giving and getting

High tension wires block the view of life along the track.  Elevated highways, bridge crossings, cranes and boats moored in estuaries mix up the vistas.  Life goes on as bits and pieces of Americana flit through the window.

At times when the train pulls close to the highway we move along faster and with more comfort than those in cars.  This train is fairly quiet.  It sways a bit but the track sounds are muffled and smooth.  The seats are comfortable and you can get up and get food or go to the bathroom without having to pull off the highway.

Changing location by train instead of car is something i haven't done in years, and you know, i kinda like it.  No stops for gas, no cramped legs and achy body, food available at any time.  The train picks you up in one metropolitan city and plops you down in another city center with such ease.  i don't know why we don't have more of these all over the country.

Making the world a better place starts with interpersonel relationships.  Trains are great places for interacting with people you don't know and makes visiting with family and friends that much easier.  All the people we have interacted with so far on this trip are a reflection of mankinds innate ability to get along.

With family and friends we keep in touch with each other, we air our grievances, get over them and move forward learning more and more about how to communicate.   Unfortunately in this fast paced world our technologically connected way of life has removed the emotional aspects of interpersonal relationships.

Today a few curt words in a world peopled by emotional misfits is not the way to make the world a better place.  Ending marriages, friendships, business partnerships and romantic liasons by texting or e-mail has become more commonplace.  Treating live human beings as if you are in some movie is not the way to make the world a better place.  Luckily on this trip we have not experienced the underside of the connected but we have heard much about it.

Elders complain that the young have lost their ability to empathize, that they don't take the time to really talk or interact.  Friends complain about other friends ignoring them at dinner to take texts or phone calls. Today the connected don't know how to emotionally engage, they have lost the knack.

i've always felt that communicating with enemies and friends alike is the only way to connect on a higher plane.  When people cut off communicating they hurt themselves.  We can't ever make the world a better place if you have to discard people that annoy you.  Removing them from your life doesn't remove them from the world or your mind.  They will always be there and their negative impact won't go away, which is why I guess I'm against the death penalty and don't believe in "an eye for an eye."

i've had the window seat on trains and planes which allows me to gaze upon the ravages of man.  Hedgerows, roads, fences and rivers delineate boundaries humanity has carved upon the earth.  From the air our handiwork doesn't look so much like a quilt but like a series of ever meandering attempts to claim ownership of uneven surfaces.  Veins and capillaries run over the earth feeding and destroying equally.  Towns and cities look like open wounds bleeding outwards.  Not much is untouched.

i'm doing this blog right now and failing to connect with those around me.  They are doing things i'm not involved in and i need to move along and get back to the living.  So if this reads funny its because I'm in a rush to get back to the living.

Looking at the landscape reminds me that it is not so much about giving these days, our way of life has become more about getting.  Too many of us forget to give, forget to play it forward, forget to help those that helped us.  So stay connected even if someone annoy's you for it will pay off in the end.

stay safe

i'm on the road for a large part of the summer and this will be an interesting task to see if i can keep this blog on schedule.  Some of the places i will visit are remote and without internet service.  Right now i'm in New  York in one of the most technologically advanced homes i'll visit.  Since i usually write anyway, on a computer or with the almighty pen, that part will be easy.  Its getting it on line that will be the challange and with pictures.

Monday, myself and a birding partner paddled over to Ruth Island which is a man made coral island.  During the construction of the oil refinery back in the 60's on St. Croix they had to dredge out a ship channel.  The solution to where to put the debris was solved by creating a huge mound of coral rubble, which is our Ruth Island.  Over the years vegetation and birds have taken possession and the place is a private little wild life sanctuary.

i'm helping with a Least Tern monitoring program and Ruth Island is a site where they fish and mate.  Its so much fun to be doing science and enjoying nature, but here's the rub, about a half mile away is one of the largest oil refineries in the western hemisphere.  All through the tank farm Least Terns are mating and nesting.  It is one of the most successful colonies on the island and our most industrial area.

The birds love it even with the noise of the cat cracker and flares.  Nature can coexist with industry. Which brings me to thoughts about the oil spill. As long as a disaster is not happening in ourbackyard we are pretty oblivious to its long term effects.

Today, there is money to be made.  Anyone that follows disasters knows that if they make a bee-line for the Gulf coast oil clean-up jobs will be available for years to come.  Top notch disaster followers will covet and obtain the cushy jobs.  No front line work for the manager's and the office personnel.  Men and women will pour in from all over looking for work  that they hope will give them a leg up in this hard scrabble world of ours.  These disaster followers will put their health on the  line to make a buck.

It happened in Chernobyl, it happened in Bhopal and it will happen in the Gulf states.

By the time workers on the front lines, who will be covered in oil day in and day out, realize what this may do to their long term health it will be too late.

Its not just the chase after the almighty dollar, these workers have to find housing, get their meals and still pay their bills.  After the day is done and the money is used up, what will they have?  Well they may have the possibility that cancer will appear, that respiratory problems will increase, skin lesions may form and a whole host of other health problems, maybe even brain damage they had never considered may show up sooner in their lifetimes than normal.

Oil is hazardous to your health.  How much can the body take breathing fumes day in and day out? What are the risks of having oil on your skin for extended periods? What are the toxic effects?  No one knows because its never been studied and a spill of this magnitude has no research data to relate back to.  If this was a one day affair like most spills the workers would be cleaning for at least 90 days.  But this isn't a one day affair and it has no shut off schedule.  For  all we know it might not ever stop until all the oil is drained out.

What is known is that crude oil workers suffer from headaches, stinging eyes, stuffiness, nausea and coughs.  Since there is spotty research on crudes long term effects, BP's minions should be out in force to minimize any adverse thoughts by their potential clean up crews.  I'm sure they will hit the media so that doubt about any ill effects becomes another issue.

There was a study done by a Spanish research group in 2002 following the wreck of the tanker Prestige.  The Spanish group tested several hundred clean up workers DNA against those who were not exposed to the oil.  DNA damage was found in those exposed which is the first step on the road to cancer.

Oil refineries, ship tankers, pipe line outfits, well diggers, all of these have safety measures that must be followed to work around oil.  They use breathing aparatus and skin protectors and keep the exposure to a minimum.  My husband worked in an oil refinery for a long time and tried never to touch the stuff.

No one knows what will happen to the workers being hired to clean-up this oil spill.  But if you are considering following the disaster to make a buck, think twice and if you do go don't agree to work with out protection.

mistakes happen

Morning walks are a great place to solve the problems of the world.  We "world problem solvers" know that lots of actions that are taken are based upon inaccurate or false information. We question why certain things aren't done the way we would like to see them done, and think the path is so clear "if only."

We discuss "if only they," the imperial "they" would do this, that, or the other thing, society could move ahead and avert further crises.  We discuss our personal problems in the same manner and find ourselves mystified by other people's failure to "see clearly."

Mistakes happen, we all agree, its just how they are resolved that causes the most anxiety. 

This morning we were talking about the ramifications of the Gulf Oil disaster, the fact that the Atlantic ocean is hotter than it has ever been, that conditions are brewing for an active hurricane season and Sahara Dust might be making us all sick. 


i was lamenting the lack of a topic for today's blog when my friend admonished me and said it is your task to point out the positive.  Why are we talking about all these dismal things she said, coral bleaching, food chain disruption, death and destruction in the gulf, wars, and STOP this we need something good to think about.

So i've been thinking, thinking about mistakes, how mistakes happen because of the choices we make. Choices we make collectively.

Last week i talked about our oil addiction.  A lot of times when people make mistakes they have an uneasy feeling before the fateful event.  Misgivings are strong but a semi disturbed state of mind may be the driving force behind wanting our luxuries and failing to admit to our destruction.  We don't want to think about what we are doing we just "want."  The sense of scruples, honor and the future are discarded in an ever increasing enjoyment of risk taking or just plain "need." 

Afterwards the elation over getting away with the process without too much grief can bolster further instances where making a huge mistake just causes monumental mess.  In the 1970's we had a perfect opportunity to change our ways, but the end of the oil embargo and easing prices led us all back to our complacent, thoughtless lives.  We enjoy being addicts, we love our conveniences.

Today that mountainous marine mess is the place where my friend asked me to find the silver lining.  Well, there are still people out there with enormous vision, people who don't give up on us addicts.  People who, not only think, but know we can do better.

Today people all over the world are e-mailing in containment ideas to BP.  Whether they read them or just pretend they are reading them is irrelevant.  The solutions are out there and we will find them.

Focus on the environment and how it sustains us all has become much more prominent in the news media.  People are talking about our addiction and how damaging it is to the whole world. We can now see right in front of our eyes what we have done.  We have climate change, which not everyone acknowledges or can "see";  but now daily we view horrible images of our addictions destructive ability.  We have come face to face with the dichotomy of "need" versus "protection."

Conversations and ideas are coming fast and furious concerning "free market economies" that function without enough regulation.  Corporations that only deliver "profit" and not sustainability are being looked at in a different light.  Why has the profit motive meant destruction instead of "trickle down?"  Why do unregulated markets and economies breed chaos, profits, and greed, not jobs for all?  Why does our system of free markets wreck havoc on our environment?  Today all these questions are being asked and more in ways unheard of only a few months ago. 

All of us are taking a new look at what our "needs" mean.  We can't go on raping the earth and expect it to recover.  We have to change.

This is a wake up call folks, the silver lining is there if we can only grasp the ring on the merry go round.  The good thing about mistakes is that if you take responsibility for making them a whole new world of possibilities opens up.  We don't have to be addicts and kill the earth too.  We can do better, we can find another way.

Our addiction has created this disaster but we can make damn sure that through more forceful planning(renewable in the future) and regulation we can try to avert another disaster.  The silver lining is the chance to wean ourselves off oil, the chance to change our consumptive habits and not make our environment expendable. 

i see this spill as a whopping, humongous, positive opportunity to create a better world. We are all focused on what we have done, the massive mess we created.  Republicans(those who want to drown government in a bathtub)Democrats and Independents are all clamoring for the government to do more.  Now is the time to point out that we all need government.  We need government that can function, not government that has spent the past decade being drowned.

Think about the future, think about our addiction, and think about the positive outcome we can create if we get out of our small minded boxes.  It is not about self, it is not about being self sufficient, it is about all of us and the sooner we realize it the better our world will be. 

And folks that's a positive!

Dancing with fish

Yesterday i was observing Least Terns hunting for small fish with which to woo their intended.  A dance with fish starts when the male tern first finds a suitable fish he can dangle before his lady love.  He flies around a bit, wiggling the fish in his beak, letting the sun make it glisten before landing in front of a female tern waiting on the ground.  He waddles up close, still wiggling the fish, trying desperately to entice her to accept his offering.  If the male appears with a fish that doesn't meet the female's criteria off she flies leaving the devastated male.  If he is successful with the fish dance she accepts his gift and waits like a queen for more.


Today we have oil dancing with humans, mammals, fish, birds and every thing else at all levels of the food chain.  The dance is not one of beauty, it is a tragedy whose final outcome we all await.

Crude oil, spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, was created through the heating of ancient organic material over geologic time.  The oil gushing into the sea today was formed from the preserved remains of prehistoric  zooplankton and algae, which settled on a sea or lake bottom in large quantities.  Today, it is being released into our ocean in unprecedented levels.

The Gulf oil spill has captured everyone in the world's attention; men, women, and children are riveted to live feeds of oil escaping from the damaged well.  Daily doses of quick fixes that failed are beamed over the intertubes and mass media outlets.  Live birds, turtles and various other affected wildlife are shown covered in oil.  Beaches, marshes, boats and anything having a common boundary with the gulf are all at risk.  Everything is beginning to show signs of this smothering greasy substance and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Oil men, fishermen, tourist industry personnel, resort owners and service people are all financially impacted.

How will it end?  What are we to do? How can we prevent it are just a few of the thousands of questions waiting for elusive answers.  

So i decided to do a little research.

In the spirit of discovery i wanted to know what the impact on wildlife has been so far.  The research is only just beginning but below is a small sampling of what has been building daily and will continue to build over the coming weeks, months, years...?

The US Fish and Wildlife Service started a data base that they put on line the end of May.  May 28th the survey was consolidated from all the information received up to that point; it included reports from Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Texas.  It only reflected the initial field level reports up to noon of that day.

• Alive but oil covered         Dead              Total
• Birds...63                            444               507
• Sea Turtles...16                   222               238
• Mammals...0                         24                  24

Fish and Wildlife has been collecting reports from all impacted states and placing them on line in 24 hour increments of noon to noon.   Yesterday, June 8, only eleven days later one twenty four hour period saw:

• Alive but oil covered        Dead           Total
• Birds...380                        622               1002
• Sea Turtles...50                 265                 315
• Mammals...2                       36                   38

In just another twenty four hour period, noon yesterday to noon today, consolidated reports from Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana counted.

• Today June 9
• Alive but oil covered                Dead                Total
• Birds...442                               633                   1075
• Sea Turtles...50                        272                     322
• Mammals...2                               36                      38

These very early numbers are just a slice of what we can actually see.  The rest remains uncounted in the ocean.

Every day since the explosion broke the pipe there has been an upward trend in deaths and this is only the beginning.  We have no idea how long this well will gush oil, we have no idea how it will spread, and we have no idea what the impact will be to wildlife and humans in the decades to come. 

And now, here comes the hard part.  We are responsible, all of us that live in Western society and enjoy our TV's, our cars, our plastic bags, shoes and clothing, our homes and the food we buy.  Petroleum products have found their way into every segment of our society. We, as a nation are the highest consumers of petroleum products world wide.  Our addiction to oil wrecks the things we love(birds, sea creatures, mammals, beaches, wetlands and marshes and oceans) it wrecks businesses and livelihoods, it contributes to climate change, causes pollution and wars through our need to protect that resource.  How much do we spend as a nation waging wars so we can keep a footprint close to the source of our addiction?

When are we going to wake up? 

We are falling behind, we are no longer number one, we are just a bunch of stupid addicts.

During World War II we sequestered brilliant scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico to build a bomb that had never been built.  If we can do that we can do the same by sequestering more brilliant scientists to find a way to reduce our oil dependence.

The time is now, we can't wait another minute.

There is beauty in garbage

A while ago i was out birding at a place that had a lot of discarded appliances and other assorted rusting hulks of garbage.  An automatic response to such a display of human lack of thought for the environment is disgust but i took a picture of it, and so does a man called Edward Burtynsky a Canadian photographer that makes a living out of creating beauty out of man's invented garbage.

"Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."  Edward Burtynsky

His pictures elucidate our impact on our environments and although distressing, beauty and future use can be found in the mess. (i wish i could reproduce them here but you will have to go to his website to view them http://www.edwardburtynsky.com    Every edifice and home we build, every commodity we make will one day turn to ruin and garbage.  Civilizations always perish and the garbage they create stays behind.

David Eagleman gave a talk in San Francisco called the "Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization".  Steward Brand summarized them as follows:

1. "Try not to cough on one another." More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce.

2. "Don't lose things." As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost." Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Books. "Distribute, don't reinvent."

3. "Tell each other faster." Don't let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by Ushahidi.com, which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time.

4. "Mitigate tyranny." The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China.

5. "Get more brains involved in solving problems." Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, Foldit (protein folding), and Cstart (moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing."

6. "Try not to run out of energy." When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online.

But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.
So remember the garbage we leave behind, the physical and the mental, could be the future generations salvation.

There is beauty in garbage.