This Blog is Spaceship Earth!

This blog is Spaceship Earth!! Needs work but, just like a good neighbor - that's what we do isn't it?

I am trying to blog. I am trying to blog but life gets in the way. Can you imagine how a mom feels two years without sleep after a baby is born? I can't. I can barely handle email; and, I blog late at night. Blog - an internet news, magazine, story, or topic.

Still I blog.

Brittany and I think of our blog as part travelogue, part research, part story telling, and, occasionally, a children's story. This blog post is all four combined. It is a story about diapers and how they can damage our really neat spaceship - spaceship earth! And this is a blog about what we have been thinking about and seeing and hearing, in CHINA. So you should listen, or, put a little better - honestly, if you can listen, thanks, and help us get this global rocket in ship shape. We need to clean up Space Ship Earth because we happen to have a lot of children on it. Well, we have more than that, hundreds and hundreds of millions, and we love children!!! 

My wife, BS(O)S letters mixed up sometimes, she just adores me, and she will let anyone know that Nathan loves little children. Must have been all the Quaker camp songs or kumbaya circles of the 70's! I love kids. I love them smiling, crying, singing, playing, talking, thinking experimenting - I even love them in their dirty diapers. I do. I love baby faces when they are screaming because they want to keep their dirty diaper on and the breezes and the cleaning are too much. And kids sense of humor is so easy to appeal to. Sometimes just not when you have to change a diaper. Just talk about something they know about or have experience with. Goo and Gaa! But you have to change dirty diapers fast - and that is our story. Diapers have overloaded spaceship earth and looking at this from the view of our 2 to 8 year old audience means a green bright future for you and me. We need kids ideas to fight global warming! 

So, if you have a kid nearby, (under 100 anyone can be a kid for our story, but only if you have a good sense of humor - do you qualify?) ask this and see what they come up with. It is sure to surprise you. Send us any answers: We want to get this figured out too. We need a real answer for how to get our best out of the diaper world. Space Ship earth can be fueled by dirty diapers! We can grow a beanstalk to the heavens in piles of decomposed and composted diapers! What else can kids think of?

Which brings me to our topic. Five Hundred, Hundred, Million, Million plastic diapers a year - just in China and groaning- O, I mean growing!

(This part of the story is where I am going to launch off the grimy, the gross, the overly candid and get scientific on you so buckle your space bra and stay with me here.…)

Five Hundred, Hundred, Million, Million plastic diapers a year is just a drop in the bucket. But it is telling us something. It is telling us something about why we need to love babies more. And,  it gives us a new way out. We can turn 'ugly-stinky-nobody-likes-them', dirty, dirty diapers into fuel for our spaceship! We can make diapers the first Zero Emissions (ZERI) super product designed by kids. My nephew Jonathan knows that there is one thing that big brothers will work really hard at, that's inventing solutions so that babies never have to smell really bad in diapers. This is not a scatological journey - hang with me, I am getting there...

Life in China is Baby positive!

Which is cool.

All I ever learned about China and Babies is that the country was trying to cut back. They were kind of harsh on the babyski, the babooshka was lowering in importance in China. Originally , I thought China was not very baby positive. How wrong could I have been? China began an experiment 30 years ago which is very interesting. They decided to have a one child law. They decided to make it a law to have safe sense. And by safe, I mean in the strictest sense of the word. Having unprotected sense in China means hot water for unprepared parents! OMG...

And, I know this blog has probably gotten to some of you because we are very China positive. Maybe too positive? We are probably wearing our China 'blinders' right? We are here, you are not, you are still reading...please do. It is about to get interesting.

China is about to start building cities to accommodate another 400,000,000 babies to be born in 20 years. They need to live in cities. 400 million children will be growing up and starting 400 million new families in China in the next 30 years. That is a lot of diapers!!!

So here it is - the awful rub: China is a country of baby lovers. China is CHILD OBSESSED. And, it is dangerous. I mean really dangerous. Their obsession may destroy them all and take us with them.So, it turns out that something I talked about in an earlier blog keeps coming back and haunting me. I described Julian Hill's phrase, he had invented nylon - which became plastics; Julian said, "Plastics will bury us all!" Now I don't think he meant bury us under the ground. I think he meant plastics will pile so high we will have to burrow through them like moles and mice and prairie squirrels. I think he meant that we are going to have to live under them and build roads and metro line subways, and boat canals and rocket ship launch pads around plastic and through them. Plastics, do not go away. They do not biodegrade like wood does, or plants do. 

I wrote earlier about how Japan has the kind of toilets the 21st century deserves. Apricot scented, warmed seats, sound effect disguises, more - and now eco-toilets with low water and eco-power that use grey water systems. These will be very important when we travel on rockets and go to planets where we have to save all water. 

In closing, I want to tell you about a toilet in India that scared a whole village because it was built 25 feet up, straight into the sky. After a Tsunami destroyed the small indigenous fishing village a 'vanity parade' of ooglers, missionaries, and those of mediocre skill, low ambition, and well-intended self-righteousness deigned assist
those whose lives and village needed urgent 'improvement.' The architects and professionals wanted to 'green' the fishing village.

Composting toilets are safer and ecological - a learning tool. Measure was given to center the toilet for equitable and common access. Engineers and architectural students contributed. Studies finalized and revised. The grand seven meter 'green' toilet was constructed like a obelisk, as compelling as it was useful. The architect left to much applause. He was so kind to visit and assist the village. A great feast was held. But, who knew? Nobody wants to climb up 7m. to post news to town of their grand constitution. When the architects motorcade turned away from sight the village came together, tore and hole in the bottom of the toilet and rebuilt, for street access of women and children, and without much humility, the lines to the top were men only. It turns out, green toilets, potash, responsible use of human waste has been here in Asia for millennium.

We can promise you that there will not be more stories of bathrooms and diapers on this blog. Unless something really crazy happens!

Signing off. Over and OUT.

NS

[For further Freudian readings on the wise use of detriment versus art - not wanting to get to Nobby O. Brown in an already 'filthy' piece above - our historical ending for European dissent rests under piled rubble between Greece and Italy before ancient capitulations toward current philosophy: Athens would destroy Sparta, who were artless heathen and spent life jockeying and canoodling in bushes.]