My previous post mentioned Fishman’s detail regarding FIJI. The water is drawn from an aquifer on the north coast of Fiji’s main island and finds its way into more than a million bottles of water a day, bottles that make it by truck, cargo container, some five to seven thousand miles to reach American consumers while more than half the residents of the nation of Fiji do not themselves have safe, reliable drinking water. 

Until the Coca-Cola company was kicked out of India, its withdrawa...

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      Texas is in the midst of an unprecedented drought: nearly 94% of the state is under “extreme” weather conditions that, climatologists predict, will continue into the next ten months if not longer. At this point, to speak of “drought” may be misleading: what’s happening looks like a shift in rainfall patterns that’s part of climate change and global warming. Most Texans, including the state’s governor, deride the possibility and ignore the warning signs, turning to prayer m...

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To the newcomer, Wyoming is the location of a mindless if relentless “Drill, Baby, Drill”(gas and oil) and ”Dig, Baby, Dig” (coal). “Plans in works for 4,200 new gas wells in Wyoming,” proclaims an August 2011 newspaper headline. Yes, that’s four thousand two hundred deep-gas wells. The Nirobrara shale-oil exploration, the upstart from the previous year. is proceeding at a pace. Like deep-well gas extraction, it, too relies on hydraulic fracturing. “1.2 million gallons: App...

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          ALS constitutes “progressive imprisonment without parole,” wrote Tony Judt in his memoir, discussed in my previously post. Last year Judt succumbed to a variant of the neuro-muscular Lou Gehrig’s disease. Though the sufferer is rendered completely immobile, there is no loss of sensation and, in his case, “there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic pr...
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