From Madrid to Salamanca

The trip has been pretty uneventful, nothing too eco/energy related to remark on except the usual thing about how trains are amazing ways to get around. But I did notice this as an East Coaster. The amount of sprawl here is next to nothing. The only time you see buildings are when you come across a town. The rest of the way is grass, hills, rocks and trees…I want to say that it’s an open canopy savannah. Part of the density may be caused by the seemingly inhospitable terrain in western Spain but a big part is that these cities were build before the car so they are built on a human scale (unlike some American cities I could name). Living on a human scale is vital to a sustainable future because a city if a city’s lifeblood is cars, its pulse will stop after Peak Oil.

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During a nighttime robbery, the horn of a 120-year-old stuffed rhinoceros was stolen, from the museum where it was displayed. Museum authorities warned that using this horn as a traditional medicine on the Asian black market could have lethal consequences because it was preserved by the use of the deadly arsenic and DDT.

But causing immidiate death should not be the only concern. The fact that DDT is still in use is really alarming, since it is a substance that causes accumulation. As an environmental term, accumulation is the gradual increase of pollutants in living organisms by direct adsorption or through food chains. The pollutants that cause accumulation cannot be metabolized or aborted by any means, so accumulation of the substance increases while going up a food chain.

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