[teal-party] News Round-Up

[lwood]

When Fortune magazine is pointing up The Trouble with the Bees, you know it's bad.

Fortune: Flight of the Honeybees

And, as always when talking about CCD, it's important to mention these guys from Penn State, the least-alarmist clearinghouse of information on CCD, from the people actually doing the research on the problem.

---

There are a lot of reasons not to use anti-bacterial soap and other products:

• It gets into the water, and kills things: SF Chronical Their source: the paper from the Environmental Working Group.


• Regular soap kills bacteria just as well at preventing infection disease and killing bacteria.


• It combines with water and sunlight to make--in brief--Things You Do Not Want. (when I think a paper is serious egghead stuff, it really is)


• It may contribute to breeding resistant bacteria--or may not.

Mostly, though, I'm agin' it because it slides right through the sewage treatment plant and out into the bay and ocean.

---

But speaking of Things the Ocean Does Not Want, here's a few:

• Has this gone far enough around yet? I admit, I'm rather obligated to point out that flushing cat litter kills sea otters--also in a semi-digested version of the same data from TIME magazine. In California, we've passed a law to require a notice on all bags of cat litter to please not flush same, but who reads the kitty litter bag--and I would not be surprised in the least to hear that it's not just sea otters, it's just that they're endangered so we're extra fussy here.


• Let's talk about the North Pacific Gyre. Plastic doesn't break down into its component parts, it breaks into smaller pieces of plastic, which remain inedible until some bright bacterium evolves into eating the (several kinds of) stuff.

---

Well, that was all thoroughly depressing. I shall post something more cheerful forthwith, still in an environmental vein.

-- Lorrie

Comments

OMG!

[purplevenus.livejournal.com]

I have never been happier that I don't flush my cat litter.
Phew!
THX!
Maybe a trip to the pacific should be made to throw woo at the NPG. I throw woo there occasionally.

Re: OMG!

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I have never been happier that I don't flush my cat litter.
Phew!
THX!

You're welcome. 8-)

Maybe a trip to the pacific should be made to throw woo at the NPG. I throw woo there occasionally.

Me, I'm a Magic through Works kind of girl: how about committing to less plastic, and every time one chooses a less plastic kind of thing, remember why you chose that?

In my world, at least, the sea is already full of teh woo--I can't really add to it. But I can choose to act in support or conflict, you know? I try for support as often as I can...and pick up litter when I see it on the beach.

Which was all well and good the last time I stopped by, except the thing I thought was an old water bottle that was oddly slumped was, i'fact, a dead moon jelly. It was amusingly squidgy, but stayed right there. ;)

-- Lorrie

Re: OMG!

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Also, missy--I have pretty little hot pepper plants. One of them simply must be for you, as its leaves are purple.

When might we rendezvous?

-- Lorrie

[petranef.livejournal.com]

I had no idea!

No more plastic for me!

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

For myself, I have severely curtailed use of disposable plastic--either not using it or reusing when possible. This has led to a lot less takeout, but a lot more sit-down (both at home and at restaurant), which gives one time to drive a wedge in the frantic furtive froth and enjoy a meal. Supermarket produce bags I tend to reuse until they wear out or something really rots in there.

For more durable plastics, I am somewhat more lenient. A yogurt container can be reused for other storage, or refilled with more yogurt that I grow myself, a process that it less scary than it might sound.

The big exception, alas, remains trash bags. Still, I'm down to one tall kitchen every few weeks, and one full of feline feces on a similar schedule.

Good luck!

-- Lorrie

[bearmum.livejournal.com]

If I read the first link correctly, it refers only to bacteria from run-off, not from flushing in toilets. Feces flushed in toilets go through sewage treatment plants, which are *supposed* to get rid of most bacteria before releasing the treated sewage. If this is not sufficient, how do we get rid of cat poop? Putting it in the garbage merely deposits it in landfills, where eventually it will get into the natural run-off and thence into the ocean....

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, no--sewage treatment plants don't get rid of T. gondii. They're a much tougher nut to crack than the average bacterium.

Now, that said, some of the pages I dug up in researching this point out, as you did, that the alternative is the landfill--and ask "how is the landfill any better?" and, more practically, "so why don't sewage treatment plants deal with this?"

As you know, landfills are less "places for things to rot" and more like tombs: they're sealed off and the stuff is left to take up (ridiculous amounts of) space. On the flip side, being sealed off, there's not much of a runoff issue as far as I know.

Anyway, this is the course suggested by people who get paid to figure out what's killing the otters (http://www.seaotterresearch.org/), after NOAA (http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_otter.html) came out with the first papers on this a couple years ago. They're still saying "put the poop in the landfill", which I don't much like either, but--*cough* on the less-rational side, flushing gets me in trouble.

Now, if I ever heard tell that EBMUD (http://www.ebmud.com/) had a way to deal with T. gondii oocysts and prevent them from getting into the waterways, I'd go back to flushing--that way the fecal matter would be used to generate electricity down at the EBMUD plant by the Bay Bridge, and I would feel much better about that than the entombment of cat poop.

-- Lorrie

[kaffee-spinne.livejournal.com]

Our cat just poops outside in the bushes. Is that ok?

I read this (http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2007/05/08/no_organic_bee_losses_bees_immune_systems_damaged.htm) in May 07. Apparently there have been no bee losses among organic bees.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Our cat just poops outside in the bushes. Is that ok?

Er, no--in fact, as your cat is an outdoor cat, he's a lot more likely to have oocysts in his feces than my indoor cats, and the storm sewer system doesn't actually treat water much at all, so...no, not really. Sorry.

I read this in May 07. Apparently there have been no bee losses among organic bees.

Not so--I know of collapsed colonies right here in Berkeley where there has been no spraying. No moving around on flatbed trucks, just hives in one place doing their thing...then poof.

The electromagnetic interference thing is pretty much rubbish too, although that was a favorite theory awhile back--I don't know of any reason it should be, save that this is a favorite topic for the usual alarmists that has yet to be consistently borne out in properly methodical research.

-- Lorrie

[kaffee-spinne.livejournal.com]

Since goat's, sheep and pigs all are also generally contaminated with this, and they all poop outdoors (into the soil which harbors the organisms for months) - I would suppose that in areas where ground-water feeds marine area containing sea otters that there should be no free-range domesticated animals of any size?

I'm not certain we have sea otters in the Gulf of Mexico. But we have a lot of large domesticated farm animals.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Of all of those critters, apparently it's only Felis domesticus that carries the oocysts in its feces, which is why it's only cats that are a problem.

-- Lorrie