Mickey Z

Cool Observer

Sunday, October 12, 2008

The high cost of water

As we learn more about the true cost of bottled water, the numbers become staggering.

*Americans buy 30 billion single-use water bottles every year
*845 bottles end up in the land fill every second
*All these water bottles are made from petroleum, and require petroleum to be shipped around the world

Catherine Clarke Fox of National Geographic adds: “All those plastic bottles use a lot of fossil fuels and pollute the environment. In fact, Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles a year to the problem. In order to make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months. Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle (emphasis added).”

Murray Bookchin sez: “The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man… But it was not until organic community relation … dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. … The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.”

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Speaking of capital and the market place:

(More cartoons here)

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Two more blurbs for me:

Eliot Katz sez: “CPR for Dummies is a brilliant, inventive, and thoroughly enjoyable novel. It’s filled with wild, engaging characters and an interesting mix of sex and politics—part Henry Miller and part Howard Zinn. While it has a storyline that moves compellingly forward, it also uses a postmodern collage structure that carves out plenty of free space for author playfulness, surprising anecdotes about history and science, and urgent political commentary. I read it in two sittings and found it to be both a real page-turner and an educational treat. And watch out for the ending.”

Thad Rutkowski sez: “Reading Mickey Z’s first novel, CPR for Dummies, is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Each puzzle piece contains an image, an interaction, an informative riff, or a comment. As these disparate elements come together, a unified picture emerges ... At one point, we are given detailed instructions for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. As everyone knows, these steps could save a life. Behind the comedy and the commentary, the author seems to be saying, someone may need our help. “

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Event Alert:

The folks at Bluestockings Bookstore have penciled me in on:

Saturday, November 15 @ 7:00 pm