Breaching The Web

The dramatic collapse of part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and yesterday’s joint meeting of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and the Arctic Council have renewed the debate over polar (but mostly Antarctic) tourism.

I’m of two minds about Antarctic tourism. On the one hand, Antarctic tourism brings people face-to-face with the beauty, harshness and stunning otherness of that continent. It most likely creates supporters of or sympathizers with rules and regulations that protect the continent. On the other hand, it’s a dangerous, unregulated industry that’s growing and putting further stress on a fragile ecosystem. The fact that most tourists visit the Antarctic peninsula, where the Wilkins Ice Shelf is now so threatened, makes tourism seem even more risky.

Overall, I think I favor heavily regulating or even banning Antarctic tourism — but which of those two options I prefer depends on the day. However, the current unregulated state of affairs is dangerous for the tourists and for the environment. Unfortunately, supra-national organizations the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and the Arctic Council have difficulty making any headway on issues like this during the best of times — which this most certainly isn’t.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is a curling, finger-like appendage of ice that reaches out from the continent of Antarctica. It’s been there for thousands of years. The shelf rises 60 feet (~20 meters) high out of the sea, and is attached to Antarctica via a few key bridges — one of which recently collapsed, leaving the future of the shelf in doubt. Antarctica has experienced a temperature rise of 2.5C in the last 50 years, making it a “hot spot” for global climate change, and making these ice shelves increasingly unstable.

Unsurprisingly, the most comprehensive stories about the collapse are coming from New Zealand, which is likely to see very large icebergs head its way if/when the shelf collapses completely. Wilkins is not large enough to contribute to a rise in ocean levels by itself, but it’s part of an alarming and quickening trend. Ten such shelves have broken off, broken up, or collapsed in recent years.

I have always loved trains and train whistles. My husband and I had an outdoor wedding ceremony, in a history house in an older part of Tucson by the train tracks. The site coordinator couldn’t promise us no trains, but she did say they were uncommon on Saturdays. Right before the ceremony started, a train came by. One of my fondest memories of that day is the sound of that train rumbling by while the bell choir played Ode to Joy.

All of which is a set-up for me to say this: As much as I love trains, even I wouldn’t pay $300 for a tea kettle with a train whistle.

As drought rages in multiple tea-growing countries like Kenya, India and Sri Lanka, tea consumption is also increasing leading to a surge in tea prices. Like oil, tea is traded in dollars, and with the dollar regaining a lot of lost ground against the British pound and other currencies, the surge in prices is likely to have only a moderate effect in the US. I’d give you a link for that info about the US price of tea, but we don’t drink enough of it for it to be an issue worth reporting on here, so I’m just speculating. Major tea consuming-countries, like Australia, Russia and England will likely see much greater price increases. Also like oil, rising prices can be expected to have mixed effects on people in tea producing regions. Most likely, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. It’s an old story.

Colony collapse disorder (CCD), where whole colonies of honeybees are just disappearing, remains largely unexplained, but it seems increasingly likely that it’s a result of multiple pressures on the hives, which makes potential solutions even more difficult to identify. This scares me — honeybees are critically important to agriculture. CCD has renewed efforts to encourage native North American pollinators like the non-social Orchard Mason Bee. I’ve been thinking of building an Orchard Mason bee house in an effort to attract them, but I fear that it would end up full of termites instead.

I have been cooking at home a lot lately, which is quite a change from my recent past. There are many reasons for this, including my ever-expanding garden, my obsession with Michael Pollan, some health issues, time and the need to save a bit of money.

But it’s not always easy. Eating out is fun. It can be romantic, educational, interesting, adventurous, entertaining, social and convenient. And it always seems like it will be faster than eating at home, although it never, ever is.

So, in a blatant rip-off of one of my new favorite blogs, Not Eating Out in New York, I thought I’d start an occasional series of “reasons to not eat out”. These are as much to reinforce my new-found enthusiasm for home-cooked meals as for anything else.

#1 is: It almost always takes longer than cooking at home, unless you are eating fast food, which doesn’t really count as either eating or food, so I’m ignoring it. There’s transit time to the restaurant, wait time for a table, wait time to get your food, the time it takes to eat, wait time for the check, and transit time home. And that doesn’t take into account drinks before or after dinner, or the occasional dessert.

At home, you have to spend time prepping ingredients, cooking, eating, and clean-up, all of which can be done in a pleasant environment with friends, loved-ones and pets. There’s no transit time and no waiting. Even if you add in grocery-shopping time, it’s still faster to eat at home.

So there you are — #1 in an occasional series.

I’ve written before to point to the Playscapes weblog, which is about modern playground design. This is not a topic I would have anticipated enjoying, but I love it. It’s about more than playgrounds, it’s about how people occupy space — in this specific case, it happens to be focused on the short set, but the general concerns and approach are applicable to all of us.

Yesterday’s post is a good example. It’s about a playground designed for a high school in London. The design is cool, modern and interesting — and it serves the needs of the teenagers for whom it was built, providing them with a safe place to socialize.

Now if only I could get the designer, Clara Gaggero, to design my garden for me.

Several TV shows in the recent past have led me to the conclusion that we need to be more British — off the top of my head, I would name Prison Break season 2, the Battlestar Gallactica finale, all of Pushing Daisies, Firefly and the cancellation of Life on Mars to be the primary factors in my conclusion, but I’m sure there are others.

I’m tired of watching shows that start with a good premise (Prison Break, BSG) drag on too long, and shows that have great drama (Pushing Daisies, Life on Mars, Firefly) get the axe because their audience is too small.

I think we need a more flexible model for TV, like that of British TV, where a series consists of a smaller number of episodes of varying length and number, depending on what the show and the channel can support. In most cases, all the eps of a given show are aired and there aren’t any cancellations. I think this would generate both more viewers and better shows — I’d be much more willing to invest time in a new show if I knew it wasn’t going to be yanked off the air before the story is done (like Pushing Daisies!!) and I think the writing would be better if the shows were of a defined and known length and number (unlike the BSG finale, for example, which betrayed the lack of planning, no matter what Ronald D. Moore would have us believe). This seems like it would be a particularly good model for cable television, with its endless hours of time in need of content.

Now, if only I could devise a The Brain-like plan to take over the world, I could make this happen.

A rare bird, Worcester’s buttonquail (Turnix worcesteri), long though to be extinct was photographed and videotaped recently. This is the first photograph ever recorded of this bird. The Worcester’s buttonquail is very secretive, with no song, and it avoids contact with humans and other animals.

After it was photographed, it was sold to a poultry market, where it was slaughtered, butchered, sold for food and presumably eaten. The hunter that caught it didn’t know how rare it was. To make this story even sadder, it’s thought that the bird was female, suggesting that it might have laid eggs somewhere — and if there had been a male hiding somewhere too, there might have been a sliver of hope for the species. Link via glitter_trash on Twitter.

I’m very curious about tea coins, which are compressed tea disks that can be used to brew up to 4 cups of tea. There are afew different kinds available via Amazon.com. One nice thing about them is that they are compressed by tea producers themselves rather than being sent out for packaging — which retains more jobs and more of the profit in the region that produced the tea. Interesting.