[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term 'neem hakeem' - means a doctor who isn't quite up to par.  Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area:  A 'neem hakeem' is a danger to your life...]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend.  People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe?  Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation?  No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.

There’s more than one lesson here:

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A too, too familiar site on campus...

A report was released in Nairobi today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that is a bit disturbing:  “Over half of the food produced globally is lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain.”

Some examples:

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Alan Paton wrote his novel in 1946, published in 1948.  It is set in South Africa.  What is startling about the book is that the first two pages could have been written about Kenya – and could have been written yesterday.

The lessons from today’s reading are painfully clear:  1)Environmental degradation is not a new problem.  Abuse of God’s creation is, apologies to Paton, as old as the hills.   As ancient as human nature.  If you’ll allow me to quote myself in Our Father’s World, ‘environmental problems are sin problems.’

And, 2)Why don’t we learn?  If it was obvious that people were destroying the very land they needed to live on more than 60 years ago, why do we keep acting surprised?  Why do we think we can solve this with more fertilizer or another loan from the World Bank?

Here’s the reading.  (Pick up the book here)

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Rachel is a missionary in Tanzania who after reading Our Father’s World sent the following plea to her friends and supporting church back ‘home’ in the US.  She’s given me permission to share this with you:

The time I’ve spent living in Tanzania has helped me to appreciate many things that I used to take for granted.  58% of the population of Tanzania lives on less than $1 per day. Although I often don’t feel rich, I am very rich by comparison. Many things (running water, washing machines and dryers, cars, electricity, refrigerators, ovens, microwaves and computers for example) that Americans expect and accept as the norm simply aren’t an option for the majority of Tanzanians, or the rest of the world. Read more »

Our organization, Care of Creation, has staff and projects in Kenya.  Craig Sorley, Care of Creation staff member and Director of Care of Creation-Kenya, our local organization in that country, recently sent us the following report.  Warning:  This is not for the faint of heart.

Right now in Kenya the gov’t has estimated that a full 25% of the population (10 million) is facing major food shortages, with famine looming right around the corner for many.  This is partly due to the poor harvests in 2008 from the election problems and the political unrest that ensued, and partly due to another drought that we”re facing.  You may recall the last major drought was in 2006. Read more »

I have recently been invited to provide a guest column once a month for the Creation Care page of Sustain Lane, which is a pretty cool environmental ‘gateway’.  Check it out.

Here’s this month’s column:

I recently spent almost two weeks in the Library of Congress, discovering some new heros to add to my collection. One of the names that kept appearing was that of Sigurd Olson. Previously unknown to me (and I suspect to many others today), he was a genuine hero of the wilderness movement in the early 20th Century. Among his writings are Singing Wilderness and Listening Point, both written in the first half of the last century. Read more »