How to make the world a better place
Alright, if you have any ideas for this list, feel free to send em in.
I'm trying to stay away from the usual mushy yet not particularly
enlightening stuff like "hug everyone you see and tell them
how much they mean to you". Not to berate such pandering, mindless
garbage that routinely clogs my E-mail to no-one's benifit.
That's just not what this page is for.
Idea A.
Boycott. If you don't believe in the way a business behaves, don't
give them your hard earned $$$. Every dollar is a vote. If enough people
can be brought to boycott a business, the business will have to either
change or shut down. This is part of the normal capitalistic process.
When people don't like a product then they don't buy it.
Of course, if the allure of the budweiser frogs or the Nike swoosh seems
too powerful to resist There is help.
(click )
Boycotts are also near impossible when a consumer cannot make an alternate choice.
For instance, it's difficult to protest the exploitave monopoly involving the
production and distribution of grain.
However when boycotts are posible, they allow even those people who don't have
time for letter writing or good 'ol riot in
the street protests to help make a change through their daily lives.
The ability to boycott effectivly begins with knowing just what businesses are doing
For that reason, I'd like to start a list of large corporations that are
in need of some boycotting. If you have any , send em in. I'm not quite
up on the legal consequences of such a list if the stuff I print is innacurate, so consider
every thing you read here "alleged" until you can confirm it for yourself.
Okay? Right now this is all off the top of my head. I'll do the real research
later.
or check out the link at the entrance to my homepage
1. Bic pens donate money to the fascist party in Europe.
2. I believe that Burkenstocks do the same. If anyone can confirm or deny this?
3. Pepsi's gotten pretty nasty over in east Asia. I have one dormmate who
claims that they've had some political dissidents killed. I'll have to check
that out.
4. A lot of the fruit that you eat out of season, if not grown in California
or Florida is grown in S.American countries. The case of El Salvador is
a good example of the problems arising from this. A demoratic election was
suppressed violently, and a popular uprising was crushed by U.S. trained salvadoran troops
when the locals started advocating land reform to remedy the huge
colonialistic economic desparity. If you're interested in what went on, you might want to check out
"THE MASSACRE AT EL MOZOTE". There was also a film on the assasination
of the local archbishop- I think it was called Romero. If anyone could give
me some info on this, (particularly whether a boycott on out of season fruit would have
a positive effect on the native population) I'd be appreciative
B. Vegetarianism
I'm not going to make an argument here against animal cruelty. Though for some,
that may be a factor in some people's decision.
Personaly, I regularly eat fish without shedding a tear. I think
some animal protien is healthy
Instead, I'm going to talk about the health dangers
presented by modern factory farming to human beings.
Most human diseases aren't confined to the human population. Usually,
they're shared by animals, and many of our worst diseases actually
come from animals. And they usually pass from animals to humans
through the raising or eating of meat
Take the flu, which periodicaly becomes
super-lethal as it did in 1918, wiping out roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population
in one season. A larger fraction of the world succumbed due to poorer diets.
The flu
is endemic to fowl and pigs, and our factory farming methods with
many animals confined to a cramped space allow a more virulent form
of flu to develop. (diseases of increased virulence tend to thrive in
dense populations where they can be rapidly passed on. If a virus can
easily find a new host, it will have less "concern" for killing it's
present one to produce more viruses.) (ed. note It is true that more virulent
strins of disease can develop under more confined condtions, however I'm reading a book
that's arguing against the hypothesis that humans and disease eventually reach an
"equilibrium". I'll revise this page when I have the new info)
Such diseases may be passed from fowl to humans (ex. the lethal H1N5 strain which
appeared in Japan recently and was fortunatly kept from spreading)or
more typicaly from fowl to pigs and from pigs to humans since pigs have
immune systems more closely related to human beings, and fowl and pigs
are both often given very disease prone portions of the farm.
If we then consider all the antibiotics being used on these animals, and the
cases of anti-biotic resistant bacteria which result our modern farming
methods become even more alarming.
24 cities are estimated to have populations of above 10 million by the year
2000, most of them in 3rd world nations with poor health care systems.
A likely scenario would be that an epidemic begins in one of these cities
(most likely Hong Kong since the mega-city is near a large rural area, has
a large population density inside the city and nearby, and since a large
percentage of it's people work in a rural environment and could transfer
the disease to the city.)
The disease would then be carried around the world, pausing to pick up
steam in various factory farms around the world.
This, of course, is a worst case scenario. Our usual yearly waves of flu
follow a similar cycle, where each year or several years a new
variant evolves that's different enough from previous viruses that
our immunity to previous waves of virus don't protect us from the
new one. What's important to take into consideration is that the
ecology of diseases such as influenza (the flu) are global, since the
diseases can be spread or picked up virutally anywhere by seagulls and
some other birds. This means that conditions in one part of the world
that allow the virus to propigate and mutate can have consequences
anywhere in the world. Not all viruses are like this, some having a more
local ecology. But similar priciples apply. When you have animals,
especially animals you're going to eat, raising animals under
factory farm conditions increases the likelyhood that you're going
to get an dangerous, anti-biotic resistant disease.
But what can you do about all this? If you're like myself, and unwilling
to give up meat cold turkey, no pun intended, here are some helpful
guidelines.
1. Eat Fish;
Fish are almost never raised on factory farms. When they are, they aren't as
far as I know given any antibiotics. And finaly, the fish immune system
is different enough from yours and mine that you don't have to worry
about your gills turning funny colors.
2. Don't eat factory farmed food;
Get free range chickens, or free range beef. Get animals raised without
the use of antibiotics to prevent the spread of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria.
3. Don't eat pork.
Pigs are most immunologicaly similar to humans and therefore the most
likely to pass on disease. I'm not sure why, but a lot of fowl are too.
C. Replace your lawn with groundcovers;
More info on how to do this later. Basicaly, there are a lot of things besides
Grass that can be used to cover a lawn. They don't require the pollution
of mowing and they look nice. For starters, check out the mint family (though make sure to contain their roots by burying them in some sort of bin. Speicies of the mint family, left unchecked, send rootlets from here to the ends of the earth.) Unfortunately, the poi family (which grass is a part of) is the only
type of plant yet known that can withstand heavy foot traffic. However for those lesser tred portions of your lawn, a creative groundcover could spare the plot beneath it from the wastefull tillings of a gas-guzzling mower.
This page, like myself, is a work in progress.
Email: wiserd@muc.muohio.edu
