Using beautiful animal illustrations and sustainable textiles, Mika Machida’s eco-friendly fashions show that you don’t need to wear fur or skins to look wild. Each piece is an elegant, innovative take on the words “animal print” — celebrating the forms and patterns found in animals. Her elephant top, for example, features an elephant’s watchful eye on its front, and a carefully-located sleeve that drapes over the shoulder in such a way to mimic an elephant’s ear. And her innovative, ready-to-wear pieces, made of sustainably-sourced materials such as organic cotton, bamboo, and wool are now available for sale in the Inhabitat Shop!
Artist Stewart Webb takes high tech recycled materials from computers, electronics, industrial, and aerospace industries and transforms them into functional art. His pieces are all handmade using repurposed materials, and include clocks, sculptures, and jewelry. Any self respecting eco-geek will want to collect at least a couple of his works.
A blog friend and colleague of mine recently shared her annoyance for the grocery baggers who shoot out the dirtiest of looks when you pull out your own cloth grocery bags. As she said in her original twitter comment:
Dear grocery store baggers: Please stop looking so sullen when I pull out my reusable bags. They save your store money.
And of course, I had to chuckle and completely agree because almost every time (save when I bring my Olive Smart bags for some reason) I pull out my own tote bags one of the following happens:
a) Huge sigh from the bagger
b) Knowing looks between the cashier and the bagger
c) The slowest bag packing ever known to woman or man, not to be matched by me having to tell them that they can fit a solid 10 more items in that bag before they try to put it back in my cart.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting severe bleaching for parts of the Coral Sea, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Triangle, causing immense damage to an important global marine environment over the next few months.
“This forecast bleaching episode will be caused by increased water temperatures and is the kind of event we can expect on a regular basis if average global temperatures rise above 2 degrees.” - Richard Leck, Climate Change Strategy Leader for WWF’s Coral Triangle Program.
The researchers, aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to create huge ‘blooms’ of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths, effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
According to lead researcher, Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, “The Earth itself seems to want to save us.”
I must admit that I was (and still am) a bit nervous about the Obama presidency due to age and experience, but today I discovered something that gives me renewed hope for the future. A new page has been launched on the Change.gov site called Open Government where the American people can ask questions and vote for their stance on all issues, including Energy and Environment.
It’s about time! So far, the response appears to be positive, from the site:
90,053 people have submitted 64,645 questions and cast 3,976,522 votes…
The top two running questions (according to popular vote) so far in the Energy and Environment category are: “William McDonough has designed self-sustaining communities and cities with green technology. Will the new administration seek innovators like Mr. McDonough to help pave the way for infrastructure building in the 21st Century?”
And…..
“Will transit and intercity rail projects be a major component of the infrastructure stimulus package, rather than focusing on highway projects?”
These are both excellent questions, and I firmly believe that if we are to practice what we preach with respect to green economics, we MUST improve our public transportation systems. In Europe, you can get anywhere you want to go using public transportation. Here in the Silicon Valley, the BART doesn’t extend from the East Bay down to San Jose and the voters have been arguing about it for ten years. It is very difficult to get from point A to point B using public transportation in the Bay Area.
It will be most interesting to see what new questions get posted, and the new administration’s answers to these questions. It does feel like at last, the American people are being listened to.
When fuel prices were higher, airlines were going to great lengths to save fuel. They stripped down their planes of all unnecessary weight and even flew slower. Planes do use a staggering amount of fuel, and regardless of the price, all that fossil fuel usage is extremely harmful to the environment.
Some airlines aren’t waiting for fuel prices to go back up to find more ways to save fuel. Air New Zealand has found a new biofuel it can mix with jet fuel to power their planes’ engines – and it comes from a poison shrub that grows wild all over the country.
An Air New Zealand Boeing 747 flew for two hours on December 30 with one of its four engines powered by a 50-50 mixture of jet fuel and jatropha oil, the airline said in a statement.
Jatropha is a plant that grows up to three meters and produces inedible fruits, which contain the oil. It is grown on arid and marginal land in India, parts of Africa and other countries, and has been touted for mass production for biofuels because it does not compete for resources with food crops.
Air New Zealand, which hopes to use one million barrels of biofuel a year, or about 10 percent of its fuel consumption, by 2013, said the flight was the world’s first commercial aviation test flight powered by jatropha.
Air New Zealand is working toward becoming the world’s most environmentally sustainable airline, and with this innovation, they’re certainly well on their way. Though experts are warning that the use of jatropha oil poses problems because it’s toxic and yields are unreliable, the fuel mixture performed well and it’s certainly the right sort of thinking.
How many remote controls are sitting on your coffee table right now? Those remotes aren’t just plastic pieces of junk, they also use up batteries. But, there’s no sense in getting up every time you want to change the channel, adjust the volume or pause the DVD you’re watching, so getting rid of them isn’t really an option – or is it? A new wind-up remote powers up to 6 gadgets at a time.
Just turn the dial on the front of the remote to charge it – thirty turns will keep it running for a full seven days. Mindlessly turn it while watching your favorite shows and you’re golden. It’s £19.53 (about $28.50) at Ethical Superstore.
If only it weren’t made of plastic, it would be awesome.
Owning a Prius has more benefits than simply saving money on gas and lowering your carbon footprint – it can also get your family through a snowstorm by providing power. And while, technically, any car battery hooked up to an inverter can do the same thing, the Prius uses far less gas while doing so, meaning you can drive away when the storm is over.
The Harvard Press in Massachusetts reported that during a recent ice storm, resident John Sweeney ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius for three days on roughly five gallons of gas.
“When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius…These inverters are available for about $100 many places online,” he wrote.
The device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.
The New York Times points out that what Sweeney did is essentially along the lines of “smart grid” technology.
The idea is that the battery of an electric car — a plug-in, in most smart-grid scenarios — can feed power to the electricity grid when the grid needs it.
Even President-elect Barack Obama has endorsed this idea, as seen toward the end of this YouTube clip in which he said: “We’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids — then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated.”
Of course, it seems as if Mr. Sweeney could have saved a bit of energy by putting his food out in the snow and ice – instead of keeping the refrigerator and freezer running in freezing cold weather – but what he did is smart all the same. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more energy efficiency breakthroughs in the coming year as people realize that we’ve been a bit wasteful in the past.
The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time. It was our beloved place, that farm and its two-storey white house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile agricultural plain north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange and apricot trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.
It was the closest farm to the northern border with Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the Israeli towns north of us.
But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my father’s life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness. It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.
The catastrophic economic collapse of Iceland has in international news stories been described as simply another, inevitable casualty of the credit crunch. A Wall Street Journal story last week noted that Iceland was one of the international financial bubble’s most enthusiastic players,” but failed to mention how Iceland’s largely homemade crisis was created by a small group of powerful political and financial figures who literally have looted the nation’s treasury.
According to the Fund for Peace, a state that is failing has several characteristics, such as group-based inequality, brain drain, sharp economic decline, corruption and criminal behavior, to name a few attributes. The magnitude of corruption and wrongdoings at the highest levels of Icelandic political and financial system that have come to light following the country’s economic collapse begs this question: Is Iceland a failing state?
In October 2008, Iceland’s three major investment banks — Glitnir, Kaupthing, and Landsbanki, which the Conservative party had privatized eight years earlier in favor of their cronies — collapsed and were taken over by the Icelandic government. They had, through various questionable artifices, incurred a combined debt equal to 7-10 times Iceland’s gross domestic product (GDP). Hundreds of thousands of investors outside of Iceland lost all of their savings, inducing the British government to invoke anti-terrorism laws in an attempt to contain the damage.
Since this collapse, the Icelandic stock exchange has plummeted, the Icelandic crown has lost one-half of its value, and the unemployment rate rose 60% from October to November. The sudden halt of major construction projects — including what was to be an iconic opera house — has caused foreign workers to flee the country in droves. Automobile sales have nearly stopped, and massive residential foreclosures loom. One-third of Icelanders have indicated that they are considering leaving the island.
Despite obvious mistakes and wrongdoings by governmental regulators and bank executives, no observable changes have ensued. The current regulators–including the head of the Icelandic Central Bank, DavÃð Oddsson (Prime Minister from 1991-2004) — are the very same people who encouraged and approved these fantasies. The majority of the top executives in the newly-nationalized banks are the same directors who created the overleveraged castles in the air. Instead of criminal charges, they get to keep their jobs and handsome paychecks, and remain in position to further manipulate the country’s finances. Average Icelanders, on the other hand, get to scratch out a living and the responsibility (along with their children and grandchildren) for paying the billions of debt Iceland is now saddled with.
The gang’s perp-in-chief, Jón Ãsgeir Jóhannesson, who also happens to “own” most of the private media in the country, is free to gallivant in his private jet between luxury homes in several countries. At this writing, he and his fellow crooks, who invented false enterprises and inflated their “worth” by selling pieces of paper back and forth to each other, continue to engage in all kinds of business transactions in Iceland and wait like carrion for opportunities to “buy” for pittance businesses that have closed or gone bankrupt since the collapse (the same fate awaits many others in the new year), not to mention real estate when thousands of Icelandic families lose their homes in this inferno of greed.
The crimes and corruption that has flourished under Iceland’s conservative rule make Bernie Madoff’s schemes look like Mother Goose tales. Each day brings forth ever more incredulous stories. Icelanders who are struggling to hold onto their homes and pay the bills were outraged at to learn a few days before Christmas that certain well connected individuals — bank execs, their families and friends (including members of the Icelandic government) — hoping to cash in on the boom, borrowed hundreds of millions to buy bank stock, but as the collapse became imminent, the loans were conveniently “forgiven” in secret meetings, with a single penstroke! The average Icelander of course gets no such absolution.
The democratic process is paralyzed. The legislature, Alþingi, is little more than a rubber stamp for the administration and has basically shut itself down. Despite massive popular protests, Prime Minister Geir Haarde’s ruling junta refuses to call for new elections before making what will certainly be extremely painful decisions.
Failed states are unable or unwilling to “protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction,” and “regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law.” They may have democratic forms but suffer from a serious “democratic deficit” that deprives their democratic institutions of real substance.
The tyrant Robert Mugabe declared a few days ago that “Zimbabwe is mine. “I will never, never, never, never surrender.” Iceland’s Prime Minister Geir Haarde, the Central Bank Governor DavÃð Oddsson, and the members of their little gang are telling Icelanders and the world that — like Mugabe — neither will they.
The stories about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have been stunning — with revelations of his boundless intent on corruption, as well as a knack for unceasing profanity. Yet Blagojevich has also displayed a canny audacity at his recent press conference, when he announced his choice of Roland Burris to fill the Senate seat of President-elect Barack Obama.
There was something theatrical in Blagojevich’s delight, as he attempted to out-maneuver everyone with a choice that would be politically difficult to reject. If anything could, rejecting an up-standing, path-breaking African-American politician to fill the seat of the only black senator in Congress would be a tough call.
Blagojevich is regularly described as the apotheosis of the shady Illinois politician — a genus that rivals the Louisiana and Jersey City variety for chicanery. At times, he seems a throwback to the days of machine politics, when the favor bank was bigger than the local savings and loan.
But Blagojevich does not come close to the finesse and style embodied by masterful machine politicians. As least, that is, as depicted in one of the best political movies — The Great McGinty, Preston Sturges’s rollicking 1940 satire of American politics.
In a city much like Chicago, Sturges — usually most comfortable with the escapades of debonair swells — tells the tale of a shrewd hobo, Dan McGinty, played by Brian Donlevy, who works his way up the local political machine. McGinty first makes his name with the machine boss, played by Akim Tamiroff — and known throughout only as “The Boss” — when he engages in industrious voter fraud. McGinty can make $2 a vote — so he casts 37 votes one Election Day.
McGinty is schooled in various forms of influence-peddling and graft (”If you didn’t have graft,” one character says, “you’d have a lower class of people in politics.”), as he rises from alderman to the city’s reform mayor — the machine controls everything, even the reform party — and, ultimately, governor. There, with Sturges’s usual elan, McGinty blows it by trying to go straight — to please the woman he loves.
But though McGinty is a petty thug who cons his way through life, as written by Sturges — who won an Oscar for this screenplay — he displays more finesse than anything we have seen, or heard, about Blagojevich. McGinty is, simply, a better class of rogue.
Take, for example, a brief exchange in Mayor McGinty’s office, between the new mayor and Maxwell, a local businessman. McGinty tells Maxwell, who controls the bus franchise, that the city is going to be running its own buses from now on, since there is a flaw in his contract “big enough to drive a bus through.”
As Maxwell tries to figure out what it will take for a “solution of mutual satisfaction,” McGinty brings up the benefits of going to a baseball game. He points to a photo of a packed ballpark on his office wall.
“Look at that crowd,” McGinty says. He asks Maxwell, casually, how many people he thinks are in the stadium. “Ten thousand?,” Maxwell says, “Guess again,” says McGinty. “Twenty thousand?” tries Maxwell, as he strives to figure how to get the contract ironed out. “Not even warm,” McGinty replies.
Suddenly, Maxwell gets it. “More like 40 thousand?” he gulps. “More like it,” McGinty says, “but it ain’t it.”
He announces triumphantly, “There were 75 thousand in that stadium, Mr. Maxwell.” He promises Maxwell that a city official will come to call.
There you have it. Bribe asked for, and settled on. And anyone listening would have no evidence to build a case.
If only Blagojevich had screened this movie and taken notes.
JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — A man who police said was shot by his stepfather ended up in the same jail with him after officers discovered outstanding arrest warrants against the victim. Police told The Daily News of Jacksonville that 37-year-old Richard Hayes shot his stepson Thursday night.
Authorities say 21-year-old Michael Bass was holding a bloody towel to his abdomen when paramedics arrived, saying his stepfather shot him.
Deputies then discovered Bass had outstanding warrants for failing to appear in court and took him to jail after he was treated and released from the hospital.
Police said Hayes told investigators he has a bad neck and shot his stepson because he thought Bass wanted to fight him.
The men remain in jail. It’s unclear if they have attorneys.
SCIENTISTS have discovered true love. Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love.
The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.
A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.
December 26th, 4:30pm - 4 days after the 1 billion gallon toxic coal ash spill in Harriman, TN.
I’m on the phone with Donna Lisenby, the Upper Watauga Riverkeeper in North Carolina, who was planning to travel to the TVA coal ash spill and collect water samples along the Emory River. I wanted to make sure she had connected with United Mountain Defense, an organization who was in the Harriman area taking water samples and talking with and providing drinking water to local residents.
She assured me she was and then offered me an opportunity I hadn’t known I was looking for. She asked me if I wanted to go with her on the river. I paused and thought hard for a moment. It seemed like something tangible that I could do. And it seemed important to go.
So at 11 a.m. the next morning, I found myself paddling up the Emory River. We quickly discovered a sheer film on the water 2 miles from the spill site. As we made our way to ground zero, the damage became more apparent. We encountered numerous dead fish, and worried about the many blue herons we saw, hoping they weren’t eating the fish, but knowing otherwise.
WATCH video of the canoeing and finding a dead fish:
The film became thicker as we grew closer to the spill zone, and we discovered the turbidity curtain TVA had raised across a side cove (we later discovered that the cove led to the Kingston Fossil Plant’s intake canal, in order to protect the plant from its own coal ash waste).
The turbidity curtain made the sludge collect so thickly we could not canoe into it. We saw more dead fish. We continued past the cranes, barges and other large equipment, not one of them removing the toxic coal ash that was slowly contaminating the river. No one said anything to us as we floated by on our way to the site of the ash spill.
What we saw was unreal. What had been a beautiful free-flowing river just a few days ago was now a barren wasteland of sludge. Huge piles of coal ash, which we termed “ash-bergs,” sat in the water.
As we canoed through this sick soup of coal waste, the phrase “Coal can do that” kept running through my head. The saying, from a coal advocacy website, is supposed to be talking about how technology can make coal cleaner. But looking out at the devastation, I thought of the irony of that phrase. This is what coal had done–destroyed homes, killed fish, and altered the ecology of the Emory River for the foreseeable future. Coal can also destroy mountaintops and pollute our air from the smokestacks. Yes, coal can do that.
We were only in the “ashberg” zone a few minutes when we were flagged down by a TVA officer, who gave us warning citations for criminal trespass even though we were in waters of the United States, which are open to the public. He claimed that the US Coast Guard had put buoys indicating the river closure, but we saw no evidence of them on our portion of the river.
The irony of the TVA cop giving us a citation while islands of toxic coal ash were sitting behind him did not escape me. The real criminal act is of TVA’s doing- not implementing “global solutions” to the earlier “blowouts” on the ash containment area, not beginning the process of removing the coal ash from the spill site five days after the incident and, on a bigger scale, not moving away from coal as a electricity source when we know how harmful it is–from its burning to its waste disposal. The officer should have been writing a ticket to TVA for allowing this coal ash to trespass on waters that belong to all of us. That really is the biggest crime of all.
Another crime is letting this incident escape notice without our society taking a good hard look at what we are willing to sacrifice for “cheap” and “clean” electricity. What this disaster should show us is that coal ain’t cheap or clean, anyway you slice it (especially through that sludge).
Nations throughout history perished or flourished based upon how well they progressed into a new age. America mastered the industrial age in the early 20th Century and, thanks to John F. Kennedy’s vision for the future of science in calling for a trip to the Moon, we mastered the age of computers.
This is what our best presidents do. They prod us forward. They nourish our best instincts. They do not just lead our government. They lead us, make us better and, as a result, make us a stronger country.
At the dawn of Barack Obama’s presidency, this unique and thoughtful man shows the promise to be one of our best. As with Kennedy, the world looked at him and saw a new America, one that looks and sounds more like the rest of the world.
Americans can look at this new president and also see themselves in a different way. It is not just that he is our first African-American in the White House. Or that he has Arab blood. Or that he grew up in an unusual mix of places, from Kansas to Indonesia.
Obama has the chance to bring about a new spirit for the country, as Kennedy did. His campaign attracted supporters who had never before been active in politics. They learned that being an American is about taking part, that the genius of our nation and the gift of our best presidents is the preservation of a simple ideal: We run our own country.
The Minnesota State Canvassing Board confirmed on Monday that Al Franken has won his Senate election, ending a weeks-long recount process that started with the Democratic challenger facing a roughly 215-vote deficit.
The final tally left Franken with 1,212,431 votes to Sen. Norm Coleman’s 1,212,206 votes, a 0.0077 percent margin of victory.
But while the canvassing board’s ruing marked a cap to a long and wild election, it did not secure Franken’s spot in the United States Senate. Even as state officials were finalizing ballot numbers, Norm Coleman’s campaign was making preparations to legally challenge the results.
Aides to the Minnesota Republican insist that part of the recount process was unfairly tilted towards districts more favorable to Democrats, and, in particular, called for the inclusion of 650 more rejected absentee ballots. On Monday, the State Supreme Court ruled against the latter complaint. By then, however, Coleman’s lawyers were already hinting at bringing the case to the federal level — under the argument that it constituted an equal protection issue. The senator will have only seven days to challenge the results: Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie must co-sign the certification within the week.
Coleman seems likely to pursue this avenue. But it may be too little too late. Aides to Franken note that with today’s canvassing board decision the vote tallies are final.
“The canvassing board has officially accepted the election numbers as official,” an aide told the Huffington Post. “The margin is not going to change anymore.”
That means a Coleman victory will have to come via a court willing to wade into the partisan waters.
Already, preparations were being made in Washington to follow through with the transition of power. At the behest of Senate rules committee officials, Norm Coleman’s Senate offices were locked and closed on Monday. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans and Democrats seem poised for a procedural fight over Franken. Democrats, on Monday, said they would try to seat the new senator, even in the face of GOP challenges. But Republican officials said they would preempt such a course of action — absent a certification signed by Pawlenty, a Republican.
The Good Ol’ Book is Back in Vogue
When green advocates talk about product service systems (PSS), many might be left scratching their heads (if that’s you, check out the linked Wikipedia page). Yet we’re all familiar with public libraries, a great example, and when times are harder economically, people increasingly turn to these alternatives to owning stuff. Read on for more….
Like any child who has lost a parent, it was only natural that Benazir Bhutto’s eldest daughter would wish to express her grief for her murdered mother. Less obvious, perhaps, was that the tribute would come in the form of a mournful rap song.
Now the song, written and performed by 18-year-old Bakhtawar is being broadcast regularly on Pakistan’s state-run television, part of a flood of tributes paid to the former prime minister a year after her assassination.
“You have beauty and intelligence, everything you did have relevance,” sings Bakhtawar, with a borrowed Brooklyn accent, over looping beats. “Shot in the back of your ear, so young in 54th year, murdered with three kids left behind, a hopeless nation without you, you are in all their hearts.”
The teenager, a student at Edinburgh University, then repeats a chorus line, from which the song takes it name: “I would take the pain away.”
The song, which has also been posted on YouTube, features a five-minute video of photographs and clips of the murdered former premier, including footage from the election rally at the Liaquat Bagh park in Rawalpindi which she had addressed just moments before an assassin launched a lethal gun and bomb attack on 27 December, 2007.
Bakhtawar is a keen music fan and was apparently encouraged to sing by her mother. Shortly before her mother’s death, the teenager asked a journalist friend in the US to introduce to the Grammy Award-winning rapper and music producer Puff Daddy.
While Bakhtawar’s dirgelike rap is unlikely to secure her a Grammy of her own, the seemingly heartfelt tribute might win her some fans. Sherry Rehman, currently Pakistan’s Information Minister and for many years a close aide to Ms Bhutto, said of the song: “It is the tribute of a grieving daughter to her iconic and loving mother.”
Bakhtawar is one of three children of Ms Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari, who inherited the leadership of her Pakistan People’s Party in the aftermath of hie wife’s death and was subsequently elected president of the country. Their 20-year-old son, Bilawal, who was jointly named co-chair of the party, is a student at Oxford University, while their other daughter, Aseefa, 15, is also studying abroad.
When Ms Bhutto returned to Pakistan from exile in October 2007, Mr Zardari remained in Dubai. In her final book, book ‘Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West’, that was published after her death, Ms Bhutto wrote of the decision: “We understood the dangers and the risks of my return, and we wanted to make sure that no matter what happened, our daughters and our son, Bilawal, would have one of us to take care of them.”
But 9/11 changed all that. Of course we had lived with airport security checks before the World Trade Center was hit. But 9/11 and every airline security threat thereafter have made the checks so much more stringent. The assorted divestments, the enthusiastic frisking, the suspicious prying open of your bag, that bleeping wand pushed into awkward spots, have all combined to make flying less fun than ever. Passengers at airports now look so chronically morose that a passing vulture flying overhead would sense a business opportunity.
The episode of the “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid, has suddenly meant more feet being bared at airports than at the average Hindu temple. My solution has been to replace my customary lace-up Oxfords with a pair of slip-on loafers when I fly. Generals are always fighting the last war, and security screeners are the same. I’m just grateful it was a shoe bomber they were reacting to. What on earth would they do if the next Richard Reid tried to ignite his underwear?
Then came the terrorists who planned to explode liquid chemicals on board. Since the plot didn’t work the first time and no one has tried it since, the only beneficiaries of this are the recyclers, who receive a truck-load of discarded water and shampoo bottles from airports every day, and the concessionaires on the other side of security, who charge exorbitant prices to quench the thirst of parched passengers suddenly deprived of their drinks.
But that’s not all that’s changed. As security procedures intensified, I had thought it wise to travel light and check in everything I needed for my journey. I had always packed a sturdy suitcase with a combination lock to ensure I arrived with what I had packed. But the best laid plans of mice and men are vetoed by airport security. First the security people wanted you to leave the suitcase open when you checked it in, so they could screen it and examine the contents. In the US, the Transportation Security Administration now lets you keep your suitcase locked, provided it’s of an approved brand whose combo locks they can open.
I promptly purchased a TSA-compliant Samsonite. I take several dozen flights a year in or from the US, and on every single one of them, without exception, I’ve arrived to find a TSA inspection notice nestling among my crumpled shirts. One would think that after the 40th attempt they might conclude that I was simply one of those people who didn’t like to carry explosives in his suitcase.
It doesn’t help, of course, that I bear a name and a countenance of sufficient swarthiness to increase the odds of my suitcase being “randomly” picked for a TSA inspection. Indians such as myself whose features might pass for Middle Eastern have learnt to put up with the misadventures of flying. “There was a time during the 1970s oil boom,” a fellow Indian told me, “that I rather enjoyed being mistaken for Arab. People assumed I was richer than I was and treated me with respect. Now, after 9/11, I’m anxious to demonstrate I’m Indian. If I were a woman I’d wear a sari all the time, just to show I’m not that kind of brown.”
If you’re the wrong shade, you often face “random” secondary security screening and your hand luggage is subject to the most thorough check of all. What’s worse is when individual items are held up to dubious inspection, amid loud calls for supervisors to rule on them. My tongue-cleaner, an Indian hygienic device since Vedic times that involves a U-shaped loop and is made of stainless steel, attracts particular attention. I can’t imagine how it could be repurposed for use in a hijacking but I’m braced for the day I’m asked to demonstrate it. “Just say Aah . . .”
But you don’t need exotica to interest the guardians of our collective safety, who all look at you with expressions that might have been filmed by Ingmar Bergman in one of his less frivolous moments. The challenge of finding a pair of nail-clippers that security won’t confiscate is one that has defeated most travellers, as the heaps in front of each security officer testify. And yet you can usually go through security and buy yourself, from an airport store, a nail-clipper just like the one they confiscated, which you will then, of course, have to give to the security staff on your way home.
If that’s all you have to go through at security, consider yourself lucky. In all fairness, you don’t have to be brown to be selected for extra-special attention, though it helps. In their desire to prove the randomness of their biases, I’ve also seen security people pick passengers in inverse relation to the likelihood of their being a terrorist - elderly women making their way through security using a walker, say, or a certain white-haired senator from Massachusetts. (It is normally not difficult to tell the difference between Ted Kennedy and a terrorist fanatic bent on mass murder but I guess the TSA wanted to prove their even-handedness - or their bloodymindedness.)
I also know of people whose experiences were considerably more embarrassing than mine. (Heard about the mother carrying breast milk in a bottle for her baby who was ordered to drink it to prove it wasn’t a lethal toxin? A friend tells me about his handicapped young son who flies with an oxygen tank. How do we know it’s not a deadly poison gas, the TSA wanted to know.)
But every time you think you’ve got the formula down pat - slip-off shoes, no nailclippers or other sharp objects, no bottles of water, nothing you can’t explain or bear to see displayed to the attentive public in line behind you - some new complication crops up. It’s bad enough that you have to take out your laptop, empty your pockets, slip off your shoes, loosen your belt and shed your jacket to facilitate the inspections - they’ll still ask you to spread your arms and legs. Worse, you have to smile through the whole ordeal. Because if you dare to complain, they really come down on you.
A witticism in an airport security line is like a Swiss tap - turn it on, and you instantly find yourself in hot water. “Jokes or inappropriate remarks regarding security could lead to your arrest,” signs humourlessly warn you at strategic points. And until they actually close Guantánamo, I’m taking no chances . . . I have watched in mounting incredulity as one of my own books, which I was carrying as a gift, was taken away to be inserted into a special device after it had already passed security to make sure, no doubt, that my words wouldn’t explode mid-flight.
So what’s next? I don’t know. But it’s a measure of how much we have come to accept in today’s world that we take those long lines at security in stride and don’t even complain too loudly about the intrusiveness of those inspections. I feel sorry for the next six-year-old who needs to fly alone. The innocence with which I first embraced air travel is simply inconceivable today.
(Originally published in the Financial Times, December 27, 2008
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