Hero of the Environment - Public Health

Our next Hero of the Environment is (drum roll)  Henry Ford.

Ford was one of a cadre of inspired innovators who transformed post-Civil War America into the modern age.  Ford understood how machinery, especially machines for moving objects, would vastly improve life.  The machines had to be reliable, they had to be accessible (a.k.a. affordable).  He didn’t invent the automobile nor the assembly line process, but he did perfect them.  Around the turn of the twentieth century he stated a goal to create "a motor car for the great multitude."

That he did.  In an even more startling move, in 1915 he dropped the price of the Model T from $850 to $290 and sold 1 million cars that year.  There was a noticable side-effect – big cities began to smell a whole lot better.  Fewer children were hurt in the streets.  Illness receded.

Alas, in our highly insulated time, many folks are clueless to the environment of cities in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  Transport yourself through time and a walk along a New York sidewalk and you notice – it stinks!

Before Ford and his colleagues perfected machines to move people and goods around, it was horsepower (and sometimes oxen and mule) that did the work.  Horses are beautiful animals (yours truly adores them) but when packed into small areas, well, a single horse produces (drops?) fifteen to thirty pounds of manure (politely).  Gravity insured that such products reached the ground immediately.

Do the math:  150,000 horse in New York (for example) dropping 15 – 30 pounds of manure daily and also collectively adding 40,000 gallons of urine...it had to go somewhere.

Henry Ford

In addition, horse powered conveyances were affected by, well, the horse.  The skittishness of horses added a dangerous level of unpredictability – any number of things could shock and spook the animals.   Forget the stampede, children were particularly at risk from horses kicking, biting, or trampling.  So, in a real sense, Henry Ford helped to save the children.

Ford also brought fresher air, cleaner water, safer streets, and an overall improvement in quality of life for all citizens, not just the well-heeled.

Oh, Ford also paid his employees well enough to retain them from competitors and enable them to purchase the products they built.  Radical. 

Ford, thrill seeker

Truly, Henry Ford – Hero of the Environment.

Whoa!

The anticipated particle that permits the physical universe may have been discovered.  The predicted higgs-boson is a step closer to imagining how matter is formed and retained.  Apparently it is a field of resistance, which allows a myriad of energy actions to collapse into a specific time-space material.  To me, this seems evidence of what has long been referred to as “ether.” 

According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of matter, as consisting of parts ('particles') which may be tracked through time.
(Albert Einstein, 1928, Leiden Lecture)

It’s all energy.  And what is energy?  Intensity or vitality of action or expression; forcefulness.  So, the Universe is vitality of action, expression, and force.  That, to me, sounds like a description of Consciousness.

Further interesting thinking from Geoff Haselhurst.

Random Thoughts Bumping Around

From time to time a few musings will escape consideration and find their way to this blog.  For instance:

Saviour of the Whales

 This month's unsung hero for Planet Earth is John D. Rockefeller.  His entry into the Hero hall of fame is due, in no small part, to his saving countless whales.  Although many forces were in play during the mid Nineteenth century regarding illumination, one of the most profound was Standard Oil's refining of Kerosene from oil as a superior lamp fuel to light houses and factories.  It was  much better and less costly than the whale oil currently in fashion.  By providing Americans a better way to light homes and business, and directly reducing the demand for whale oil (and thus allowing to live countless thousands of great mammals) we applaud Mr. Rockefeller.

Spared by American innovation and marketing

 What if...

A generation of space exploration launched thousands of powerful rockets.  Keeping in mind the action - reaction nature of force, each launch, such as the Saturn 5 here, not only pushed the payload into orbit (or beyond for many Saturn 5 launcheds) but each launch also pushed away from it, Earth.  The Earth is very big, comparatively, and over decades such pushing migh disturb or realign the orbital position of our planet a teeny-tiney bit.  Oh, and add a Japanese earthquake to the mix.

Who knows?  Maybe the Mayans were astronologically on target regarding the end of their calendar (and presumably the world) around the winter solstice 2012?  Mere weeks later a rogue asteroid  zipped closer to Earth than many of our communication satellites.  If that rock had but a slightly different trajectory (or if the Earth were in a slightly altered position) a huge portion of the surface would have been anihilated.

Meteor dust and dawn in Russia

As if to illustrate, on February 15, 2013, as the asteroid sped away from us, a meteor plunged into the atmosphere over Russia and exploded in its upper reaches.  The angle of attack for this rock was slight enough that it skipped through the atmosphere rather than plunding downward - where it would have been much closer to the surface when it exploded.

So, I'll add all of Mankind's rocketry of the 20th Century and 21st Century to date as a possible Hero of the environment.

And the Chelaybinsk meteor made for some wonderful sunrises.  It could have made something else...