4/25/2008

Globalmania

by Barbara Currier Bell

The world is getting crazy. Look at these news flashes.

1. Cyanobacteria are reproducing so fast and furiously that they’re covering the surface of many waterbodies, robbing fish and plants of dissolved oxygen and causing declines in aquatic life. Some of the bacteria poison humans.

2. Drug-resistant bacteria are dining on anti-biotics in soils.

3. Postal workers are being attacked by wild turkeys. They are fighting back with water pistols and long sticks, but losing, as the big birds seem to be driven wild during breeding season by the postal-truck colors of red, white and blue.

4. Cherry blossom season has gotten earlier by an average of 4.2 days over the past 50 years.

5. A national corporation is protecting forests and providing jobs for low-income citizens by using a renewable resource from trees to manufacture condoms.

6. Agriculturalists are producing square tomatoes, square watermelons, and even, according to one source, square trees.

7. An “aeroponics” company grows mesclun and other greens for restaurants in a process that uses neither soil nor water. Says the owner, “This technology can be set up anywhere, including Iceland or Antarctica.”

8. The owner of a home with solar panels sued when his neighbor’s trees cast shade on the panels—and won. In a backlash, state representatives are debating a new law that would overturn earlier legislation protecting a person’s right to sunlight. Put another way, humans are pitting trees against the sun.

9. Sharp increases in locavores are encouraging the growth of family farms not in rural areas, where they might be expected, but in cities and suburbs. Small farm animals that are good food producers thus may replace pets.

10. April is the new May, which means April showers are falling in March, although the date of April Fool’s Day has not been changed to May 1.

All of these news stories are about real recent events, except one.

A. Which one is fiction?

B. Which events are related to global warming?

C. Which events have actually or probably happened already in Milford or could happen soon? Answers below.

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A. The square trees are fiction. B.#1,4,5,8,9,10. C. #9 has actually already happened in Milford; #1,2,4,10 have probably already happened; #7,8 could happen soon. (#3 is unlikely to happen in Milford, although postal workers might face aggression from resident Canada geese or ducks; #5 won’t happen anytime soon, as it involves rubber trees in Brazil’s rain-forest; #6 is a toss-up, as it depends on square forms, not plant genetics, and spreads mostly by fads.)