Fortunately Luxembourg is big enough to fit us all

I guess by now most of the 6.999 million people will have heard the news: we've hit the 7 million mark! But should we congratulate ourselves, or rather feel sorry for overcrowding our planet? Well, the thing is not that we're too many to fit - it would take an area smaller than Luxembourg to fit us all, shoulder to shoulder. Nor is the problem how to feed the whole population - there's plenty of scope to increase yield per ha in vast parts of the globe. Just consider, for example, that many farms in sub-Saharan Africa yield only 10% of their north-American peers.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that our patterns of production and consumption are simply not sustainable. Period. This is all because of the technological advances we have made over the past centuries, which made man redundant in many aspects of what is supposed to be his productive life. And let's face it: why pay someone who's prone to failure and fatigue, when a machine can perform the same job at a fraction of the cost and without nasty labour unions nagging about physical and psychological well-being?

The demand for educated labour is being reconfigured by technology, in much the same way that the demand for agricultural labour was reconfigured in the 19th century and that for factory labour in the 20th. Computers can not only perform repetitive mental tasks much faster than human beings. They can also empower amateurs to do what professionals once did: why hire a flesh-and-blood accountant to complete your tax return when Turbotax (a software package) will do the job at a fraction of the cost? And the variety of jobs that computers can do is multiplying as programmers teach them to deal with tone and linguistic ambiguity.

Now, you cannot simply have 6 million bums while the remaining 1 million are working, can you? So we simply had to come up with unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, which would require people to staff repair offices, call centres and other customer services, while keeping factory workers happy with supplying the ever-continuing demand of unsustainable products, invented by engineers to last as long as not to upset customers (too much), but as short as to keep them buying the gimmicks they invent every other year or two.

Because of this problematic situation - a growing (skilled) workforce and a general lack of labour demand for basic products and services - jobs have always been a sword of Damocles hanging over politicians' heads, especially in periods of economic downturn. Heck, even the weapons industry, to name but one, gets away with crying foul when governments dare not to approve a murky deal with a semi-friendly autocrat - while in reality they only employ a few hundred people and represent (in most cases) less than one percent of GDP. I don't know the solution to this problem, but maybe it's time for more ideas to have sex?

Could you spare me a dime, my friend?

It's been a few weeks since my last post. I have been busy, indulging myself in cultural nights out, meeting friends and family all over the place. But I also have been quite tired. Although I like to pretend I can manage a few nights with less than 7 hours of sleep, if I do so, I feel too exhausted after work to do anything active in the evening. So it's a good thing I haven't been writing, because I did not have the energy to give you my thoughts. For me to feel well, I need sleep. Although I'm well aware that my mental well-being is beyond salvation, letting things rest, giving myself time to look around and soak up the colours of life does bring me a good deal along the road towards feeling more energetic.

It's a pretty basic principle of life, in fact: you cannot give, or treat other people well, for that matter, if you don't give yourself a moment off, or a treat you would usually forsake, when you could use a little dose of happy feelings. Of course I am not the first one to come up with this attitude, but it never hurts spreading the word.

Now then, two weeks ago, I was walking down the Antwerp Central train station, plenty of positive energy inside of me, to catch a train to the Netherlands for a job interview. As the escalator goes down, I get surpassed by someone who I think was in a rush to catch the train. Instead, he stops abruptly a few steps below me and starts talking to me in English. He had noticed that my coat had a label that said 'Quechua' - "that's a French brand, do you speak French?". He himself did, as he was from Burkina Faso. "No kidding, wait a sec, Ouagadougou is your capital, right?", I said, still convinced this was just a warm hearted fella sharing some positive energy in a morning chat with a random stranger. (happy face)

Not so. By the time we had reached the platform, it turned out he had missed his flight to Brussels ("look, the Schengen visa in my passport says I should have gotten here 10 days (!) ago") and so he had missed the people from Amsterdam who had invited him to come over in the first place and who were supposed to have picked him up at the airport. He had tried going to some immigration offices to seek help, but no one could offer him any, as he was here on a legitimate - albeit moneyless - basis. If I could spare him a ticket to Amsterdam, he asked. I kindly declined, pointing out I was unemployed. Instead, I gave him the address of the Amnesty International office, which wasn't too far off, as I honestly had no clue who could help him. "And a dime to eat? I haven't eaten since yesterday…" (sad face)

an angry Mongol warrior slitting my niece's throat for a nickel

I never really know well what to do in such situations. I want my job to be helping people by giving them a voice or the means to improve their lives. But does that mean I have to give something to everybody who comes asking for it in my face? For now, I ease my conscience with the fact that I don't earn any money, which makes it more difficult for me to give a financial contribution. Unfortunately people here don't have the creativity that I witnessed in Latin America and Asia to make money - be it selling biscuits or sweets on street corners or entertaining people waiting at a crossroad while dressed as Charlie Chaplin - there's a myriad of ways to have people give you money! As for when I eventually will make money, I still haven't figured out what I'll do, but I'll have to make a choice somehow. With hindsight, I guess I should have bought the guy his train ticket (although his was a murky story), if hadn't had to catch my train. Because, let's be honest - there is no inherent virtue in money. Its natural state is to flow, so let it flow to those in more need of it!

No, my (Polish) mum wasn't cleaning my dad's office when they met

A few years ago, I was taking up French evening classes. The audience consisted mainly of working people, with just a few students like me. After a few classes a pretty, shy girl in her early twenties joins in. She introduces herself briefly, saying her name and that she comes from Romania. My first thought was: how good of her, she's spiking up her French to improve her work prospects - in the informal cleaning industry, that is. Dutch being nearly impossible, she should get around well with French. Never mind that the language school was in Leuven, a major university city in Belgium. Never mind that if she didn't know Dutch, and really wanted to find such a job, she probably would have been gone straight to Brussels in the first place.

It's the perfect, yet very embarrassing, illustration of what the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie talks about in her TED-talk: it is easy to judge people by their nationality, rather than as the person who they are by their own right. It is dangerously easy to forget that everybody has his or her own story about who s/he is as a person. Yes, nationality can play a role in it, but it's not because you're from an African country that you listen to tribal music every single minute of the day, or that you don't know what an electric cooking stove is. It's not because you have a cleaning lady from a poor family, that they aren't capable of being creative, of producing quality products they can sell to generate an income.

When I walk on the street, when I sit on the train, or when I am traveling in far-away countries, I always wonder what people's story is. Especially with those old people whose wrinkled faces vividly tell you that they've gone through quite some history. Even though I die to hear their stories, I'm often too embarrassed to ask. I envy people who have this natural flair and get all these stories out of people. Like this guy who has walked from his home in Belgium to Santiago de Compostela with a camera on his shoulder, meeting the most random people on his way, who tell him their deepest life stories.

The more people I meet, the less I associate them with countries. Rather, I start associating countries with those people. Myself, I've given up trying to hide my true story. You never know who it is you're meeting, if you're going to see him or her ever again, and, most importantly, how impacting the real story of yourself can be on that person. I'm always surprised by the amount of goodness that I find in people. It often makes me wonder - where is it, then, all this negativity I hear about in the media? What stops us from a peaceful society, where people actually enjoy living together and embrace diversity?

I guess it's just that much easier to hide in your own shell, keep that hostile - because unknown - outside world far away, prey to your prejudices. I am guilty, too. Aren't we all, sometimes? But then I think of all the missed opportunities to share a positive view on our society with others, all the fascinating people that are walking around there, bringing hope by being the persons they are, instead of the negative people take them for. It could be the beginning of wonderful friendship with a talented exchange student seeking opportunities she doesn't get back home to put her great talents to practice, I can tell you that!

Set your water on fire

One thing is very clear to me: our 'developed' societies are not sustainable. The sheer demand of natural resources to keep our patterns of production and consumption going far outpaces our planet's capacity. Every year we set a new record in consuming the earth's resources "available" for that year's consumption (last year we did so already on August 19th). Understandably, then, the energy business is frantically looking for new sources or techniques to keep the machine running. We may have found a winner: shale gas. At least, that's what The Economist tells us when introducing its special report on natural gas:

If the boom persists gas may take coal’s place as the world’s second-favourite fuel in just a few decades, and millions will breathe easier as a result. This is because, even were it not cheap and plentiful, gas would be attractive simply on the grounds of cleanliness. It is true that there are questions about the harm that may be done by the “fracking” process that liberates shale gas; there is an urgent need for systematic before-and-after environmental audits. But once the gas is out of the ground, it is a great deal cleaner than coal. It does not distribute neurotoxic mercury around the planet; it does not clog city air and the lungs of those who breathe it with soot and sulphur. Gas is a boon to public health.

But, how clean is shale gas really? The Dutch programme Tegenlicht recently aired a superb documentary by Josh Fox on the very topic of shale gas and hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking): Gasland. Starting with a letter he received to lease his land to a shale gas company for the sum of 100,000 USD, Josh sets out on a journey to learn why his land is worth so much. Turns out, this 'boon to public health' is more of a bomb to the health of the people living nearby extraction sites. Honestly, if you can set your tap water on fire with a lighter, or if your animals start to loose their fur for no obvious reason, something's rotten in your back yard…



Also, the claim that shale gas is that much cleaner than coal, and that we will breathe easier, is not entirely true. During the fracking process, a lot of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more harmful than CO2 - is released into the air. The environmental impact of shale gas is at least 20% greater than that of coal when compared on a 20-year horizon, scientists of Cornell University have argued.

The last word about shale gas hasn't been said yet, that is clear. Yet, there is a smell about the whole fracking business - especially when insiders start comparing it to the infamous Enron corporate politics (see p.5 of documents leaked to the NYT). Interestingly, this boom in shale gas has attracted foreign investment. India's biggest firm, Reliance Industries, for example, is reported to have stakes in several projects in the US. So now it's the Indians who are messing up American's back yards, for a change...

Leave your comfort zone and learn!

When I had just embarked on my discovery of international politics (and whatnot), Kevin introduced me to The Economist. 'A must read, Tom, if you want to stay on top of things in this world. Sharp analyses, I'm telling you. My advice - subscribe, asap!' I still am, six years later. It's pretty addictive, I'll admit to that. It's just that they cover such a variety of issues from all over the globe, so reading your weekly issue feels like getting the hang of what's up in the world.

It's not until recently, however - say a year or so - that I started reading the whole issue, from cover to cover. Although the magazine is called 'The Economist', surprisingly most of its content is just reporting on world politics (with a strong economic focus, at times). But the 'Business' and 'Finance and Economics' sections had never appealed to me - too difficult when not having a clue about those topics, I thought. Turns out, they're quite readable even for an economy illiterate, and pretty damn interesting on top of that!

Amazing how much you can learn by expanding your horizon, going beyond what you already know, with what you already feel comfortable. So it is that I came across this very intriguing article in the 'Science and technology' section. Turns out there is this spider species in Central America, the Leucauge argyra, that has an interesting way of reproducing. Usually, the male spiders make plugs of mucus to seal the female's orifice after mating (other animals do it too, apparently). With this species, however, the female has been observed doing that to herself, for a very peculiar reason:

Spider sex is unusual in that males transfer their sperm to the female on small limbs called pedipalps. They use these to pick their sperm up from their genitals and insert it into the female’s sexual orifice, rather than copulating directly. […] On the 14 occasions [observed] a sexual plug was made, the female produced it without assistance from the male. On ten of these occasions the male’s pedipalps then seemed to get stuck while he was transferring the sperm (which is rarely the case in other species of spider), and he had great difficulty freeing himself. In two of those ten instances, he was eaten as a result. The two researchers conclude, therefore, that what was once a mechanism which allowed females to discriminate between males has evolved into a way of trapping them so that they can be consumed at leisure. Whether only high-quality males, whose sperm the female also wishes to keep, are affected is not yet clear—though eating such males may bring the bonus of denying their sperm to rivals. Whatever the details, for male Leucauge argyra this behaviour gives a new meaning to the term “unsafe sex”.

Yes, utter randomness. But that's why I like it! Often, my best ideas are inspired by other disciplines or areas of work. Not that I'm saying women should start plugging themselves with mucus for safe sex, but you never know which brilliant idea might arise from these unexpected articles or encounters. I'm not doing it enough myself, but: dare to leave your comfort zone and dig into terra incognita, you never know what you may come across…

If it weren't for the sugar cane liquor before, I'd never put this anaconda up my shoulders...