Slaying the trash monster

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quests, trash, garbage, environmentalism, recycling, plastics

In 2017 and 2019 there were controversial proposals in northern Delaware to raise the permitted height of the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington from about 150 feet to 190 and then 225 feet. This all dropped out of the news after a while. A recent search reveals that the present permitted height is 225 feet and the operator is seeking a variance to allow a new permitted height of 325 feet. At the same time, new compaction technology is being studied, that involved dropping weights of between six and thirty tons as much as 75 feet onto existing trash piles to increase their density and reduce the height of current landfills.

With this all sitting in the back of my mind, I ran across a book published last year, Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman's Trashy Journey to Zero Waste, by Eve O. Schaub. In prior years Mrs. Schaub has performed year-long experiments, with her family's often reluctant approval, that resulted in Year of No Sugar and Year of No Clutter. She has promised her family that this is the last such experiment! Having taken on the Trash Monster, and finding it rather harder to slay than the prior ones, she will need to set her sights on less onerous quests in the future.

At the beginning of the experiment, she reports that her family—she and her husband and two girls, teen and post-teen—had been filling a 96-gallon trash container every week. If "filling" is literally true, that comes to 4,992 gallons. At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, it is 667 cubic feet, which is just over 8x8x10 feet, or one-twelfth of the volume of a 1,000 square-foot ranch house. Her family also has a 96-gallon recycling container, but I didn't get a good handle on how frequently it fills. Suffice it to say that total waste had been well beyond 5,000 gallons yearly, probably in the 1,000-cubic-foot range. How hard is it to reduce the landfilled portion to zero, and also getting recycling "right"? That is, it's good to recycle if the people taking away our "recycling" actually recycle it. (Spoiler: they mostly don't.)

Let me contrast that with my family, which until fifteen years ago included my wife and me and our college-age son. Now it is just the two of us. We have a few waste baskets around the house and a box for recyclables, which mostly holds cardboard, paper, and occasional steel or aluminum cans. If we were to hold our trash container until we filled it, we would be putting it out about every six weeks. We fill a plastic grocery bag or two weekly, which sit forlornly in the bottom of the bin on trash pickup day. The trash collectors typically reach in and snag out the bags rather than roll the whole bin over to upend into their truck. When our son was at home, we sometimes filled a third bag. By the way, we mostly kept all those single-use grocery bags, folded and stuffed into a bag. We reuse them for garbage. Now that we can't obtain them any more, our supply is slowly depleting. It will last another few years. As for the recycling bin, we put it out every second week, typically less than half full.

I suspect that the author's family and my family are close to the opposite ends of a spectrum of trash disposal for middle-class families in America. Back to the Wilmington landfill. It is notable in the area because the operator accepts trash from outside Delaware. Geographically and demographically, Wilmington is a suburb or Philadelphia. I suspect overflowing landfills in Philly provide a significant portion of the total trash.

This is the most recent Google Earth satellite photo of Cherry Island. By noodling around with my mouse, I find that the maximum height of the main dumping area, at lower right, is 150 feet. The similarly-sized area to its left has a height of 40-50 feet, as does the smaller area to the upper right. I don't know the filling strategy.

Wilmington is a smallish city, with about 80,000 residents, and the rest of the northeastern quarter of New Castle County has about twice that population. I don't know if Newark, Delaware, home of University of Delaware, uses the same landfill. If so, that portion of the county has a similar total population, making population of the "upper half" of the county about 400,00, all using that landfill. There is an area "south of the canal" focused on Middletown, that pushes total county population to almost 600,000, or more than half the state total. This historical montage of the Cherry Island area is instructive:

The years are 2010, 2005, and 1992 (it is what is available). Thirty years ago, only the whitish triangle in the middle of the photo was being actively landfilled. The county had planned for the future, and over time, we see how the future has arrived. Today's future includes possible growth of the main landfill to 325 feet, nearly the height of Iron Hill, at 328 feet the second-highest point in Delaware! The highest point in the state is a survey marker near Ebright Road as it passes north into Pennsylvania, 448 ft.

What has the author and her family discovered? It appears that to really not send anything to the landfill, in the face of limited recycling options, one must become a hoarder! So much for the Year of No Clutter!! I think it is the ancillary matters related to recycling that form the findings of greatest value. First and foremost: Plastic just isn't recyclable. Polyethylene (PE) can be "downcycled", that is, turned into products of lower value than their original use, such as making picnic benches out of recycled milk cartons. That takes care of "triangle" numbers #2 and #4, for high-density PE and low-density PE. All the other numbers can't be recycled, no matter what various industry websites say.

Can they be burned? Sort of. At present, waste incineration is sometimes used to generate heat to drive turbines and make electricity. However, burning plastics generates lots of toxic chemicals, and the worst of these come in two groups, the furans and the dioxins. In order:

Until petroleum-based polymers came along, the primary source of furans in the atmosphere was forest fires. They are produced by pyrolysis of cellulose, fortunately in rather low amounts. Typical methods of plastic incineration have a very high yield of furans, and they are trouble! Asthma- and cancer-causing trouble. Where is the research in how to incinerate plastic in a way that reduces furan production?

Dioxins contain chlorine, and are worse than furans. Forest fires also produce dioxins, but in very low amounts, due to the small amounts of chlorine in wood. PVC and PCB and other chlorine-containing plastics produce huge amounts of dioxins when burned. There should probably be a ban on burning them, but then what would we do with the waste? At present these are usually sent to landfills.

Looking back to a motto of Earth Day: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first word is Reduce. Don't buy so many plastics in the first place, particularly the chlorine-containing ones. When "organic" produce or meat is wrapped in plastic, much of its "benefit" is nullified. Public safety is touted as the reason for wrapping (and over-wrapping and even triple-wrapping) food in plastic. A century ago that wasn't an option. The options were oilcloth for certain products, and cloth or paper for the rest. People learned how to use these to safely transport stuff, or they got food poisoning as a learning experience.

For some waste materials, reusing and recycling are possible. But for plastics in particular, these are hard to impossible. Mrs. Schaub advocates legislation coupled with education to make a difference. Both are hard. But so is encroaching illness and early death.

She is a born optimist. Still, as fascinating and well written as the book is, it's a bit of a downer. I'm glad to already be at the more frugal end of the spectrum. But there are still habits it would be worthwhile for me to change. I hope you'll read this book, and perhaps learn some useful strategies and habits.

---------------------------

I want to correct a single erratum. On the first page we find a list of "Ten Statistics to be Horrified By". Number 6 states:

In its history, eight billion metric tons of plastic have been produced. That's the mass equivalent of 100 Moons.

Gigantic oops! The Moon's mass is 1/81st the mass of the Earth. That means that plastics already outweigh the entire Earth by 23%. Hardly! Eight billion is an 8 followed by nine zeroes. The statement implies that the Moon's mass is 80 million metric tons. The Moon, in short tons, weighs close to 8 followed by 19 zeroes. That's 80 billion billion short tons, or 72 billion billion metric tons. A better comparison would have been that 8 billion metric tons is about equal to 80,000 fully-laden aircraft carriers of the Gerald R. Ford class.

Skirting the edge of destruction

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural disasters, apocalyptic imagery, history, quests

Craig Childs is an adventurer. A couple of decades ago he became enamored of the idea of exploring those portions of Earth that epitomize various ways natural events could do away with civilization, even humanity, and perhaps all life. He wrote about these experiences, and waxed lyrical about them, in his 2012 book Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth. The picture here is in no way a likeness, but an evocative generated image.

I see him imagining the planet musing, "How might I kill you? Let me count the ways." He chose nine ideas to instigate nine adventures, such as crossing a couple of deserts (the Sonora and a salar in the Atacama), spending a couple of weeks "helping" scientists gather data in the middle of the Greenland ice cap (I suspect he'd have preferred Antarctica, but getting sponsored to go there is infinitely harder), running a river of Class VI rapids in the Himalayas (all by itself that exposes you to a dozen ways to die), or spending just a couple of days crossing an Iowa cornfield to see if anything except corn can live there (spoiler: no surprise, it's darn little, a list that can fit on the back of a business card, mostly bugs and tiny plants). I can do no better than to list the chapter titles, with my instant summaries in brackets:

1. Deserts Consume [Sonora Desert, Mexico]
2. Ice Collapses [Glacier in Patagonia, Chile]
3. Seas Rise [St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea off Alaska]
4. Civilizations Fall [Squaw Peak/Piestewa Peak near Phoenix, AZ; side journey to Maya country]
5. Cold Returns [Greenland, far uphill from the west coast]
6. Species Vanish [Iowa cornfield; a few square miles of monoculture]
7. Mountains Move [Salween River, Tibet]
8. Cataclysm Strikes [Lava field in Mauna Kea, HI]
9. Seas Boil [Atacama Desert, Chile]

The basic message, reiterated often, is that this is a favored time to be on Earth. Bad times of numerous varieties come and go, but each chapter illustrates for us ways the Earth can outdo anything encountered in human history. Greatly outdo. For example, if you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980, you might recall the thick dust we all had to wash off everything, all over the U.S. (and a number of other countries). All that was from the expulsion of about one cubic km of material, which blasted ahead of it another 2-3 cubic km of existing rock and ash. Eleven years later Mt. Pinatubo ejected 10 cubic km. In 1912 the largest eruption of the 20th Century, Novarupta, was a further three times as large.

Volcanic eruptions are scaled, similarly to earthquakes, by a scale called VEI, Volcanic Eruption Index. Each number on the scale is a factor of 10 larger than the one before. Mt. St. Helens was VEI 5 and the other two mentioned were VEI 6.0 and VEI 6.5. The scale goes as high as almost 9, and an eruption of VEI 8.0 releases 1,000 cubic km. The most recent VEI 8 eruption was the Taupō volcano in New Zealand, 27,000 years ago. The largest known eruption in geologic history was one of eight VEI 8 or larger eruptions that occurred in Paraná Province, Brazil about 132 million years ago, a VEI 8.9, with an eruptive volume of 8,600 cubic km. All of those eight eruptions were larger than the largest eruption from the Yellowstone caldera, the "supervolcano" of recent hype. See this list for more information.

That's all just one kind of event that makes a serious dent in the global ecosystem. The message of the book is that Earth has a lot of ways to make our life miserable at the very least, and perhaps to terminate it. So far, our comparative good fortune has held.

The lyrical writing makes the book enjoyable to read. I was rather astounded at the amount of misery suffered by the author and his companions (he never adventured alone). "Better he than me!" The more optimistic message I see is that life has persisted on Earth for very nearly four billion years, in spite of VEI 8 volcanoes, iceball stages that left no liquid water on the surface, even at the equator, and titanic flooding events; all this in the face of a warming Sun, which is 30% hotter now than four billion years ago, and will be 40% hotter than it is now in another 5 billion years, just before it becomes a red giant and heats up by another factor of about 100. At that point, the sky will be nearly half filled by searing orange light emitted by a thin gas with a temperature of at least 3,500°C (6,300°F). The planet itself will melt. In the meantime, we have perhaps a billion years to figure out how to migrate to the stars. Cheers!

====================

Errata: I must deal with two egregious errors.

Firstly, in page 90 we find, "…a quarter of the earth is covered with water." Hardly!! The ocean covers 70.8% of the planet, almost three-quarters. If we consider fresh water in all its forms, lakes and rivers add less than 1%, while ice caps (Antarctica and Greenland) make up another 2.8%, leaving something over 74% of earth covered by ocean, ice, or fresh water.

Secondly, and much more serious: On page 290 the author writes that the impacts of gigantic planetesimals during the Late Heavy Bombardment as it is called, prior to 3.8 billion years ago (and beginning 4.2 billion years ago), triggered nuclear reactions that produced major radioactive isotopes, particularly the long-lived isotopes of thorium, uranium and potassium. The amount of heating needed to produce nuclear reactions is not in the thousands of degrees (during the LHB the core may have exceeded 15,000°F or 8,300°C) but in the millions or tens of millions of degrees. LHB heating cannot have had the slightest effect on the isotopic abundance of the Earth, although various isotopes would have been included in the impacting bodies already. However, there is an interesting side point here, which the author also misses. Let's look back at the three isotopes mentioned, going back 4 billion years, which we will call T0:

• Th-232, half-life (T½) 14.2 billion years (Gy). Four billion is only 28% of a half-life, so going backwards, we find that at T0 there was about 20% more Th-232 than there is today.
• U-238, T½ = 4.5 Gy. At T0 there was almost twice as much U-238 as today.
• U-235, T½ = 0.70 Gy. Four billion is 5.7 half lives, so at T0 there was 40 times as much U-235 as today. At present, U-238 is 138 times as abundant as U-235, but at T0 the ratio was about 7:1.
• K-40, T½ = 1.26 Gy. Four billion is just over three half-lives, so at T0 there was about nine times as much K-40 as today.

If these figures are put together with present abundances of each isotope (a few parts per million), it balances out that radiogenic heating, just from these four, was about six times as much as it is today. There may have been other isotopes present when Earth was formed, but because the universe was already about nine billion years old, anything short-lived that hadn't been very recently forged in nearby supernovae would have been long gone.

More radiogenic heating most likely led to early initiation and more rapid plate tectonics once the LJB-induced melting subsided and the crust formed. The Earth as a whole could have been warmer and stayed so for a good while as a result, offsetting the reduced heating of the 30%-cooler Sun. We know so little of that era, but it is clear that life started as soon as liquid water was able to remain and accumulate. Life is an active agent, and has "conspired" for almost 4 billion years to keep Earth habitable.

Bath toys in the biggest bath available

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, pollution, quests

About eight years ago Donovan Hohn became intrigued with the spill, in January 1992, of thousands of floating bath toys from a container ship into the northern Pacific Ocean. Initially thinking he could interview a few people and write an interesting article about it, he wound up quitting his teaching job and spent big chunks of the following four years traversing the planet in search of this latter-day "toy story" and of the toys themselves. His book details his travels: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.

The toys that were lost were equal numbers of four varieties, 7,200 each of yellow ducks, red beavers, green frogs and blue turtles. Somehow, the duckies became the iconic representatives of them all. As this image shows, floating toys of all kinds have been lost in shipping accidents and wash up on "trash beaches" that are particularly prone to collecting flotsam. These particular toys were produced by The First Years and were called Floatees. The small duck below center of this image is the most like a Floatee, but it is not clear that it is the genuine article.

Most of the Floatees have never been found. Yet this unintended experiment in current tracking has been helpful to oceanographers that study the currents that circle within ocean basins and also flow between them.

This map, from the Wikimedia Commons, shows the likely current directions as deduced by Curtis Ebbesmeyer from reports of Floatees that were collected or spotted. Now that nearly twenty years has passed since the toys were exposed to the elements, it is a race against time whether any more will be found.

As the author found from keeping a plastic Floatee in his freezer for a few months, they become brittle and prone to breaking into pieces. Those that made it into warmer climes were sun-bleached and then degraded, and have also been breaking up. In gyres such as the North Pacific "Garbage Patch", the plastic that has been collecting there is mostly not intact, but is in little bits. Most plastic lost at sea is in the form of pea-sized "nurbles" that are used to mold things. All these bits circle the seas and collect in the centers of gyres. Their density ranges from a few per cubit meter to a few hundred per cubic meter. This seemingly low density makes it hard to spot the Garbage Patch visually. But there are a lot of cubic meters out there, and the plastic mass is in the millions of tons.

Somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 containers are lost at sea every year, and each is the size of a semi trailer, holding up to forty tons of cargo. That comes to as much as a quarter million tons or more of cargo lost yearly. Much of that is nurbles on the way to China or plastic toys on their way back to America.

To elucidate such facts, the author first visited certain Alaskan beaches where the Floatees were first reported. These trips comprise the second and third chapters of the book. He also visited a toy factory in southern China, then managed to obtain passage on a container ship as it sailed from Pusan, Korea to Seattle, Washington.

In his chapter on this cruise, he records a few helpful coordinates. These are marked on this image as red pins. The green line is the great circle route between the two harbors, and is a straight line on this projection. The image below shows a more conventional view of the great circle and of the ship's route, which is quite a bit to the south.

The great circle route is not precisely navigable, and for this reason, and to avoid the worst winter storms, once the ships leave the Japan Sea they stay south of the various archipelagoes along the route.

This doesn't keep them from losing cargo. Studies of the dynamics of these "Panamax" ships (meaning too large to pass through the Panama Canal) indicate that nonlinear effects of wave motions can cause them to suddenly tilt from side to side as much as 40°, which is almost certain to set loose some of the containers on board. On the author's cruise, he experienced only a rather mild storm, which was enough to make him hurl his lunch, but didn't cause any loss of cargo. This is the "normal" situation, or bath toys would be a lot more expensive!

It may seem that a lot of cargo is being lost, but it is a small percentage of total shipping. The insurance underwriters have so far been willing to carry on shouldering such losses (for suitable premiums, of course).

In his last chase, two chapters' worth, the author sailed on a research cruise through the Northwest Passage, on an icebreaker. He had quite a gaggle of scientists along for stimulating conversation. Few were interested in his quest for Floatees, however. While becoming one of a select few who have sailed the Northwest Passage and lived to tell the tale, he left posters in all the settlements where the ship docked, the kind of poster with little tags telling how to contact him. Unsurprisingly, he has not heard from anyone. By 2007, few Floatees were expected to be sufficiently intact to be recognized if one does come ashore. Along the way he helped one scientist launch more durable bottles containing notes with contact information, for a continuing study of polar currents. As long as you don't launch a glass bottle against the side of an iceberg and shatter it, it is likely to last many years and eventually wash up somewhere. Bottle launching is still more effective than computer modeling, primarily because we don't yet know enough about the oceans to accurately model their currents on any except the hugest of scales.

What resulted from the author's quest? He wound up with a fresh Floatee given him by Dr. Ebbesmeyer (who expects its eventual return), and a weathered one he found in Alaska. He attained a much greater appreciation of the sheer size of our planet. It is amazing that a little yellow duckie and a few thousand of its fellows can help us understand a little about what makes the oceans tick.

Gaining on Insanity

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mental health, quests

Mental health, or its lack, runs in families. Not all offspring of an afflicted person, or couple, will manifest the disease, but the chances are higher. Being bipolar (thankfully at a moderate level), I recognize that my mother was also bipolar, but my father and brothers seem to be unaffected, and my son is remarkably stable, thank God!

Patrick Tracey is not so fortunate. Several of his family members are schizophrenic, though he himself is not. In Stalking Irish Madness, Searching for the Roots of My Family's Schizophrenia he chronicles the disease in his grandmother, two sisters and an uncle, and his grandmother's great-grandmother. His grandmother was a Sweeney, of a family in which madness is well known, and the earlier ancestor was an Egan, probably the most-afflicted surname. The variant Madigan actually refers to the "Mad Egans".

The author is not schizophrenic, though his writing shows evidence of paranoid tendencies. However, knowing his family history, is it paranoia to decide against having offspring, who'd have a great chance of mental illness? This is similar to a cousin of mine, who had her tubes tied because she didn't want to have offspring who might carry or suffer her extreme allergies.

By the way, not all schizophrenics are paranoid; the designation "paranoid schizophrenic" is a distinct category. Schizophrenics in general are those who are so troubled by various kinds of hallucination that they cannot function normally. Many hear voices, but not all. The afflicted among Egans and Madigans are so troubled by voices that they cannot pay much attention to "real life" around them. The author's sister Austine is almost catatonic, being so overwhelmed with voices that she seldom hears anything else, while his other afflicted sister, Michelle, cheerfully carries on dialog with her voices, but can include "outside persons" in the conversation.

Other schizophrenics see things others don't see, or hallucinate other senses such as touch, taste or smell. In all cases, the diagnosis is typically given when the hallucinations dominate the person's life. Whatever the sort of hallucination, in schizophrenics it rises to the level of obsession, and is typically accompanied by delusional thinking.

Sometimes the delusion is itself the affliction; this is the case with paranoid schizophrenics such as a friend of mine. He is able to function normally for various periods of time, but unless he takes his medications, he frequently "flips out" and may flee imagined persecution. He once held a steady job as an electronic engineer, and was doing side jobs. When he found out that some of the devices he was making were being used for illegal gambling, he became convinced that he was a target of organized criminals, and fled halfway across the country. Later checking uncovered that the supposed "mafiosi" were in no way organized, but were a couple of petty criminals. But he has not moved back, nor has he obtained long-term employment since.

The stereotypical schizophrenic is the raving, voice-ridden "nut" that one might see on a street corner. Considering that one person in a hundred is afflicted by overpowering voices, we all know at least one. However, not all who hear voices are schizophrenic. I'll offer myself for an example. In the hypomanic phase of my bipolar cycle (I seldom experience full-blown mania), I hear voices whenever I shut my eyes, but not with my eyes open. I can seldom understand the words, or at least I don't recall what they say. In quiet circumstances, particularly with subdued light (like a business meeting with PowerPoint in progress!), I tend to drift into a state of lucid dreaming, with both visual and auditory sensations. I can usually tell the difference between such hallucinations and reality…usually.

Thus, it seems Pat Tracey is saner than I, or perhaps more circumspect. Much of the book's content narrates his travels through Ireland, seeking information about his ancestors and their sanity, and the prevalence of madness among the Irish. He is drawn eventually to a well in farthest western Ireland, called Gleanna-a-Galt. Its waters are reputed to heal the mentally afflicted. He gathers some of the water to take to his sisters. He finds that the water contains a high level of lithium. That is known to help bipolar people, and can help many schizophrenics also, so the well's reputation is probably well founded.

When he returns home, he slips some of the water to each sister, but gives no report about its effectiveness. It is sad to think they got no help from it, but it is better for bipolar. Among those I know who have bipolar disorder, lithium salts are the most consistently effective treatment, though the therapeutic dose is a nearly toxic level; it has to be watched. The amount in Gleanna-a-Galt well water is much lower than the amount given medically.

The author's conclusion is that schizophrenia's cause is not wholly genetic, but rather that certain genetic types are more likely to react to stressful circumstances by "flipping" into a hallucinatory state, and they never flip back. I see the affliction in all its forms as several extreme manifestations of ordinary variations of human experience, particularly in the tendency to dream lucidly.

Some people, like my solidly stable wife, seldom remember dreaming in sleep, though sleep researchers assure us that everyone dreams for part of every night's sleep. People like myself dream frequently, often remember the dreams, and may begin dreaming before being fully asleep. Others find dreams popping up while they are fully awake. When such dreams cause trouble, they become symptoms of schizophrenia.

Although schizophrenia means "divided mind", the experience is really one of being divided from common experience, because of the distractions of the hallucination/dream. Dissociation of a personality into more than one seeming entity is a different condition entirely, though it often happens that one or more of the dissociated fragments becomes a distraction to the "main person", leading to a condition that is schizophrenic in effect, whether that is the correct DSM diagnosis or not (DSM is the acronym for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

While Patrick Tracey could not find out everything he sought, nor effectively treat his sisters, he did come to terms with the disease and its history in his family. His trek to Ireland was a kind of flight, and at its end, he is at peace to return home, to help his family cope as best they can with the incurable. While I hope and pray for his sisters, as well as others I know who are so afflicted, I know that the disease seldom leaves, and is quite resistant to all treatments. Pray with me for continued medical progress, and perhaps breakthroughs!

Frozen Dreams

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quests, the arctic

Right away I learned something: "Thule" has two syllables. It's been in my reading vocabulary for decades as "thool". Now I find (see the entry in TheFreeDictionary) that the classical "utmost north" place is spoken "thoo-ley", while the Thule Air Base and nearby Inuit village in Greenland are spoken "two-ley". I once knew someone with the last name Tooley. I wonder if an ancestor of his spelled it Thule?

The frontispiece map in The Ice Museum: in Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna makes it clear we are in for a lengthy quest. In her introduction, Ms Kavenna describes leaving her job to go hunt the Arctic for the "real" Thule. In the Acknowledgements among the afterleaves, more of the story is revealed. No quest is cheap, and the author was favored with a number of complaisant editors who published the freelance writing with which she replenished her finances from time to time.

No dates are given, but I suspect the "wall clock" period of the quest is quite a bit longer than the two or three seasons implied in the narrative. However, if she did perform the travels all at one go, my hat's off to her, for endurance at the very least!

The places visited, with one exception, each have a champion among 19^th and early 20^th Century explorers, as the location for the classical Thule, first mentioned by Pytheas in the 4^th Century BCE as lying six days sail beyond northern Scotland. That exception is the metaphysical Thule of the Thule Society, purported progenitor of the Nazi party. While the book devotes a couple of chapters to that bit of Germanic insanity (unfortunately still going on), for me, more than enough said.

In order, the Arctic places the author visited are the Shetland Islands, Iceland, northernmost Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and the Svalbard (Spitzbergen) islands. Of them all, I find the Estonian location the most intriguing. Former Estonian President Lennart Meri, noting that "tuli" in Estonian means "fire", and that Kaali crater on the large Estonian island Saaremaa resulted from a large meteorite fall just a few generations before Pytheas sailed, believes this crater to be the origin of the legend. Excited Germans, who live West and Southwest of Saarema, telling Pytheas of the day the sun fell in the East, are a likely source of an enigmatic passage he wrote regarding Thule.

Whatever Thule may have been physically, the idea of Thule has had the greatest impact over explorers of the past two or three centuries, and over others, both benign and evil, who see it as a prize to be won, an ideal to emulate...or impose.

If you gave a mouse the equipment to speak, could he use it?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, quests

Fourth World by Kate Thompson is billed as science fiction, but the element of fantasy is rather strong in her writing. This is the first novel in a trilogy called "Missing Link". Danny, a seemingly handicapped boy, helped by his stepbrother Christy and some decidedly odd companions travel from Ireland to Scotland across a near-future Britain in the grip of energy-crisis rationing (forget £2-per-liter petrol; there is nearly none to be had at any price), in search of Danny's mother. Two of the companions are a dog and starling that can speak.

More than half the novel is taken up with their journey. When they arrive, they find a lot more speaking animals, including a pink, hairless mouse that befriends Christy. Now, with the starling I already drew the line. The mouse is a step way to far. Unless we have greatly misunderstood how brains work, there simply isn't enough gray matter in the brain of any small creature to manage the thinking that underlies speech. Perhaps the mouse looks like "The Brain" in the cartoon...

A second scientific quibble I have is with the notion that the Missing Link between humans and apes is defined by exactly one gene, that supposedly endows humans with the power of self-reflective thought and speech. The current understanding in Anthropology circles is that there are at least twenty known links between humans and the proto-hominid that is ancestral to both humans and chimpanzees. The genetic difference between people and chimps is a bit over two percent, meaning major differences in about five hundred of the 22,000 or so "genes" that define each species. Even in 2000, when this book was released, we knew that it takes a few hundred genes at least to differentiate humans from apes.

Oh, well. Thompson is a skilled writer. With a bit of struggle, I could at least set aside disbelief and enjoy the yarn. The twist at the end, revealing why Danny can hold his breath so long, is satisfying. I guess I'll hunt up the other two novels.