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...Elphil was in the south of the country scouting a new crop of watermelons one morning when a call arrived from the Port of Tunis. El Phil, the young chief of the Jinene Agro farming business, figured the customs agent was calling to report a problem with his latest load of peaches, bound for Marseilles in a refrigerated truck aboard a cargo ship. But the paperwork and produce were all in order. The problem, the customs officer explained, was that an electronic scanner had detected something moving inside - the farm's two night watchmen, stowed away among the crates, trying...
...contain dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, which can contaminate the air and water when those products are dumped. It's called electronic waste, or e-waste, and the world produces a lot of it: 20 to 50 million tons a year, according to the UN - enough to load a train that would stretch around the world. The U.S. is by far the world's top producer of e-waste, but much of it ends up elsewhere - specifically, in developing nations like China, India and Nigeria, to which rich countries have been shipping garbage for years. There the poor...
...problem is, all those calories come at a price. Humans, like most animals, are hardwired not just to eat but to gorge, since living in the wild means never knowing when the next famine is going to strike. Best to load up on calories when you can - even if that famine never comes. "We're not only programmed to eat a lot," says Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History, "but to prefer foods that are high in calories." What's more, the better we got at producing food, the easier it became. If you're a settler...
Finally, you can try to lighten the guilt load a bit. "There's a lot of parent-blaming that goes on," says the New York Obesity Research Center's Carnell, part of a British team trying to tease out just how genetics affect appetite, "and I think that's probably unfair. Parents are a powerful influence, but there are other influences as well--like genes." Recognizing that at least some cards in the obesity hand are dealt even before a child is born can be an important first step for parents and kids accustomed to thinking their weight woes...
Among this urban detritus, something else is moving. It looks like another trash cube--but with binocular eyes, forklift plates for arms and Caterpillar tracks to navigate the rough terrain. The thing is called a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class--WALL?E--and its job is to clean up the mess of consumerism run amok. It's also apparently the last of its kind still functioning...