Emissions be damned! The British are burning their trash. New findings are complicating the conventional wisdom that particles released into the air lead to health problems. The Danes, world leaders in green technology, burn roughly 40 percent of their garbage. An unscientific survey of my own lungs indicate that they are holding up pretty well, in spite of my roots in the Ozark borderlands where trash fires are as common as turkey poachers...
Keep your eyes peeled for NASA's rubber ducks, which will emerge like unfrozen phoenixes from Greenland's glacial ice floes. Be sure to email Dr. Alberto Behar when you find your duck...
The Americans and the Dutch share a conservation-minded land ethic, but they arrived at their policies in opposite ways. Scarcity forced the Dutch to take their land back from the sea, whereas plenty induced the Americans to settle and consume land as quickly as possible. Engineering innovations created the Netherlands. Many now hope that they will save America...
The new EU president is a global warming skeptic. Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic has fought the liberal consensus, led by Germany's Angela Merkel, to reduce carbon emissions, insisting that science has not proven the urgency of this policy. He is also an avowed enemy of the EU in general. Of course the recent economic catastrophe has played into the hands of those who bristle at unification...
Less debate is heard about the ownership of Earth's most precious resource. Water is to a greater and greater extent under the control of the wealthy, but a new "virtual water footprint" statistic should raise awareness about this inequality. The metric shows how even rainy northern Europe imports fruit, cotton, beans and wood from the developing (and increasingly dry) world. With guys like these extolling the virtues of bottled water, a return to local-water drinking is long overdue.
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Glimpses of our cousins, the Europeans
