That doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of humor. Indeed, sometimes humor is the only thing that keeps us going. So when a music video on the evils of single-use plastic bags came flying in through the email transom, we perked right up (thanks Chris Palmer!). “A Plastic State of Mind,” co-winner of this year’s Eco-Comedy Video Competition (who knew “eco-comedy” was a genre?), blew us away while hitting a bull’s eye on mission: We promise—we really do—to bring our canvas bags into the store, rather than forget them with a means-well shrug in the car. Or this could happen:
On the power of humor, one farmer’s stand, birds, bottle caps, better bottles, trash-tracking and why corporations need to push politicians toward smarter recycling policy Here at TrackerNews, where our unofficial tagline is “One Damn Thing After Another,” the focus tends to be on the grim. Floods, droughts, plagues, blights, quakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, climate change, pandemics, drug-resistance, fake drugs, oil spills, nuclear accidents, dead bees, dead trees, melting ice, rising seas, acidic oceans, aging populations, e-waste… Lather, rinse, repeat.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of humor. Indeed, sometimes humor is the only thing that keeps us going. So when a music video on the evils of single-use plastic bags came flying in through the email transom, we perked right up (thanks Chris Palmer!). “A Plastic State of Mind,” co-winner of this year’s Eco-Comedy Video Competition (who knew “eco-comedy” was a genre?), blew us away while hitting a bull’s eye on mission: We promise—we really do—to bring our canvas bags into the store, rather than forget them with a means-well shrug in the car. Or this could happen:
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On primal forces and perspective, how climate change may make nuclear an even more dicey option and better, smarter search & rescue bots The March 11 earthquake off the east coast of Japan was one for the record books. Now rated a 9.0 on the Richter scale by the Japanese Meteorological Society, up from what was still a rather gobsmacking 8.9 initial estimate, the temblor known locally as Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan is officially tied for fourth in the official record books.
But in many ways, this was an earthquake like no other. Nearly 60 million people felt direct shaking. The breakdown as measured by theModified Mercalli Intensity scale, which is calibrated to measure surface impact rather than seismic energy: “2.14 million (VIII – Severe), 29.96 million (VII – Very Strong), 19.69 million (VI – Strong) and 7.07 million (V – Moderate).” Then the tsunami hit, a 30-foot killer wave weaponized with debris, racing inland with pedal-to-the-metal speed, flattening buildings, drowning fields, swamping towns, shredding lives. This being Japan, where all phones are smart and digital cameras abound, the catastrophe was documented in staggering detail. In near real-time, images raced across the planet even faster than the tsunami. We watched in collective global horror as dark water oozed across the land, snuffing out all signs of life and civilization in its path. From Tokyo came video of chandeliers shaking, computers tumbling, books falling. We felt people’s terror in the crazy angles of videotaped escapes. We cried out as shards of glass rained down on frightened office-workers. At TrackerNews, we tend to shy away from issues that have “days” as almost a sure mark that the cause, however noble, is all but lost. Awareness is whipped to fever pitch, followed almost inevitably by a “what do we do now?” hang-over, and an ADD sprint onto the next issue du jour. But World Toilet Day (Nov. 19) caught—and kept—our attention. So much so, we used it as the fulcrum of one the largest link suites ever on the aggregator. —Ed. It is as basic—and necessary—as breathing. And, just like breathing, one of the first things we need to be able to do on our own: We poop. But what begins as a triumph of living, quickly devolves into daily problem with deadly implications. Human poop is a happy home for at least 50 pathogens, including cholera, the latest of Haiti’s cascading list of immeasurable woes.
At some point each day, each one of the now more than 6 billion people on that planet will need to “take a moment,” “go to the powder room,” or “be right back.” For one in six, however, there is no “powder room,” or even a bucket into which to “do one’s business.” A full third don’t have access to a clean bathroom. Instead, they do as nature designed, find a place to squat and simply “go”—or, in the jargon of the sanitation experts, perform “open defecation” (OD). It is messy, smelly, wildly dangerous in terms of public health, and dicey in terms of personal safety. Women and children are especially vulnerable to attack and rape. No safety, privacy or dignity. Journalist Rose George, author of “The Big Necessity” and an expert on the issue, notes that only a small fraction of development funds spent on water projects goes toward sanitation. Yet to seriously move the dial on global public health, safe toilets and hand-washing with soap are required as well. According to one, oft-quoted stat, one child dies every 15 seconds from largely preventable diarrheal diseases. Hand-washing with soap alone can reduce the tally by more than half. Every so often, we come across a topic so critically urgent, it takes over the entire TrackerNews aggregator. Typically, it is a natural disaster: an earthquake, hurricane, fire or flood. Smoking, however, turns out to be an even more deadly and costly disaster. By the end of the century, as many as 1 billion people will die from tobacco-related illnesses. We felt this topic so important, we have reprintedTrackerNews tumblr overview of the link suite below. Scientists and social entrepreneurs, please note the section on a call to action. —Ed. Talk about “low hanging fruit.” Smoking ranks right up there with HIV/AIDs, malaria, TB and flu pandemics as a global public health scourge. In fact, more people die from smoking-related illnesses than HIV, illegal drugs, alcohol, car accidents, suicides and murders…combined. By some estimates, as many as a billion people—two-thirds in the developing world—will die tobacco-laced deaths by the end of this century. There are better, not to mention more merciful, ways to manage population numbers.
Yet for all the public awareness campaigns and urban smoking bans (good luck, Alexandria!), more people are smoking more cigarettes than ever. In 2002, the tally stood at 5.5. trillion, but it has gone up by at least by hundreds of billions since then. Smoking rates have leveled off in many parts of developed world, but are exploding in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. According to a recent World Health Organization survey of adult smokers, Russia leads the cigarette pack, with 40% of the adult population puffing their lives away. Indeed, of former Soviet republics, only Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have shorter average life expectancies. Recently, the Philippines made smoking headlines when a video of an addicted toddler went viral. With the help of loads of “play therapy,” the kid is now down to 15 cigarettes per day from 2 packs. But his exposure to second hand smoke will no doubt still be considerable in a country than ranks as the #2 market in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. How scheme sold as pro-energy independence & climate-friendly unleashed environmental disaster in 5 years; From U.S. to Australia, Poland & India; Clean water as legal casualty; Green lesson from Bangladesh The devil really is in the details: Fine print can kill. In 2005, as part of Bush/Cheney Energy Bill, a then obscure natural gas mining technique - hydraulic fracturing – was given an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Corporations were now allowed to keep the chemical contents of fracking fluid, used to break up shale deposits, a proprietary trade secret. Since Halliburton, where Dick Cheney had been CEO prior to becoming vice president, was one of the few producers of fracking fluid, the exemption became known as the “Halliburton loophole.”
Freed of any legal constraints, the fracking gold rush was on. It didn’t matter how many dozens of carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic compounds environmentalists discovered and documented in the “secret sauce,” the energy companies had the law on their side. Indeed, they had the law in the bag. The past as prologue: fortune-telling from tree rings; The Green Revolution hits the skids: genetically resilient pathogens and monoculture crops What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?
When…
If only there were a rewind button.
From the first, almost cheerfully do-able estimate of 1,000 barrels of oil spewing daily into the Gulf of Mexico to a…
Dispersants that present environmental issues of their own have only made the situation more complex. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil,” according to Admiral Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the clean-up. It will takes months to scrub the surface. Years at least to scrub the wetlands. A special TrackerNews page with news, info and resources relevant to Haitian relief and reconstruction, prototype “sketch” for a personal aggregation tool; Hi-tech meets What-tech?, Haiti’s legacy At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource. Very occasionally, major breaking news stories—a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference—have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade. For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page. (Ed. Note: the site was taken down after the TrackerNews Project wrapped)
The last-minute, cobbled-together, non-binding, specifics-lite COP15 “accord” managed to unify almost everyone in disappointment, though perhaps not in surprise. Many, including climatologist James Hansen and economist Jeffrey Sachs, have for months called the drawn-out politically-driven process “broken.” When there was no time to waste, time was wasted. The representative from the fast-sinking island of Tuvalu noted forlornly that the fate of the world was “being decided by some senators in the U.S. Congress.”
Really? Just a handful of senators? A few people out of a few dozen determining the future of six billion? If true, then as a species perhaps we deserve ourselves—though our fellow travelers on this blue dot planet certainly deserve better. Leave it to an 8 year-old. Specifically, the 8 year-old son of Jim Warner, managing director of design consultancy Brandimage, who took one look at a plastic bottle his dad had helped create and said, “Oh. You make trash.”
Once the sting of that nasty little unvarnished truth wore off, Warner set to work to make not just a better bottle, but a better approach to bottling altogether. And with the 360 Paper Bottle, he may have hit the eco-ball straight out of the cradle-to-cradle design park. |
backgroundThe TrackerNews Project was a demo aggregator I developed for InSTEDD, an independent spin-off of Google.org's humanitarian practice. It covered health issues, humanitarian work and technology. archives
November 2013
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