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When we encounter an animal or the outdoors, there's best practices that get ignored, stop |
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This is going to be a blog. It covers things I've learned about outdoor exploration, ecology, best practices hiking, responsible pet ownership, etc. It is also my intent to call out the crap the human race tends to do when we encounter Nature. Yes that 'N' is supposed to be capitalized, because everything from our national and state parks to our animals is included in that word. Some people might call what I write here controversial bull crap. It's what I've learned as a biology major(back when), exploring, and being a life long reader about all things related to the natural world. |
| The title of this entry should be self evident to all adults! But I have found first hand that it is horrifyingly absent in a lot of people's common sense. Apparently, I was the only one in my town who was raised by a mother who told them not to litter. Today I am taking it upon myself to share what I know about why you shouldn't throw things you're done using onto the ground. Maybe if people understand why it's so dangerous, they'll clean up their act! The most common waste I see as I walk through town includes, beer cans, plastic bottles, medical face masks, used diapers and cigarette butts. These things don't just magically disappear when you throw them on the ground. They sit there leaching the things inside them into the ground and eventually into the waterways, aquifers and soil. The sun hits the plastics and they turn into smaller broken down pieces of plastic. Some people may be thinking "so what? This doesn't hurt me. No one will know I threw my Aquafrio bottle into that pond. My smoking only hurts me and everyone throws their butts on the ground!" Well, guess what? Even if it's not you directly, your litter will hurt someone. It's not just the sea turtles, fish and salamanders that suffer. Humans are impacted by the improper disposal of waste too! According to the University of Berkeley, https://www.oceancare.org/en/stories_and_news/cigarette-butts-pollution/ and myriad other sources that aren't in big tobacco's pocket, cigarette butts contain lead, nickel, arsenic and other toxic chemicals. Sadly, this is one of the most common forms of waste. Hundreds of thousands of butts get picked up by ocean and environmental cleanups. This shouldn't be normal! To explain how toxins from these disgusting cylinders get into the soil and water, let me remind you of something. The water cycle. Even if your cigarette butt doesn't start a fire. If you leave it out in the open the rain falls on it and all seven thousand of those lovely toxic and carcinogenic chemicals inside flow out of the butts into storm drains and waterways. Think about this process repeated hundreds of thousands of times, all over your cities, countrysides, roadways and wetlands. Seriously irresponsible smokers, thanks for killing off your neighbors, shortening all our lives! If you're going to smoke, at least make sure you're putting the butts into an ashtray. Then empty that into a trash can, so hopefully waste management can deal with the hazardous waste appropriately. That way, you are only hurting you and the people around your second hand smoke! So face masks and disposable diapers. We needed one during the Pandemic.(Not going to name it, pretty sure we all know which one.) The other prevents incontinent children and adults alike from making a mess everywhere. Yeah, okay, at first glance these may seem like necessary evils, but they're not. Yes I wore a face mask during those two extremely long years they were mandated. Yes I wore diapers as a small un-potty trained infant. Still in these instances, reusable beats disposable. Why? Well let's say you're like the absolutely vile tourists in a mini van that decided to throw baby doe's poopy diaper onto the side of the road...right outside my house. If I hadn't gone out there and picked it up, and disposed of it in our trash, what would've happened? Let's start with the poop. Any human(or cat or dog or etc.)feces, without a doubt, contain disease causing organisms. Best case scenario is a non-lethal strain of e.coli. There are other worse door prizes waiting to ooze out of that soiled diaper. They include, Noroviruses, Hepatitis A, Adenoviruses, Influenza A, Salmonella shigella(food poisoning), Cryptosporidium, Cholera(yes that's still a thing, especially in the developing world), oh so many forms of dysentery, and other communicable diseases. So if you made it through that list, congratulations, you know why poo is gross. By leaving disposable diapers out in the open, in nature or on the ground, you're exposing everyone to those horrible sicknesses. That's not a favor. Neither is all the microplastics released into the environment by diapers and other sources.(More on what those are in a moment!) Face Masks, again, you throw those on the ground, they will not magically disappear. In fact as you're wearing them, your spit hits the mask and gets trapped. That's the idea. Because your spit contains bacteria and viruses. When they get left in the gutter, sidewalks, fields and so forth, those germs are still there. There's also plastic pollution released too. This comes from the elastic loops and fibers in your Face Mask. If you truly care, be aware of what you do with these objects. Now why, if these objects are so germ covered, would you want reusable ones? First, let me state that there's these fabulous innovations. They are called washing machines, plant based detergents, soap, and hand washing. These are available. If you are too squeamish to clean diapers, maybe there's a business in your area that launders things like that.(I'm just putting it out there.) And, thanks to science, we now know that twenty-one to thirty seconds of thorough scrubbing of wrists, palms, fingers and nail beds will eradicate most of the germs on your hands! That makes re-usable diapers and face masks more than feasible. So before I tackle plastic containers, let me talk about beer containers. Alcohol, even the grain based alcohol humans enjoy, is poisonous. It kills things on a cellular level. Beer, wine and spirits just do it at a slower rate than say iso-propyl(rubbing alcohol). Even after the booze is gone, the containers are still problematic. Not only do the glass ones leave dangerous shards all over the place when chucked at high velocity, there are other dangers too. There's lead and cadmium in the painted decorations. Not to mention other metals like tin and aluminum. Our friend the water cycle will disperse these into the soil and waterways. More yummy poison anyone? That brings me to the final problem. The one most talked about. Plastic in its myriad forms. Whether it's in bottles or any other form of litter I've mentioned, we've got our hands full. Animals not only get stuck entangled or injured by our waste products. When it end up in a wetland, ocean or other natural environments, it can be mistaken for food. If it's lucky it doesn't die of starvation or bowl perforation. But something more insidious is afoot, microplastics. These tiny particles break off of bigger pieces of waste. When ingested, they go on to mimic hormones in the body of animals and people. Some disrupt endocrine function, cause infertility, and disruption of the endocrine system can lead to diabetes, PCOS, developmental problems and maybe even cancer. For the reader who is saying to themselves. "So what? Who cares if some fish in India or where ever eats plastic? It doesn't affect me." More bad news, it does. See, that type of stuff tends to concentrate up the food chain. So even if a tuna ate a plankton that ate a microplastic, there's going to be more bad stuff in that tuna than there is in any animal lower on the food chain. Our civilizations are more interconnected than we realize. Our food in any one country comes from all over the world. So that fish in another country where the waters are filled with plastic waste might just end up on your plate. This isn't just a carnivore problem. If you're vegan or vegetarian, microplastics still impact you. According to Science Alert, microplastics are entering human blood streams. That means even if we don't eat meat of any kind, the water we drink contains plastic pollution. Isn't that really sad? I think it is. I also think it is beyond time to clean up our act as humans. The Anthropocene doesn't have to continue to be a pile of rubbish. So what can everyone do? First and foremost stop throwing your trash on the ground! Whether it's the city, country, ocean or natural environment, take responsibility for your trash. Hold onto it till you can properly dispose of it! Whether that's a compost bin, recycling(if available), or trash can, that is where your trash belongs. Also, if someone could get around to inventing more biodegradable packaging that'd be great because the current stuff will kill us. |
| So if you venture outside your house and look at your section of this blue ball, you'll notice something. It's made up of rocks, dirt and, for the sake of simplicity, let's call it sand. Even the bits of our planet covered by water are made of more rocks, dirt and sand. Way back when our planet had calmed down from the Hadean and late heavy bombardment, this was not the case. Earth was water rocks and more tiny rocks. How did we get a planet with gravel, sand and dirt? Right now I want to tell you about two forces; erosion and plants. They may seem unrelated but they're not. See, due to Earth being hit with the comets and meteors that brought both the stuff for life and water to this world, you now have complex physical and chemical processes going on. Water doesn't just sit in one spot, it evaporates. That turns to clouds in our atmosphere. Eventually this water rains back down. That's the water cycle. The stuff that we call rain isn't just water. Atmospheric gasses dissolve in water and changes how acid or basic it is. The rain erodes the rocks, bits and pieces break off and get rolled down hill and carried "down stream." So eventually these bits that break off the higher points get broken down into pebbles and ends up becoming gravel and sand. (There's also a rock cycle but that's not where I'm headed with this.) Meanwhile, plants are evolving. They start out small and in the ocean. But eventually, they conquer everything. Seriously look, there's plants everywhere humans go. The mosses, hornworts, and liverworts begin the breaking up rocks as well. Over millions of years, these simple plants have produced dirt. This substance is critical.(Not just for something to clean.) Why? It gives a place for more complicated plants to grow. True, some animals can and do eat small, simple plants like algae and mosses, but, with the exception of some seaweeds, humans can't eat these. In fact, a great number of algae and mosses are poisonous to people. We and other animals eat plants. They form the foundation of any ecosystem's food web. So plants gave us dirt, a source of food for everything and, as mentioned in a previous entry, they absorb CO2 and emit oxygen. There's still more they do. Humans like to build our homes so we don't die of exposure. Let's face it, we've settled on six out of seven current continents but came from one. (Africa, not Pangea just to be clear.) We're not adapted to the environments we've settled in, having shelter from the weather is a necessity, not a nicety. Usually, if you don't want to have to fight off bugs and cave bears, this means making some sort of structure. Dirt by itself doesn't hold still, thanks to wind and rain. If we build and leave bare dirt, that surface will wash or blow away. That's erosion, remember? Once your dirt leaves, there's cavities forming below your shelter. Maybe not right away, but soon, your shelter will collapse. I can hear some out of touch person in my mind's eye. They're asking "well why don't we just pour concrete all over and build on bedrock?" There are so many problems with that idea. Most obvious ones being the water table, thermal gain and sink holes. Let's look at the water table. Not all the water on Earth is on the surface. Some of it is beneath the dirt and rock we build on. We call those underground lakes and Aquifers. That's what makes up the water table. Bedrock is not always above the water table so you can't count on bedrock. Concrete is the other problem. Water naturally tends to seep into the ground if it doesn't evaporate first. But that only happens if there's pores in the soil. The typical concrete pad isn't porous. Water can't flow through this. But it can get underneath it from up hill. Eventually, the water sweeps away dirt and erodes any rock. This leads to sinkhole formation. Any structure sitting on top of such a cavity is going to have a very bad day. Usually, without a readily noticeable warning. Even if your building hasn't succumbed to the undermining of sinkholes, concrete has another big problem. Even when it's not dark colored, concrete absorbs visible light, that gets re-emitted as heat. Anything sitting on that concrete is going to get much hotter than its surroundings. At best that's just unpleasant but could quickly become lethal in the wrong conditions. Do you know what I'm going to suggest as a solution for that problem? Plants! Sure you can build your building and related pathways. Just add plants. If you have plants growing in dirt, it provides something to hold the dirt in place while still allowing water to properly make its way down into the soil. This lowers the risk of sink holes. Another added benefit of having plants in and around any structure is that they lower the temperature of the air around them. How? There's this thing they do called transpiration. That's the process of dragging water through the plant's roots up through its leaves. This process cools their surroundings significantly. Think of it, cities are often overheated because they are mostly stone and metal. Imagine if we harnessed the power of transpiration? We plant trees, bushes, flowers and other things in planters, green plant covered rooftops and along our pathways. We could potentially offset the overheating that plagues urban and suburban areas. If all this seems useless, wait there's more. Plants make alliances with other organisms to care for the soil. It's true, corn, legumes(peas and beans), and other species form a relationship with special microorganisms that help them fix nitrogen. Nitrogen is often a limiting nutrient for plant growth. Our crops require it to grow. Hence why we rely on the products of the Haber-Bosch process to fertilize our farms' soil. This is often inefficient and farmers apply more than necessary which leads to toxic runoff. Unlike our artificial means of introducing more nitrogen, plants that form a relationship with microorganisms get an advantage of the microbe getting nitrogen for them. Leading to enhanced growth of not only that plant but the ones growing around it. By depending on these nitrogen fixing alliances, we could have healthier, better agricultural practices. For those of you saying "that's nice, I'm off to space so this doesn't apply to me." I'm just going to be rude and say you're wrong. Even if we manage to solve all the problems with gravity, gamma rays and inorganic materials, we still gotta eat. It may not be dehydrated corn and potatoes but you can bet some sort of plant matter will be essential to providing food for future space faring humans. Plants could also fulfill the role of oxygen supplying and bio fuel in these new space colonies. Not only that, our species kind of has these complex brains that need something to keep them sane. Whether we're talking about aesthetics or pharmaceuticals, plants will play a critical role. And, sigh, yes, for the utilitarian among us, we can use them for other things. Like bamboo for sustainable building materials. Plant starches for glue and bio-degradable packaging. Fibers from plants should be something we consider as well if we intend to still have textiles. So after all that, I hope it's clear why plants will be a critical component to saving the humans. |
| 4.5 billion years ago, the primordial earth was a hellscape complete with molten surface, un-breathable gasses and life as we know it did not exist. It was only through the Late Heavy Bombardment that things necessary for Carbon based life, such as water, simple inorganic compounds that would become the building blocks of life and so forth got here. Point is, long before humans were around to get all their big ideas, planet Earth was here. Sure it was getting smacked by space rocks and "sister worlds". (Thats why we have a gigantic moon is because during Earth's formation another world smacked into our planet.) Earth has been host to various forms of life. In fact, the reason that the atmosphere had oxygen in it at all is due to life. Tiny little microbes related to cyanobacteria performed photosynthesis. Whereby they took photons of light to fix carbon into themselves and made energy for themselves. Their pollution is the oxygen they poop from photosynthesis. Eventually this led to global cooling. Creating "Snowball Earth" and the first mass extinction event. Billions of years later Earth has been through five mass extinction events. All caused by different things like asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions on scales we haven't seen in human history, when things started eating each other instead of using photo or chemo synthesis.(Shocking, I know.) Here in the modern era, we're on the verge of a sixth mass extinction event due to climate change. Every time a cataclysm wiped out most life on earth, there were survivors. They branched out and became the diversity of the next epoch until the next planet wide catastrophe. Even if humans do go extinct due to a disaster they had a hand in creating, planet Earth will still be here. Until our sun starts expanding into a red giant and vaporizes our blue dot. (Don't worry, that's not going to come about for another 800 million years.)We won't save or destroy our planet.(Unless we survive and evolve as a civilization then maybe we can haul our little blue world away from the cosmic frying pan.) So instead of shouting "Save the Planet" we should be shouting "Save the Humans from themselves" or "Save the way things are." I admit to paraphrasing Neil deGrasse Tyson in the previous paragraph. That said, I think that astronomer makes a good point. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to save the humans other than adapting our behavior and attitudes and that is easier said than done. We could reduce carbon emissions. Figure out a way, using microbes that eat green house gasses, such as methane and carbon dioxide to reduce the amount of these substances in our atmosphere. We could also make ourselves floating cities that employ sustainable practices to make a living in the ocean. Yes it's challenging and maybe a little weird but it could help us weather the changes that we cannot stop. (Sorry, fact is, we are already headed for changes. Our species, if it wants to survive, must adapt we can't just keep going the same way. That's the rules. I didn't make them up.) Humanity could potentially become a star traveling race and outrun the solar induced demise of our planet. But that requires multi-generational ships, a way to shield ourselves from cosmic radiation(including gamma ray bursts), a way to generate earth like gravity.(if we want to survive in a form we'd call human.) A way to feed ourselves and gain resources to make it all happen. It's lightyears between us and our nearest stellar neighbors.So we'd basically be cannibalizing neighboring worlds in our solar system. We're a long ways from being anything like Star Wars or Star Trek's ideas of humanity. We'll need to survive ourselves first before we ever leap into inter-stellar space. |
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