Book Review: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Our primitive ancestors’ survival extincts served them well, Newitz theorizes, as they dispersed from Africa and wandered across the continents, possibly intermingling and intermarrying with our fellow hominids the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Love and cooperation may very well have saved Homo sapiens from extinction—and not our ability to use symbolic logic alone, although it played a crucial role. By scattering far and wide, adapting to the local climate changes and environments, and remembering to share their stories and adaptive technology with their offspring, our ancient human ancestors insured we’d still be here today.

But what happens if another mass extinction event occurs? Remember the dinosaurs? What if we’re hit by a burst of gamma radiation from a hypernova or a megavolcano erupts spewing particulates high into the atmosphere, blocking out our sunlight? How will we survive as a species then? Newitz interviews top scientists about the cities of tomorrow and where they’ll be located (probably underground), and how we could change genetically in order to survive on Mars or Titan. More good news—research into these far reaching fields will yield discoveries we’ll be able to use now, such as the space elevator and fuels derived from blue-green algae. All in all, our odds of surviving the apocalypse have never been better.

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The Buck Stops Here Because We're Mad-As-Hell

The Buck Stops Here Because We’re Mad-As-Hell

by Cindy A. Matthews

Everything seems to be going downhill quickly these days in the US economy and in the political arena. Not being a politically active type of person, I can’t imagine the stress and horror die-hard Wall Street types and party members must be feeling lately. My husband and I discussed the dire situation we’re all in the other day and hit upon what we feel is the perfect solution to all our problems.

We simply need to junk the current two party system and begin again.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, “A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything away,” so we're going to do just that--take it all away. To this end, we have started a third party that will sweep the next federal elections and clean out the seriously-self-centered halls of Congress. It will be a party of the little people (not that we can’t stand to lose a few pounds, but pasta is so much cheaper than meat when you’re living on unemployment). It will be a party made up on non-career politicians who only want to serve their fellow little people and then come home to the family farm, ranch, restaurant, shop, etc. You know—the way the original founders sort of envisioned our elected representatives would be like before all this political party bickering began in the election of 1800.

And we think we have just the right name for it.

“The-Mad-As-Hell-And-We’re-Not-Going-To-Take-This-Anymore” party or (TMAHAWNGTTTA party for short) is titled after that classic line from the classic film Network. Howard Beale (our party mascot—who needs an elephant or a donkey?) was a news anchor who told everyone to go to their windows and start screaming our party’s name until something happened to fix the world’s ills.

Network was quite a prescient story, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the mid 1970s and the early 21^st century have a lot in common—energy crisis, pollution crisis, unemployment, corrupt politicians (remember Watergate?), trouble in the Middle East, etc. So now is the time to learn from our mistakes we made forty years ago and clean up our economy and Congress and our environment all at the same time. As another little man once said, “The buck stops here,” and we’d better stop it in case it slides down further in comparison with other world currencies.

For Mad-as-Hell president we’re thinking of nominating Weird Al Yankovic. “Why Weird Al?” you may ask.Weird Al’s parody songs demonstrates he’s a keen observer of the culture and what’s wrong with it. Even if he can’t fix everything within four years he can at least entertain us with a polka version of the Star Spangled Banner. For vice president, my hubby suggests Sarah Palin (to gain the media’s notice) but I’m leaning more toward Cyndi Lauper. “Girls just wanna have fun” and who is having any fun in a time of economic and political crisis? Cyndi may just be able to help us on this very important point. (And I like how she spells our  shared first name to boot.)

Our platform will be made out of good old-fashioned, renewable wood. We stand for clean air, clean water, clean food, clean cities, clean language on the TV and clean underwear. But most of all we stand apart from those other politicians who seem to think that pointing the finger at the guy (or gal) across the aisle from them in the House of Representatives somehow defines what “good government” should be like.

If you want to join our party and start the crusade toward sanity, please feel free to forward this blog to your friends, family and other members of the human race. Tweet it up and Facebook and Google+ it to death. We’re “Mad-As-Hell-And-We’re-Not-Going-To-Take-This-Anymore” and we’re coming soon to a local, state, and/or federal office near you. We thank you for your support.

(Editor's note: Feel free to "like" our new Facebook Page: The Mad-As-Hell Party  Thank you.)

Container Gardening

I've been meaning to post another blog about what all we've been doing this summer to go "green", but life crises got in the way (again). All is not lost, however. We plan on attending a seminar on how to use solar power in the city this coming week, and a couple of weeks ago we attended the first annual St. Louis Sustainable Backyard Garden Tour. Organic veggies, bees, chickens and goats--all growing in peoples' backyards in an urban setting. It proves that it is possible to get in touch with nature and get away from processed food, one chicken at a time... But first, here are some photos of our own "sustainable garden" growing in containers on our very hot and very narrow balcony:

The tomato plant got off to a good start and has produced two Roma tomatoes already.

The pepper plant really took off after we planted some spaghetti squash next to it. Perhaps she was lonely?

The very first "hula hoop" pepper!

Our containers are not pretty or even store bought, but found plastic tubs, buckets and old styrofoam boxes.

Here's a happy hen we met on the sustainable tour in Webster Groves. Even though the chicken house was just mere yards away from a train track, the noise of the engines blaring past every few minutes didn't phase her and her feathered friends one bit.

These three gals were very happy eating blueberries from their master's hand... and lived in the city proper. We learned a lot about egg production and how entertaining raising poultry can be.

Having your own beehive would keep you in honey, but all those swarming bees make me a bit nervous.

Aquatic organic agriculture: crayfish being raised in a rain-fed backyard pond. Both pretty and productive.

Reuse, Reduce, Recycle--and Rethink

The sun is setting on the age of fossil fuels...

A few folks out there have asked me questions about how green energy works and what they should be doing about it upon discovering I’m currently enrolled in an energy technician program with hopes of gaining a BPI Building Analyst certification. What that means is that I’m trying to become an “energy auditor”. With those credentials I’ll be able to inspect and write up a report on how energy efficient a home or business is. With that information, a home or business owner can take steps to lower their energy bills.

Why is finding out how energy efficient a building is all that important? If you don’t know then obviously you’re not the person in charge of paying your family’s electric, gas, trash removal, water and/or sewage bills these past few years. To further break your bubble of ignorance on issues of world significance, I regret to inform you that fossil fuels (that is, petroleum products, natural gas, coal and their variants) are a dwindling resource. On top of that, the CO2 gases they emit when burned/used could very well be the culprits of global warming.

And here you thought $4 a gallon gasoline was bad!

Sorry to bring you down for a moment, but I feel the public has a right to know. After all, we’re the ones paying the bills, and the decisions we make now will have lasting effects on our children’s and grandchildren’s futures.

Since this is going to be a short blog posting, I’m going to keep things really simple. It’s easier on both of us that way. The best things you can do right now to help save energy, keep the planet cleaner and greener are what I’d term “The Four R’s”: Reduce, reuse, recycle and rethink.

The last one is my own invention, as I’ll admit the first three R’s have been a mantra for many enlightened people for some time now. In my opinion, however, the rethinking aspects can’t be understated. It’s great to recycle our food packaging, and it’s wonderful when we come up with new ways to use old things such as furniture and disused buildings, and it’s fantastic to reduce our use of water by planting only plants that are native to our area which can thrive on rainfall alone. But without changing our mindset about what it really means to take care of our planet, these measures alone will not help us meet the goal of keeping it alive.

What do we need to “rethink”? Just about everything! Admit it—most of our three R’s have been rather token measures. We’re still buying agribusiness-sponsored fast food packaged in an over-abundance of paper goods, and we do so by driving gas-guzzling SUVs through drive-thrus with our engines idling during our lunch hour. Sure, we may recycle the paper goods (if we’re able), but if we had done the fourth R—rethink—we’d never find ourselves in this situation in the first place.

We’d grow a lot of our own veggies or buy them from local farmers who may use organic techniques eliminating the overuse of pesticides and petrochemicals. We’d make ourselves a healthy brown bag lunch (in a reusable cloth sack with reusable containers to hold our sandwich and fixings) instead of buying fast food that is processed using additives and other potentially unhealthy chemicals in a manufacturing plant located thousands of miles from where we live and trucked in using even more fossil fuels.

We’d walk from our place of work and eat our lunch in the park. No starting up of the ol’ gas-guzzler necessary. In fact, we might even bike or walk to work in the first place, blissfully ignoring the $4 a gallon gas station signs.

We’d walk or bike home in the afternoon and not turn on every light, appliance and electronic entertainment system imaginable in our homes--including the newest home energy hog, the flat screen TV. (Who knows? We might even rediscover the joy of reading!) We’d open the windows and let the breezes cool our home in the summer, and we’d put on an extra sweater and keep our thermostats under 67 degrees F in the winter. We might even buy our clothing from Goodwill or make our own sweater with our own knitting or crochet needles. When it got too worn or we’d outgrown it, we’d pass it on to others or recycle the fibers so others could make something useful out it.

If the inhabitants of the Western World emulated some of these habits of the inhabitants of the so-called Third World Nations, we’d probably be halfway there in our rethinking process. We’d understand that to continually think “More is better! I must have the latest gadget, drive the biggest car, use the most resources I can afford, etc.,” is not healthy and is certainly not true. We’d realize the lies we tell ourselves on a daily basis are killing us and our planet.

In short, the first three R’s alone will not save us or our planet unless our hearts and minds come along for the ride. Rethink how you use energy. Rethink how you use resources—from the paper that wraps us a greasy hamburger to the combustion engine vehicle that adds to the CO2 problem and further depletes the remaining fossil fuels.

Rethink how you’ll tell your children and grandchildren why you feel your planet—their planet--deserves to be in the state it’s in today.