This little light of mine | I'm gonna let it shine

What a lovely and powerful illustration of the deep, deep, depths under the seas, about which we know very little!

That image accompanied this essay by Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes: "We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it."

One of those awesome mysteries lies way down where the sun don't shine, as they say:

Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that—in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone”—there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself.

Hadal zone.  I had never heard about this, until I read the essay.

In this zone, the only light is the light created by life.  Yes, created by life.

Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. ... In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.

We have barely understood anything that deep down, but we know enough that there are precious and rare metals.  So, who cares for life in its variety and complexity, eh!  “Even if we found unicorns living on the seafloor, I don’t think that would necessarily stop mining.”

Such is our human behavior!

A later issue of The New Yorker includes a poem titled Bioluminescence.  Why the editors failed to pair it in the same issue that had Kolbert's essay is beyond me.  At least in my post, I can present them together.

Here is the poem Bioluminescence, by Paul Tran:

There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own
light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful

though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish.
I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden

by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware
from where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled

by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld

underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing.
I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going

even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far
away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby

dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed.
I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay

alive. I swam. I kept going. I waited. I found myself without meaning
to, without contriving meaning at the time, in time, in the company

of creatures who, hideous like me, had to be their own illumination.
Their own god. Their own genesis. Often we feuded. Often we fused

like anglerfish. Blood to blood. Desire to desire. We were wild. Bewildered.
Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions

we proved that life can exist. I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea.

At your service!

On quite a number of occasions, my father has expressed his surprise at how people earn money these days, in contrast to the old days when he was an active participant in the labor economy.  Back then the work products were a lot more tangible.  Farmers grew crops. Miners dug stuff. Workers made widgets.

His favorite way of expressing the change that he and all of us try to understand is "now, everybody is a consultant."

While that is an exaggeration, of course, it is true that even in the old country there has been a tremendous change in the percentage of labor in anything but agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.  There are consultants. Beauty parlors. Investment managers.  And that other comment that father makes: "if they are not consultants, they are all doing software."

If that is the story in the old country, it is even more dramatic here in the US.  However, listening to trump and his 63 million voters, one would believe that everybody is in farming or mining or making widgets in factories.  While facts do not matter to these minions, the rest of us care.

 “goods-producing” jobs like logging, mining, construction and manufacturing accounted for only 20.5 million jobs last month, in a nation with 148 million total positions.

Where do the overwhelming majority work then?  In the service sector.

If you have a mental model in which the only valuable jobs involve making steel or mining coal, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the middle-income jobs that are more common in the 21st-century service economy. Examples include the blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, the nurse at a hospital renowned for its cancer treatments, the audio technician on a movie set, the engineer who advises companies worldwide on the best way to extract oil.

trump and his fellow idiots want to make America great again by trying to bring back those logging, mining, construction, and manufacturing jobs that will only fade more into the future?  What a bunch of morons!  "Fucking morons," to quote the now ousted Secretary of State, Wayne Tracker.

Services make a lot of money for the US.

The biggest is travel, which accounted for $204 billion last year. This is an area that the president should know well. When a Canadian couple stays in a Trump hotel in New York, the money they spend counts as a service export.
The next biggest category is “charges for the use of intellectual property,” a category that includes foreigners who pay to watch movies or music made in the United States, as well as licenses of patents and trademarks.
Other big ones include financial services, insurance, telecommunications and information technology, and a wide range of engineering and other consulting services.

If trump really cared for the average, forgotten, people, he should talk more about the plight of fast food workers than pretending to care about the coal mine workers.

Who am I kidding; the narcissist in the Oval Office cares for nobody but himself!

No amount of gold can put Humpty Dumpty together again

Remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics from the high school days?  What? You forgot that already?  No way!

The next time you read about, or see something, which makes you comment along the lines of "the world is getting more and more chaotic," remind yourself about the second law of thermodynamics, according to which the amount of disorder in the universe will always increase.  Always.

Did that stir any memories of your high school science classes?  You recall that entropy is a measure of the level of disorder?  What? You forgot that already?  No way!

I have been thinking about the disorder and entropy a lot more after reading about two incidents, one here in the US and another in China.  Here, it was that awful accident that turned a river yellow; I am sure you saw plenty of photos of that.  And in China, it was the explosion at Tianjin.

These, like many events that unfold in life, are irreversible.  We can't undo them.  Once the egg falls and cracks, all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put Humpty together again.  In irreversible processes, entropy always increases.

Mining is one of the best (worst?) examples of entropy, where we can also see that Humpty Dumpty cannot ever be put together again once we start digging down. The Animas River turning mustard yellow reminds us about one of those uncomfortable and inconvenient truths about mining:

The accident heightened a debate here over the future of this region’s old mines, and served as a reminder, some critics say, that the Gold King’s toxic demise could be repeated at any of thousands of abandoned mines around the country.

Source

We humans value gold, for reasons that are beyond my wildest imaginations.  Thus, we mine for it.

In its heyday, the Gold King produced about 350,000 ounces of high-grade gold, according to its current owner, and its products landed on the fingers of well-off women in New York City, in the pockets of everyday Americans and in the vaults of banks around the world.

So, what is the connection with the explosion at Tianjin?  Mining for gold.  Cyanide is the connection:

Alarming levels of sodium cyanide have been found at wastewater monitoring stations in the disaster-stricken city of Tianjin almost five days after a series of deadly explosions claimed at least 114 lives and sparked intense criticism of the Chinese government.

Source

How does cyanide connect Tianjin and the Animas River spill?  The spill was from an abandoned gold mine.  And one of the most common uses of sodium cyanide is in the mining of gold.

Most of the world’s gold is not found in nugget form but as very fine gold powders in rocks. In fact, our cultural demand for gold forces us to mine in rocks that can be as low as 0.005% gold. This means we need industrial extraction to separate and purify gold from all the other materials.
After mining and milling, the crude rock mixture is turned into a fine powder and added to a solution of sodium cyanide. The gold forms strong bonds with cyanide molecules and can then be separated from the rest of the minerals because it is then soluble in water. It then reacts with zinc and turns back into a solid. Finally is smelted to isolate the gold and cast into bars.

Mining for gold is perhaps one of the most toxic mining activities ever.  Is our madness for gold worth all this disorder?  I suppose we need to send people back to the science classes and not let them out unless and until they have understood the second law of thermodynamics and entropy!

Mining the mountains of Meghalaya and West Virginia

Less than a month ago, the New York Times' India Ink blog that is about India had a report with a troubling headline: "A Village Brings Down Its Hills as Lure of Mining Grows."  It was, yet another, depressing piece on the economics versus environment struggle that seems to be the only way we humans know.  Apparently we know not how to make it economics and the environment.

The NY Times reported on the mining activities in the hills of Meghalaya, a state in the northeast, whose name means the abode of the clouds, which will invoke nothing but wonderful imagery.  But, the photo in the report is anything but that.

Meghalaya "has become home to an increasing number of family-owned limestone mines, whose owners are seeking wealth unheard of in a region accustomed to subsistence farming."

Of course, it will be a wonderful development to raise the standards of living and provide opportunities for people to live a life that is more than mere subsistence.  But, the lucrative mining comes at a steep environmental cost:

“In this village, we get our water straight from the river,” Mr. Pohsnem said. “As soon as the mining started, the water became undrinkable. Now they say they have stopped mining near the river, but they have buried the headwaters of the streams already. Maybe with the money they make from mining, they can buy clean water, but that is not a solution.” ...
“We used to have deer and bears around here, but even the squirrels ran away after the mining. If they cannot drink the water, then how can we?” he asked. “It’s no use fighting — better that we buy a place elsewhere where there’s no mining.”

Mining messing up the local water supply is an all too familiar story. Not only in India or China, but even right here in the United States.  And not the US of a hundred years ago as the country's economic engines were revving, but even now.  The chemical spill in West Virginia this past January is the context for this piece in the New Yorker with an equally depressing title: "Chemical Valley."  After MCHM—4-methylcyclohexane methanol--leaked in the thousands of gallons, and after another chemical--PPH--had leaked as well, 

Authorities urged the public to watch for symptoms of exposure, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, and wheezing. Just after midnight, President Obama declared a federal emergency. He dispatched FEMA and sent in the National Guard to deliver truckloads of bottled water.

The water was not safe for  “drinking, cooking, washing, or bathing.”

Interestingly enough, the local health department is headed by a guy with origins in India--Rahul Gupta, the son of an Indian diplomat.

When I asked Dr. Gupta, the head of the health department, if he and his family were drinking from the tap, he said that they were not. The water at their house still had an odor. “It is very difficult to drink licorice-flavored water,” he said. I asked if there were any outstanding scientific questions, and he laughed. Then he said, “What is the metabolism and excretion of this compound in humans? Does it accumulate? Where does it accumulate? What is the carcinogenic potential? What is the teratogenic potential? What does it do to home pipes? How does it interact, if at all, with other compounds in water, such as chlorine? Does it form harmful or harmless products?”
Dr. Gupta ran though another half-dozen medical and scientific issues, and arrived at the question that concerns him most. For a man who had left a country that had undergone radical divides in human development, the causes and effects of the Freedom Industries spill feel like a departure from an American principle he thought he understood. He said, “The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act allows every resident of the United States to have access to safe drinking water. So how do we say that, for three hundred thousand people in this part of West Virginia, it’s O.K. to have ‘appropriate’ water? Do we understand the path we’re taking here, by defining two different classes of water, for two different groups of population? Do we really want to go down that path? In the history of this nation, it doesn’t end well when we go down this path.”

What is it that makes us think so little of water?  Even when we understand the preciousness of water and its connection to life itself.  When we scan the universe, it is the presence of water that we use as an important proxy for whether we might be able to detect life far, far away from this pale blue dot.  Yet, we sacrifice water because ...?

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We humans are so messed up!

Water
By Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.