.  Her car was totaled, a term used here in the U.S. to indicate that the car is beyond repair.  It was a perfect alignment of events.  A second before or after and she would have been past the woman's car; had the woman looked, had there been another lane, had the light stayed red a bit longer.  In an...