Category: Environment

See your baby with another girl. Right? Everyone of a certain age knows the lyrics to “Sally Go Round The Roses”, the Jaynetts’ huge 1963 hit.

For years, I didn’t really give much thought to the question of what the saddest thing in the whole wide world really was. I figured the Jaynetts had settled the issue and I could think about other things. But a couple of years ago, I saw something which was way sadder than seeing your baby with another girl. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone until now. Too sad.

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m one of those curmudgeons who likes animals a lot more than people. I like all animals, dogs in particular. I even like animals that don’t like me, though most of them can figure out I’m not a threat and are neutral at worst. I still think every day about the first and best friend I ever had, a beautiful girl .

Before I went away to summer camp one year, I went over to a neighbor’s house to say goodbye. My friend followed me and waited by the front door. I stupidly left via the back door and forgot about her. Later I found out she didn’t leave the neighbor’s door for three days, apparently thinking I was still inside.

If you ask most people about the happiest day of their life, they’ll say it was their wedding day, or the day their child was born, or the war ended, or something like that. I would too, I guess, though one moment stands out for me even now as perhaps the happiest moment of my life. When I came back from summer camp, my friend went absolutely insane with joy that I had returned. It was like one of those Youtube videos where the soldier returns from deployment and his dog sees him for the first time in months or years and just flips out. Only more so.

My friend’s total happiness made me totally happy, and I learned something then which I know with absolute certainty: animals have emotions. Just like us. You will often hear people say they couldn’t possibly, but I can tell you with 100% confidence that those people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Which brings me back to the saddest thing. Did you know Canada Geese are monogamous and mate for life? I didn’t either until a couple of years ago.

Mom and Dad, with chicks

On my daily bike ride around the Charles River three years ago, I saw a dead Canada Goose lying right next to the path. It looked like she had a broken neck, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered how it happened. Maybe some kid threw a rock at her, or fired a BB gun, or maybe she was hit by a bike. God knows there are so many geese around the river these days that they’re competing with walkers and bikers for the path, and they’re not shy about asserting their rights, either! They make a mess, too (but I still like them).

It was pretty sad seeing the poor goose like that, but it got sadder. The next day on my ride, I saw that she was still there, but her mate was now there too, keeping a vigil, or waiting for her to “wake up”, or just bereft without a clue as to what to do next. And they were both there the following day, too, and the day after. On the fourth day, I changed my route. I just didn’t want to keep seeing anything that sad anymore. The saddest thing in the whole wide world is one beautiful, innocent animal grieving the death of another.

One of the things that separates us from the animals is that they’re not aware of their own mortality. We know we’re going to die at some point, but they really don’t, and maybe they don’t even comprehend what death is. But that doesn’t mean they don’t experience grief. I know they do.

So how come I’m writing about this sad thing now after not mentioning it for years? This story about a really silly woman shooting a giraffe for fun made me think of it.

Giraffes aren’t monogamous and don’t mate for life. I’m not sure if the other giraffes grieve for one that has been senselessly assassinated. But we can.

Mrs. Stewie Generis makes a new friend

OK, kids, are you ready for a pop quiz?

One of the following things was actually said by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry this week. Two were said in presentations at which I’ve been present, and one was said to a reader of GOML recently. Which did Perry say?

1) “Our department does what the boss wants. We jump, he says how high.”

2) “It will be clear when I show you this chart. A picture tells a thousand stories.”

3) “Here’s a little economics lesson: supply and demand. You put the supply out there and the demand will follow.”

4) “Men can’t be virgins, because they don’t have a heimlich”.

Here’s a clue: Rick Perry got a D in “Principles of Economics” at Texas A&M. Yup, he was the author of the crazy upside-down version of “supply and demand”  but, to be honest, it wouldn’t shock me to learn he’s said all of the others at some point.

Perry was visiting a coal-fired plant in West Virginia and explaining why we should produce as much coal as possible, since there will be a demand for it no matter what. Or something. He may have been thinking of, “If you build it, they will come”, but it’s hard to know.

But here’s the thing. You can’t point out that this guy’s an idiot who doesn’t know anything about the area he’s in charge of, because you’d just be proving what everyone already knows, which is that you are an Eastern liberal elitist who thinks he’s smarter than people who support Trump. And also you hate America and don’t want to make it great.

And we all knew what he meant anyway, just as we all understand what the people who said the other three things in the quiz meant. He meant coal is good. And climate change is a hoax. No “real” American could disagree, so just keep your stupid “corrections” to yourself, mmm-kay?

In other cabinet-level news this week, 18 states are suing Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos for allegedly “unlawfully delaying new federal regulations designed to protect student loan borrowers from being ripped off by for-profit colleges and other schools.”

Onward.

Everyone knows the Trumps are the real conservationists, not like those phony climate science hoaxers.  That’s why they need to shoot the last few large wild animals we have left. You know, to protect them.

But, really, why should these young heroes have to travel all over the globe to find big animals to assassinate, when there are still a few left alive right here in the good ole U. S. of A.?

Well, we have some good news for you today. Very soon, they’ll be able to roll up on one of the few Grizzly bears left around Yellowstone and blow its brains out with a high-powered weapon from a safe distance, possibly from the comfort of a Humvee.

All this will be possible because the Trump administration is removing the Grizzly from the Endangered Species list after 42 years. In that time, the population of Grizzlies has managed to recover from the last 150 left alive to a whopping 700 now, and the man-baby and his pals figure that’s plenty. Who needs ’em? Do they vote?

Here’s some background about the joyous changes.

Here’s a pic of young Donnie checking out the latest in silencers. Definitely a necessary add-on.

Well, at least it will be a fair fight, not like what happened to Maxine, who was just sleeping when she was executed.

It’s that time of year again. Each May,  there is a brief window of opportunity, granted by the seasons and local conditions, when you can attempt a visit to the top of the world.

Climbing Mt. Everest has become one of the world’s most expensive, deadly, and destructive hobbies. Every year thousands of hopeful climbers and tourists descend on the area, many of whom really shouldn’t be there at all.

And, of course, a lot of them die. There have been about 300 or so deaths on Everest over the years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first summited in 1953, and the Sherpas who guide the adventurers have died more often than anyone else. The last year without known fatalities on the mountain was 1977.

This year, the death toll has already reached ten, including an 85-year-old guy who was trying to reclaim his record as being the oldest to do it.

An industry has grown up around getting the clients to the summit one way or another, even if it means cutting some corners. The paying customers expect it, having put up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there.

In 2014,  Wang Jing, the 41 year old owner of a large Chinese outdoor clothing firm, defied a Sherpa strike by taking a helicopter to 21,000 feet, drawing some scorn from the mountaineering community.  She was trying to get to the “seven summits”, the highest point on each continent. The Sherpas were striking to redress many grievances they had about their treatment. This article covers the subject well.

The 1996 case of socialite Sandy Hill, who brought her cappuccino machine along,  got a lot of attention when Jon Krakauer wrote about her in Into Thin Air, his excellent account of the disaster on Everest she was part of.  He describes her as essentially being carried to the summit,

“the Sherpa, huffing and puffing loudly, was hauling the assertive New Yorker up the steep slope like a horse pulling a plow”

Hill became the focus of disdain and ridicule, a caricature of the rich and demanding westerner, and a self-promoter who put others in danger. She has her own version of the story, of course.

Everest is maxed out. It’s getting so there’s a traffic jam near the top, as people wait their turn to try for the summit.

A good deal of attention is at last being put on the environmental impact of all this activity.

This article talks about how people are leaving shit all over the place. Literally. It says

At base camp, visitors annually produce about 12,000 pounds of human waste each year, which often ends up in the waterways that nearby villages rely upon. “It’s getting notorious — people getting sick from water contaminated by dumping human waste,” Alton Byers, director of science and exploration at the US-based Mountain Institute, expained. “The place is getting covered with landfills, creating an environmental hazard for humans and animals.”

Here’s a good one from Outside Magazine with a lot more detail on the defecation problem. Gross, I know, but actually very interesting. Human laziness is the biggest part of the problem. It’s hard work removing stuff at those altitudes. Dead bodies are a particular challenge, and many have been there for decades.

Nepal is trying to address the trash situation with a rule that everyone has to pack out 18 pounds of trash. Literally tons of spent oxygen tanks have been hauled out, but trash generation is far outpacing trash removal.

Pictures from base camp:

Is there any place on this planet that we haven’t yet ruined? Please keep it a secret if you know of one – maybe it can remain free from our intrusions for a little while longer.

A  wax worm that eats plastic has been discovered. Could this lead to a way to solve the problem of plastic waste disposal?

That would be nice, as humans now produce 80 million tons of polyethylene every year.

We’re going to need a lot of wax worms.

Holes eaten by 10 wax worms in 30 minutes

Here’s a brief video in which a Spanish scientist explains the accidental discovery, and a link to her publication about it.

Once we figure out what to do when the world is overrun with the wax worms, we should be good to go.

Maybe robots will eat them? But not ones made of plastic? Don’t know yet.

In any case, I, for one, welcome our new wax worm overlords.

I wrote a piece on Midway Island four months ago that no one read (so I should probably take the hint and not revisit the subject, but, hey, that’s why Stewie is Generis). It was about the ecological disaster happening there, in the middle of the Pacific where no one really lives. If you want to know what’s going on in the picture below, check this out.

Here’s an 11-minute video from National Geographic that explains a lot more about the big picture.

What made me think about this was a short video I saw the other day showing someone sifting a bucket of sand on Kailua Beach in Hawaii. A random, ordinary looking bucket of sand turns out to be filled with plastic debris. This means, of course, that every bucket of sand in Hawaii, and probably everywhere else, looks like this as well.

For technical reasons, I can’t display it on this site, but do yourself a favor and click on this link to be amazed.

What you can see on the surface in Hawaii is bad enough, as this next picture shows.

But even if you cleaned up everything you see on the surface, you wouldn’t have touched everything beneath the surface that the sifting video clip shows.

And it made me realize there’s nothing particularly unique about Hawaii or Midway – the whole planet is already deeply damaged, possibly beyond repair. It’s just that it’s more jarring when you see it in the places we expect to be pristine, i.e. in “paradise”.

But we’ve become accustomed to a very high level of ambient garbage everywhere in the cities. It occurred to me that if you sifted a bucket of dirt from the banks (or the bottom) of the Charles River, you’d have a huge amount of plastic and metal garbage as well, probably a lot worse than in Hawaii, but in the cities it’s no longer a shock.

Yesterday, I took a walk by the river and was struck by the debris everywhere, and the fact that it’s completely “normal”.  No one thinks much about it, though there is an annual clean-up day that does make things look a little better, at least on the surface, and at least for a while.

There’s a Canada Goose in this picture, believe it or not. See if you can spot it.

It’s that time of year again. December in the Northeast means you can see the birds flying south. That is, you can see them if you’re not distracted by all the plastic hanging in the trees.

The leaves are now gone from the trees leaving an unobstructed view of what has replaced them. Plastic. Tons of it. And since its nobody is responsible for getting rid of it, it accumulates year to year.  It’s something you tend not to notice if you’re speeding by in your car. In the summer, if you’re out for a walk, you don’t notice it much because of the leaves.

It’s one of those things you don’t notice until someone draws your attention to it, and then you can’t stop noticing. This time of year, if you take a walk on the bike path next to the Charles River, you can see it in full bloom.

There’s plenty of plastic along the banks of the river as well, but each year there are big volunteer efforts to clean up all the trash there, and they do a great job. The trees are a different problem, though. If you look carefully at the picture at the top of the Charles River Watershed site in that last link, you can see some tree plastic that will persist after the banks are clean.

Part of the problem is the cost of getting a single piece of plastic out of a single tree. Part of the problem is that many trees are in some weird no-man’s land of jurisdictional ambiguity. Who’s responsible for the trees between Storrow Drive and the Mass Pike? City of Boston? City of Cambridge? The Turnpike Authority? The DCR? And which of these has the budget they’d need (and the will to prioritize this) to start addressing the problem?

But most of the problem is the sheer volume of plastic that has been produced over the years. It doesn’t go anywhere once it is created. The wind takes it from place to place until the trees give it a permanent home.

Some progressive towns have now passed laws against the certain kinds of plastic, but the wind doesn’t pay attention to town borders, and the scale of the problem defies local control.

In the end, the visual pollution of the tree plastic is a minor annoyance, an insignificant whiff of the overall disaster here. Try doing a google image search of “wildlife plastic” if you really want to make yourself sick.

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