Morning. Many of our conversations have focused on providing high quality food to nourish ourselves and stay healthy. Growing, purchasing local and cooking more from scratch is one part of the cycle of reliance. Another part is what is being returned to the earth as byproducts of daily living.

Plastic is in the clothes we wear, bedding for sleep, furniture for sitting, carpets and shoes for walking. We almost wrap ourselves in plastic.

The amount produced keeps growing.

Microfibers are showing up in our drinking water.

Mahon said there were two principal concerns: very small plastic particles and the chemicals or pathogens that microplastics can harbour. “If the fibres are there, it is possible that the nanoparticles are there too that we can’t measure,” she said. “Once they are in the nanometre range they can really penetrate a cell and that means they can penetrate organs, and that would be worrying.” The Orb analyses caught particles of more than 2.5 microns in size, 2,500 times bigger than a nanometre.

Microplastics can attract bacteria found in sewage, Mahon said: “Some studies have shown there are more harmful pathogens on microplastics downstream of wastewater treatment plants.”

How microplastics end up in drinking water is for now a mystery, but the atmosphere is one obvious source, with fibres shed by the everyday wear and tear of clothes and carpets. Tumble dryers are another potential source, with almost 80% of US households having dryers that usually vent to the open air.

Landscaping preferences in our commercial and residential areas contribute to overall pollution.

Today, American lawns occupy some 30-40 million acres of land. Lawnmowers to maintain them account for some 5 percent of the nation’s air pollution – probably more in urban areas. Each year more than 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled during the refilling of lawn and garden equipment—more than the oil that the Exxon Valdez spilled.

Homeowners spend billions of dollars and typically use 10 times the amount of pesticide and fertilizers per acre on their lawns as farmers do on crops; the majority of these chemicals are wasted due to inappropriate timing and application. These chemicals then runoff and become a major source of water pollution.Last but not least, 30 to 60 percent of urban fresh water is used on lawns. Most of this water is also wasted due to poor timing and application.

Pharmaceuticals effecting the environment is not simply due to agricultural practice. Antidepressants are showing up in fish and effecting behavior.

Antidepressant drugs, making their way through an increasing number of people's bodies, getting excreted in small amounts into their toilets, and moving through the wastewater treatment process to lakes and rivers, are being found in multiple Great Lakes fish species' brains, new research by the University of Buffalo has found.

Researchers detected high concentrations of both the active ingredients and metabolites — byproducts of the parent drug — of popular antidepressant pharmaceuticals including Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa and Sarafem in the brains of fish caught in the Niagara River connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

Farm Report
The first forest fire smoke was the beginning of August. I was starting to believe the air was getting better since the smell of smoke no longer greeted me whenever a door was opened. MarilynW provided a link showing the smoke patterns. Still in the heaviest range of smoke concentration. The inside of the house must be saturated with smoke fragrance. Snow is what will probably extinguish the closest fires.

The plums should have been ready 1st or 2nd week of August. Their development slowed when the smoke arrived and are just now becoming edible. The plum in front of the bunch made a good snack.

The maple leaves are skipping the yellow, reds and oranges stage, changing straight to brown.

Natures way to store some feed for winter. Green grasses grown with too much nitrogen are not palatable to the livestock. The cattle and sheep avoid the cow pie patches (in picture) and the grass growing in the fertilized water overflow from the neighbors fields. However once it has been frozen and dried it becomes a preferred grazing food (November through February).