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Moments Of Silence, Broken: Thoughts About Nice From 'Space'

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Dirt is awesome. Hurting people is not awesome. Let's help each other through this.

Wednesday night over dinner we argued about soil. Not argued so much as batted ideas around the way that scientists sometimes do. "That's not soil -- that's bedrock." One of us will say, "Even ground-up, it's not soil unless it can act as a nutrient source." Someone else will say, "Is the sea floor soil? It provides nutrients for ocean life." "That's a sediment, not a soil, per se," a third person will add. "Soils are a subset of sediments. As is muck," will answer that question, while opening the floor to muck-raking of a whole different kind. Soil, radiation, lava flows, orbital trajectories -- it's what's for dinner conversation. Lunchtime in the cafeteria at NASA or in the break room at Space Science Labs is very much the same.

Thursday night, instead of feasting upon ideas, we asked our French crewmate, "Have you had heard from all your loved ones back home?"

"It's night time there now," he answered. "So probably in the morning." Without another word, he turned a hard gaze to the glowing face of his laptop, willing it to fork over news about the attack in Nice.

The rest of us were silent, too. What is there to say in these moments? We cleaned up from dinner and went back to work. While I wrote this, two people repaired the hab. Another toiled away at a geology task. The fourth member of the crew coaxed a computer into running software it REALLY didn't want to run. The last of my crew is hoped that the people he knows are alive and unharmed. We were all terribly, terribly sad for his country and for the planet we call home.

One of the many great things about space is that taking life for granted becomes blessedly difficult. Every breath you take here is precious. Every morsel of food you get to consume is precious. Every person on your crew is precious whether or not you happen to like them in that moment or in general, because we all depend on each other to make it through this. The same is true on Earth. Only on Earth, our interdependence is obscenely easy to dismiss; to deny; to disregard to the point where revoking the right of other humans to breathe and eat and be there for those who depend upon them becomes a valid option. That is something we can't be silent about, now or ever. So what do we say?

We could start with something like: Hurting people is not, has not ever been, and will never be acceptable.

It's true, at least in principle. In practice, people get hurt accidentally. When that happens, we need to forgive ourselves and each other. So we specify:

Hurting people on purpose is not, has not ever been, and will never be acceptable.

This states the problem. Important people repeating this phrase over mass media would be a great step in getting all of society on the same page. We need to hear these words from our leaders and we need to say them to our kids, or co-workers, and our leaders: hurting people is not acceptable. We don't condone it or wish to live in a world where injuring others is a way of life. Let's say it out-loud and often: hurting people is not acceptable. It may dent the ratings of our more lurid reality TV shows, but let's face it, that's a good thing.

Even saying, "Hurting people is not acceptable," to myself while alone on the ground floor of a dome on simulated Mars makes me feel better -- stronger and more capable of taking positive action towards a resolution of the problem. Speaking of which: how do we resolve this problem?

A million specific things would help avoid situations like this: providing more resources to mental health; reducing poverty; increasing in regional stability; strong, non-radical leadership, and so on. Most of these are, if not complicated, hard to come by. The attainable, more general thing that we can all do is help each other through this. By this, I mean everything. Life. The old man struggling to get his groceries home in 100-degree heat or 2-foot snowbanks. Help him through this. The neighbors setting up for a party that will probably keep you awake until 2 AM. Want the social capital to ask them to turn it down? Help them set it up and you'll be that much closer. When I lived in South Central LA, I brought the nice Mexican family across the street some beer and never had to ask twice. The person stranded on the side of the road? Help her or him through this.

Is there a chance that any of these things could go horribly wrong? Sure there is. On the other hand, we don't want to live in a world where we don't help each other through this, so we have to try. It needn't be something against your nature. Whatever your nature is, whoever you are, you struggle with life. If you look around for others who are similarly struggling, you will see them. Help them through this. At least make the offer. Do it for yourself as much as for them and for everyone else on the planet. Help us through this.

I'm going to have to keep saying this, because the silence is killing me. It's killing us. In space, no one can hear you scream, or type. Fortunately, through the wonders of the Deep Space Network, people can be read and heard no matter where they are in the solar system. So let's hear it. Let's say it. What don't we do? Hurt people. What do we do? Help each other through this. Wherever we are, whatever we believe -- if we believe this, everything really will be OK.

Being human is remarkable. We have the way. All that's needed is the will. The will to help each other through this and not hurt people. How do we find the will? Someone once wrote that all things began with a word. I can get behind that. Words are all I have at the moment, anyway. Words and the will to use them over and over until we will the words into a world we want to live in -- one where hurting people is not acceptable.

So let's help each other through this thing in Nice, and whatever comes tomorrow and the day after that. Let's start our reports with, "Hurting people is not acceptable -- and now, the news." Let's talk about the terrible, unending messes as if we have the power to end them -- because we do and because anything, even fantasies of a better world, even muck, outshines silence and sorrow.

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Dirt, like helping people, gives us a world worth having.

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Environmental Justice Means We Stand With Vulnerable Communities
Environmental injustice and environmental racism are not new phenomena, and yet the scandal in Flint, Michigan shocked so many. As a result of the outrage in Flint, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a report, What's in Your Water? Flint and Beyond, that noted Flint was not an isolated case. The reported highlighted that more than 5,300 local water systems are in violation of EPA's regulations, and states took action in 817 cases while EPA took up only 88.

One of the report's recommendations:

Address environmental injustice, allowing local communities who bear a disproportionate burden of polluted water to participate in developing solutions to drinking water infrastructure challenges.

This recommendation begs the question: where is the environmental movement in the face of all this injustice?

Yet, in 2016, in the richest country in the world, we are failing our neighbors by ignoring or not addressing the issue of clean water or environmental injustice issues. Rarely is there a larger meaningful policy discussion about these issues until it's a scandal or an outrage like Flint. While we can point fingers at every level of government, and we can argue about the enforcement of existing laws, or the jurisdictional issues that always comes into play between local, state, and federal officials, but what's worse about issues like this, are the numerous complaints that the regulators were complacent.

There is a perception that for too long there has been a cozy, compliant relationship with local authorities and federal officials and that perception has been exacerbated by the situation in Flint. The question for most laypeople is, how does this happen? One example of this cozy relationship is that federal regulators have allowed local and state regulators to use testing methods that allow them to cheat detection of lead above the legal limits. Case in point is the class-action lawsuit has been filed against the City of Philadelphia over this practice.

When regulators fail to do their jobs, community members and activists must be there to hold them accountable. But when over five thousand communities are being poisoned for years, and the authorities have gotten away with it all this time, the environmental movement must be introspective about our roles in standing up for unserved communities.

A small activist group in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Limpio, has been leading the charge on what many have called the next Flint. For more than a year, the organization has been protesting about municipal landfills in the territory, with local residents complaining that toxic materials were poisoning the water and ground in their neighborhoods for decades and the authorities have yet to do anything about it. Their protest reminds me of similar local activism in my own community in Warren County, when I was a state appointed official.

Local residents from poor and underserved communities who face terrible threats from big utilities and lax regulators should not have to come begging for our help. We, those who care for the poor, the environment, and injustice, should be shoulder to shoulder with these communities from the beginning, embracing their agenda as our own and fighting the injustice of unequal protection from our government.

Injustice is interconnected in vulnerable communities. It is usually the same voiceless, vulnerable communities where toxic landfills are never forced to comply with the law, where the drinking water is poisoned with lead for years without accountability, where schools are failing from the lack of funding, where police killings occur, and where children go to bed hungry at night. When we fail to fight one injustice, we often fail to overcome any of them. It's time the environmental movement revitalize its commitment to justice as a core component of its mission, or millions of vulnerable Americans, usually in communities of color, will be fighting alone against a system that is ignoring their health and safety with impunity. It's certainly time for federal regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency to intervene in Puerto Rico, we cannot afford the lack of accountability to pave the way for the next environmental injustice issue.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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On The Anniversary Of The First Moon Landing

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Photo by NASA

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon. Six hours later, on July 21, they stepped out onto the lunar surface, the first humans to do such a thing.

Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who circled the Moon alone while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface:

Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.

I don't mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully -- not as fear or loneliness -- but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.

Moonwalker by Charlie Duke, CapCom for Apollo 11 & crew on Apollo 16:

"Roger Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue! We're breathing again! Thanks a lot!" I sank back into my chair, looked at Deke [Slayton] -- we were grinning from ear to ear. This was my greatest experience, until I had the opportunity to land on the moon myself almost three years later.
[...]
The enormity of the achievement hit me later when I began to reflect that this feat had occurred less than ten years after the first man had gone to space. It was a tremendous accomplishment and the culmination of years of planning and training and managing. All of us felt a great sense of pride and fulfillment to have been part of this flight. Everyone was popping their buttons, our chests were so swelled with pride.

Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin:

The magnificent desolation of the moon was no longer a stranger to mankind. We came to experience firsthand the utter desolation of the orb's lifeless terrain. In contrast, the achievement realized by scientific enterprise and teamwork in designing and engineering the rockets that could send two men to land on the moon was magnificent. I could not help marveling that the very first footsteps we had taken, and the footprints we had left on the moon's surface, would remain undisturbed for millions of years to come.

President Nixon on the phone call to the Moon:

Hello Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.

I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have done. For every American this has to be the proudest day of our lives, and for people all over the world I am sure that they, too, join with Americans in recognizing what an immense feat this is.

Generation Space: A Love Story by Anna Leahy and Douglas R. Dechow:

Now in my late forties, I wasn't yet three years old when Apollo 11 made it to the Moon on July 20, 1969. My mother had plunked me in front of the family television set in the den that would become my bedroom a few years later. I sat in the middle of the carpeted floor, with my parents, one of them cradling my brother, surely behind me on the green upholstered couch, to watch the event along with an estimated 500 million other viewers worldwide that Sunday. Somehow, I knew that the hazy black-and-white images of two men in gleaming spacesuits were important. There were people inside those bulky, bouncing spacesuits; I listened to their crackling voices. The Moon seemed a place I might visit someday. Upon that image of the Moon landing, everything I have experienced and know has been built.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Why toxic algae blooms like Florida's are so dangerous to people and wildlife
By Ernst B. Peebles, University of South Florida

Reported cases of algal blooms, when algae grow rapidly from an influx of nutrients in waterways, have been rising at an exponential rate in recent decades. Industrialized countries have the highest incidence with North America, Europe and eastern Asia being hotbeds for new cases due to runoff from industry and cities as well as these areas' intensive use of manufactured fertilizers.

These events often cause a noticeable change in the color and smell of natural water bodies and may be accompanied by highly visible fish kills or even respiratory distress in humans who inhale tiny, aerosol particles created by wind and waves.

A highly visible new case recently developed in Florida, where a particularly intense bloom of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) formed in Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater lake in the state. As is often the case with today's larger, more intense blooms, the event was visible to satellites orbiting in space. This year's Lake Okeechobee bloom was first noticed on Landsat 8 images during early May 2016 and persisted through at least midsummer.

While blooms of this nature are not uncommon in Lake Okeechobee, this one received more attention because of its intensity and size - it covered 33 square miles. Also, the bloom was exported to the coast when water managers released water from Lake Okeechobee in response to several months of heavy rainfall and concerns that rising water levels in the lake, which is contained by a dike, would cause flooding.

Upon reaching the coast through two man-made diversions that short-circuit the lake's natural, southerly flow to the Everglades, the bloom persisted instead of dispersing, causing economic damage to local tourism, fishing and boating businesses. Florida's governor subsequently declared a state of emergency in three of the hardest-hit counties on the Atlantic coast and in one county on the Gulf coast.

Apart from the economic damages, Floridians are also bothered by the environmental degradation these events cause. What are the environmental and health dangers from this sort of large-scale algal bloom?

Bloom types and basic bloom mechanics

Blue-green algae are one of three types of single-celled algae that frequently cause harmful blooms in coastal waters. In Florida and elsewhere, the blue-greens tend to bloom in fresh water and at the upper ends of estuaries, near where freshwater runoff first starts to mix with coastal seawater. The other two algal types, diatoms and dinoflagellates, tend to bloom at more seaward locations (especially the dinoflagellates).

While the fundamental causes of coastal algal blooms are well understood, there is considerable uncertainty about the details. A large part of the debate involves determining which cocktail of nutrients - whether it's nitrate, ammonia, orthophosphate or organic nutrients such as urea - promotes one particular bloom type over another.

Algae blooms from excess nutrients in the waterways are common and becoming more common in developed countries.
John Moran/EPA

One of the well-understood fundamentals about algal blooms is that land use has a strong bearing on the types of nutrients that are delivered downstream to bloom-prone water bodies.

Urban development introduces new nutrients from sewage, manufactured fertilizer and rain-borne emissions from burned fuel to downstream parts of local drainage basins. Agriculture, especially row crops, can introduce manufactured fertilizer in large amounts to drainage basins. Intensive animal feed lots may also introduce excessive nutrients; hog farms in North Carolina and duck farms on Long Island are two well-known examples of intensive animal production leading to harmful algal blooms and lowered water quality. In Florida's case, intensive feed lots are not common, but the other two land-use types are.

Also well-understood is that water stagnation encourages blooms by giving the algae enough time to remain in calm surface waters where the light needed for photosynthesis is most abundant. In Florida and elsewhere, water is withdrawn from rivers and streams for various municipal, agricultural and industrial purposes, and these withdrawals tend to increase the incidence of stagnation. On the other hand, there are coastal areas both inside and outside of Florida that are relatively immune to stagnation and algal-bloom formation because tidal flushing is strong there.

Once blooms have formed, they can have two types of effects, indirect and direct. The most prominent indirect effect is low dissolved oxygen in the water, or hypoxia. During a bloom, the algae produce dissolved oxygen while they photosynthesize during the day, but then consume dissolved oxygen at night in the dark as they respire.

Although the balance between these two opposing processes (photosynthesis vs. respiration) can be either positive or negative, the trend toward hypoxia becomes stronger as the algae from the bloom start to die off and decompose. First, the sick and dying cells stop producing as much oxygen through photosynthesis, and then the total amount of respiration surges once nonphotosynthetic bacteria start to break down the newly abundant, dead algae cells for food.

Hypoxia can lasts minutes to months, but is nearly permanent in some bodies of water.

Harms to many organisms

Why should we be concerned about hypoxia? Basically, the answer is that hypoxia determines which animals can survive in a given body of water.

Hypoxia and anoxia (the complete absence of dissolved oxygen) kill aquatic organisms of all sizes, but the less-mobile bottom animals are usually the first to go. In some cases, hypoxia/anoxia spreads throughout much of the water body, resulting in fish kills. Even if fish kills do not occur, the likely loss of bottom animals eliminates a critically important food supply for the fish community.

The algae bloom this summer was so large in Lake Okeechobee that it was visible from space.
NASA

Many aquatic animals, especially larger predators such as fish, obtain their energy from food webs that include bottom animals; even fish and other aquatic animals that do not eat bottom animals directly may be affected. A study of European fisheries revealed that this food-web effect translated into a dramatically changed composition of the fish community over a period of decades. As algal blooms became more common, highly valued fish that were once abundant in the harvest became scarce.

Toxicity, however, is the most direct effect of algal blooms. Some types of bloom are never toxic, but still cause harmful hypoxia, and others are toxic in some cases but not others.

Blooms of algal types such as the red tide organism (Karenia brevis, a dinoflagellate) always appear to be toxic once the blooms exceed a threshold density of cells. Karenia's toxic product, brevitoxin, mostly kills fish, although other marine life, including dolphins and manatees, have also been killed by red tide. Nutrients released from the decomposing fish are believed to prolong the blooms.

The toxins from various types of algal blooms can become dangerously concentrated within shellfish, especially filter-feeding clams, mussels, oysters and scallops. While the detection of blooms often leads to the closure of shellfish beds by authorities, human deaths have occurred in areas where such regulation does not exist, and also in areas where new blooms are believed to be forming for the first time, catching people off-guard.

One study identified 2,124 cases of saxitoxin poisoning in the Philippines, with 120 deaths between 1983 and 2002. These cases were attributed to Pyrodinium bahamense, the same dinoflagellate that blooms intensively in Tampa Bay, apparently without becoming very toxic (yet).

Researchers are starting to suspect that asthma and other human respiratory ailments are more related to algal blooms than previously believed. Also, there is concern that with continued environmental change, blooms that are presently mildly toxic could become far more toxic in the future.

Possible remedies

Given these economic, environmental, and human-health impacts at the coast, what can be done? In Florida, managers release freshwater from the interior to the coast for flood control and water supply. But ecosystem health at the coast must also be managed.

In accordance with the U.S. Clean Water Act, the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program, which sets pollution limits in bodies of water, is being implemented to lessen the nutrient runoff that fuels algal blooms. The TMDL program provides a geographic accounting of pollutant sources, including excessive nutrient runoff. Yet new blooms keep forming.

In addition to TMDLs, further development and implementation of best management practices for agricultural and urban land use needs to continue with the goal of curbing excessive nutrient runoff, particularly during rainy periods.

Detailed computer models of water circulation should be used more routinely in the course of water management to predict where coastal algal blooms are likely to form. Finally, natural wetland buffers should be used to intercept nutrients before they reach the coast (provided this does not cause a different set of problems in the interior), and the construction of engineered treatment wetlands should be considered.

In the Lake Okeechobee case, restoration of flow to the Everglades may go a long way toward solving Florida's current problems at the coast.

Ernst B. Peebles, Associate Professor of Biological Oceanography, University of South Florida

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Golden Gate at Sunrise. by Dustin Kahia

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Splash! by Fabrizio Adurno

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Muay thai, culture fighting thai boxing

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Cannibalistic behaviour also affects evolution

Bloom types and basic bloom mechanics

Harms to many organisms

Possible remedies

Physicists show quantum weirdness of neutrinos over longest distance yet

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Golden Gate at Sunrise. by Dustin Kahia

Photo by: Dustin Kahia Photography (www.dustinkahia.com) Processed with VSCOcam with a6 preset

Splash! by Fabrizio Adurno

Muay thai by sutiporn somnam

Muay thai, culture fighting thai boxing

FT3A8754.jpg by JACK.Vision

Cannibalistic behaviour also affects evolution

Bloom types and basic bloom mechanics

Harms to many organisms

Possible remedies

Physicists show quantum weirdness of neutrinos over longest distance yet

Untitled by 彦融曲