It is a manifest that in a free nation where slaves are not allowed, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor.... To make society happy and people easy under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of then should be ignorant as well as poor ... A man who has had some education, may follow husbandry by choice ... but he won't make a good hireling and serve a farmer for a pitiful reward, at least he is not so fit for it as a day labourer that has always been employed about the plough and dung-cart, and remembers not that he has lived otherwise.

Bernard Mandeville (circa 17th-18th century)

 

If you've never thought about how a whale's poo affects you, the time is now.

Why? Because the faecal matter of whales, oversized land mammals, seabirds and migrating fish plays a critical role in fertilising the planet. 

But a new study shows species decline and extinction is threatening the planet's age-old 'biogeochemical cycling' system (or nutrient recycling system), potentially weakening ecosystem health, fisheries and agriculture.

An interlinked system of animals that carry nutrients from ocean depths to deep inland, through their poo, urine, and, upon death, decomposing bodies. Here, the red arrows show the estimated amounts of phosphorus and other nutrients that were moved or diffused historically and how much these flows have been reduced today. Grey animals represent extinct or reduced densities of animal populations.

(See diagram)

"Previously, animals were not thought to play an important role in nutrient movement," said Christopher Doughty, an ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study Global nutrient transport in a world of giants.

What the study highlights is the ability of animals to transport masses of nutrients in their faecal matter to ocean surface waters and inland, acting as a sort of nutrient "distribution pump." 

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was the result of a collaboration of scientists from the universities of Oxford, Vermont, Harvard, Aarhus (Denmark), Princeton, the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and Purdue University. 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/decline-in-land-and-marine-species-leaves-less-poo-to-fertilise-the-planet-20151027-gkjlde.html#ixzz3plL9mB3Y 
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook


Don't think that human faeces at Manly Beach in the 1980s were good for you or the environment. The big trees lining the beach front were dying as well from the surfactants. The sewage outlet has been extended a long way away to sea and the treatment plant has been improved a lot but:

It has been described as a pong so diabolical it has old ladies keeling over in the streets around one of Sydney's major tourist attractions.

The eye-watering odours wafting out of the Sydney Water North Head Sewage Treatment Plant and the trucks that cart off the excess solid bits (treated poo) through the seaside suburb of Manly have for years plagued residents, businesses and stunned unwitting tourists.

"It is so bad on some days, " said Dr Geoff Lambert from the North Head Sanctuary Foundation (NHSF), "it makes you want to vomit."

Dr Lambert said when the trucks carrying treated poo leave the plant and travel through the streets, the smell literally has people wilting in its wake

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/manly-beach-scientists-from-around-the-world-working-to-eliminate-odours-from-north-head--sewage-treatment-plant-20150508-ggx5v7.html#ixzz3plMX0Aoa 
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

Of course the treated poo is recycled as fertiliser or such but because humans add a lot of "loo products" to the flushing of the natural function, more and more unwanted chemicals enter the process. We need to keep an eye on the health of the cycle.

 

O’ freedom sun,
Thrust in darkness,
Democracy will cure the wounds,
Which emerge from your blood-stained soil.
O’ saddened nation,
Fight your antagonists.
Take revenge for your martyrs,
On the enemy of democracy and woman.
We shall bring through knowledge,
Through blood and smoke
We shall bring the dawn of freedom,
The morn of democracy.
Meena’s flag on the shoulders of women
Who will sing she is our pride
O’ People, arise
Fight the enemies of democracy
In revenge for the blood of your beloved martyrs
And as a message for your fighters.

Translation of a song written by a RAWA activist and sung at a funtion by students of "Watan" school, 1993.

ON THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.

“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/27/world/greenland-is-melting-away.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

 

Meanwhile our humanity is tested by our inability to stop being idiots.

Correction: in the quote of Bernard Mandeville that explains WEALTH (Capitalism) in simple terms, above, one should read:

great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor ...