Shards of Survival

Shards of Survival, the site for everyone who gets off the beaten path. Shards of Survival contains information on survival techniques, trail work, scouting and hiking, orienting and camping. You'll also find information on "primitive" techniques and sustainable alternatives to modern technologies. Survival for everyone starts here!

Friday, November 25, 2005

Our impact on our environment

Lately, the news papers are once again filled with news of our impact on nature, the environment and (ultimately) ourselves. First there is the disaster occuring right now in Harbin, Jilin Provence, China. Benzene has flowed into Songhua river after an explosion in a petrochemical factory. Harbin is dependent on the river for its water intake. The intake of water has been halted since last tuesday and the city has mstly ran out of drinking water. The pollution is expected to have flowed past the city in a few days but will then flow into Amur River, threatening the Russian region of Chabarovsk, Siberia, where a state of emergency has been declared.

Bird flu keeps claiming lives, the latest being a 35 year old woman in China. I can't help thinking that our modern intensive cattle and poultry farming is finally coming to bite us in our behinds. Chicken stuffed together hundreds in a cage, cows being fed hormones to make them grow faster, we wouldn't do that to ourselves because we instinctively feel it can't be right. Yet, we do it to animals, for profit.

Russia is about to make work harder for NGOs like Amnesty International. The Kremlin wants to make it harder (illegal?) for these NGO's to be funded from outside Russia. I can imagine that that would mean a severe drain on funds for these organisations that would dramatically restrict their possibilities to do their work.

Unicef reports that still each year some 3(!) million girls and women undergo female circumcision, usually termed genital mutilation. As much as I abhore the practise and that these women and girls are mostly forced to undergo this practise, I can't help thinking that we (Westerners) are placing our cultural views and morals on this practise. Ethnocentrism can be a very ugly thing. We should always be on the alert when we condemn or judge other people's cultural practises.


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