Notes From A Bear's Journey

Fracking the Capitol    The news that mineral and other exploration would be allowed in the largest federal forest in the East, the George Washington National Forest, was a bit shocking.  And while it's intimidating to delve through over 500 pages of the Environmental Impact Study, one area highlighted was the possible introduction of fracking and oil exploration in the park.    Fracking is a complex and complicated issue, at once giving those of us in the United States a semblance of energy independence but also hiding exactly what is going on in the process. This exemption was lightly labeled the Halliburton Loophole , the resounding successful measure passed by former Halliburton executive and former vice-President of the U.S., Dick Cheney.  With this law, exploration companies are exempt from disclosing what's in their pressurized fluid but also from what may happen should something go wrong.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...    F...

Polar...Bearly?    Yesterday's news that a segment of the polar bear population had declined almost came as no surprise.  One seems to regularly read of the ice melting at the poles, new shipping lanes opening (China has already moved a shipload of steel through one polar shipping lane, signalling the pattern of things to come), new requests for more drilling of oil.  For the polar bears, however, this simply means longer distances to swim between ice flows, as well as less prey to catch for survival.  In one study, of 80 polar bear cubs born from 2004 to 2007, only 2 have survived.     Some of this is also being blamed on climate change.  Said Margaret Williams,  Managing Director of WWF’s Arctic Program , “Here are concrete numbers to show us that the impacts of climate change are happening now. We need to change course if we want to stop further habitat loss and ensure resilient wildlife populations, both in the Arctic and ar...

Passion and Purpose    Find your passion.  Find your purpose.  Those words, passion and purpose, seem to be appearing everywhere, as if soon the mega-corporations will pick them up and make them as insincere and meaningless as their letters to employees that usually ended with, "Thank you for all that you do," words that were marketed as the buzz words of the past years or so.  But today, there may be blossoming  a difference as people are finding their passion.  A quick survey among those with MBAs found that the percentage of people skipping the corporate route to found their own venture had jumped to nearly 10%, about a third higher than the numbers from the last decade.    Passion was the lead story in this month's Fast Company (the article was actually titled, Find Your Mission ) as well as in this month's More and Inc.  People who had decided to break off and do what they loved (and were succeeding) were featured and indeed,...

Solid As A Rock?    Solid as a rock, yet often ignored.  The pillar of strength, yet often stepped on.  Made of earth from which it came, yet usually covered.  As ancient as Rome, yet still waiting to be fully discovered.  One speaks, of course, of concrete, something that has fascinated me since 1980 when I first began keeping notes on it, watching it evolve and being discovered in its different forms.  And admittedly, something I knew little about, despite it being almost everywhere.    Concrete is now so prevalent that it we have entire bridges made of it, bridges with spans taller than the Eiffel Tower (concrete is now used for more bridge building than any other material ), and is classically remembered as the material for the largest unreinforced dome in the world, now two thousand years old, the Pantheon in Rome.  Which is not so ironic since Rome led so many nations in innovation (one burial site uncovered by archeologists di...

Our Beginnings...On A Comet?    Today marked something historic, something never accomplished, and something that may reveal how we all, including our planet earth, came to be.  Today, a probe landed on a comet.  Ten years in the making, eight years actively transmitting and two years staying in hibernation, this mission by the European Space Agency was summed up in one quick two-minute video (there are several videos but scroll down and watch the first two minutes of this particular webcast: First Go/NoGo 20:30 CET ).     Now one might think that this wasn't that spectacular an accomplishment, after all, we've regularly sent missions to the moon, docked with the International Space Station and even landed a probe on Mars.  But here's what the engineers that calculated this mission faced...get to a small ice ball (the comet is small, only about the size of Manhattan at a little over two miles in length), one irregularly shaped (looks almost l...

Giving...giving well    The holiday season is around the corner (gasp, I'm getting worse than Costco and the stores...whatever happened to Thanksgiving?  Today's stores seem to jump from summer to a quick blip to Halloween and then bam, the Christmas push, in September no less!) and with the holidays come the spirit of giving, not only gifts to friends and relatives but to those we don't even know.  And of course, the surge of mail coming from so many charities that want and likely need your donations...but how to sort through them all?     One option worth considering is a site called GiveWell .  Type in your charity and you'll likely be disappointed.  And you might feel just as Tom Rutledge did when he wrote a post on giving :  Before GiveWell, I had accumulated a lot of bad feelings related to giving.  My charitable activities had consisted of the usual, in the usual categories: alumni funds, causes that friends solicited f...

Walls Up, Walls Down     Time seems to move by so quickly.  Three years ago came the nuclear disaster at Fukushima (Japan just announced that it will reopen 2 reactors in the southern part of the country); and today marks the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.  Memory plays tricks on us, our memories vivid with watching the jubilant people with hammers and bars, reaching out to the hands of those in the eastern side, then big chunks of the wall actually crumbling down.  A quarter of a century melting into a time not long ago.     We, as humans, have a long history with walls, some built to keep people out, some built to keep people in.  Hadrian's wall, the Great Wall of China, the walls bordering Mexico, the walls separating the West Bank in Israel (that particular wall just passed its 12th anniversary)...each marking our efforts to build homes, forts and prisons.  In Bill Bryson's book Home , he talks of the fi...