Last November, I wrote about cow chips or pies. In America, frontier people and Indians used cow chips to fuel heating and cooking fires. I suggested that such chips could be used in modern times as a solution for perceived climate change.*
Well, it turns out that in parts of India today, cow chip patties are prepared, harvested and burned for fuel, cooking and religious rituals. In fact, it is reported that cow chips are so popular that they are hot sellers online with retailers including Amazon and eBay.** While the patties long have been associated with rural life, the demand now appears to be from urban dwellers longing for the old days. People are said to find the smell of dung fires to be "pleasant." So, what may be old for rural life has become new for city life.
In the case of water, old is becoming new also. Orville and Wilbur Wright are the acknowledged inventors of the first successful airplane that actually flew. For years, their father had warned them of the dangers of contaminated water. Newspaper stories indicated that every case of typhoid was due to water. However, before their success, Orville became sick with typhoid from drinking water at the age of 25 in 1896. For several days, he had a fever of 105 and was delirious After nearly two months, Orville finally recovered.
Wilbur Wright was not as fortunate. After successful demonstrations of their airplane in both the United States and Europe, Wilbur died in 1912 from typhoid. He was only 45 years old, and it was only some four years after the first flight.***
Thankfully, chlorination and other disinfection protocols have alleviated concerns over typhoid, except in some less developed countries where safe water remains an issue even today. However, the elimination of typhoid in developed countries in modern times has not eliminated concerns over safe water even there. For example, in the United States recent examples of contamination of water supplies include cryptosporidium, chemical waste products, algae toxins and lead. These examples illustrate that the old issue of safe water can pop up again as new issues.
While science seems to focus on hypotheses over how Earth got its water or whether Earth is or is not warming, that focus may be shortsighted given the continued pressing need for safe and adequate water on Earth. Sometimes, as the photo above suggests, we can spend too much time gazing into the brightness of the distance instead of dealing with the darkness of what is on the table before us.
__________________________________________
* "A Solution For Climate Change",
November 22, 2015
**"Cow Dung Patties Sell Like Hotcakes
In India", Rapid City Journal,January 3,
2016,P.D2
***See McCullough, "The Wright Brothers",
(2015), P. 27,256
