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" In Los Angeles, half of all smog from sulfur dioxide comes in from ships. "
Rose George
Los Angeles
Los
Ships
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" Night is the best time to visit sewers, because the businesses dispelling the most waste are closed, and the flows are calmer. "
Rose George
Night
Waste
Best
" Half of the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering from what are generally known as water-related diseases. "
Rose George
Africa
Suffering
People
" 'MaerskKendal' is a rarity with its British flag, the 'LONDON' home port painted on its bow, its two British chief officers, and its portrait of the queen in the mess room, apparently common courtesy on British ships, but a little alarming to me. "
Rose George
Queen
Home
London
" Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters. "
Rose George
Financial
China
Back
" My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is - brain damage - is too expensive. "
Rose George
Brain
Husband
Mother
" 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. "
Rose George
Women
Pain
Me
" Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety laws. "
Rose George
Labor
Taxes
Cruise
" Some countries have more water than others - some can afford to use clean water to flush their poop away, and some can't. "
Rose George
Clean
Water
Others
" 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. "
Rose George
Captain
Fast
Fruit
" 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. "
Rose George
Sea
Rules
Roads
" Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement. Biogas, as this energy is known, can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood to vegetables to human excreta. "
Rose George
Statistics
World
Wood
" Because sanitation has so many effects across all aspects of development - it affects education, it affects health, it affects maternal mortality and infant mortality, it affects labor - it's all these things, so it becomes a political football. Nobody has full responsibility. "
Rose George
Health
Education
Political
" 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? "
Rose George
History
Culture
Child
" What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it. "
Rose George
Door
Done
Find
" Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. "
Rose George
Marriage
India
Freedom
" Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination. "
Rose George
Men
Space
Size
" 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). "
Rose George
Energy
Fat
Oil
" 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. "
Rose George
Years
Home
Human
" The days of languorous shore leave are long gone. Overnight stays are unheard of and sailor towns a distant memory. In better ports, seafarers head for a seamen's mission. "
Rose George
Long
Mission
Head
" 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. "
Rose George
Losses
Tourism
Three
" There are more than one hundred thousand ships at sea carrying all the solids, liquids and gases that we need to live. "
Rose George
Live
Ships
Sea
" In villages across the developing world, governments have provided reasonable enough latrines that have again and again been turned into storage spaces or simply abandoned. In India alone, millions of government-funded latrines have become goat-sheds. Some had been built near kitchens, a taboo in Indian households. "
Rose George
Enough
Alone
India
" Sending a container from Shanghai to Le Havre emits fewer greenhouse gases than the truck that takes the container on to Lyon. "
Rose George
Than
Shanghai
Greenhouse Gases
" Ninety percent of what we wear, we eat, we consume is carried by ships... Container ships carry a vast amount of stuff. "
Rose George
Eat
Percent
Wear
" 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. "
Rose George
Measles
Food
Child
" All that is known for sure is that endometriosis is endemic and that it cannot be cured. Management is the best hope. This makes for treatments that are, if I am being polite, based on trial and error. If I am feeling less generous, they are shots in the dark. "
Rose George
I Am
Hope
Dark
" 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. "
Rose George
Selling
Sexy
Early
" 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. "
Rose George
Air
Travel
Information
" 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. "
Rose George
Place
World
Practice
" 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. "
Rose George
System
Nothing
Convenience