Keeping Yourself Pale May Also Make Coral Reefs Pale

I love the smell of cocoa butter. It sends me immediately into daydreams of hot, summer beaches and cool water.

If that statement seems odd to you, then you are either old and forgetful or younger than 25, or were too much of a lily to go outdoors.

Back when I was a kid, running around mostly-naked on the beach during summertime, the word "sunscreen" meant a wide-brimmed hat. I would slather Coppertone on myself. That rich, mildly-chocolate smelling yummy lotion infused with cocoa butter seemed an excellent means by which I could sauté rotund little body to a beautiful tan in no time without sizzling to a crisp in the mid-day Southern sun. SPF values were something like 2 or 4, which meant that drenching myself with Coppertone only protected me four times longer from imitating a beet, which I did often. Anytime now I expect skin cancer to crop up and remind me why my grandma carried an umbrella (which she called a "parasol") to shade herself when she went outside (and with good reason – she developed skin cancer in her elder years).

But by the 80's, the term "suntan lotion" was gradually being replaced by "sunblock" or "sunscreen", until now you never hear the term "suntan lotion". HERE is a good discussion about the change in terms.

Is it wrong of me to be wistful? Maybe it's because I live in the Northwest, where it's too testicle-shriveling cold most of the year to lay around nearly naked absorbing photons, but I just don't hear about people trying to get tans anymore. Everyone's too busy coating themselves with sun-repelling chemicals. I miss being brown.

Besides, this picture illustrates how "artistic" you can be with your melanoma-inducing love of sun (see THIS page for information on the artist).

Oh, sure, sure, I know all the arguments. Skin cancer = bad. Pale = good. Love the skin you're in. No one wants to look like an alligator by the time they're 45. Even I use Coppertone Sport sunblock, with SPF 15, and my children, who are dark-complected African-Americans, get coated with Baby Blanket sunscreen, SPF 50+.

But before we pat ourselves on the back for being health-conscious and educated about the potential dangers of UV radiation, let us consider a recent study that shows that sunblock lotions washed off of our sweaty, body-surfing bodies are contributing to the bleaching of coral reefs:

http://www.physorg.com/news130762664.html

Yes, in addition to the effects of global climate changes like increased UV radiation, increasing water temperatures, and rising water levels, plus industrial pollution, which endangers some 60 percent of coral reefs, some 10 percent of reefs are also at danger to being bleached by dangerous by-products produced when sunscreen breaks down. 78 million tourists who visit these reefs each year may gawk at the incredibly diversity of fishes and corals, but they are also releasing some 4000 to 6000 metric tonnes of sunscreen into that water. Researchers demonstrated that even small doses of sunscreen can bleach coral reefs within 96 hours of application, probably by stimulating viral infection of the coral.

No, I'm not advocating giving up the sunscreen. But maybe my grandma had the right idea. Let's not rely completely on painting our bodies with chemical sunscreens. Bring a parasol. Or at least a beach umbrella. But I still recommend getting out from under it enough to get some Vitamin D and maybe darken your skin enough to hide the veins. Ew!


Image taken from HERE.

Crap Fountains And Biosolids On Your Food

Just north of my little town is a cow farm. Every time I drive past the place I hit the little "recirculate" button on our car so that no outside air can get in. The stench is positively wretched almost any time of the year. During the winter (which I call the "rainy season" because of the climate here), the smell is somewhat tolerable as long as you drive too fast, but the cow dung is nice and soggy and fermenting. During the summer, though, the smell is overwhelming as the cow turds ripen in the heat.

And then there is a nightmare even worse than the usual nasty stench: several times in the spring and summer, all that cow crap is liquefied and pumped out over the neighboring agricultural fields in an ungodly fountain of sh*t, turning the crops dark brown with a rain of feces.

Oh – my – God! Now say with me: Ewwwwww!

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking, "Oh, get over it, Lab Rat! It's just fertilizer in liquid form. You're a biologist. You know the value of poo for growing plants."

Fine! But I just want to say for the record that the typical cow dung fertilizer is first allowed to compost. Thus the harmful bacteria and parasites are neutralized, along with most of the foul smell.

But then I came across this wretched article, which informs me that it has been perfectly acceptable – nay, encouraged by our government! – for farmers to use human sewage and industrial sludge to fertilize their fields!

http://www6.comcast.net/news/articles/science/2008/03/06/Sludge.Poisoned.Land/

Are you f*cking kidding me?!! Has the world suddenly gone upside down? You mean to tell me that I've been eating food that has had my neighbor's crap sprayed on it? If you've ever seen my neighbor, you'd be shaking as hard as I am!

Apparently this policy has been in effect for 30 years. I'm very disappointed in Jimmy Carter!

From the article: "About 7 million tons of biosolids – the term that waste producers came up with for sludge in 1991 – are produced each year as a byproduct from 1,650 waste water treatment plants around the nation. Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is cheaper than burning or burying it, and the government's policy has been to encourage the former."

HALF?? That's 3.5 million tons of wastewater sludge on our crops!

In addition to the risk of carrying human disease, bacteria, and parasites, the sludge has been found to contain dangerous levels of arsenic, thallium, other heavy metals, and PCBs. Plus the drugs you flush down your toilet when they expire. I shudder to think what else. Anything that can be pollutants of our waterways.

The article mentions a recent court ruling where a dairy farmer sued the government for poisoning and killing his cows, which had fed on plants fertilized with this raw sewage and sludge laced with heavy metals and PCBs. He won his case. The judge in the case said that, in addition to using questionable data for their actions and policy, "senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of the EPA's biosolids program."

Yes, this is America. Not China. Not some third world nation. Not the sewage-filled tenements of some late-night plea for helping poverty-stricken families in Latin America "for just pennies a day". No, this is the USA, where industry reigns supreme over the health and welfare of our Twinkie-eating obese citizenry. Heck, using sludge on fields is a win-win situation, right? I mean, the EPA gets to claim that they are cleaning up our waterways, and farmers get a free source of fertilizer. Wow! Genius!

The sad thing is that the product of all this a-maizing arsenic-laced miracle of modern agriculture is food direct to your supermarket, and milk from poisoned cows. Heck, it's the "cycle of poo". Once you've eaten your thallium laced food grown in crap-sprayed fields you can take a dump and start the process all over again.

Sure, the victim in that lawsuit had cows that died, but how many other cows aren't dying, but instead are merely passing along their PCB milk to you and me and our kids?

So the next time you pour yourself a glass of chocolate milk or put a pat of butter onto your ear of corn, take a quick sniff and think twice about its source. There may be more than chocolate in that glass of yours, and the yellow of your corn may hide little physiological timebombs.

As for me, the next time I drive past one of those fountains of sh*t, I'll be wondering if it truly is cow manure that's being sprayed, as I had thought, or crap from the farmer himself!


Image taken from HERE.

Helping The Environment -- With Dynamite!

Ah, the Great Outdoors! The rich smells of vegetation, fresh air, conifers, flowers, and – cordite. Yes, with the miracle of modern explosives, we can blast our way to a better tomorrow.

Case in point: Last Fall the Nature Conservancy restored wetlands in the Klamath Basin of Oregon by blowing up two miles of levees:

Video and article: http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/oregon/about/art22854.html

In a move that would make the inventor of dynamite proud (Alfred Nobel – yes, for whom the Nobel Prize is named), the Nature Conservancy restored wetlands along the Williamson River. Blowing a river levee sky-high allowed the Williamson River to dump into the Williamson River Delta wetlands, which had been bypassed for agricultural reasons in the 1950s.

Oh, but no one thought about the lowly Lost River sucker fish, whose newborn fish fry required the delta to grow in. Without the delta, these tender, baby fish were dumped directly into Upper Klamath Lake, which could be as much as three degrees colder ("It’s like bringing a fish home from the pet store and dumping it into a cold tank without letting it get acclimated,” says Matt Barry, director of the Williamson River Delta Preserve), and with little cover to hide from predators. Now these fish are endangered. And, by hurting the wetlands, bird species like cranes and terns weren't able to get the habitat they needed. Also, the lake's water quality dropped, in part because wetlands weren't there to absorb pollutants.

Now these little fishies will have a nice, warm, decaying marsh to live and grow in, and their bird friends will have food (the fish!) and homes of their own. Home sweet wetlands.

So let's give an explosive "Hurray" to these naturalists and things that go Boom! It's not everyday you get to blow things up in the name of helping nature.

How Many Trees Die Because You're Divorced?

Ah, life is grand. I'm livin' the nuclear family dream. I've got my 2.1 children and 2.1 cars. I've got my average house with its average (slave debtor's) mortgage. I'm working a stable career with a heartless company. I've spent too much for Christmas. And, despite being short, round, forgetful, and hairy like a beast, I haven't been awful enough for my lovely wife to leave me yet. We've been married for over 12 years. Yeah, over 12 years! Can you believe it? And neither of us have been married (or divorced) before.

In this day and age when, in the United States, we have an average divorce rate of about 50%, most ending within the first 15 years, young folks tend to be a bit jaded on the whole marriage thing (statistics information). Many of their parents were Baby Boomers, the "Me Generation", who suffer the highest divorce rate of all demographics. Maybe it's a good thing Americans are marrying later, on average.

Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night, "Journeys end in lovers meeting," but as Pauline Thomason said, "Love is blind – marriage is the eye-opener."

When the honeymoon is over, the love handles start coming on, and the enthusiastic and oh-so-Leave-It-To-Beaver "Honey, I'm home!" hug is replaced with a quiet shutting of the door, a couple aspirins, and a "Hey, what are you getting out of the freezer for supper?" Sadly, some folks open their eyes and discover that the snoring lump sleeping next to them on the Posturepedic isn't quite what they bargained for, or worse. All too often they give them the boot, the Big D, the marital sayonara. DIVORCE.

But wait! If this is you, my fellow blog reader, you may want to add one more thing to the social, emotional, economic, religious, parental, and physical strains that await (or afflict) you, your spouse, and your children around the dark corner along the divorce path. A recent study found that divorce actually hurts our environment:

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news115925227.html

Research abstract: HERE

That's right. If you are divorced, you are likely contributing to the misuse of our planet's precious few resources, thus forever increasing your already sky-high guilt factor. According to the two authors of the paper, which studied individuals from a number of countries, households of divorced individuals have more rooms per home per individual, thus requiring more heat and light, and thus more resources to power them.

To quote the paper: "In the United States in 2005, divorced households spent 46% and 56% more on electricity and water per person than married households. Divorced households in the U.S. could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households. Furthermore, U.S. households that experienced divorce used 42–61% more resources per person than before their dissolution."

Yikes. So, what does that equal in terms of pollution? How much greenhouse gases were made by all the coal that was burned? How much acid rain? How many dead trees and tumerous fish? Come on, I've got to have a figure for our angst to feed upon!

And that doesn't even take into account the growing numbers of single adults who have yet to marry, or widowed individuals who live longer and don't remarry. Just think what the neoconservatives will say about this one! All those ultrareligious Focus On The Family nutjobs and preaching presidential candidates. The authors also found that when divorced individuals remarry or return to their previous cohabitating married lifestyles, their energy consumption returns to average.

But, unfortunately, we don't all marry wisely, and people change. And there are a lot of really, really bad people out there who hide their true natures. Sometimes divorce is simply unavoidable. So what are all you divorced people to do to reduce your impact on the Earth and save your environment? Wear tie-dye and join a commune? Move back in with Mom? Go crawling back to their deadbeat or philandering spouse? Jump back into the hot, smarmy date circuit in search of a ring again?

No, of course not, dummy. Just live wiser. Living alone without the benefit of someone nagging at you doesn't mean you have to forget to turn off the lights or use less water, and now that you no longer have an extra person to throw away your money for you, do you really need that third bedroom for all those craft projects you never had time for while you were slaving away for that slug you used to be married to, a formal dining room to collect dust bunnies, or a second bathroom frequented only by your cats and the occasional tub spider? No. Live simply. Live in a smaller space. Let your hair hang down and live a little more like a hippie. Dig it?

As for me, I'm going to sit with my 2.1 children and my lovely, long-term wife tomorrow night, drink hot chocolate, and turn off all the houselights except for the Christmas tree. And as I enjoy my Leave It To Beaver life in the flickering woodstove flames of my energy-conscious lifestyle, safe in the self-riteous assumption that my marital bliss will last forever, I'll drink a toast to all you divorced-types and hope you'll be reducing your energy consumption this fine holiday season as you write out your alimony checks by holly-scented candlelight. Cheers.


Image taken from HERE.

Biofuel Isn't Golden Yet

If you’re like me, you get a curious little quiver of excitement when you think about biofuels. Stick it to the oil companies, damn it! Those greedy, all-time record profit conglomerates that suck crude out of the ground in oh-so-unstable parts of the world, helping BushCo wage greedy little wars so they can pump up the costs and make us pay a significant portion of our take-home-pay at the filling station. Yes, the souls of the oil executives run as dark as their product.

Ah, but now we have biofuels. Just take that grease from evil obesity-causing fast food chains and refine it to burn in your VW bus and go happily along down the road smelling like French fries. What could be better? No crude oil went into that engine, thank you!

But there isn’t enough used canola cooking oil to fuel every car, nor do most people care to convert their garage into a refining station. Thus enters the biofuels market.

Now biofuels outlets are popping up all over the place. BioWillie, for instance.

And thus we enter into a glorious future where new and altruistic start-ups fuel our cars with biofuel, crude oil looses its grip on the car fuel market, the world gets less greenhouse gases, there is less and less smog to breathe into our asthma-riddled bodies, and we all live in a happy, hippie, utopia as golden as the canola we feed to our cars.

But wait. It’s never that simple.

Originally, biofuels came from corn. However, even though corn farmers have grown more maize in the U.S. than ever before, they are facing a deficit in the amount that goes to human and livestock food. Too much is going to biofuel, and growing every day, putting our dinner plates at risk for too little deep fried goodies. What are we to do? (HERE is an article discussing the tradeoff).

Okay, so if we can’t get biofuel from corn, we can look for other alternatives. No problem. Corn only yields 18 gallons per acre of refined biodiesel. It’s at the bottom of the list of alternatives, even though it is currently the easiest to grow.

The most promising source for biofuel oils is algae. I’ve blogged on this before. Early research suggests you can get an amazing 10,000 gallons of biofuel per acre of algae, presumably grown in massive vats in the deserts of the world. Unfortunately, research on this lucrative area has only just begun, so we must turn to other options in the meanwhile.

Well, how about trees? Wood pulp contains oils which are now able to be processed out, according to THIS article. But this, too, is a very early technology, far from release. And we wouldn’t want to cut down even more forests, would we? Being good flaming liberals, like me, you would rather forests go to spotted owls.

Well, there are many other alternative crops with large oil content, such as rice, soybean, olives, avocado, or opium poppy. But these face the same old problems of interfering with food sources, being unable to be grown in large enough quantities, or, in the case of poppy, are simply illegal.

That leaves oil palm. At 625 gallons of refined biofuel per acre, it’s near the top of the list of potential biofuel sources. These lovely palm trees produce fruit very rich in oil. So much, in fact, that it is the second-most produced cooking oil in the world, behind soybean oil. Grow ‘em up in orchards and harvest the fruit, and you’re in the biofuel business. Malaysia, for instance, is a leading nation in converting its cars to biofuel, growing orchards of oil palm, and creating biofuel refineries.

Ah, but here’s that evil little catch: where do you grow them? Why, you have to cut down wide swaths of old growth hardwood forests, or grow over precious crop or grazing land, or fill in delicate marshy ecosystems.

And here’s one I’ll bet you didn’t expect: drug lords. Yes, according to a recent article from TruthOut.com, drug lords in Columbia are KILLING peasants and forcing them off their land to take possession and build oil palm orchards:

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/060607ED.shtml

It seems growing “legitimate” crops is more lucrative than cocaine, since the Columbian army and the United States (the third most funded military effort behind Iraq and Afghanistan) have attempted to eradicate illegal coca farming and cocaine production. Well, that hasn’t actually worked, since coca production is up 27% since 1999, but never mind. Columbia produces 1.2 million liters of palm oil biofuel a day. It’s not just the rebels and drug lords stealing land, but now even the paramilitary groups formed to fight them have taken land, as well. The Columbian government can’t keep up with the thousands of complaints they get each month.

When you go to the pump to fill up your Volvo with biofuel, there is simply no good way to tell where that fuel comes from.

And let us not forget that ANY source of fuel will eventually lead to greed and price increases.

So what is a good liberal to do, short of selling the car for scrap and biking everywhere? I guess we have to choose the least of the evils: continuing to support greedy global oil conglomerates and their smog- and greenhouse-producing war-causing goo, taking corn- or soy-based food out of the mouths of starving people, gobbling up precious natural lands and supporting drug lords and paramilitary groups with oil palm groves, or simply hoofing it until algae biofuel is made?

You be the judge. For now, I guess I’ll keep supporting big oil.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going home to eat some deep fried meat bits dripping with canola oil, and I’m not going to refine it to fuel my car, either. So there.


Images modified from HERE, HERE and HERE.

Another Big-Industry Bush Lackey Resigns In Disgrace

Oh yes! Score one for lovers of the environment everywhere! Yet another Bush lackey has been forcefully booted into resignation. This time it is the pro-industry, non-science-literate, anti-scientist, non-lover of endangered species Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Julie A. MacDonald, who oversaw the Department of Fish and Wildlife:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-macdonald2may02,1,7039154.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true

Also here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/29/AR2007032902003.html

Fellow science blogger, GrrlScientist, has a good write-up: HERE.

Ah yes, MacDonald, the person who was in charge of safeguarding much of our natural resources, insuring that endangered species are preserved, and insuring scientific accuracy in the reports of her scientists, has resigned after repeated egregious abuses of her power. It is another glorious day in the turning of the tide, as science and reason are slowly winning back the minds of America against the disinformation spewed forth by the neo-cons and BushCo.

MacDonald repeatedly overrode her scientists, preventing important data about endangered animal populations from reaching policy makers and the public. According to the LATimes article, “In many instances, MacDonald's changes caused scientists to request that their names be removed from documents. The inspector general calculated that in the last six years, 75% of the endangered species reports from the Fish and Wildlife Service's Western offices did not have standard signoffs by scientific staff members.”

Among her abuses, MacDonald has repeatedly passed sensitive FWS and EPA documents to big oil and other industry lobbies, insisted on reduction of habitat for a number of sensitive and endangered species (stating that economic concerns overrode the value for the species), covered up data that would have seemed harmful to big industry, and bullied scientists into changing their conclusions.

Before her appointment to the position in 2001, MacDonald was a civil engineer, with no formal training or experience in the biological sciences. Of course, is it any surprise that she got the position, given that she was appointed by former Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, another Bush appointee who resigned in disgrace for abuses of power (with the Jack Abramoff / Indian Casino scandal and uncollected royalties from oil drillers, she had been a litigator beforehand for mining-, cattle-, and oil-interests).

It’s getting harder and harder for the pro-industry Republicans to get their way these days. How many have left in disgrace in the last 7 years? I’ve lost count. And let us not forget that the times are changing. All those dreams of the hippies are slowly but surely coming true (see Mark Medford’s article: “The Hippies Were Right”). Even the steak-chewin’ crowd who think raw vegetables are a “yuppie thing” are coming around to buying organic and recycled goods at Wal-Mart (of all places!) and finding a twinge of pride when they drop some money on that new hybrid to chauffer their soccer-playing kids.

Doubtless the White House (which fuels its heating system with the still-twitching corpses of environmentalists and oil taken from Alaska) will attempt to put another MacDonald in her place. Let us hope that America’s newly-restored Democratic Congress can insure an appointee who has at least a little bit of green in his “ring around the collar”.


UPDATE (5/9/07): Though MacDonald has resigned, controversy still rages over the long-term consequences of her meddling and the role her assistants played. Congress has conducted an inquiry (ARTICLE).

I'm Not Grizzly Adams No More

I miss being in the forest, hiking, camping, backpacking. They are a part of me, but my crazy life hardly allows for time out in the forest any more. I have too much work, two toddlers in diapers, a busy personal life, and absolutely no energy. Grumble, grumble.

Many of my recent friends have no idea what I used to be like. To most of them I'm an overweight lab rat. On the outside, my skin would probably glow with the fluorescent dyes I use at my lab bench, but if you pulled me apart I'm pretty sure you'd find that a significant portion of my guts are made up of pine needles, moss, and oak leaves. My love of biology started as a little kid, wandering around the woods where I grew up, poking at bugs in streams and rummaging through the undergrowth. It was this early curiosity that fed my lifelong love of nature and its workings. I'm guessing most scientists could figure their love of science started through the curiosity of their childhood.

By the time I was in college, I could live for a week in the woods with practically nothing besides a bedroll and a pocket knife. Really. I proved it by working a couple summers in the wilderness areas of Idaho, backpacking the Rockies, studying endangered plants, and doing stream surveys miles from the nearest trail. The experience nearly killed me (literally), but those memories are close to my heart.

Do you remember the TV show, Grizzly Adams? I could relate to that guy back then. Alone in the wilderness, at one with the animals (like his grizzly bear companion, Ben), living independently and loving nature. Except I didn't care for the cheesy plotlines – how is it so many non-woodsman people in desperate need of help would just *happen* to run into Adams way out in the middle of the wilderness, I'd like to know? And what was up with the sidekick, "Mad Jack", and the sidekick's sidekick, a mule called "Number 7"? Didn't they seem superfluous and "unfunny" to you?

But somehow I moved away from ecology to follow my interest in lab work. I still get the same thrill I had as a child when I peer through a microscope at cells or come upon some new, innovative method. I think part of the reason I don't do ecological work is that nearly all the jobs (that don't involve timber) are jobs which are seasonal, temporary, and pay diddly-squat.

Now I live in western Oregon. Old growth forests and mountains are tantalizingly within sight on clear days, less than an hour's drive away. But I haven't been camping in years, and even day-hikes on flat, easy trails are a rarity. It's understandable, I guess. My adorably kids aren't old enough for serious outings (both are in diapers), and I would feel selfish going out there without the family included for more than a few hours. I'd strapped the kids into those backpack carriers, but I'm too out of shape to lug them around for long, and they're getting too big for those, anyhow (but still too small to hike far). So I pretty much have to wait until the kids are older. Love of the woods never dies, and I hope to instill that love into the hearts of my kids.

Maybe I'll be Grizzly Adams again someday, but I'm not going to have a stupid sidekick with a mule.