Biosolids hit the fan
From Sound Consumer magazine
(March 2012)
When Alice Cho Snyder and her husband Mark bought a 13-acre farm near Everett, Wash., last July, they thought they were going to be organic farmers, not the epicenter of a biosolids storm. Shortly after the Snyders closed on the property, Snohomish County officials notified the couple that biosolids were slated to be applied on 250 acres of land bordering their property.
“Biosolids” is a recycling industry term for sewage sludge that has been treated to remove most (or in some cases, nearly all) pathogens. After being somewhat defanged, biosolids are used as fertilizer or soil amendments.
… Read More »They bombed my toilet
Tags | Iraq & Militarism
Excerpt from Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq (Nazraeli Press: 2006)
This and nothing else must have been the power of the magic mirrors that are so often mentioned in the treatises of the occult sciences and in anathemas of the Inquisitors: to force the God of Darkness to display himself and to join his image with the one the mirror reflects.
— Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Two hundred furious men chant in the street outside the home of Imam Rabia Mohammed Habib Al Imir. Accounts vary, but at least five Iraqis died and eight more were wounded during a raid on the imam’s residence… Read More »
Come together
Tags | Iraq & Militarism
Excerpt from Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq (Nazraeli Press: 2006)
They kill you with kindness. It will not always be this way, but for now it’s its own weapon, its own devastation. A Kurdish taxi driver hauls me from the Ameriya Bomb Shelter—where the aquarelle ghosts of 408 Iraqi civilians were burned into the concrete walls Feb. 13, 1991 during a U.S. bombing attack—to the Al Fanar, a 45-minute drive in heavy traffic, and refuses to take my money. “You are American,” he says, “you are my friend.”
I leave one of my cameras—a Nikon with a new 300-mm lens—sitting under a chair in a hamburger… Read More »
Nanotech on the Menu
From In Good Tilth magazine: January/February 2009
Interest in nano is also fueled, in an aberrant way, by the visions of a fringe element of futurists who muse on biblical life spans, on unlimited wealth and, conversely, on a holocaust brought about by legions of uncontrollable self-replicating robots only slightly bigger than Einstein’s sugar molecules.
— Gary Stix, in Understanding Nanotechnology (Warner Books, 2002).
Just when you thought it was safe not to sweat the small stuff, it turns out the truly small stuff may be infinitely worse than the large stuff—if, by truly small, we mean nanoparticles, which have come… Read More »
Code Oranges
From In Good Tilth magazine: July/August 2009
The Department of Homeland Security’s lime green website recommends that each home-preparedness kit include a can opener. The agency, not well known for linking cause and effect, goes on to state that a can opener is used for food. And then, just to be sure you don’t put your eye out with it, or attempt to paddle it past the broken levees, the agency observes that your disaster preparedness kit should include a can opener if your kit contains canned food.
What the agency doesn’t recommend, but that we’re hearing more and more these days, is that your disaster kit should include a… Read More »
Sowing the Vine
From In Good Tilth magazine (July/August 2011)
Photos (on this website) by the Staff and Volunteers of the Homeless Garden Project, Santa Cruz, Calif.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. (Matthew 7:18; King James Version)
Janet O’Brien did what she was supposed to do—what any loving, desperate mother would do—and in less than 21 days will be homeless.
Simple, yet convoluted. It’s not supposed to be that way, of course. It’s an unspoken rule that narratives about the chaos that ultimately lands a person on the street must open with a list of moral breaches, self-destructive acts, tearful confessions … and conclude with… Read More »
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