So
much to read. So much to absorb, but so little time. Never in human history has
there been so much information and so little time to consume it. For
those who won’t have time to get into the new book, The Human Age: The World
Shaped by Us, here are some snippets of fascinating information. They are
taken from the New York Times book review of The Human Age by Rob Nixon, author of Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
1. Concentrated body heat
from 250,000 daily commuters is being harvested at Stockholm’s Central Station to
warm a 13-storey office building nearby.
2. Incessant texting
prompts a child’s brain map of the thumbs to expand.
3. Studies of young people
in Shanghai and Seoul reveal that 95 percent are near-sighted. This epidemic
might be caused by the shift from children playing outside to indoors, hunched
over screens.
4. Fruit flies share 70
percent of human disease genes, including those associated with Alzheimer's and
Parkinson’s
5. Reintroduction of
mammoths to Siberia is envisioned by some de-extinction proponents.
That’s interesting fuzzy stuff. Here are some icy bits to suck on:
1. The net worth of the
world’s 85 wealthiest individuals in 2013 equalled that of our planet’s 3.5
billion poorest people.
2. Ninety corporations,
primarily oil and coal companies, have generated two-thirds of humanity’s CO2
emissions since 1751.
And,
a chilling comment that Nixon makes in his review:
“A
technology’s emergence is no guarantee that its benefits will trickle down to
humanity at large. When men attacked two teenage girls and hanged them from
mango trees in India this May, the atrocity drew attention to the fact that the
women had to defecate in the forest at night. Two and a half billion humans
still lack access to a rudimentary latrine, a venerable technology developed
over 3,000 years ago.”
The
book is:
THE
HUMAN AGE
The
World Shaped by Us
By
Diane Ackerman
344
pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95.
The
review can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/books/review/the-human-age-by-diane-ackerman.html?_r=0
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