1. 16 January 2007

    Zodiac

    Neal Stephenson

    722 days ago

    Stephenson has his go at Captain Planet; kicks all kinds of ass.

    I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyonein a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That’s why I don’t even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you’ve put yourself into a situation where someone has to see you in order to be safe – to see you, and give a fuck – you’ve already blown it. 45

    The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. 57

    I knew this, but never fully realized what it meant:

    “Look, I’m no expert here,” Boone said, “but every environmentalist knows that a lot of water doesn’t have any air dissolved in it. Right? Polluted water, anything that’s got undecayed garbage or shit in it, doesn’t have air.”

    “Right,” Kelvin said, “because the organisms that break those things down use up all the air in the process. The more sewage there is in the water – that is the higher the Biochemical Oxygen Demand – the less oxygen is present. 250

  2. 20 April 2006

    993 days ago

    Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation

    There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained.

    I’m getting the vibe that human industry is more harmful to nature then a nuclear meltdown. Ugh.

    I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers. James Lovelock

    via Kjell Olsen993 days ago

  3. 29 January 2006

    1074 days ago

    Global warming

    Look at the graphs about 3/4 of the way down.

    via Kjell Olsen1074 days ago

  4. 04 June 2005

    1313 days ago

    BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Changing planet revealed in atlas

    A coffetable book comparing satellite images from the past with corresponding new ones to show what kind of devestation we are forcing upon the earth. Tomorrow is the UN’s World Environment day.

    Among the transformations highlighted in the atlas are the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain, the rapid rise of shrimp farming in Asia and Latin America and the emergence of a giant, shadow puppet-shaped peninsula at the mouth of the Yellow River that has built up through transportation of sediment in the waters.

    Kjell Olsen1313 days ago

  5. Also somewhat recently

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