Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" I went down to the sewers in London and looked at a campaigning group in London called RATS, Rowers Against Thames Sewage, and I went to Sewage School and hung out with kids learning to make sewage soup and how to clean sewage. And it was great - really good fun. "
Rose George
School
Soup
Fun
" 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. "
Rose George
Three
Together
You
" We see the sea as this place of leisure and this place, you know, a blue patch on the map to fly over because we all go by plane these days, mostly. And we don't really see it as a place of industry anymore. "
Rose George
You
Blue
Sea
" China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust. "
Rose George
Night
Dark
Great
" Ships are obliged to take on harbor or river pilots - who provide specialized local navigation - when they approach a port, but in the canal, a Suez crew is also obligatory. The crew members are there in case the ship needs to be moored during the canal transit, but this rarely happens. "
Rose George
Harbor
Crew
Take
" Before containers, transport costs ate up 25 percent of the value of whatever was being shipped. "
Rose George
Value
Transport
Up
" In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet's projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water. "
Rose George
Live
World
Water
" 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
" 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
" 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
" In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward. "
Rose George
Forward
Great
Leap
" 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
" 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 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
" Research into endometriosis is as scanty as funding. "
Rose George
Scanty
Funding
Research
" The first thing I did when I decided that I was going to dive into the world of poop was look at who was doing stuff in that world. The first I came across was the World Toilet Organization. So one of the first things I did was to go to their annual show in Moscow. "
Rose George
Look
Doing
World
" Felixstowe, the United Kingdom's largest port, stops work only for Christmas Day and for crane-toppling Force 9 gales. "
Rose George
Day
Kingdom
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. "
Rose George
Earn
Elite
Isolation
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea. "
Rose George
Support
Life
Environmental
" The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European, on one ship. "
Rose George
Boxes
Ship
Thousand
" 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. "
Rose George
Child
Single
Anything
" I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company, A. P. Moller-Maersk, is Denmark's largest company, its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark's GDP; its ships use more oil than the entire nation. "
Rose George
Parent
Sales
Company
" 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
" Diarrhoea is the reason you can have a malnourished child in a well-fed family. "
Rose George
Family
Child
Reason
" 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