Love Will Save This Place - Review for This Changes Everything

Climate change is a boring topic when you live within a community that shows less enthusiasm towards environmental issues as politics are always in the limelight these days. Yeah we know about green house gases, increasing temperature, melting glaciers, rising sea level, extreme weather, but what else? Malaysia is a tropical country where the weather is almost always hot or hotter, we complain about the heat every day, and agree with each other that 'it must be the climate change', and then we switch on the air-conditioner in the house, escaping the hellish weather out there, forgetting about climate change as we can't do anything about it. I roll my eyes all the time when lecturers start talking about climate change, thinking 'I know I know, I am aware of every single mechanism of climate change, I have watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and studied about it for a few semesters. This bad attitude (I admit that it is a really bad attitude) continued until I read this book - This Changes Everything - written by Naomi Klein.

Dish Motion - Wednesday Soup Delivery

Personally I enjoy soup very much and I like to drown my nice with soup (hey don't judge!). It is not difficult to have soup during meals when I am studying in UPM because there are two economic rice shops at old flat serving Chinese-style soup for free! I have tried bittergourd soup, old cucumber soup, ABC soup (tomato, potato, onion soup basically), corn soup etc. but all of them have one similarity - you feel thirsty after having them. 

I came across this Facebook page named DishMotion which makes dinner delivery on every Wednesday, and it is specifically soup with tomato rice (the one that was quite popular on internet last time, hahaha). At first, I thought it was another project of a student taking business management course who are required to sell something as part of the course (since it is a compulsory course I will have to face it sooner or later). After talking to a friend who has ordered the delivery, it is actually a personal business started by a third-year student of UPM. What attracted me the most about this dinner delivery is that they use good quality containers which are non-disposable! Being an environmental student I feel rather uneasy using disposable container. Can you imagine how much plastics or polystyrenes you are going to throw away each time you take away food?

Tadaa! The lovely containers that serve me nice and warm food! 

The Cove - Review

(Image taken from the Examiner.com website)

This is the second documentary that I watched and decided to write a post about it. In my the other blog I wrote a post regarding extracted information from the documentary The Inconvenient Truth, the facts behind global warming. When I am trying to do the same to The Cove, I found difficulties in doing so because The Cove is more like a real life action movie of a group of activists risking their life to reveal the truth behind dolphin hunting in Taiji, Japan rather than a collection of facts. This documentary was awarded the Oscar Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2010 as they brought attention of the world towards inhumane treatment towards dolphins especially the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.

Beautiful cove of Taiji.
(Image taken from Tiffany&Ink blog)

We often see the dolphin shows on TV where the dolphins leap out of the water gracefully and interact cheerfully with their trainers. This dolphin show trend was not popular until the release of Flipper TV Series in 1964 which was about story of a bottlenose dolphin named Flipper and Ricks family. Since then, dolphin captivity became more common and makes a lot of money from the audiences. However, people do not know the suffering of dolphins behind the show just like other animals in the circus. Ok this might not be the focus of the documentary but the dolphin slaughter which is covered up by the Japan government. Yes we slaughter cows, pigs, poultries, fish etc. for food but the secret slaughter of dolphins is just so unreasonable since their meat is not suitable to be consumed and they have high intelligence, even higher than dogs and cats (many people around the world are mad at dog meat trade in China). There is no big protest towards dolphin slaughter in Japan because people do not know about the blood spilled at the cove in Taiji.

Pristine sea stained red with blood.
(Image taken from Digital Journal website)

During the seasonal migration of dolphins passes by Japan in September, that is when the hunting season for dolphins begins. The hunters scare the dolphins to the shore by creating noise and trap them there until the next day when the dolphin trainers will come and select the ones they want. The rest of the dolphins will end up bleeding to death at the cove, out of everyone's sight. The number of death can be up to 23 000 each year. It was a very risky and tough work of the team leading by Louie Psihoyos in uncovered what has been happening behind the beautiful cove of Taiji by using hidden cameras and hydrophones. My heart was in my mouth when they were carrying out the mission in the dark because if they were caught, they would be dead. The team also did surveys on the streets and found that hunting dolphins as the Japanese culture was just a lie to make things seem rightful. The consumers in Japan are even tricked to buy dolphin meat which is sold as high quality whale meat. If you watch the documentary you can see things done by the Japan government to hide away the ugly side of Taiji.

Dolphin meat? Whale meat?
(Image taken from National Geographic website)

I do not hate Japan because of things they have done in the past and the dolphin slaughter, but the lies they have told to the world make me feel disgusted towards the Japan government. Since animals are given to human as food, slaughtering of animals is normal but unnecessary killing is just a sin that is unforgivable (of course when people see the scenes in the normal slaughter house they will be disgusted as well). They kill because they can.

Here are some dolphins facts extracted from the documentary:

• In the wild, dolphins can travel 40 miles per day.
• Instead of sight, sonar system is dolphins' main sense in 'seeing'.
• Due to their sensitivity towards sound, dolphins get stressed up when the surrounding is too noisy.
• The language people used to communicate with dolphins is a version of American sign language.
• Breathing is a voluntary movement for dolphins (unlike human, we breath automatically) which requires conscious effort. 
• Dolphins are self-aware, they can understand how to manipulate circumstances, how to interact with people and how to use their imagination in creating innovatively.
• During the Greek era, harming a dolphin could lead to death sentence as dolphins were known to save humans' lives.
• Two animal rights activists, Jenny May and Jane Tipson got murdered because they tried to stop dolphin traffics.
• Dolphin meat is heavily loaded with mercury (20 times higher than recommendation by World Health Organisation), a heavy metal which contributes to Minamata disease. 

Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins. Bottlenose dolphin is the one common in dolphin shows.
(Image taken from Horizon International Solutions site)

Take your time and watch the movie. Brace yourself for some unpleasant feelings. For your information, the effort of old Ric to rescue the dolphins is still going on. You can check out this website to find out more.

Silent Spring - Review

The original edition of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson published in 1962.
(image taken from The Manhattan Rare Book Company website)

The term 'Silent Spring' literally means the season spring which is quiet, without the chirping of birds. Before I read this book, all I knew about it were it was written by Rachel Carson, a female scientist (a marine biologist to be exact, I found out about this later) in the era when men were dominant and it brought about a green revolution by getting the attention of the public about pesticide pollution.  So after I heard about this book a few times from my lecturers for the last two semesters, I thought I should read it at least once because it ignited the people's green awareness towards the environment at the time when there was no such thing as green movement.

Supported with a lot of scientific evidences from various research institutes and departments, Silent Spring has pointed out the dark side of pesticide usage despite of the 'convenience' claimed by the manufacturers and sellers. Pesticides including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides exist for only one purpose, to kill off so called 'pests'. At that time people did not realise how strong the poison was that almost all living organisms regardless of species were wiped out in a short period of time. Detailed data was embedded in the book stating the damages pesticides had given rise to towards the plants, insects, birds, fish and even human beings. At the beginning of the book, various types of pesticides were introduced, followed by their effects on living organisms and finally the carcinogenic impacts on human beings. The processes that initiated the effects were described scientifically in a simplified way that normal people would understand it. For those who studied biology, they will understand instantly about the processes which involve generation of energy in cells, inhibition of nerve functioning, carcinogenic agents etc.

The author, Rachel Carson who died of breast cancer two years after the publication of Silent Spring.
(image taken from The Pop History Dig website)

This book was not written to deny the usage of pesticide or to call for banning of pesticide but to acknowledge the people about what they were actually facing and to propose better alternatives to replace the unnecessary massacre of all living things directly or indirectly as the poison travelled and accumulated in body fat down the food chains. Biological control using the natural prey-predator and host-parasites relationships has been proved effective and cheap. If immediate treatment has to be done, direct applying of chemical at the affected spots will be better than vast spraying which contributes to the non-point source pollution when the air or water carries the chemicals to the other parts of our world. It is tragic when people had to pay for what they had not done, and not even known because the bitter truth was coated with sugar so that no one would question the true colour of pesticides.

Carson used simple language in delivering her concerns and scientific facts so that general public would understand what's going on in the perspective of science instead of stuffing the whole book with hard-to-digest scientific terminologies. Informations and knowledge are difficult to reach when they are just available in journals or reports which are accessible only by people in the academic and research fields who are only a small fraction out of the whole human population. The real danger often lies in people's ignorance when we don't even know what is threatening us. The efforts Carson made was a leap towards grassroot movement when people began to realise that the whole situation was being manipulated by certain parties for the political and economical benefits where human rights were not being taken care of.  

Bashfulgrass on the field.

P/S: It is quite enjoyable to read the Silent Spring because the words used are truly beautiful as if I am reading a literature full of knowledge. I will certainly read the whole book for the second time and extract the informations chapter by chapter. Although it might take some time, do read and digest it.