writeaboutwarming

I was listening to Science Friday on NPR today, and Ira Flatow said that increasing numbers of people now understand that climate change is really happening. He or a guest remarked that many of those same people ask, What can I do to improve the situation? Since that's a subject I haven't written about in awhile, and since there is so much each of us can do, let's talk about it. Where to start - what we eat? what we wear? what we drive? There are right answers to each of those questions. If you're eating conventionally grown food, that needs to change, because foods that "require" chemicals to be grown are killing all of us, both because of airborne pollutants, and because of the poisons that wind up in our bodies. While it is difficult to eat a diet that consists only of organic foods, there are so many organic options (especially produce, dairy foods, and meat) that you should acquaint yourself with what's available. The end result will be healthier bo...

March 19, 2012 - The World Health Organization (WHO) announced last week that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to antibiotics could well put an end to the practice of modern medicine.  Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's Director-General, told participants at an EU health conference that AMR is exacerbated by three current global conditions: inappropriate use of antibiotics in humans and animals, increasing world travel, and lack of development of new drugs.  Rates of death among patients infected with drug-resistant germs is on the rise. In 2010, there were 650,000 cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis worldwide.  (If I am remembering correctly, the increase in tuberculosis was first observed in Russian prisons, and in Russian AIDS victims.)  As a result, only an extremely expensive, prolonged battle is capable of curing as many as 50% of these cases.  The drugs used are toxic, and in constant short supply.  Other illnesses are drug resistant as we...

August 30, 2010 - BOOK REVIEW. A Nation of Farmers , by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton. 2009. Gabriola Island : New Society Publishers. This is a terribly important book, packed with information. Its co-authors take turns writing chapters, and while their styles are – as you would expect – a bit different, the difference isn’t great enough to be jarring. Sad to say, the book is poorly edited. That’s nothing new anymore, but the missing words, wrong forms of the right words (i.e., considerable/considerate), and general lack of understanding with regard to the need for punctuation can all be distracting. That having been said, the authors have created a book which will serve as an important reference in times to come. Their observations are gleaned from lives spent gardening and/or farming. Among them, the observation that 2,000 acres farmed by 500 individuals yields a great deal more than 2,000 acres farmed by one individual – or corporation. My own observation: people who fa...

November 23, 2009 – Pesticide use has increased in the United States. Yes, that’s right, I said increased. We’re spraying more poison on our food. Small amounts of that poison enter our bodies when we eat those foods. Small amounts of that poison enter our children’s bodies when they eat those foods. The best news of all? The poisons are getting stronger. Before going further, allow me to relate what I suspect was a case of coming to grips with this very Frankenstein in my own front yard. This year’s crop of dandelions was nearly unprecedented. (One might say they grew like weeds ….) Since we try to treat our yard for them as infrequently as possible, we had a bumper crop. Our yard was a sea of yellow. Then a neighbor came calling, claiming to be speaking on behalf of other neighbors. The short and the long of it was the dandelions had to go. Our front yard isn’t small – nearly half an acre. There could be no question of digging the dandelions up anywhere near as fast as the neighb...

August 2, 2009 – Since I didn’t begin buying organic fruits and vegetables because I thought they were more nutritious, I can’t be disappointed by reports that they aren’t. I’m guessing that buyers who are unaware of the carcinogenic effect of herbicides and insecticides on their food must have assumed that superior nutri- tion was the reason to buy organic. The same would be said, therefore, about buyers who are unaware of the deleterious effect of soil compaction, caused by enormous, very heavy farming machinery being driven over the soil. (Plants grow best when the soil is loose, allowing for air, earthworms, and various microscopic residents of the soil to co-exist with plants.) And the effect of “mining” the soil, i.e., farming it without rest by merely supplying the needed fertility through chemical fertilizers, rather than replacing the lost fertility with the use of organic fertilizers, which not only fertilize the plants, but leave an organic residue that improves both ti...