“Green” condoms

Wednesday, I tweeted (is that correct? Trying to find the correct conjugation will get you into

trouble in a hurry) about Andrew Revkin's blog on how condoms might be a powerful weapon to combat climate change.

There's little doubt that unbridled population growth sits at the center of a cyclone of a host of issues – and not those that seemingly affect just the developing world. Sure, Rwanda's bursting at the seams, and farmers in Niger are struggling to scratch a living on too little arable land as the desert threatens to swallow the Sahel, but those are far-off problems. But the stark reality is, as the headcounts of these countries swell, in step with the likes of population behemoths India and China, they'll consume more resources, make more garbage, put out more CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, and add to the inevitable mercury spike of the planet.

And even if they don't use as much fossil fuel, water and plastic soda bottles as we do – and if they live outside the United States, rest assured they don't – their sheer numbers will be overwhelming, and all the deliberate choices some of us try to make to conserve, recycle and just be generally less wasteful won't make a bit of difference when it comes to righting the course of our planet.

Take a statistic I'm familiar with: The average woman in Niger will give birth to eight babies. Eight! And that statistic's not unique outside developed countries. Now granted, maybe two of those won't survive to adulthood, not that that's something to be happy about. And with medical care improving, albeit at a snail's pace and in some cases only because of direct handouts in the form of medica

l supplies and expertise that prop up shoddy regimes, more of these children will survive.

That's a great paradox. No one will argue that saving the lives of children isn't the right thing to do. Every kid deserves a fighting chance. But by artificially introducing modern medicine into cultures that still prize fertility, and indeed have needed it in abundance for millennia in order for their culture to survive, we're allowing the balance to tip toward a human-heavy planet struggling under this yoke.

That's where the condoms come in, green or any other color. A simple fix, cheaper and less permanent than vasectomies and tubal ligations ("getting tubes tied"), fewer hitches when it

comes to take a daily oral pill, and worlds more realistic than abstinence-only solutions, it at least puts some power in the hands of women when it comes to avoiding pregnancy. Female condoms would be ideal, but we had a few of these floating around for demos in our Peace Corps hostel, and their practicality was laughable – something along the lines of a shapeless sandwich baggie.

Condoms are just the tip (pardon the pun) of the iceberg when it comes to attacking the population problem we all will face. Education and the empowerment of women lie right under the surface as imperative parts of any solution. Here's a little more math: so of those six Nigerien

kids who survive to adulthood, only two will learn to read. What that means is that increasingly bottom-heavy population will have few people who are aware of the role they play in the world's fate.

Incidentally, Sheryl WuDunn and Nick Kristof, the Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning couple, have a new book out called Half the Sky. I haven't read it yet, but if it's anything like Kristof's columns, it'll be engaging, passionate and energizing.

Reading “To Timbuktu”

Timbuktu – the name of the Saharan outpost is synonymous with any far-flung destination. For centuries or, more likely, millennia, the town stood at the intersection of two ancient highways – one, a watery path to the sea; the other, a trail only visible in the memories of those who have traveled it, into the sand and across the desert. And yet photographs of signs outside the city (I've never been there) unceremoniously spell out "TOMBOCTOU" in block letters. No flourish, no attestation of the role the settlement has no doubt played in history countless times throughout the ages. Just a simple indication like any other for travelers, put in place by a government that has more pressing issues to worry about, like feeding its citizens.

Perhaps the city itself is like many icons – a bit hollow unless you take into account the getting there. I've been reading Mark Jenkins's book, To Timbuktu, which is about just that. So far it's a great read, as he takes the reader through an expedition to find the source of the Niger River in Guinea, and then follow it to Timbuktu in Mali. Aside from the action and anecdotes from both Jenkins's experience and the annals of African exploration, we readers are treated to a few spot-on riffs – observations in which Jenkins draws on his experience as a traveler and his time as a stringer in East Africa. This one's admittedly a generalization, but in my experience it's true for almost all expats:

"Like all expats in Africa, the Olafsons (a couple he stays with in Guinea) don't quite live in Africa. They live inside a walled compound with guards and guard dogs and gardeners, servants and chauffeurs, flush toilets and air conditioning. The Olafsons aren't typical though because they don't whine about it. They openly admit they have chosen exile. They are in Africa to make money, plain and simple. They plan to retire twenty years before everyone else. Most expats, when they go back to their own country (twice a year, expenses paid), find it too tame and talk ceaselessly of the drama and wildness of their life in Africa. But then back in Africa they take every precaution to make their lives just as they would be if they lived at home-except for the servants and the cases of expensive liquor and the very good money (hardship bonuses and all).

"Even foreign correspondents are like this. That's something I learned in East Africa. People have this image of foreign correspondents out there on the edge getting the tough story for the betterment of mankind, but most of them are just expats. They live behind walls of money, drink like fish, and spend all their time with other soused white people. They send their stringers out to get the story." (p. 50-1)

A few pages later, again taking a step back to see the differences in perspective on the human experience, Jenkins makes an astute observation, ahead of its time: "Places with no roads and no wires are bigger than other places. Distance hasn't been distorted. People claim the world is getting smaller, as if it were some green and blue balloon leaking air. Africans don't buy this. To most Africans the world is enormous. Why? Because they walk. They have no choice; they are poor. If you must use your own legs--your own blood, bone, and sinew--to travel from one place to another, a mile is a mile and the world is boundless." (p. 56)

Interesting that this story was published in 1997. Certainly at the time, people were talking about the shrinking world, but I don't think "global village" had yet entered the lexicon. Again, he rightly attributes that sentiment to a question of perspective.

Silence, one bike – or one plug-in hybrid – at a time

Riding around town the other day, I had a picture of what streets of the future might be like, as a super-silent Toyota Highlander hybrid crept past me. Of course the biggest problems that more bicycles on the road will solve are the escalating release of carbon into our atmosphere and our insatiable thirst for energy. But a curious byproduct of our desperate need to make use of every possible solution we have available might be more silent streets.

Think about it. How magical would it be to replace the roar of car and truck engines burning fuel at their most inefficient with the quiet hum of electric motors and the whir of bicycle chains? It doesn't take an engineer to figure out that those stops and starts downtown and residential areas are murder on gas mileage, often driven by our perceived need to accelerate as quickly as possible to the next stoplight. Toyota and other leaders on the hybrid front have turned that on its head, recycling the energy generated from the constant braking in urban areas and funneling it back into forward motion.

Now, with companies like General Motors beholden to the will of the masses – not just as the easily hoodwinked consumers who chomped down so hard on the sport-utility craze of the 1990s, but as (hopefully) more savvy investors who will demand ventures into technology that will be profitable and stem the hemorrhage of oil from the earth and carbon into the air – an affordable plug-in hybrid seems to be within our grasp.

Neil Winton at the Detroit News would counsel me to temper my enthusiasm, but I'd argue the closer we get, the more exciting the potential. Predictions about battery life, range and consumer enthusiasm are conservative, he writes. If that's the case, fair enough – it wouldn't be the first time car companies have fallen woefully short of expectations. But maybe we just need to take the time to envision the wondrous and unanticipated ways that our world might change – ahem, enter the quiet cul-de-sacs and hushed avenues of the 21^st century, part of my own tenuous hopes – for solutions to go viral. Winton himself points out that in Germany, and undoubtedly most developed countries where nearly everyone owns a car, most trips top out at around 30 miles: tripping to the grocery, running the kids to school, hopping to the gym. You get the idea.

Sure, we in the media hype, and in many cases overhype, a good deal too many proposed solutions, such as the exciting idea to pepper the oceans with iron flakes, hoping to encourage the growth of carbon dioxide-absorbing algae. So avoid the hyping the naysayers too, and don't be afraid to imagine the possibilities.