Rose George
Rose George
Rose George is a British journalist and author. She began writing in 1994, as an intern at The Nation magazine in New York. Later, she became senior editor and writer at COLORS magazine, the bilingual "global magazine about local cultures" published in eighty countries and based first in Rome, then Paris, then Venice. In 1999, she moved to London and began a freelance career, and has since written for the Independent on Sunday, Arena, the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Details...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
air areas busy cars codes control depend equivalent operate outcomes respecting roads rules separation ships traffic treated work
Usually, there is no equivalent of air traffic control at sea. Some busy areas operate 'traffic separation schemes,' but mostly, ships are treated like cars on roads where there are rules and codes of behavior, and successful, accident-free outcomes depend on everyone respecting them. As on roads, this doesn't always work.
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We are using the same water that the dinosaurs drank, and this same water has to make ice creams in Pasadena and the morning frost in Paris.
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We are wasting our water mostly by putting waste into it. One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic meters of water. Discharging wastewater into oceans turns freshwater into the less useful salty stuff, and desalination is expensive.
carrying gases hundred
There are more than one hundred thousand ships at sea carrying all the solids, liquids and gases that we need to live.
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We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures.
humble water toilets
The humble latrine, or flush toilet, reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water.
ocean law practice
In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.
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Perhaps we believe that everything travels by air, or magically and instantaneously like information (which is actually anchored by cables on the seabed), not by hefty ships that travel more slowly than senior citizens drive.
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Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?
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Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That's more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.
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When Peru had a cholera outbreak in 1991, losses from tourism and agricultural revenue were three times greater than the total money spent on sanitation in the previous decade.
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It's difficult on a ship to get away from your job because that accommodation house, which is where seafarers live, is their workplace, it's where they live, it's where they relax, it's everything, and it's just hard to get away. And seafarers often refer to their job as being in prison with a salary.
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The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European, on one ship.
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There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route.