Poop Shute

Environmental Fun Day

No matter how much we screw things up, life will go on. This we all know. The cockroach, for example, they say would easily survive a complete nuclear holocaust.

Skeptics to environmentalists seem to think that those who care about the environment are sappy sentimentalists who want to save things just for the sake of saving things. I've heard people ask questions like "What's in it for me?" and "Why should I care?"

To those I say read on.

And I'm not going to throw numbers about rainforests at you. That is only a symptom, and not nearly the worst one. The problem, as far as I can find is too many friggin' people. With all these damn people on earth we need a lot of food, so anything else alive on the planet is either eaten or knocked out of the way to produce more of our food.

The problem with that philosophy is that it throws things way out of balance.

Check out this piece about Factory Farms:

"Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations [CAFOs] are, perforce, Concentrated Animal Shitting Operations. Every hog produces ten times as much feces as a human being. Imagine if you produced ten times as much shit as you do right now.

A single CAFO in Utah is home to 850,000 hogs, producing as much shit as the city of New York. New York City has fourteen sewage treatment plants. CAFOs have none. This presents some problems."

On the traditional, small, family-owned hog-farms of days-gone-by they would use the feces as fertilizer on their crops. Nice and efficient. However, today a typical CAFO "farm lagoon" of feces holds anywhere from 5 to 25 million gallons of untreated feces. It's impossible to use that much for fertilizer. And keep in mind that is only one farm's load.

In 1995, after one of these pools spilled in North Carolina into The Neuse River scientists found a previously unheard of microbe called pfiesteria piscicida. "This dinoflagellate is a microscopic free-swimming single-celled organism that can mutate into at least 24 known forms, depending on its prey. It attacks fish, stunning them with one toxin, then liquefying their flesh with another, then feasting." This freaky little guy has made himself a comfortable home in The Neuse. To this day fish wash up dead on the shores and they, along with the fisherman and bridgekeepers, sport horrible, bloody lesions from the microbe.*

But don't take my word for it. These links illustrate the idea far better than I ever could. And if you only read one, make it the first one. It's a complete synthesis of what I'm trying to say.

BBC ARTICLE

SHIFTING BASELINES

NATURE.ORG

*Quotes from Franken, Al. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. page 341