Hujambo!

Nobody wants to be the last one holding the hot potato when the time is over; that’s kinda how I feel about electronic waste. E-waste is a really, really big problem. There is a village in China, for example, where people crouch over fires of melting electronic components (mobile phones, motherboards, wires, CRT monitors, etc). Children have sores all over their bodies, mothers have breast milk with heavy metals, cancer rates are through the roof. All of this just to reclaim a few ounces of gold, silver, or who-knows-what other precious metals live inside that 21st-century trash.
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I just saw an article in Science Daily which talks about a “Digital Dark Age.” The introduction sums up the idea:

“What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer’s hard drive?”

The article mentions 8-inch floppy disks as an example. Remember those, from the 1980s and ’90s? They were the floppy disks which were actually “floppy,” not those 3.5-inch ones some old people still use today. The “floppy disks” of this era are CDs, DVDs, and flash disks, and you may not foresee them going away any time soon, but it’s inevitable; what happens when those are phased out for “newer, better” storage formats? The year is 2020: where will you find somewhere to plug in your now-ancient USB flash disk (let alone your circa-2001 floppy disk)?
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In May I read Derrick Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words…

“Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.”

Although I know the feeling, I have no interest in being a writer and I don’t know the first thing about bombs; I’m not sure where that leaves me.

Jensen’s definitely an environmental activist but the book isn’t really an “environmental” book. I gave the book away so I can’t verify, but I think the book is even categorized as “Spiritual/Philosophy” on the back cover. What stands out in my mind from the book is Jensen’s use of historical references to explore the complete disappearance of once-flourishing animal populations like salmon, bison, and passenger pigeons. He quotes North American explorers who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, remarked on flocks of passenger pigeons one mile wide and three hundred miles long, containing up to one billion birds. Holy crap, right?
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