Natural Living Tips

In the past, we reported on manure powered dairy farms. Now, in Israel, they’re developing a chicken waste powered coop with wind turbines and solar sells. Being touted as the “Coop of the Future,” the Agrotop coop also has special egg collection chutes designed to enable birds to more easily lay eggs – and nearly double the space currently used to house them.

This not only makes the whole operation environmental. It makes it more humane, an issue Naturalbuy is very concerned with.

Under new regulations by the EU set to go into effect in 2012, egg producers will be required to provide 750 square centimeters of space for each bird. Also required will be sand or grass, imitating the birds’ natural habitat, and even soft material for birds to rest on.

To top it off with a cherry, the coop itself is largely built of recycled materials.

Though the coop is more expensive than traditional ones, the money-saving advantages make it more economical in the long run. Those are, running the coup, refrigerating the eggs, and cleaning up the waste. Since this one uses the waste to power the coop with enough power to refrigerate the eggs, that’s three birds with one stone. But we won’t kill any of them that are in the coop.

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I thought maybe we’d take a slightly different direction today. That is, a Western medicine one. Those who read this blog regularly probably assume, and rightly, that I do have an alternative medicine slant, this being an organic blog and all.

However, I do still believe in Western medicine.The way I see it, the two fields are both legitimate precisely because they don’t really overlap all that much. Alternative medicine primarily has to do with health. Maintaining it, strengthening it, putting us in line with nature so our bodies, products of nature, can more easily and efficiently move through their environment.

Western medicine, on the other hand, has more to do with sickness. Meaning, when your body is way off center, you might need some sort of technological intervention to get you back. A U-turn, a sharp curve left, something that’s out of the ordinary, because if you stay on the nature path when you’ve got a serious problem, you cannot forget that nature also has the capacity to kill you. Sometimes, nature is actually our enemy, and we must circumvent it. Failure to recognize this truth can be deadly.

The reason I’m writing about this now is that a case was just reported out of Sydney where a middle-aged couple was convicted of manslaughter for not seeking medical help for their 9-month old daughter who died of severe eczema, (pictured here) a common skin ailment among babies that is easily treatable. My nephew even had it for a few weeks.

In this case, the eczema was left untreated for 5 months, and the baby, Gloria, died of infections from open wounds in her skin as a result of the rashes. They finally brought her in to hospital when an eye infection was literally melting her corneas, but by then it was too late. The reason they did not take her in is that the father, Thomas Sam, a college lecturer in homeopathy, resorted to homeopathic techniques instead.

Homeopathy is a theory of treatment based on the assumption that an extremely diluted mixture of a substance that would otherwise cause similar symptoms at higher doses in a patient can actually cure a patient of those symptoms. This is fine, even if a bit strange, because it can’t really hurt you. But relying on that to the exclusion of Western intervention can, indeed, kill you, as it did to this baby.

Recently, my wife was prescribed a series of homeopathic treatments, to which I raised my eyebrow, but was OK with because other forms of treatment were also included. I remember being opposed to the practice because I didn’t see any scientific merit in it, but thought that, on the off chance that there’s something scientific to it that we just haven’t discovered yet, I’d be willing to give it a shot. But not at any risk.

Back to the story at hand, Sam refused to take Gloria to a hospital even after her hair actually turned white from the disorder. By the time he finally did, it was too late.

“Gloria was subjected to significant pain over an extended period of time and the omission of the offenders to seek proper assistance for her may be characterized accurately as cruelty,” Johnson said. “Each offender fell profoundly short of their parental obligations to their infant daughter.”

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I’m in a solar mood today. I often am. I really think it’s the future of the energy market, because, when it comes down to it, everything is solar powered. The sun is the Earth’s only source of energy, ultimately speaking.

With that in mind, let’s turn to Waterbury, Vermont, where Green Mountain Coffee Roasters just completed the installation of a 572-panel solar array to power its coffee-producing operations. Altogether, the array provides 100 kilowatts of electricity to the plant. They are teamed up with Green Mountain Power, which has promised to install 10,000 panels in 1,000 days in the state of Vermont. I’ll be here counting and reporting.

“In addition to generating clean electricity for use in our facility, the array also demonstrates the feasibility of solar panels as a viable solution for producing power in Vermont,” said Paul Comey, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ vice president of environmental affairs, said Thursday.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters also offers its employees group discounts on solar power systems through a green benefits program with groSolar. They donate $1,000 toward an employee’s solar electric system, which also receives a $0.25 per watt installation discount. Now THIS is the kind of stuff we need to get off of foreign oil. If you’re going to pass a multibillion dollar stimulus, you might as well do it here and focus it in on this stuff.

And it seems this environmental company is getting place. Its most recent quarterly report had a 61 percent increase in revenue and 123 percent boost in profits. Wow. I might just buy some stock right now.

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When I came across this piece of news, my mind immediately fell to the Archaeopteryx. This was a bird/dinosaur combo that flew around 65 million years ago or so. It was purported to be the missing link between birds and reptiles. Apparently, they found another type of these flying reptiles in China.

“The extensive feathering of this specimen, particularly the attachment of long pennaceous feathers to the pes, sheds new light on the early evolution of feathers and demonstrates the complex distribution of skeletal and integumentary features close to the dinosaur-bird transition”, researchers from the Shenyang Normal University wrote.

The fossil is 160 million years old, and is the oldest of its kind to be found so far. At that date, it is millions of years older than the archaeopteryx, putting it at the forefront of being the missing link instead.

Discoveries before this one had put archaeologists in a little bit of a temporal pickle because the fossils found were younger than the fossils of birds they had found. So that didn’t really work out so well. What might have happened is birds and reptiles splitting off evolutionarily from this guy millions of years before, and then you’d have both the hybrids and the birds showing up in the fossil record after. The only thing that could mess up the chronology now would be a 160 million year old bird fossil.

The research findings will also be published in “Nature” magazine on Oct. 1. Take a look at it there for a more in depth survey.

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