This is a commentary on the reports of the multitude of deaths from bottled milk in China.

A long time ago I read the reports on Brazilian children dieing after there was a push for baby formula because mother’s were too weak to breast feed. The problem with the push, was not that their was poison in the feed but that it was unaffordable. Today, more than 10 years later Western culture has managed to convince the world that ‘less breast is best’. For anyone with a medical sciences background, they quickly acknowledge the absurdity of moving away from breastfeeding to the bottle.

Children are sick and dieing because we’re ‘modernized’/'westernized’ -whatever you want to call it- in our eating and ‘feeding techniques’. We’ve moved away from maternal instincts and natural body productions that are designed to protect infants -though acceptance of natural defense factors called antibodies- to more commerical and ’sophisticated’ means of ‘nutrition’.

I won’t get into the different types of antibodies; what the reader who’s not medical oriented needs to know is that a baby is not born with natural defenses against antigens-foreign invaders-, but obtains the necessary protective factors from breast milk, which they will NEVER get from a bottle. In social sciences terms…babies get ground level support from the mother.

Rich Euro-Western society decided long ago that ’sophisticated’ bottle feeding is better, that only the ‘lower classes’ breast feed. Their convictions that have traveled through nations have continue to create a ripple effect in child heath and now we can add one more problem to the list. That said, 53,000 babies wouldn’t have been in danger of bottled milk poising if we weren’t so fixated on a ‘better body’ and ‘less breast is best’, ‘preserve the shape of your breast’ and trust technology over that which was created as a natural system that knows when to change according to an infants needs. A mother’s body & instincts knows what her child needs and puts itself into motion to provide those needs, whether or not the mother is aware or wants to. Don’t believe…watch the changes as she gets pregnant, and watch the changes as the baby reaches 6 months.

We’ve trusted infant health (internal) ‘ground level protection’ -breast milk natural growth factors- to machines and chemical engineers- a lot of whom probably don’t have any breasts (last line sheds a bit of humor on the situation). In the end ’sophistication’ has cost us more than 53,000 lives…I wonder what would have happened if mothers had stuck to proven method that have worked for centuries! If it’s not broke…don’t fix it!!!

I’ve been out of the country for a while which may explain the recent lack of blogging. As it happens, I’m still out of the country and so reading the IHT instead of the New York Times. Thusly, I was not aware of  this article, which I think ran in last Sunday’s New York Times. So, Rem Koolhaas is hoping to build a non-city within a city in Dubai. In the article Nicolai Ouroussoff, which you should read now before continuing, presents the idea that this sort of development might cater to only a small global elite. Really, you think? I’m not condemning the rich for luxuriating rather than attempting to save the world, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that massive architectural projects such as this are utterly and viciously boring: hypermodern non-places, stripped of any organic of evolutionary structure. For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding such projects–Atlantic Yards , which is located in my back yard comes to mind–they’re really nothing more than an attempted synchronization of suburban planning and urban scale: sterile, lacking anything resembling charm, violent by the fact of their existence. As far as I’m concerned, this sort of remapping of urban space into monadic unity runs entirely contrary to Globalhood’s commitment to engaging difference qua difference: real, deep, difficult and highly necessary. If every street, corridor and arcade is the same as the next, why should I leave my house in the morning?

There hasn’t been a lot of energy talk here on the Globalhood blog. Let’s change all that and kick things off with a recent article from Chuck Squatriglia at Wired about bacterially developed hydrogen.

Researchers at Penn State University say they’ve developed a way to use bacteria to extract hydrogen from almost any biodegradable organic substance, from grass clippings to wastewater.

Hydrogen is often touted as a virtually limitless source of clean energy, but its ecological benefits have been minimal because it is often produced using natural gas in a process that releases carbon dioxide — a problem the new method seems to solve.
The discovery, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, holds great promise for advancing hydrogen as a viable sustainable fuel because, the researchers say, it uses existing technology and can be put to use immediately.

“It’s crossed the line from a science-fair project to feasible technology,” said Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering who led the research. “You can do it from any renewable organic matter.”

Cool. Hit the link to jump to the full article.

Knife-forks are abstract ideas, fantasies that make us feel better about a hypothetical world in which they’re adopted, but don’t actually improve the real world in which they’re not… Some people are actually working, inventing chopsticks or something, to improve the real world, not some hypothetical world in which everyone pays more attention to their eating. And distracting them with your knife-forks hampers such progress.

There’s a highly amusing and insightful article over at typewriting about creating functional solutions for the world as it exists, not idealized solutions for the world as we would like it to be. No matter how clever an idea might be, it’s no good if inherent human flaws get in the way of its execution.

Another way to express this idea might be: “tailor the clothes to fit the person, not the other way around.”

Great stuff to keep in mind for anyone looking to make the world a better place.

The Global Strategy Institute is a Washington-based organization that consults with corporations, government, and non-profits about their long-term thinking and planning.

One of their projects, the Seven Revolutions, imagines the 7 biggest issues that will affect the world in the year 2025. They include: Population, Resource Management, Technology, Information/Knowledge, Economic Integration, Conflict, and Governance.

The main page for the organization also features a regularly update blog that covers all kinds of multidisciplinary news items.

Ebay, “the world’s online marketplace,” is launching a new sort of market: one focused on doing good.

Called Project Good, the site is still very much in beta but the basic idea seems to be an extension of the labeling initiatives that have become increasingly popular. In order to tap into the spending dollars of particular interest groups, products have been labeled with all manner of social agendas. Witness the rise of “organic,” “fair-trade,” and even “endangered species chocolate bars.”

In similar fashion, this new site will allow you to purchase goods that have been verified as “positively impacting the lives of its producers.” Its target market seems to be those who are attracted to the idea of the triple bottom line - recognizing economic, environmental and social profit - and Globalhood certainly considers itself among those ranks.

The idea is fascinating, and I for one will be extremely interested in seeing how this project executes.

From Bill “The Thrill” Moyers comes this interview with the Yes Men, a group of guerrilla political satirists of a rather Swiftian bent.

Full text, Youtube videos and relevant links are here.

Amazing blog chronicling the construction of a homemade generator windmill in Malawi. (thanks to the nerds at Boing Boing)

For you urban warriors, why not try out a solar powered bag. You can also make one yourself.

In The Future of Life, E.O. Wilson writes that if every country consumed natural resources at the same rate as the United States, Earth would have to be four times as large to keep up with demand. That’s roughly the size of Neptune.

The Western imagination tends to focus on fossil fuels–oil, and increasingly coal–but, for a billion people water is severly scarce commodity. Recently, water consumption has become a hot topic in the States. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom announced that on July 1st, his city will begin banning the purchase of bottled water by city departments. The impetus for this decision stems largely from the increased energy costs of production and transport of bottled water. Fast Company has just published a amazing article about the water-biz:

Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave empty space.)

Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.

(full text here)

Also, this month’s Good Magazine has a graphic that should make you think twice before slapping down three bucks for that next imported plastic bottle.

Long story short, we here at Globalhood recommend that you buy a Nalgene. It’ll pretty much last forever.

For those who missed the NY Times Science section article about the Cooper Hewitt Exhibition, and KickStart (the social entrepreneurship organization that developed the products), there is a video about their products that accompanied the article. 

KickStart’s goal is to help people rise out of poverty, focusing on the development of new agricultural and human necessity technology that is geared towards the needs of the supposed 90% of the world that first world design ignores.  KickStart develops and sells new products and business plans, provides training, and helps develop local industries around their products in developing countries.

For example, they sell an uphill pumping water pump to farmers for around US$50. It may have been difficult for the families to save the money, but after a few months, their profits are often multiplied many times.  Local industries and wage earning jobs are developed in manufacturing and provision of the KickStart products as well. KickStart is involved in the whole process to ensure the most success.

Here is another of their success stories