Our World and Everything in It

Chimpanzees are being threatened in more ways than one. We like to think of Africa and point over there when it comes to the species closest to man, the little chimps that make us laugh and that everyone remarks are “so like us.” And they are. We’ve spent millions of dollars on the study of apes, on how much they are similar yet not exactly like us as we’ve come to find they have emotions, families, mates, tribes, and live life much like we do mourning death, being afraid, stressed, defensive, angry, happy, and depressed. Scientists have successfully taught large primates sign language, and they have conversed with humans too. There is only 1 percent difference in our DNA and their’s.

So to read the heart-wrenching stories of chimpanzees and other large primates used in research is depressing to say the least. What are we thinking spending millions to find out if a species is similar to humans, and when we do, use them as objects for research? The old cliché that “we have to do that to save human lives” is outdated and has been a crock for quite some time. Breeding research animals is big business. The medical community has been divided on the use of animals in research for years.  Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, NEAVS or New England Anti-Vivisection Society, In Defense of Animals, the Humane Society, Doris Day Animal League, and plenty of other organizations have been trying to get the message out in the mainstream that the use of animals for experimentation is no longer necessary. There are other and better alternatives.

How many times have we heard that a certain drug or procedure tested fine in animals, but not in humans? And we’re only lately seeing the results of what is known as a virus “jumping species.” When viruses jump species, from animal to human, dog to cat, etc., the virus usually becomes virulent or deadly to the new species host, i.e., the bird flu. So when the new human host of an animal virus passes that virus onto another human—look out. It could become a deadly epidemic. In this scenario, using animals for research should not be the norm, not to mention being outright inhumane? How inhumane are we? Read what Theodora Capaldo, president of NEAVS, and also a licensed psychologist with over 35 years of experience helping humans highlights in the NEAVS Newsletter about the lives of 3 different research chimps and their rescue into a sanctuary:

• Rachel [a chimp], raised in a home like a human child, was abandoned to a laboratory and spent the next eleven years in research. Even though she is now in sanctuary, her emotional breakdown left her prone to terrified screaming and attacking her own hand as if it were a stranger’s.
• Jeannie spent most of her life in a lab, being used in research that included cervical biopsies and HIV studies. She suffered what can only be described as a complete emotional collapse. She self-mutilated and screamed to the point that the lab considered euthanizing her. She was rescued and spent nine years in sanctuary before she died.
• Bill Jo endured repeated “knockdowns” during his 14 years in research, surrounded by groups of men while he was shot with darts of anesthesia. For years afterwards he couldn’t bear to have more than a few familiar people near his sanctuary enclosure. He died after nine years in sanctuary.

Theodora says that rescued research chimps display human symptoms of “trauma and abuse like hypervigilance, dissociation, depression, self-abuse, and relentless anxiety.”

This is just one misuse of primates that I’ve read about lately.  I also watched what happens to the chimpanzees and great apes imported for the express purpose of using them in shows, movies, even the circus. The TV special about entertainment primates aired on PBS not long ago. We think “Oh Hollywood is filled with rich people that are animal right’s activists,” and self assure ourselves the animals in show business are treated better than some human kids but that’s not the case. When the apes get older and unruly, they are simply shipped off in the most expedient manner to an immediate place, and by no means are they guaranteed a nice sanctuary somewhere.  Think about it. Young chimps are imported from the wild, and trained for a particular purpose in the entertainment industry. This means they get constant attention and stimulation from humans. They have names, are fed and taken care of, get medical attention, and bond with people. As they age, hormones kick in and many times the apes become erratic teenagers. This is when humans simply throw them away. They are discarded to all types of locations.

I watched a small, innocent chimp end up at a research facility that was no longer in use. There were a lot of cages and space available in buildings what looked to be out in the middle of nowhere. The little chimp was locked in a cage in a small room with little to no light, no other animal around, in dead silence, only to be given food once a day. There were no toys, no stimulus of any kind in that cage. The chimp was given a solitary confinement sentence for simply growing up.  He wasn’t cute or funny anymore, no use to humans. 

Hopefully since the series aired, he’s been given freedom at a sanctuary. Other entertainment apes won’t be as lucky. They’ll end up in research facilities going through what Rachel, Jeannie, and Billy Joe endured.  I’m surprised I haven’t found that some of these castaways ended up in a canned hunt in the U.S. somewhere–yet.

The practice of importing these apes for entertainment remains the same. It’s a cycle that needs to be broken. As fast as they are discarded, new apes are imported. Their lives are expended in order to achieve a little more laughter, a little more entertainment for humans. And it isn’t only chimps and apes that suffer this abuse.

Research and entertainment aren’t the only industries that are culprits in the abuse of the species that are the closest to human beings. The savagery of the illegal bushmeat trade is unbelievable. So unbelievable that I have to include the picture I received in a newsletter from the Jane Goodall Institute here:

The left half are what appear to be gorilla parts, the hands being a prized possession for a collector. Mind you, a gorilla named Suzie learned sign language and spoke with her human companion. That’s twisted irony.

The right half looks like cooked and/or dried chimpanzees.

People are starving. There is a world famine going on. These pictures are the result of both greed and starvation. Greed is an unordinary desire for wealth, whether for money or treasure. Starvation on the other hand, is the outcome of the unfulfilled basic human need for food. They are opposite on the spectrum of what is necessary, and what is outright wasteful and inhumane. We can do without both.

This is just a small snapshot to what is happening with many of our animal populations, animals we love, and have been aware of since we were children. Chimpanzees and apes are some of the biggest draws at the zoo, not by coincidence, but because they are so much like us. But we’re abusing them worldwide as we are each other, not only by fueling global warming, but also by our neglect for reverence for life, all life. It’s our world, our domain as humans and we’ve abused it to the point people are starving and eating anything. What’s next? I already did a blog on cannibalism as a next step. Tell me that in the picture above and on the right that it doesn’t look like a charred person lying there with an arm up near the head.

I’ve said all that to say this. There is a U.S. House Bill, H.R. 5852, the Great Ape Protection Act, that’s being considered in committee right now. This bill would end testing on chimpanzees, all breeding for invasive research on them, and retire chimpanzees currently in research to sanctuaries. It’s a brand new bill that I’m going to urge my rep to co-sponsor. Contact your rep to get this bill out of committee with few changes and onto the floor, or to co-sponsor it. 

We can do something immediate about research on apes. Great Britain, New Zealand, Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands have already banned chimpanzee research.

Unfortunately, the greed and starvation causing the illegal death of chimpanzees and other apes have no immediate solution.  We need to practice the grandness of our humanity by being humane, not by the arrogance and unempathetic tendencies of which we are also capable to the detriment of our world and everything in it.

Check this out. Someone has come up with a way to extract the water from the atmosphere the way leaves dew, get it?

The structure collects dew and makes it into fresh water. I have to ask about acid rain type water, or water passing through a polluted atmosphere? But it is quite a nice structure as far as contemporary sculpture, which is up my alley, maybe not so much for country folk.

It’s not big, provides shade, does not take up a lot of space around the bottom and yields 48 liters of water per day!  Holy Cow, if a liter is a tad over a quart (1.0567 quarts), then 48 liters is 12.68 gallons.  Couple this with reduced shower usage, a water saver shower head, low flow toilets, gray water recycling system, this WatAir as it’s called,  gets close to what all is needed in a two person household. My two person household does a heck of a lot less laundry, dishwasher loads, and such than larger households.

One of these atmospheric dew extractors in a place like Michigan could have a ridiculous yield. But would we homeowners keep viable water from re-entering the Great Lakes?

Read more about it: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604222124.htm

I received an interesting e-mail from a French blogsite, e-citizen.tv, with an article about 16 year-old Canadian high school student, Daniel Burd, who put together the right balance of bacteria to eat plastic bags at a record rate of  42% elimination in just 6 weeks. That’s really close to ½ of a bag in a very short period of time. Plastic can take up to 1000 years to disintegrate.

I read Daniel’s report. Burd’s experiment is on PDF and the link is in the article. He worked with three different bacteria strains that feed on the organic material in the plastic bags. Daniel reasoned that if plastic eventually breaks down then there are bacteria that are able to digest the plastic bags. He was able to isolate the microbes that eat plastic and by mixing strains created bacteria that can really gobble the stuff without creating CO2 in the process.

Powdering landfills with Daniel Burd’s mix could substantially reduce the size of them. All I can ask is why didn’t an adult think to do this? Why didn’t science do this? Makes you wonder doesn’t it? Read about it:

http://www.e-citizen.tv/wordpress/2008/06/11/lang_frsacs-plastiques-genie-environnement-sciences-recherchelang_frlang_enplastic-bags-environement-sciences-research-geniouslang_en/langswitch_lang/en/

I can’t pass up reading the Science Daily website. There are so many articles lately about microbes, that they are the real engineers for climate control. As one article stated: “Microbes will continue as climate engineers long after humans have burned that final barrel of oil. Whether they help us to avoid dangerous climate change in the 21^st century or push us even faster towards it depends on just how well we understand them.”

Well it seems science understands them better and better every day and hopes to use the enzymes produced by microbes to break down all sorts of material in a “closed, integrated system that produces edible products, flowers, and biodiesel with little waste.” Sugar cane and hibiscus flowers are key to this closed system.

Scientists plan on using the enzymes from microbes to break down the sugarcane/hibiscus biomass to sugars, and ferment them to ethanol. I have to LOL here because this product is basically the same as that pure grain alcohol that we can get out of the hills of Tennessee, namely WHITE LIGHTENING. Every drink this stuff? I think a person could hallucinate on it. I know the ring from the pint jar it comes in can be lit easily and burns for a while. But I digress.

After the biomass is fermented the carbon dioxide produced during the fermentation is trapped. It’s then fed to micro algae (more microbes) in ponds. Once this micro algae goes to work a type of polymer is produced that could be refined further into jet fuel. The spent micro algae is then harvested and used as fertilizer for the sugar cane and hibiscus flowers again. That’s quite an efficient loop.

I say they get on with this microbe research because the Bush/Cheney regime is about to ruin more of our country than invading enemies would ever do. Right now, Halliburton is ruining parts of Utah, Colorado, and other places in search for natural gas, when methane is right under our nose, get it, methane—nose? Ditto for oil. Halliburton’s trucks are already corroding prehistoric drawings that stretch across the rocks in Nine Mile Canyon.  No one knows or cares because everything is either overshadowed by the economy, Iraq, and the election. Let’s just say the Bush/Cheney administration is having a field day in its final months in office to the detriment of irretrievable artifacts, land, and animals in our national parks and areas around them.  

I would love to see these guys just deflate like a balloon and buzz off into the atmosphere but that would just be adding some really defiled waste into our air.

Remember that what the powers that be tell you about not having enough alternative sources of energy to replace oil and natural gas is a lie. There is probably enough methane alone to blow us sky high. That’s a lot of energy laying around they like us to believe is waste, because it’s cheap and works just as well as natural gas because—it is.

Read more about microbes at Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080604141014.htm. 

There was interesting news on BBC World this morning about a study done by scientists in India. The scientists seem to think there is a link between cancer and pesticides. The study centered on farmers in Punjab. The farmers didn’t necessarily suffer a higher rate of cancer as much as a change in DNA that leads to cancer.

Of course a spokesperson for the crop industry trade said that just couldn’t be. They don’t use pesticides enough, and the pesticides in use simply do not cause cancer. The author of the article found that the farmers were indeed spraying all the time, not occasionally.

The scientists were careful to rule out age, alcohol, and smoking as a factor, and still ‘found significant change in the DNA, so the cancer risk is greatly increased when the extent of DNA damage is very high.’

The farmer that claimed he was spraying night and day had cancer already. Yields of new crops have gone down, while population rises. The farmers are doing everything they can to maintain crops until harvest, but it doesn’t look promising for the crops, or the health of an India that is slowly emerging from a third world status, and getting cancer now.

Is it me or does it seem that if the country is poor, it suffers deaths and problems from simple diseases we don’t have? But when a poor country begins moving up in status, using modern methods, bingo, cancer makes an appearance relative to DNA damage.  Hmmmm?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7407707.stm

I read an article “More Problems With Plastics” in U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2008, by Adam Voiland that will be very disturbing to males. It’s about chemicals called phthalates found in plastics. I’ve already reported and insinuated that we’re slowly poisoning ourselves with gender bending bisphenol A (BPA), another additive in plastics. Phthalates are endocrine disruptors, (interferes with hormones) like BPA, whose results are already seen in fish with both male and female reproductive organs, no organs, or a variety of mutations in between. BPA could soon affect birds and mammals, if it hasn’t already done so. Who knows? We’re lied to so much with scientific jargon relating to parts per million, trillion, and so goes the story of phthalates.

It takes me a long time to research scientific reports about industrial toxins because I have to look up every other word and then find out what the baseline is. Then I have to look at the industry that produces it and figure out how they are lying about it. It’s like every time I hear that water and air are so much cleaner than 30 years ago.  I want to scream. Thirty some years ago we were so awfully polluted, and I was here to see it, when beaches were closed not sporadically but regularly. Out of this pollution came the Clean Air and Water Acts where we began to clean up. So of course we’re cleaner than at our all time highest pollution levels. But how much cleaner? If we mean 2 parts per trillion less of any of a myriad of toxins in our air and water than in 1970, we can honestly make that claim, but it’s hardly ideal or healthy now is it?

So here we have an article that talks about birth defects from phthalates especially in male babies. One out of 300 baby boys, (scary numbers here) don’t have a urethra that emerges out of the tip of their penis. It ends up somewhere else underneath, midway down the shaft, or barely out of the scrotum. It’s called hypospadias and studies show that phthalates reproduce it in rodents. The article says, “Phthalates are used widely as softening agents in certain plastics,” PVC mostly, but also pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and all types of products. 

The article states that in 2005 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that “most Americans have traces of hormone-disrupting chemicals in their body.” Another advocacy group found “84 percent of American have at least six different phthalates in their urine.”  Scientists have been studying 3 of the most prevalent hormone disruptors that are also linked to “testicular cancer, reduced sperm quality, diminished penis size, and undescended testicles.” Told you it was a male nightmare.

Of course, and here is the lie, not everyone thinks the effects seen in animals justifies concern. Again, the excuse is that the doses the animals are given are higher than anything in humans. Risk to humans is minimal. Lives are weighed by parts per million/trillion. Nice, real nice. One in 300 babies has hypospadias, but nah, no big risk. That’s why many European countries have banned phthalates in certain toys. America is still in the consideration stage at this point; even though some companies stepped up to the plate and phthalate free products are showing up in stores. Now you know what that means.

I have to take the time here to point out one of my biggest complaints also. What’s the sense of experimenting on animals if someone ultimately uses the same tired excuse that it’s not the same for humans? It is why I am and have been adamantly against animal experimentation for a long time. It is an absolute myth that it is necessary. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, NEAVS, and many professionals have been testifying about it for years. We’re in the 21^st century now. There are superior methods. But research animals are a big racket and cheap. Don’t ever lose your cat or dog.

If you’re male and already in your 20’s or 30’s breathing a sigh of relief, think again. Or rather look to your hairline. As a licensed cosmetologist that had my own shop for almost 8 years, I paid close attention to the most successful products for baldness. Baldness is relative to some of the many hormones our body produces. An overabundance of a certain type chokes out the hair follicles. My husband’s father and grandfather on his mother’s side were bald, as were all of his uncles on both sides of the family. My husband is 55 with a full head of hair. Hmmm. Eating freshly cooked meals every night, not drinking tap water for almost 30 years, imbibing minimal pop or junk food, and growing our own fruits and vegetables is starting to really show results. It’s not just a cliché that we are what we eat, drink, and breathe. Believe it!

I was looking over Science Daily’s website and found so many articles about man’s involvement with global warming. It seems humans have affected the environment for thousands of years. The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming period all the nay sayers like to brandish as proof that global warming happened before and is a natural occurrence just ain’t so.

Man has been affecting the environment for thousands of years. The sad thing is this article is almost 3 years old. Have these findings been censored from the general public because I’ve been arguing with people who have brought up the ice ages and warming periods of the past, while the whole time science has had proof that: “Humans have been tinkering with greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere for at least 2,000 years and probably longer, according to a surprising new study of methane trapped in Antarctic ice cores conducted by an international research team.”

Read more about it and browse around because there is a plethora of articles and findings that substantiate we are indeed causing what we call global warming.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050909075709.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981002082033.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0902-our_changing_climate.htm

A U.S. District Court judge has ordered the Bush Administration to stop stalling on adding polar bears to the endangered species list. The Endangered Species Act requires that the decision be made on the latest scientific evidence. And the evidence gets clearer everyday. The deadline for this order is May 15^th. If it’s ignored it’s back to court.

The NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Greenpeace sued the Bush administration because it violated the law by missing its January deadline to add animals to the endangered list and is still dragging its feet while continuing to sell oil leases in the Arctic area. Can the dots get any bigger.

This administration is catering to oil, ignoring the Supreme Court’s warnings, appointing cronies for his cause in departments like the Dept. of the Interior, the EPA, etc., and most of all ignoring our petitions, as well as science. There is little doubt we have been lied to about climate change also.

Now it’s up the Dept. of the Interior to decide about the list, and Secy. of Interior, Kempthorne has already ignored thousands of petitions relative to all types of wildlife abuse. And this judge says he’s already in violation of the law already. What a guy! If the deadline is ignored, it’s back to court.  

Quite frankly, I wouldn’t keep pushing the envelope with the courts. They’ve been pro-environment lately with the U.S. Supreme court ruling against the EPA that they will use their authority to regulate CO2 emissions from autos. The U.S. Court of Appeals was angry when it vacated the EPA’s Clean Air Mercury Rule, calling its cap and trade program for mercury nothing but moving the pollution around, and ditto for vacating the EPA’s Incinerator Rule. The outcome of that court session cost the coalburning industry big time. In less than two years the EPA must come up with new standards for mercury emissions relative to the coal industry, no cap and trade allowed.

And now the courts are drawn into the Endangered Species arena where Earthjustice has stopped the wolf kill that failed to be stopped by the Dept. of Interior despite scientific data, and this current court action on behalf of the polar bears filed by the NRDC. CBD, and Greenpeace. I’d be looking over my shoulder for a big boot if I were Kempthorne. On behalf of the animals, I hope he gets it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24369059/

Yesterday I reported that NASA satellites are studying all types of changes on the earth. One of NASA’s studies whose results were on their website stated that:

Scientists from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., set out to see what effect reduced sea ice cover would have on the organisms that comprise the base of the Arctic marine food web, the single-celled floating algae called phytoplankton. Because these photosynthetic organisms rely on the sun to meet their energy demands, reduced Arctic sea ice cover means an increase in the amount of open water habitat suitable for algal growth. Thus, their abundance is expected to increase.

Not surprisingly, the scientists found that the growth of phytoplankton has indeed increased markedly in concert with the rapid reduction in sea ice cover over the last five years. However, they were surprised to find that this growth did not take place in the areas of the Arctic where we expected it. The researchers anticipated that areas experiencing the most dramatic loss of sea ice would show the largest increase in algal growth. However this was not the case. Algal growth did indeed rise in newly ice-free areas, but only accounted for about one third of the total Arctic increase. The majority of the increase in algal growth (70 percent) was observed in the shallow waters that ring the Arctic Ocean. In these areas, algal growth rates increased because the sea ice in these areas, algal growth rates increased because the sea ice cover was melting sooner and freezing later in the year giving the algae increasingly more time to grow.

This was nine year study using all types of satellite imagery including and MRI Spectroradiometer to compare ocean color and temperature relative to sea ice melt that was also assessed.

I read a lot of things and certain words like phytoplankton buildup tweaked my curiosity as to the difference between phytoplankton and plankton. Phytoplankton is the autotrophic component of plankton. According to Wikipedia an “autotroph is an organism that produces complex organic compounds from simple inorganic molecules using energy from light or inorganic chemical reactions. Another article I found at:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002481.html didn’t differentiate between phytoplankton and plankton.

This does not bode well at all in my mind because of the blog I just wrote about explosions of methane gas into the atmosphere that are growing in size to that of meters in the ocean waters off of Namibia. If all of this phytoplankton is rapidly spreading in the shallow waters that ring the Arctic Ocean, and there are not enough fish or marine mammals in that region to eat the excess plankton (phytoplankton), doesn’t it stand to reason that this Arctic phytoplankton will go the way of plankton near Namibia? In other words, it will die and rot, creating hydrogen sulfide pockets. All that is needed is high pressure from a storm on the ocean’s surface to affect the pressure on the ocean bottom in these particularly shallow waters around the Arctic and an eruption might occur. These are the same eruptions happening off of Namibia. I realize that scientists claim these explosions are not likely to take place because of the constant churning of the ocean floor. But then there is Namibia. Explain that?

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/04/24/mankind-contributes-to-global-warming-through-fish/

Scary stuff since the first global warming event 40 million years ago was from methane gas eruptions. The earth was eventually scorched. This just shows how delicately balanced our world really is. We fish too much, or disrupt certain species by changing habitat drastically, and something else is thrown out of kilter like phytoplankton, something so small we don’t really see it except for greenish colored water. It’s something so small, yet it can eventually kill us.

NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ecosystem_research_briefs.html..

While I was on the NASA website I couldn’t help but click on ” Forests Damaged by Hurricane Katrina Become Major Carbon Source.” That article stated that, “a research team has estimated that Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged 320 million large trees in Gulf Coast forests, which weakened the role the forests play in storing carbon from the atmosphere. The damage has led to these forests releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.” The satellite pics in the article show the devastation from Katrina. It was quite a wipe out.

The NASA article also stated that “[t]he carbon cycle is intimately linked to just about everything we do, from energy use to food and timber production and consumption. [] As more and more carbon is released to the atmosphere by human activities, the climate warms, triggering an intensification of the global water cycle that produces more powerful storms, leading to destruction of more trees, which then act to amplify climate warming.”

So one event, like a massive hurricane, results in deforestation and decay that cause more CO2 to be released, and more overall warming for more massive hurricanes. Destructive cycle seemed to be formed rather easily. Not good for us.

Read more and check out the web short “In Katrina’s Wake” @ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2007/katrina_carbon.html.