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
earn heavy lucrative six work
Seafaring can be lucrative - the elite, such as gas-tanker captains, can earn $100,000 for six months' work - but the isolation is a heavy price to pay.
bananas captain goes ships supply
Seafarers are used to being exploited. At sea, the captain moans at chandlers who supply ships with green bananas that will never ripen; at fruit that goes moldy obscenely fast; at sub-standard meat.
cities serve works
Sewage works that serve big cities run into trouble when the cities grow up around them.
chinese home human raw
Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields.
family
Diarrhoea is the reason you can have a malnourished child in a well-fed family.
agony days difficult hardly mild pain severe symptoms women
Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.
cause causes instead nurses retain vaccine
Rotavirus does not cause all diarrhea, but it causes a lot of it. Instead of a single vaccine dose, however, harried nurses may have to give several, as diarrhoea makes it difficult for a child to retain anything.
mostly oceans putting salty ten turns useful wasting
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.
asked care children diarrhea mass potent three weapon
You've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction.
cart costs encouraged fat money places tip tons turned
As for restaurants and fast-food places who tip tons of oil down their drains, they are routinely encouraged to use fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to cart away fat (although now that fat is being turned into energy, it can make money).
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.
acoustic damaging happening impact noise role shipping terms underneath
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.
communist decided essential great party policy took
In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward.
bought selling soap tried
In the early 19th century, they tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. They tried selling it as sexy, and everyone bought it.