Friday, February 2, 2007
The author of The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called Tuesday Morning Quarterback during football season. I didn’t get a chance to read it Tuesday because I was still in Vegas. I love Easterbrook because he’s not afraid to tackle social issues in the middle of discussing the merits of good run-blocking. Buried in the middle of this week’s football news he wrote the following:
Last week the British Medical Journal, a technical publication, released a survey in which physicians said sewers, not antibiotics or vaccines, were the greatest public health advance of the past two centuries. Those who live in the favored cities of the West should never take sanitation for granted. The construction of sewage systems in European and American cities, beginning in the late 19th century, dramatically lowered rates of disease, to say nothing of making cities more livable; lowered disease in turn helped Western nations grow more productive and affluent. Today much of the developing world is held back by the fact that its citizens are often sick, and thus not productive. Open conduits of sewage run down the streets of many large developing-world cities; raw sewage pours directly into the Ganges, where bathers are supposed to go for purification rites. In many developing nations the No. 1 need is clean water: clean drinking water, buried sewer systems and modern wastewater treatment plants. The United States appears to have wasted nearly $1 trillion in Iraq. That sum could have brought modern public sanitation to the 25 largest cities of the developing world, and made America the hero of the world’s poor for generations.
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
A few weeks ago I finished reading The Best American Science Writing 2001. It’s a marvelous collection of all the “best” essays written on scientific topics from last year. One article, “Running Dry” by Jacques Leslie, really shocked me. It’s all about the depletion of the Earth’s freshwater and the (disastrous) effects damming has had on the planet’s ecosystem. There’s going to be a special on The Discovery Channel tonight about China’s Three Gorges Dam (8pm). The tag-line of the special is:
“The Chinese have a plan to tame the large, muddy and unpredictable Yangtze River with a huge dam that measures two and a half miles wide and 650 feet high. Creating a reservoir 400 miles long, the dam will be the world’s largest concrete structure.”
That sounds amazing, right? After reading the article by Leslie, though, to me it sounds downright scary.
The planet accommodates 40,000 large dams - dams more than four stories high - and some 800,000 small ones. They have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth’s rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. Together they blot out a terrain bigger than California.
I’m of the opinion that anything mankind does to significantly alter our freaking course around the sun is probably not a good idea. Am I the only one concerned about this?
Saturday, May 27, 2000
Sylvia and I went to Itchetuknee Springs today. I’m not sure if that’s how you spell it. I’ll check the brochure later. We both got fricaseed in the blazing Florida sun. It was a very slow, leisurely 3 1/2 hour inner-tube ride down the perpetually 72-degrees-F Itchetuknee River. Afterwards we went to Karen’s Sandwiche Shoppe and ate chicken tenders and french fries. We had fun.
