Bits and Pieces

Tag: plastic rollers

Note from the undersea—As reported last month in a very interesting new magazine, Arctic Circle, published above the ice way up there in the Northwest Territories, a new scheme is afoot for extracting, processing and transporting crude oil below the ice: "As the world price for crude oil creeps toward $25 a barrel," the article explains, "exploration and development activity in Canada's Arctic is beginning to intensify, recovering from the disastrous era of the mid-1980s. What's more, the technological complexity of many projects verges on the incredible. Calgary-based Panarctic Oils Limited, for example, has announced a plan that Jules Verne might have drafted to draw oil from a production facility on the seabed and transport it beneath the ice in huge submarine tankers. The facility, to be constructed under the ice at a depth of 350 meters, would produce 25,000 barrels a day from the more than 250 million barrels believed to be recoverable from the Cisco field (roughly half the size of Newfoundland's Hibernia oil field)."

Advance notice tells us the week will be heavily promoted, with lots of T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers paving the way, or at least decorating the route. While such trappings make the organic-food movement seem a trifle crass and commercial, a lot of us can remember when raising crops organically was regarded as a nearly treasonable act. So let us rejoice despite the hoopla and applaud the fact that growing organic is becoming mainstream. For more information, contact the Committee for Sustainable Agriculture (P.O. Box 1300, Colfax, CA 95713).

October 7,the first Sunday of the month, marks the celebration of the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, who in the Christian hagiography is to animals what Saint Elmo is to sailors. A Mendicant who ministered to the poor and the homeless, Francis also possessed that somewhat rare affinity with animals that crops up now and then among naturalists, biologists, veterinarians, shepherds and homesteaders, to name a few. Some people just have a way with animals, and Francis was one of them: According to legend, he befriended a wild wolf that wandered down into Gubbio from the Umbrian hills.