Earthquake in Haiti January 2010 (via The Big Picture)
Tomorrow: Dr. Paul Farmer, from Partners in Health and Harvard Med School, on the efforts to rebuild Haiti and the country’s health crisis
Very interested in hearing this segment. And for more, I highly recommend his book Mountains Beyond Mountains.
This would be amazing. I’ve been meaning to get a new library card, but Jersey City’s libraries have really limited hours, and collection for that matter…
Soon, your Kindle will replace your library card: Amazon is rolling out some great new features to Kindle users, including book lending and access to 11,000 public libraries. No word on when they’ll be out, though. source
(Source: shortformblog)
In 1992, a cargo ship headed from China to the United States lost one of it’s containers to the North Pacific, dumping 28,000 rubber ducks into the ocean. Since then, these bath toys have been on quite the journey. Over time, a few duckies were reported to have reached our shores, some in Maine and others in Alaska.
Thirteen years after the “accident”, Journalist Donovan Hohn decided to take on the mission of tracking these ducks down as much as he could. The project started out from the comfort of his home by interviewing oceanographers, talking to beachcombers about their finds, and researching ocean currents and geography. Hohn’s investigation became much more extensive than he had expected, taking him on a journey all over the world and sharing the details in his book titled, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.
In an interview with NPR, Hohn claims that he did not intend for this adventure to be an environmentally focused project. However, due to all of the encounters with floating plastic, or what he calls the “plague of plastic in the ocean”, it is too big of a problem to be ignored.
And he is right, the problem with plastic is that it has become so widely available and used in our everyday lives. When you walk into a grocery store, so many products are individually wrapped for our convenience. We buy items in plastic containers so they will not break when transported. There are hundreds of disposable items such as razors, shampoo bottles, diapers, etc. that will be thrown away after one use. Even the bags used to carry home those goodies are plastic. The main problem occurs when these plastics are seen in the ocean. Since most plastics are not biodegradable, they can last visibly for decades and chemically for centuries. Even some plastics that are made with cornstarch that are designed so that bacteria and other organisms can eat away at it only to break it up into smaller pieces, not fully disposing it and causing it to be more dangerous for animals that might eat them.
Read the full article here.
Books to read
I’m visiting family for a few days, and I usually have a lot of free time for relaxing and reading. Lined up on the kindle:
- finish Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
- finish Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, Jack Kerouac
- Zeitoun, Dave Eggers
- At Home, Bill Bryson
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, BF
What are you reading?
Google eBooks. Sooo this is cool. I’m a book-fiend turned Kindle-lover. I wonder how many generations we are from people thinking books are like cassette tapes?
The 2 books I finished on vacation. Both great ‘green’ reads. Food Revolution maaay have pushed me back towards the teetering edge of being vegetarian. I’m at least cutting meat back to once or twice a month, and then hopefully only happymeat.
I have about 50 more quotes I’d like to put up from Ecological Intelligence, but I’ll try to post other thoughts instead of just the quotes. If anyone wants to borrow it, it’s up for grabs. Except for Andy, he loses books.
