Rose George
Quotes by Rose George
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The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea.
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In villages across the developing world, governments have provided reasonable enough latrines that have again and again been turned into storage spaces or simply abandoned. In India alone, millions of government-funded latrines have become goat-sheds. Some had been built near kitchens, a taboo in Indian households.
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Half of the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering from what are generally known as water-related diseases.
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Shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's.
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I went down to the sewers in London and looked at a campaigning group in London called RATS, Rowers Against Thames Sewage, and I went to Sewage School and hung out with kids learning to make sewage soup and how to clean sewage. And it was great - really good fun.
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When Peru had a cholera outbreak in 1991, losses from tourism and agricultural revenue were three times greater than the total money spent on sanitation in the previous decade.
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Ships are obliged to take on harbor or river pilots - who provide specialized local navigation - when they approach a port, but in the canal, a Suez crew is also obligatory. The crew members are there in case the ship needs to be moored during the canal transit, but this rarely happens.
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As for restaurants and fast-food places who tip tons of oil down their drains, they are routinely encouraged to use fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to cart away fat (although now that fat is being turned into energy, it can make money).
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All that is known for sure is that endometriosis is endemic and that it cannot be cured. Management is the best hope. This makes for treatments that are, if I am being polite, based on trial and error. If I am feeling less generous, they are shots in the dark.
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The days of languorous shore leave are long gone. Overnight stays are unheard of and sailor towns a distant memory. In better ports, seafarers head for a seamen's mission.
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What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it.
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Rotavirus does not cause all diarrhea, but it causes a lot of it. Instead of a single vaccine dose, however, harried nurses may have to give several, as diarrhoea makes it difficult for a child to retain anything.
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In some of the great cities of Europe - Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels - tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe.
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Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles.
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Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.
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In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.
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