Environment and Spirituality

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kmaherali
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November 18, 2008
Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

BULENGO, Congo — Jean-Marie Serundori wakes up every morning with gorillas on his mind.

“I wash my face, I stare at the mountains and I think of them,” he said. “They are like our cousins.”

But Mr. Serundori, a Congolese wildlife ranger entrusted with protecting some of the most majestic — and most endangered — animals on the planet, is far from the broad-backed mountain gorillas he loves.

Instead, he is stuck in a wet and filthy camp for internally displaced people where the only wildlife are the cockroaches that scurry across the mud floors. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of people left idle and destitute by eastern Congo’s most recent spasm of violence, and the consequences in this case may be dire and irreversible.

Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas (the rest are in nearby areas of Rwanda and Uganda). Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.

“We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we,” said Sekibibi Desire, who is staying in a tent near the other rangers.

This is just the latest crisis within a crisis. Congo’s gorillas happen to live in one of the most contested, blood-soaked pieces of turf in one of the most contested, blood-soaked corners of Africa. Their home, Virunga National Park, is high ground — with mist-shrouded mountains and pointy volcanoes — along the porous Congo-Rwanda border, where rebels are suspected of smuggling in weapons from Rwanda. Last year in Virunga, 10 gorillas were killed, some shot in the back of the head, execution style, park officials said.

The park used to be a naturalist’s paradise, home to more than 2,000 species of plants, 706 types of birds and 218 varieties of mammals, including three great apes: the mountain gorilla, the lowland gorilla and chimpanzees.

Now Virunga is a war zone.

Rebel soldiers command the hilltops. Government soldiers fire mortars at them, blowing up precious gorilla habitat that is rapidly disappearing anyway because of deforestation and an illegal charcoal trade.

“Armed groups hide in the park, they train in the park, and most importantly, they eat in the park,” said Samantha Newport, a spokeswoman for Virunga National Park.

Ms. Newport said that two years ago, at one of the lakes in the park, a local militia went on a hippopotamus-hunting rampage, machine-gunning hundreds of hippopotamuses for their meat.

“The lake turned red,” she said.

Eastern Congo has been stuck in a vise of bloodshed for more than a decade. The trouble began in 1994, with the genocide in Rwanda, which killed 800,000 people and sent waves of refugees into Congo, along with bloodthirsty militias. Since then, various armed groups and neighboring nations have battled for control of this stunningly beautiful land, loaded with gold, diamonds and other precious resources. Last month, a rebel force widely suspected of being supported by Rwanda routed government troops near the strategic city of Goma and was poised to capture it, when the rebels declared a cease-fire.

That cease-fire remains shaky. On Sunday, the same day that the rebels’ leader, Laurent Nkunda, vowed to stick to the truce, heavy fighting broke out north of Goma. Congolese troops fired rockets. The rebels responded with mortar bombs. Once again, game wardens were caught in the middle. Some of their families have even been shot.

Last month, the 14-year-old daughter of a ranger was shot in the stomach during a firefight near a ranger post deep in the forest. “I put her in my arms and just ran,” said her father, Mberabagabo Rukundaguhaya. “I thought she was dead.” She lived, though it is not clear when her family will be able to go home.

Officials with Virunga National Park are urging the rebels and government troops to allow them to return to work. The rebels insist the gorillas are safe.

“We are protecting them,” said Babu Amani, a rebel spokesman.

Mr. Serundori said that in his 20 years as a ranger, he has seen the gorillas more than 100 times.

“But what always impresses me is how fragile they are,” he said. “They could be wiped out — in a minute.”

France Moves to Add Troops

UNITED NATIONS — France began circulating a draft resolution on Monday that would temporarily authorize an additional 3,085 troops and police officers for the peacekeeping mission in the Congo to protect civilians in the eastern part of the country.
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Electric car revolution coming

Mike De Souza
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, November 25, 2008

http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... d&sponsor=

CREDIT: Fred Prouser, Reuters
A Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric car and others like it will make up the five per cent of clean vehicles expected on roads in the next decade, says a federal task force
.

One in every 20 new cars sold in Canada should be electrically powered within a decade, say members of a task force that today is to deliver a progress report to the Harper government about the future of plug-in vehicles.

The group was set up by the government last winter to design Canada's Electric Vehicle and Technology Road Map for shifting the transportation industry away from fossil fuels.

"It'sgoingtobeanelectricvehiclerevolution," saidMichaelElwood, chairperson of the task force and vice-president of marketing at Azure Dynamics, which specializes in electric and hybrid electric drive technology. "Hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid electric and electric vehicles are all part of the equation," he said.

The group includes a wide range of stakeholders, including automakers Ford and General Motors as well as the Canadian Auto Workers union, academic institutions such as the University of Manitoba and utility companies Hydro Quebec and Manitoba Hydro. It's expected to submit its final recommendations next February.

"Anything is possible and everything is being worked on and the sooner we dedicate resources to the advancement of this (industry), the better," said Elwood.

The group set its five per cent target last summer, after reviewing a technical analysis of the industry submitted to Natural Resources Canada in June. The goal would be the equivalent of 80,000 to 125,000 electric vehicles sold yearly.

A Canadian industry spokesperson said the Big Three North American car manufacturers are moving toward new hybrid or electric technologies in their models, but progress depends on consumer demand, securing loan guarantees from the government during an economic downturn and the price of gasoline at the pumps.

"The industry is almost in the midst of the biggest revolutionary technology turnaroundin its history," saidMarkNantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturing Association.

"Probably one of the worst nightmares wouldbetobringforwardthistechnology in a low energy cost environment."

Bob Oliver, director of the transportationprogramatPollutionProbe, saidsome ofthemainchallengesincluderesearching better technologies for more powerful, longer-lasting batteries and ensuring that there is sufficient infrastructure in place for people to charge their vehicles on the road. But he believes it's possible to exceed the five per cent target.

© The Calgary Herald 2008

****
November 25, 2008
Slump May Limit Moves on Clean Energy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.

From Italy to China, the threat to jobs, profits and government tax revenues posed by the financial crisis has cast doubt on commitments to cap emissions or phase out polluting factories.

Automakers, especially Detroit’s Big Three, face collapsing sales, threatening their plans to invest heavily in more fuel-efficient cars. And with gas prices now around $2 a gallon in the United States, struggling consumers may be less inclined than they once were to trade in their gas-guzzling models in any case.

President-elect Barack Obama and the European Union have vowed to stick to commitments to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and invest in new green technologies, arguing that government action could stimulate the economy and create new jobs in producing sustainable energy.

But as the United Nations prepares to gather the world’s environment ministers in Poznan, Poland, next week to try to agree on a new treaty to reduce emissions, both the political will and the economic underpinnings for a much more assertive strategy appear shakier than they did even a few weeks ago.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/world ... nted=print
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December 27, 2008
The Energy Challenge
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.

Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”

There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.

The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.

The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.

Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.

The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.

“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.

Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”

Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said.

Buildings that are certified hermetically sealed may sound suffocating. (To meet the standard, a building must pass a “blow test” showing that it loses minimal air under pressure.) In fact, passive houses have plenty of windows — though far more face south than north — and all can be opened.

Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.

Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.

Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). “We’ve found it’s very important to people that they feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.

The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.

In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.

But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.

Dr. Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.

Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe.

Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.

And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.

Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.

“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”

Photo and links to more articles on the subject at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world ... ?th&emc=th
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Prince Charles set to visit South America on eco-tour


Herald News ServicesFebruary 14, 2009

Britain's heir to the throne, Prince Charles, is to visit the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands next month on a mission promoting environmental preservation, British officials said Friday.

The prince, accompanied by his wife Camilla, will travel to Chile, Brazil and Ecuador between March 8 and 17, the respective British embassies and the prince's office in London said in statements.

"The visit will focus on the theme of climate change, one of the U. K. governments highest foreign policy priorities in 2009," a statement from the British Embassy in Brazil said.

"Environmental sustainability and protection will be the central issues of the visit. This reflects The Prince of Wales' long-standing interest and expertise in this field."

Prince Charles, 60, is to begin the tour with a three-day stop in Chile, where he will focus on bilateral ties, including military ones, the diplomatic mission there said.

March 11 to 15, he will be in Brazil, where he will give a key speech on environmental preservation and visit the Amazon forest, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.

The prince is to round out the trip with a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador. That visit will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the Briton who formulated his evolution theory from research in the archipelago.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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February 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Yes, They Could. So They Did.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New Delhi

So I am attending the Energy and Resources Institute climate conference in New Delhi, and during the afternoon session two young American women — along with one of their mothers — proposition me.

“Hey, Mr. Friedman,” they say, “would you like to take a little spin around New Delhi in our car?”

Oh, I say, I’ve heard that line before. Ah, they say, but you haven’t seen this car before. It’s a plug-in electric car that is also powered by rooftop solar panels — and the two young women, recent Yale grads, had just driven it all over India in a “climate caravan” to highlight the solutions to global warming being developed by Indian companies, communities, campuses and innovators, as well as to inspire others to take action.

They ask me if I want to drive, but I have visions of being stopped by the cops and ending up in a New Delhi jail. Not to worry, they tell me. Indian cops have been stopping them all across India. First, they ask to see driver’s licenses, then they inquire about how the green car’s solar roof manages to provide 10 percent of its mileage — and then they try to buy the car.

We head off down Panchsheel Marg, one of New Delhi’s main streets. The ladies want to show me something. The U.S. Embassy and the Chinese Embassy are both located on Panchsheel, directly across from each other. They asked me to check out the rooftops of each embassy. What do I notice? Let’s see ... The U.S. Embassy’s roof is loaded with antennae and listening gear. The Chinese Embassy’s roof is loaded with ... new Chinese-made solar hot-water heaters.

You couldn’t make this up.

But trying to do something about it was just one of many reasons my hosts, Caroline Howe, 23, a mechanical engineer on leave from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Alexis Ringwald, a Fulbright scholar in India and now a solar entrepreneur, joined with Kartikeya Singh, who was starting the Indian Youth Climate Network, or IYCN, to connect young climate leaders in India, a country coming under increasing global pressure to manage its carbon footprint.

“India is full of climate innovators, so spread out across this huge country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are working right now,” said Howe. “We wanted to find a way to bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation. There’s no time left to just talk about the problem.”

Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. They persuaded him to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with longer-life batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge — and to lay on a solar roof that would extend them farther.

Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.

Deepa Gupta, 21, a co-founder of IYCN, told The Hindustan Times that the trip opened her eyes to just how many indigenous energy solutions were budding in India — “like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the kind of recycling in slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place, like the Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go.” (See: www.indiaclimatesolutions.com.)

At Rajpipla, in Gujarat, when they stopped at a local prince’s palace to recharge their cars, they discovered that his business was cultivating worms and selling them as eco-friendly alternatives to chemical fertilizers.

I met Howe and Ringwald after a tiring day, but I have to admit that as soon as they started telling me their story it really made me smile. After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.

“Why did this tour happen?” asked Ringwald. “Why this mad, insane plan to travel across India in a caravan of solar electric cars and jatropha trucks with solar music, art, dance and a potent message for climate solutions? Well ... the world needs crazy ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working anymore.”
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February 16, 2009
Editorial
400 Miles North

There is an interesting and potentially tragic purity in the way other life forms respond to our warming climate. They do not debate the matter. They simply shift as the contours of their habitat shift. Even the distribution of slow-moving species — like trees — is changing. And more mobile species? They offer vivid testimony about the alterations in our world.

According to the Audubon Society, data from the past 40 years of the annual Christmas Bird Count — a three-week census of American bird populations — shows a striking northward movement among a majority of species. This is not just a movement of individuals. It’s the migration of an entire population.

The boreal chickadee has moved 280 miles north, almost out of the range of the lower 48 states. The marbled murrelet, a seabird that breeds inland, has moved 360 miles north. The wild turkey has gone about 400.

These population shifts make it look as though many bird species can easily adjust to a warming world. And some of these shifts may be opportunistic in nature — taking advantage of open ground and new food sources in regions that used to be snowed over in winter. But ultimately birds cannot migrate out of their habitats.

A boreal species pushed farther and farther north comes eventually to the end of the plants (which move far more slowly) that it depends upon for food. A grassland species cannot simply decide to become a woodland species. And birds do not simply push northward over unchanging terrain beneath them. The entire species mix that defines suitable habitat is changing as well, bringing with it the risk of extinction.

The important thing to remember — as we notice an absence of purple finches at our feeders — is that we are not merely witnesses of these striking shifts. We are the cause of them, and it is our responsibility to do all we can to mitigate them.
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March 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Next Really Cool Thing
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
San Francisco

If you hang around the renewable-energy business for long, you’ll hear a lot of tall tales. You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.

Hang around long enough and you’ll even hear that in another 10 or 20 years hydrogen-powered cars or fusion energy will be a commercial reality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard one of those stories, I could buy my own space shuttle. No wonder cynics often say that viable fusion energy or hydrogen-powered cars are “20 years away and always will be.”

But what if this time is different? What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer.

Are we there?

That is the tantalizing question I was left with after visiting the recently completed National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 50 miles east of San Francisco. The government-funded N.I.F. consists of 192 giant lasers — which can deliver 50 times more energy than any previous fusion laser system. They’re all housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields — the rather dull cover to a vast internal steel forest of laser beams that must be what the engine room of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise space ship looked like.

I began my tour there with the N.I.F. director, Edward Moses. He was holding up a tiny gold can the size of a Tylenol tablet, and inside it was plastic pellet, the size of a single peppercorn, that would be filled with frozen hydrogen.

The way the N.I.F. works is that all 192 lasers pour their energy into a target chamber, which looks like a giant, spherical, steel bathysphere that you would normally use for deep-sea exploration. At the center of this target chamber is that gold can with its frozen hydrogen pellet. Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, “far greater than exists at the center of our sun,” said Moses.

More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home — just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid.

Last Monday at 3 a.m., for the first time, all 192 lasers were fired at high energy precisely at once — no small feat — at the target chamber’s empty core. That was a major step toward “ignition” — turning that hydrogen pellet into a miniature sun on earth. The next step — which the N.I.F. expects to achieve some time in the next two to three years — is to prove that it can, under lab conditions, repeatedly fire its 192 lasers at multiple hydrogen pellets and produce more energy from the pellets than the laser energy that is injected. That’s called “energy gain.”

“That,” explained Moses, “is what Einstein meant when he declared that E=mc2. By using lasers, we can unleash tremendous amounts of energy from tiny amounts of mass.”

Once the lab proves that it can get energy gain from this laser-driven process, the next step (if it can secure government and private funding) would be to set up a pilot fusion energy power plant that would prove that any local power utility could have its own miniature sun — on a commercial basis. A pilot would cost about $10 billion — the same as a new nuclear power plant.

I don’t know if they can pull this off; some scientists are skeptical. Laboratory-scale nuclear fusion and energy gain is really hard. But here’s what I do know: President Obama’s stimulus package has given a terrific boost to renewable energy. It will pay lasting benefits. And we need to keep working on all forms of solar, geothermal and wind power. They work. And the more they get deployed, the more their costs will go down.

But, in addition, we need to make a few big bets on potential game-changers. I am talking about systems that could give us abundant, clean, reliable electrons and drive massive innovation in big lasers, materials science, nuclear physics and chemistry that would benefit, energize and renew many U.S. industries.

At the pace we’re going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us. Yes, we’ll still need coal for some time. But let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal, when our real future depends on birthing new technologies that can replace it.
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April 1, 2009
Editorial
State of the Birds

Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, released a new, nationwide survey last month that assesses the state of bird populations in America. The news is grievous. Over all, a third of the bird species in this country are endangered, threatened or in serious decline.

There is special concern for grassland birds — whose habitat has been vanishing steadily for decades — for birds in Hawaii, where a variety of species face a variety of threats, and for coastal species. The good news is that wherever nature is allowed to recover, especially in the case of wetland birds, it shows its usual resilience.

But there is no glossing over these staggering losses, and there is no dismissing what they mean. There is nothing accidental or inevitable about the vanishing of these birds. However unintentional, it is the direct result of human activity — of development, of global warming, of air and water pollution and of our failure to set aside the habitat these birds need to flourish. Every threatened species reveals some aspect of our lives that could be adjusted.

The survey also shows that where humans have made an effort — as with migratory waterfowl and with endangered species like the peregrine falcon — good things have happened, with some species recovering even as others declined. This in turn argues that the programs now in place to protect habitat should not only be spared the budgetary wrecking ball but also expanded — most conspicuously those managed by the Agriculture Department that seek to preserve wetlands and prairie grasslands as well as the Interior Department’s Land and Water Conservation Fund.

The remarkable recovery of ducks and geese and other wetland species — thanks to strong conservation efforts — should remind us of what is possible. The only other outcome is too grim to consider — a landscape steadily emptying of birds.
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There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/scien ... grees.html

April 16, 2009
By Degrees
Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

KOHLUA, India — “It’s hard to believe that this is what’s melting the glaciers,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, as he weaved through a warren of mud brick huts, each containing a mud cookstove pouring soot into the atmosphere.

As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.

In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot — also known as black carbon — from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.

While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming — especially in the short term, climate experts say. Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

In fact, reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called “low hanging fruit” — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming. “It is clear to any person who cares about climate change that this will have a huge impact on the global environment,” said Dr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who is working with the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi on a project to help poor families acquire new stoves.

“In terms of climate change we’re driving fast toward a cliff, and this could buy us time,” said Dr. Ramanathan, who left India 40 years ago but returned to his native land for the project.

Better still, decreasing soot could have a rapid effect. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for years, soot stays there for a few weeks. Converting to low-soot cookstoves would remove the warming effects of black carbon quickly, while shutting a coal plant takes years to substantially reduce global CO2 concentrations.

But the awareness of black carbon’s role in climate change has come so recently that it was not even mentioned as a warming agent in the 2007 summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that pronounced the evidence for global warming to be “unequivocal.” Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford, said that the fact that black carbon was not included in international climate efforts was “bizarre,” but “partly reflects how new the idea is.” The United Nations is trying to figure out how to include black carbon in climate change programs, as is the federal government.

In Asia and Africa, cookstoves produce the bulk of black carbon, although it also emanates from diesel engines and coal plants there. In the United States and Europe, black carbon emissions have already been reduced significantly by filters and scrubbers.

Like tiny heat-absorbing black sweaters, soot particles warm the air and melt the ice by absorbing the sun’s heat when they settle on glaciers. One recent study estimated that black carbon might account for as much as half of Arctic warming. While the particles tend to settle over time and do not have the global reach of greenhouse gases, they do travel, scientists now realize. Soot from India has been found in the Maldive Islands and on the Tibetan Plateau; from the United States, it travels to the Arctic. The environmental and geopolitical implications of soot emissions are enormous. Himalayan glaciers are expected to lose 75 percent of their ice by 2020, according to Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a glacier specialist from the Indian state of Sikkim.

These glaciers are the source of most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of glacial melt is severe flooding in mountain communities. The number of floods from glacial lakes is already rising sharply, Professor Hasnain said. Once the glaciers shrink, Asia’s big rivers will run low or dry for part of the year, and desperate battles over water are certain to ensue in a region already rife with conflict.

Doctors have long railed against black carbon for its devastating health effects in poor countries. The combination of health and environmental benefits means that reducing soot provides a “very big bang for your buck,” said Erika Rosenthal, a senior lawyer at Earth Justice, a Washington organization. “Now it’s in everybody’s self-interest to deal with things like cookstoves — not just because hundreds of thousands of women and children far away are dying prematurely.”

In the United States, black carbon emissions are indirectly monitored and minimized through federal and state programs that limit small particulate emissions, a category of particles damaging to human health that includes black carbon. But in March, a bill was introduced in Congress that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to specifically regulate black carbon and direct aid to black carbon reduction projects abroad, including introducing cookstoves in 20 million homes. The new stoves cost about $20 and use solar power or are more efficient. Soot is reduced by more than 90 percent. The solar stoves do not use wood or dung. Other new stoves simply burn fuel more cleanly, generally by pulverizing the fuel first and adding a small fan that improves combustion.

That remote rural villages like Kohlua could play an integral role in tackling the warming crisis is hard to imagine. There are no cars — the village chief’s ancient white Jeep sits highly polished but unused in front of his house, a museum piece. There is no running water and only intermittent electricity, which powers a few light bulbs.

The 1,500 residents here grow wheat, mustard and potatoes and work as day laborers in Agra, home of the Taj Majal, about two hours away by bus.

They earn about $2 a day and, for the most part, have not heard about climate change. But they have noticed frequent droughts in recent years that scientists say may be linked to global warming. Crops ripen earlier and rot more frequently than they did 10 years ago. The villagers are aware, too, that black carbon can corrode. In Agra, cookstoves and diesel engines are forbidden in the area around the Taj Majal, because soot damages the precious facade.

Still, replacing hundreds of millions of cookstoves — the source of heat, food and sterile water — is not a simple matter. “I’m sure they’d look nice, but I’d have to see them, to try them,” said Chetram Jatrav, as she squatted by her cookstove making tea and a flatbread called roti. Her three children were coughing.

She would like a stove that “made less smoke and used less fuel” but cannot afford one, she said, pushing a dung cake bought for one rupee into the fire. She had just bought her first rolling pin so her flatbread could come out “nice and round,” as her children had seen in elementary school. Equally important, the open fires of cookstoves give some of the traditional foods their taste. Urging these villagers to make roti in a solar cooker meets the same mix of rational and irrational resistance as telling an Italian that risotto tastes just fine if cooked in the microwave.

In March, the cookstove project, called Surya, began “market testing” six alternative cookers in villages, in part to quantify their benefits. Already, the researchers fret that the new stoves look like scientific instruments and are fragile; one broke when a villager pushed twigs in too hard.

But if black carbon is ever to be addressed on a large scale, acceptance of the new stoves is crucial. “I’m not going to go to the villagers and say CO2 is rising, and in 50 years you might have floods,” said Dr. Ibrahim Rehman, Dr. Ramanathan’s collaborator at the Energy and Resources Institute. “I’ll tell her about the lungs and her kids and I know it will help with climate change as well.”
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Post by kmaherali »

Nature's lessons not wasted inside corporate strategy

By Reese Halter, Calgary HeraldApril 19, 2009

A number of businesses around the globe are adopting the concept that all waste is lost profit.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, Getty Images, Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Technology ... story.html

Nature has a warehouse of proven principles and a research and development laboratory with four billion years of product development. Many corporations draw their ideas, information and inspiration from ecosystems such as prairies, coral reefs and ancient forests. When we follow nature's blueprint, economic, social and environmental abundance occurs. We know that in living systems the behaviour of the parts operates to benefit the entire system. In forests, for instance, specialists (species with unique as opposed to general requirements) find it to their advantage toco-operate with one another. As it turns out, these specialists use fewer resources and in some cases extend their longevity.

A number of businesses around the globe are mimicking natural systems, reducing waste, creating new products and employing millions of workers.

In the early 1950s, Bill Coors, the grandson of the founder of Adolph Coors Co., discovered that "all pollution and all waste are lost profit."

He observed that industrial companies were taking raw materials and fuels from nature, cycling products through the economy and then generating tons of garbage. In turn, the garbage was polluting the groundwater. An "open loop" system exploits nature's resources and deposits waste at both ends. A"closed loop" economy, on the other hand, is one where the full array of costs is accounted for within a system and the only way to do business. Companies and consumers are rewarded for reducing waste. And the environment is safeguarded.

In 1952, to control liquid waste from the brewery, Coors built Colorado's first biological waste-water treatment plant, which also treats waste waters of Golden, Colo.

Bill Coors initiated a penny for every Coors aluminum can returned for recycling and he opened the nation's first aluminum recycling centres offering "cash for cans."CoorsTek, a subsidiary of Coors, manufactures advanced technical ceramics using nature's model for smart design, by embedding hardness, strength, insulation and durability into its products. Another subsidiary Graphic Packaging uses clever technology to reduce ink by as much as 90 per cent and solvent by 100 per cent while producing bolder graphics.

By following nature's blueprint, many corporations believe the most valuable forms of capital in the learning organizations are knowledge, gained through feedback and learning, and changes in design--adaptation. Toyota Corp. has effectively used its labour force for ideas. In 1982, for example, its workforce made over two million suggestions, that's more than two every month per employee, and 95 per cent of them were implemented.

Technology enables humankind to do more with less. From 1973 to 1990, society learned how to create more real value per unit of energy consumed. By 1990, about a third of the energy and material services were delivered from innovation and efficiency.

The chipmaker Intel has advanced its microchip design through innovation as each successive generation of chips holds more information. In effect, Intel has been very successful by emulating nature's blueprint. For billions of years nature has replaced consumption by design.

Dow Chemical also utilizes nature's model and in 1982 it began encouraging employees to find ways to reduce pollution. By 1992, 700 projects were underway reducing waste around the globe and saving the company millions of dollars.

DuPont, another chemical titan has been reducing its CO2 emissions worldwide, striving for a zero-emission target by 2020.Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, a company that specializes in coatings and adhesives has been following nature's path for decades, solving their own environmental problems and implementing Pollution Prevention Pays.

By 2000, 4,650 employees had prevented about 750 million kilograms of pollution and saving the company over $825 million. Moreover, the company has reduced water losses by 82 per cent, volatile organic compounds in emissions by 88 per cent, solid wastes by 24 per cent and rates of waste generation by 35 per cent.

Business, like nature, is a living system--creative, productive and resilient. All waste is lost profit, all value is created by design and adaptation--the ability to learn--is crucial for survival.

Reese halter is a public speaker and founder of the international conservation institute global forest science. He can be ContaCted at www. at www.drreese.Com

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Royal eco-push hits big screen

Herald News Services
April 21, 2009

Prince Charles is writing a book and making a film warning of the threat to the environment posed by Big Business.

The project puts the prince on a collision course with industrialists and bankers he accuses of endangering nature in pursuit of profit. The prince has waived his author's fee, but his foundation will receive an undisclosed share of the royalties.

"I believe that true sustain-ability depends upon us shifting our perception and widening our focus, so that we understand, again, that we have a sacred duty of stewardship of the natural order of things," the prince said. "In some of our actions we behave as if we were masters of nature and, in others, as mere bystanders.

"If we could rediscover that sense of harmony, that sense of being a part of, rather than apart from nature, we would perhaps be less likely to see the world as some sort of gigantic production system, capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit--at no cost."

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Post by kmaherali »

Alim Khamisa wins first annual Environmental Innovation Challenge

April 22, 2009
Posted by ismailimail in Canada, Ismaili Muslims in the News, North America.
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Prepared and published by volunteers of Ottawa Ismaili Newsletter team:

Congratulations to Alim Khamisa for winning Carleton University’s inaugural Environmental Innovation Challenge! The Challenge is intended to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to produce innovative and practical plans that may address local and global environmental problems. Working in partnership with another student, Alim submitted a proposal for a clean and cost-effective means for breaking down polyurethane waste. As this excerpt from Alim’s proposal explains, “Biodegradation of polyurethanes is an environmentally safe and cost-effective way of dealing with the increasing number of problems associated with the disposal of polyurethanes (PU). Worldwide, only 10% of the total PU waste is recycled which means a massive amount of PU is currently filling landfill sites and even worse - it takes as long as 1000 years for PU to naturally degrade. Current mechanical and chemical methods of recycling or degrading PU are of high cost, energy demanding, and polluting due to the release of toxic by-products..There is great potential in taking the idea of an enzymatically based degradation process for polyurethane to the market because of its advantages of being cost-effective, less polluting, and environmentally friendly.If we, the western societies implement a process like this one, we can act as role models to the rest of the world, especially to third world countries and developing nations.”

The competition carries a cash prize of $1000, with $500 allocated to a charitable organization of the winners’ choice. Alim and his partner agreed that the $500 would go to the AKDN because of the organization’s work in economic and environmental sustainable development.

Alim is now carrying the proposal forward independently, participating in the Technology Venture Challenge, an Eastern Ontario competition well known to those in Ottawa’s technology sector. Successfully proceeding to the semi-final round, Alim has been working with a mentor, Mr. David Mann, former Vice President of Emerging Business Technology Investments at Nortel and past Chair of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, to refine and further develop the business proposal in hopes of making it to the final round. Out of 35 submissions, only 13 advanced to the semi-final-if the proposal makes it to the final round, there is a good possibility of obtaining funding from investors and governmental organizations for research and development.

Good luck to Alim in this exciting project and congratulations on this great accomplishment.

Further information about Carleton’s Environmental Innovation Challenge can be found at:

http://www.carletoninnovation.com/eic/

Information about the Technology Venture Challenge can be obtained at:

http://www.techvc.org/

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/0 ... challenge/
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia and more at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/scien ... uburb.html

May 12, 2009
In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”

Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, and thus to reduce global warming. Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe — a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment Agency — and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.

While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser, and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.
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Post by kmaherali »

Is man-made global warming real?


By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldMay 23, 2009

After the Narnian winter we've just had, a reasonable person could easily agree with controversial Friends of Science spokesman Dr. Tim Ball on this much: Global warming is just another unfulfilled government promise.

So, why are we still preparing to spend money on it? Good question.

Ball is controversial because the retired science professor bucks the prevailing wisdom on global warming, calls the science behind it wrong, and questions the good faith of the governmental agencies promoting it. He gets flak. He also gives it, as he did Thursday to a crowd of 400 at Calgary's Metropolitan Centre, in an event sponsored by a reinvigorated Friends of Science, and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. For instance, the idea that carbon dioxide generated by human activity is unnaturally warming the atmosphere through some supposed greenhouse effect is not (and never was) supported by facts that were reasonably easy to obtain. Want to know where the problem is? It's cycles related to solar activity.

At the risk of bastardizing a sophisticated presentation, the dots join like this. The sun is constantly emitting cosmic rays: Those that reach the Earth stimulate cloud creation, which has a cooling effect. But, when the sunspot cycle is active, the flow of cosmic rays is disrupted, fewer reach Earth's atmosphere, cloud cover is diminished, and the Earth warms.

It was seven years ago that local Friends advocate Albert Jacobs laid this out for the Herald editorial board. At that point, it was more of a prediction, as the solar cycle was popping and some interpretations of global temperature data suggested ambient temperatures were rising. Since then though, the sun has gone quiet and the last seven years of satellite data show a distinct cooling trend--even as CO2 levels continue to rise.

Yes, there's still melting in the Arctic. But is that more of a delayed reaction, not unlike a cast iron frying pan that stays hot for a while after it has been removed from the heat?

Could be. Not a bad evidence-based prediction, anyway. And before Canada diverts billions of dollars to CO2 reduction, you'd think it would make reasonably sure.

So, the Friends are back after a few years of discouraged retirement, trying to reopen the warming-science debate their opponents say should remain forever closed.

Most of the Calgary-based group of geologists are old enough to have lived through a few distinct eras of climate change themselves. Some can even remember the celebrated patrols through the Northwest Passage of the RCMP schooner St. Roch during the Second World War, which is another way of saying that the Earth's climate being as prone to change as it is, this isn't the first time the Arctic has thawed sufficiently to be navigable. (Indeed, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made it through in 1903-06, and the Vikings got as far as Ellesmere Island a thousand years ago, before things cooled again.)

Initially, the group got traction. At that ed-board meeting, Jacobs pointed out that core samples from ancient ice packs showed atmospheric CO2 levels trailed, rather than preceded a rise in temperature: The bubbles you see in boiling water are the release of air held in solution at lower temperatures, and as the seas warm, they too give up dissolved gases, CO2 included.

And, did we know the global-warming crowd relied on computer modelling more than observation, and that the guide for policy-makers prepared by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change was written by bureaucrats, and was not in fact the lowest common denominator of the views of 1,700 scientists, just the ones the bureaucrats liked? We did not, but it sounded possible: We had just learned Canada's Kyoto targets had been decided by "think of a number"methods intended to embarrass the Yanks at an international gathering.

The Friends, in short, made a good case and while I didn't feel qualified to adjudicate it, it seemed to me that somebody who was, should.

But, that never happened. Instead, a well-funded global warming lobby steamrollered the world's governments and mainstream media, Canada's among them.

Indeed, it became professionally suspect to be a "climate-change denier." Oil companies one might have expected to argue the science, rolled over: Business is business. The provincial government listened, once, but figured they couldn't fight the gathering consensus and in Ottawa, the new Conservative government quickly realized that in any contest between ice-cores and cuddly polar bear cubs, the votes were with the bears.

And after that, there was the inconvenient Al Gore who, despite fostering a film loaded with misinformed or dangerously stretched data, rode the wave of future rising sea levels to an Oscar.

"It was," Ball told a Calgary audience Thursday, "the greatest scientific deception in history."

The Friends want to raise $500,000 to take their show to the airwaves.

I wish 'em luck. And a fair hearing.

nhannaford@theherald.can-west.com

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/made+ ... story.html
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June 28, 2009
It’s Time to Learn From Frogs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.

“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”

The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.

Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opini ... nted=print
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Post by kmaherali »

Why people are cool to global warming
By Nigel Hannaford,
Calgary Herald
July 25, 2009

Why, asks U of C biology professor David Mayne Reid, do so many people not accept the data of climate change?

He suggests no less than seven reasons, and does so in a refreshing departure from the condescending tone more usually heard from that side of the argument. Our skepticism is driven, he proposes, by fear, genetics, short-term thinking, selfishness, ignorance, a mistakenly humble view of our own capacity to affect change and the sinister machinations of lobbies with something to gain.

There is some truth to some of this.

Human beings are, for instance, given to seeking their own good at the expense of others. In democracies, humanity's horizon is also limited by election cycles typically extending no more than five years. Countries where governments do not present themselves regularly for a new mandate and should therefore be able to look decades ahead, do not in fact fare any better. To understand the limits of human planning, one need only review the troubled history of Russia or China when the Communists ran things, or Saudi Arabia today that still manages to be broke despite its vast oil revenues.

And, while fear is responsible for human responses as damaging as an arms race or as personal as refusing to stop and help someone in need, we do indeed have just such a capacity for denial of experience as Reid proposes. (This is not always a bad thing: If we did not, there would be precious few second marriages, some of which actually turn out spectacularly well).

Nevertheless, there are two straightforward answers to Reid's ostensibly rhetorical question.

People remain skeptical for two reasons.

First, notwithstanding Reid's rejection of what he calls the "hubris" argument --that "it is arrogant to believe humans could disturb a vast global ecosystem," our powers to disrupt things are indeed pathetic when compared to planetary and extraterrestrial forces. He offers examples, some of which are indeed testaments to human folly. However, it is one thing to overfish a species to the brink of extinction, or degrade the soil of a once-fertile watershed, but it is a task of an altogether different magnitude to influence an atmosphere that we know has fluctuated wildly all on its own in the not-so-distant past, and far beyond most pessimistic predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC's worst-case scenario, for instance, posits a 30-centimetre rise in sea levels over the next century, caused by melting ice sheets and the expansion of sea water in a warming atmosphere. Al Gore came up with six metres for his film, An Inconvenient Truth, by calculating what might happen in the unlikely event that human activity caused the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to entirely disappear.

But, mother nature mocks us. Thirty thousand years ago, human influence on the atmosphere was negligible, but the sea level was 135 metres lower than it is today. Meanwhile, fossil beaches suggest 5,000 years ago, it was two metres higher than today.

True the sea level has risen 30 centimetres in the last 100 years: But, given the dramatics of the last ice age, humanity's effect must be seen as amateur, even if validated. After all, the energy the Earth receives from the sun vastly dwarfs all other planetary sources put together, including mankind's efforts. As the Pembina Institute observes on its website promoting solar energy, "In 20 minutes, the amount of solar energy falling on the Earth could power the planet for one year."

Second, predictions of global climate are based on modelling. That is, a researcher feeds assumptions into a computer, which then generates a result. I wouldn't go so far as to call this futile, but obviously the conclusion can only be as comprehensive as the assumptions, and climate is nothing if not chaotic.

Some models, the so-called hockey stick graph purporting to show a sharp rise in global temperature in the last 100 years for example, have proved fatally vulnerable to statistical analysis. Even the best of them cannot account for random events--major volcanic activity for instance or, as Australian climate researcher Chris De Freitas observes in a paper released Thursday, the unforeseen warming effects of the Pacific El Nino current. Worse for the modellers, models based on current observations do little to account for past conditions, which throws their future predictions into doubt.

People may be all the dumb things Reid says they are--there's a reason why the Bible calls us sheep --but they understand that when forecasting weather two weeks out is hit and miss, it's hard to have confidence in climate predictions for the year 2109.

To be blunt, scientists who believe in anthropogenic global warming have yet to prove their case.

Some people will choose to believe them anyway, which is their right. Others, fearing in their own way some of them may be as agenda-driven as they believe their opponents to be, still ask for better evidence.

Reid will find it frustrating, but if trillions of dollars are to be spent, that too is their right.

nhannaford@theherald. canWest.com

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=

*****
July 25, 2009
An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

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Post by kmaherali »

Painkiller plant cures a world of ills
By Reese Halter, For The Calgary HeraldJuly 26, 2009

For thousands of years, the First Nations people have known the importance of respecting all living things. There certainly seems a natural cure for every ailment that afflicts humankind; the caveat is that we must not continue to dismantle all the wild ecosystems.

One of the most amazing plants that I have come across over the past quarter of a century of studying plants is the South Pacific noni or Morinda citrifolia.

This small blossoming shrub with its dark, glossy, 300-millimetre-long evergreen leaves are indigenous to Tahiti, southeastern Asia and Australia. It has been naturalized in China, India, parts of Africa and the Americas.

About 1,500 years ago, the Polynesians took noni seeds with them as they colonized the South Pacific Islands including Hawaii.

The noni plant produces egg-shaped fruits with indented pit-marks. Its tasteless yellowish white skin becomes near transparent when the fruit ripens. The ripened pulp, on the other hand, smells of strong cheese and the extracted pulp juice is quite bitter.

The fruits contain reddish-brown seeds that float in the ocean and accounts for noni's widespread global distribution.

Noni flourishes under harsh environmental conditions including the onslaught of salt, drought, sandy Australian soils, porous volcanic Hawaiian soils and nutrient poor limestone soils of Guam.

Noni fruit was an important food source for Australian, Burmese, Fijian and Samonian Aboriginals, and the red dye from the bark and yellow dye from the roots were used extensively by these peoples.

Noni roots, flowers, seeds, leaves, bark and fruits contain more than 140 nutraceuticals or medicinal extracts that act synergistically in the human body.

I recommend only using organically certified products.

Noni fruits contain 800 times more proxeronine than pineapple. Proxeronine is converted in the human body into a group of nitrogenous compounds-- the main constituent being xeronine. Xeronine enables all human cells the ability to work more efficiently in addition to correcting deficiencies and repairing damaged cells.

Noni's medicinal properties are known to enhance the thyroid and thymus glands, which fend off infections.

Moreover, noni boosts the human immune system by bolstering macrophages and lymphocytes--two integral parts of our defence system.

Incredibly, noni's medicinal properties help the human body attain homeostasis or a state of being normal. For instance, noni will correct blood sugar if it's too high or too low or if the body's acidity is too high or too low.

Japanese scientists isolated the compound damnacanthal from noni fruit, which inhibits some precancerous cells and thus tumour growth. Noni has also been shown to be effective in raising T-cell counts in victims suffering from AIDS. And noni is an effective treatment for type II diabetes.

Scopoletin is a plant nutrient found in noni fruit, which helps dilate blood vessels and successfully reduces high blood pressure.

Noni has terrific antibacterial properties able to combat Shingella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus morganii, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus aureus and Escherichia coli.

Noni contains a class of unsaturated hydrocarbons called terpenes--key components of essential plant oils which help rejuvenate cells, and possess strong analgesic actions that relieve pain.

In fact, in a study group of 8,000 patients in the U. S., over three quarters of the people that took noni reported relief from arthritis, bursitis, fibromyalgia and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Noni is also an anti-inflammatory and antihistaminic that efficiently fights allergies. It reduces menstrual cramps and it lessens the need for men with an enlarged prostate to urinate at night.

Veterinarians have experienced tremendous success using noni in treating pain, inflammation and as an anthelmintic or ridding animals of worms.

The use of noni obviates the need for pharmaceutical muscle relaxants, antiinflammatory and steroids.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that controls appetite, mood and anger and noni has a powerful serotonin binding capacity, which helps people who suffer from sleep disorder. Furthermore, noni provides relief for those suffering from depressions, nausea, digestive problems, diarrhea, anxiety, arrhythmias --or irregular heartbeat --and it has been proven to lower cholesterol.

Noni increases energy and endurance, and it helps reduce weight.

Noni is safe for children and pregnant or lactating mothers.

This remarkable South Pacific plant packs a tremendous punch and is worthy of being front and centre in your medicine cabinet.

Reese Halter is a public speaker and conservation biologist. His upcoming book is entitled the incomparable honey bee, rocky mountain books. He can be contacted through www.drreese.Com

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Post by kmaherali »

In defence of climatology

By David Mayne Reid,
For The Calgary Herald
August 18, 2009

Let me answer criticisms of my column "Why do so many not accept climate change data?" Although these criticisms (shown below in quotation marks) have been refuted by many others, many times, I will try again.

"Humans are insignificant. They can't affect the climate. Climate shows enormous natural variability."

No one debates climate variability. While natural factors, solar activity and volcanoes affect climate, humans are a potent additional factor, forcing climate change. William Ruddiman's hypothesis is worth study. His data suggests ancient agriculture and deforestation caused increases in greenhouse gases and began a global warming trend millennia ago. However, if you need hard facts, look at the devastating effects of 6.5 billion humans who, in 100 years, have radically altered the composition of the global atmosphere by increasing CO2, methane and N2O. Through habitat destruction and over-exploitation we are causing mass extinction of numerous land and marine species. The rate of species loss is unprecedented in the history of Earth. In 50 years there will be virtually no tropical rainforest, and marine fisheries will be a thing of the past. We have used most of the world's easily available phosphate. Without phosphate fertilizer there is no food.

The catalogue of human-caused environmental devastation is horrifyingly long. Don't tell me human actions are globally insignificant. Remember, even small changes in temperature, rainfall (remember Alberta drought 2001) or sea level devastate agriculture and economies.

"Most climate scientists have left-wing political agendas."

Nonsense, they come from all political stripes. Scientists are employed to make predictions: will a cancer spread; will an engineering structure collapse; will pine bark beetle advance? All scientists I know reach their conclusions without political motivation. It is not their fault if their deductions are unpalatable to some. Scientists examine the data, and try to make rational conclusions. There is no political agenda.

"It is not warming."

Sorry, it is. One must look at the long-term big picture and overall trends. Mean global temperatures are rising. It is misguided to compare today's temperature to one anomalous warm year in the '90s, or an earlier brief cool period. Contrary to the critics, Mann's "hockey stick graph" showing rapid temperature increase stands up well to recent statistical analysis. Yes, there is substantial year-to-year variation, but look at the overall temperature trend. It is warming.

"Prediction by computer modelling is useless."

Wrong, it is an effective tool. It is irrational for people to accept computer modelling for aircraft and bridge design and cancer research, but not climate studies.

Some argue modelling has no value because it failed to predict the economic collapse. Untrue, many economists predicted collapse but were ignored and publicly vilified, because those in power were too busy making money, and were deaf to bad news.

Some claim climate modelling only shows non-causally related correlations. For example, warming is correlated with human height AND greenhouse gas levels. Thus it is argued that the correlation between greenhouse gas and global temperature is meaningless. This is false logic. There is obviously no connection between human height and temperature, but greenhouse gases trap heat. Causality exists.

Computer modelling is the only technique for examining vast data sets and is an effective way to handle complex climate information. Model validity has been tested by using older climate data to see how it predicts today's climate. While not perfect, these models work well and so far they are the best and only guide to the future. Critics seem to argue that since modelling is not perfect, we should reject this tool, and forget about the fate of future generations. Nonsense, models work, they are improving, so let's use the tools we have, but constantly sharpen them.

While climate critics distrust modelling they fail to offer alternative techniques.

"They can't predict tomorrow's weather. How can they predict climate in 50 years?"

"Weather" and "climate" are different. "Weather" is the atmospheric condition at a specific time and place; impossible to predict with 100 per cent accuracy. Only a lunatic would claim that in Calgary at 10 a. m. on Jan. 1, 2100, the temperature will be Xo C. However, "climate" is the prevailing atmospheric conditions averaged over many years. Climate scientists do not give precise weather predictions for specific dates, but suggest trends, such as: Much of the Earth will warm over the next 100 years.

Even if the link between increased greenhouse gas and warming was somehow shown to be weak, that humans have dramatically altered the composition of the Earth's atmosphere in the blink of the eye in geological terms, warns us of our ability to cause negative environmental changes on a grand scale. If we continue to pollute the environment like this, something bad will inevitably happen. Climate scientists conclude it has already started.

The downside of legislating reductions in pollution will be substantial cost to the energy industry and job losses. The cost of their products will rise. The upside of pollution reduction is that the ecosystem and human health will improve, health-care costs decrease, profitable new industries using energy-efficient technologies, pollution reduction and alternative energy will grow, offsetting the above financial problems. Increased efficiency will preserve fossil fuels for future generations when cleaner technologies are available.

Less efficient, polluting companies will disappear.

Forward-thinking intellectually nimble industries will take their place. We will live in a cleaner, healthier world with a more sustainable economy. Sounds like a nice place to live.

David Mayne Reid Is A Professor Of Biology At The University Of Calgary.

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Post by kmaherali »

Poorest pay highest price for warming

By Wangari Maathai, For The Calgary Herald
September 18, 2009

In my home country of Kenya, a major drought is wreaking havoc on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Crops are shrivelled, cattle are dying--and there is an imminent threat of widespread hunger and starvation.

The situation is desperate and heartbreaking--but unfortunately, not completely surprising.

Decades of environmental mismanagement, coupled with global warming, is making extreme weather like droughts, hurricanes, floods, cyclones and erratic rainfalls a more regular occurrence everywhere. However, scientists say that 'developing countries,' especially those in Africa, whose economies are already precarious and where so many people, especially women, depend directly on the natural world for food, water and fuel, are being hardest hit. Mother Nature is, for much of the world's population, a rapidly diminishing source of human security.

In Darfur, for example, the lack of water is fuelling conflict as different groups fight over access to limited farm and pasture land, and deal with rapid desertification. Last summer, when I visited refugee camps in Eastern Chad, next to door to Darfur, I met an overwhelming number of women who had been raped while gathering firewood. Deforestation obliges women to walk farther and farther from the camps--and thus put themselves at risk of sexual violence.

The effects of climate change on individuals in poor countries--including Sudan, Zambia, Bangladesh and India--are well documented. A recent Oxfam report calculates that 26 million people have already been forced to migrate by climate change and other forms of degradation of the environment. In fact, by the middle of this century, such environmental refugees could number 200 million people.

The tragedy is that those hardest hit are least responsible. Per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world's least developed countries, for example, are almost negligible. Around 100 countries, most of them poor, account for only three per cent of global emissions. Canada is among the high-emitting countries on a per-capita basis, a minority club of major polluters that of course includes its neighbour to the south.

Whenever I come to Canada, people ask what they can do to help. Canada is a land of immigrants, and so many Canadians come from countries that are hardest hit by climate change. Equally important, the Canadians I meet seem anxious about the effects of climate change on themselves and others--and understand that their country bears responsibility for the problem and must help those global warming is hurting most.

My answer to this question is about leadership, because Canada's leadership and position counts in the international arena. Next week, the UN holds its Special Session on Climate Change in New York, and the G-20 nations will meet in Pittsburg. Canada can help turn the world's governments turn a corner in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit this December. Canada's leadership should include not only committing to slashing carbon emissions more aggressively, but also supporting significant financing to help developing countries adapt to climate change and utilize new technologies so they, too, can effectively reduce their emissions.

Of course, doing the right thing is not always easy. It is not yet clear, for example, how Canada can effectively fight climate change at home and still allow the tarsands to keep expanding. As an energy producing country, Canada is obviously struggling with some of the issues that are key to solving the global emissions problem. The world is watching closely how Canada manages this challenge. And with a global recession still raging, Canada will not be alone among the G-20 countries in trying to figure out how to find funding on the scale required-- some $150 billion a year.

But failure to make the investment now will come with a much higher price tag--and soon. Global warming and environmental degradation is making the world a far less secure place, not just for the citizens of Darfur, Kenya and Bangladesh-- but also for us all. The struggle for natural resources, and the costly wars that result, inevitably bring problems right to the front door of each Canadian.

A 'green deal' in Copenhagen which includes support for adaptation to climate change so vulnerable communities can stay where they are, access and afford-ability of green technology (particularly for energy) and protection of forests and trees--forest destruction or degradation accounts for up to one-fifth of all global carbon emissions--makes good sense for everyone. It is for this reason that the former prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin, and I accepted an invitation from the British and Norwegian governments to be co-chairs of the Congo Basin Forest Fund.

Climate financing is not charity. It is a strategic investment in tropical forests and natural resources that provide ecosystem services such as wood, clean drinking water and climate regulations and in turn nurture low-carbon economies in regions of the world beset by problems that include extreme poverty and widespread food insecurity. It will also create new jobs in low carbon goods and services, utilizing the sort of technology that Canada is in a good position to share with the rest of the world. Canada can show that it is a world leader by doing the right--and responsible --thing, and thus demonstrating that we are all in this together.

Wangari Maathai, The 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, Is The Founder Of The Green Belt Move-Ment ( greenbeltmovement.org)And A Co-founder Of The Nobel Women's Initiative (nobel- womensinitiative.org).She Is In Calgary Today To Speak At The Power Within--the Power Of Women Series At The Telus Convention Centre.

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Post by kmaherali »

Scientists pull an about face on global warming
By Lorne Gunter, For The Calgary Herald
September 19, 2009 9:03 AM

Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?

Or if Don Cherry claimed suddenly to like European hockey players who wear visors and float around the ice, never bodychecking opponents.

Or Jack Layton insisted that unions are ruining the economy by distorting wages and protecting unproductive workers.

Or Stephen Harper began arguing that it makes good economic sense for Ottawa to own a car company. (Oh, wait, that one happened.) But at least, the Tories-buy-GM aberration made all the papers and newscasts.

When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference--an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change --Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.

"How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."

But it is increasingly clear that global warming is on hiatus for the time being. And that is not what the UN, the alarmist scientists or environmentalists predicted. For the past dozen years, since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, it has been beaten into our heads with the force and repetition of the rowing drum on a slave galley that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100.

While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the face: None of the alarmist drummers ever predicted anything like a 30-year pause in their apocalyptic scenario.

Latif says he expects warming to resume in 2020 or 2030.

In the past year, two other groups of scientists--one in Germany, the second in the United States--have come to the same conclusion: Warming is on hold, likely because of a cooling of the Earth's upper oceans, but it will resume.

But how is that knowable? How can Latif and the others state with certainty that after this long and unforeseen cooling, dangerous man-made heating will resume? They failed to observe the current cooling for years after it had begun, how then can their predictions for the resumption of dangerous warming be trusted?

My point is they cannot. It's true the supercomputer models Latif and other modellers rely on for their dire predictions are becoming more accurate. But getting the future correct is far trickier. Chances are some unforeseen future changes will throw the current predictions out of whack long before the forecast resumption of warming.

Lorne Gunter is a columnist with the Edmonton Journal and National Post.

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latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate2-2009oct02,0,3269860.story

latimes.com

Climate summit delegates like state's planned carbon trading market
Governors, premiers and environmental officials from around the world attend the conference in Los Angeles, co-sponsored by the United Nations.
By Margot Roosevelt

October 2, 2009

Manoel Silva de Cunha, leader of a group of 200,000 Brazilian forest-dwellers, was blunt about why he traveled this week from the Amazon to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Summit.

The rubber tappers, nut gatherers and fishermen who live off tropical forests want money from American corporations to help them preserve the trees that cool the planet.

"These companies have polluted a lot," he said. "They have to make up for it."

Many of the 1,200 delegates who crowded into Century City's Hyatt Regency this week came with similar hopes: to cash in on California's expertise, its technology and the multimillion-dollar carbon trading market it plans to launch in 2012.

While Congress dithers over national climate legislation, and negotiators wrangle over a global treaty, governors, premiers and environmental officials from 70 states and provinces around the world gathered, as Schwarzenegger put it, for "action, action, action."

This year's gabfest is double the size of California's first climate summit last year and, for the first time, is co-sponsored by the United Nations.

Whatever greenhouse gas targets are ultimately adopted by national governments, it will be up to localities to "protect your forests from fire, your water supplies from contamination and your coastlines from erosion," Olav Kjorven, a U.N. assistant secretary general, told the group.

California, he added, has "blazed a path for other regional governments around the world to follow."

Some 20% of planet-heating emissions result from the burning of tropical forests and their conversion to soybean fields and cattle ranches.

But forests, which are complex to regulate, were not part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty that is to be revised in Copenhagen in December. Negotiators are debating whether wealthy nations will compensate such countries as Brazil and Indonesia to preserve trees, which store vast amounts of carbon.

Several dozen local officials and environmental groups from forest-rich nations gathered in Los Angeles for two days before this week's summit to discuss rules, similar to those recently adopted in California, to measure the carbon in their forests and provide credits to companies willing to pay for offsetting industrial emissions.

A country, or even a province, that develops trustworthy regulations and enforcement could be eligible to tap into California's planned cap-and-trade program or a broader system proposed for seven Western states and four Canadian provinces. Such a carbon trading system could funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to such communities as Brazilian rubber tappers, Indonesian island dwellers and Tanzanian villagers.

On Wednesday, Schwarzenegger officials signed an agreement with representatives of Mexican states to explore whether California's carbon rules could be adapted to preserve Sierra Madre forests, which harbor monarch butterflies.

Today, California officials are expected to finalize a partnership with the Chinese province of Jiangsu to share energy technology.

Why collaborate when companies from both nations are competing furiously over green technology? "California is the most energy-efficient state in the nation," said Secretary Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. "We want to sell our technology to them."

California officials are also exploring common ground with the Chinese to limit cement plant emissions in both countries, Adams said. California cement executives complain that if the state cracks down on their plants, they will have to import most of their cement from China, where controls are less stringent.

No public money was spent on the summit, according to administration officials. They refused to reveal the total cost of the event or confirm news reports that corporations paid between $100,000 and $250,000 to sponsor the gathering.

On the podium, Schwarzenegger thanked the Aga Khan, a philanthropist who focuses on development projects in the Middle East and Africa, as "one of the main sponsors." Panels including "The Evolution of Offsets" to "Opportunities for Industry in a Carbon Constrained World" featured video screens saying they were "graciously sponsored" by Shell Oil and other companies, many of which have a financial stake in proposed climate regulations.

margot.roosevelt @latimes.com

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Post by kmaherali »

October 31, 2009
French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME

PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.

Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.

But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

More....

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November 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Trucks, Trains and Trees
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Tapajós National Forest, Brazil

No matter how many times you hear them, there are some statistics that just bowl you over. The one that always stuns me is this: Imagine if you took all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world and added up their exhaust every year. The amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, all those cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships collectively emit into the atmosphere is actually less than the carbon emissions every year that result from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are now losing a tropical forest the size of New York State every year, and the carbon that releases into the atmosphere now accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global emissions contributing to climate change.

It is going to be a long time before we transform the world’s transportation fleet so it is emission-free. But right now — like tomorrow — we could eliminate 17 percent of all global emissions if we could halt the cutting and burning of tropical forests. But to do that requires putting in place a whole new system of economic development — one that makes it more profitable for the poorer, forest-rich nations to preserve and manage their trees rather than to chop them down to make furniture or plant soybeans.

Without a new system for economic development in the timber-rich tropics, you can kiss the rainforests goodbye. The old model of economic growth will devour them. The only Amazon your grandchildren will ever relate to is the one that ends in dot-com and sells books.

To better understand this issue, I’m visiting the Tapajós National Forest in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon on a trip organized by Conservation International and the Brazilian government. Flying in here by prop plane from Manaus, you can understand why the Amazon rainforest is considered one of the lungs of the world. Even from 20,000 feet, all you see in every direction is an unbroken expanse of rainforest treetops that, from the air, looks like a vast and endless carpet of broccoli.

Once on the ground, we drove from Santarém into Tapajós, where we met with the community cooperative that manages the eco-friendly businesses here that support the 8,000 local people living in this protected forest. What you learn when you visit with a tiny Brazilian community that actually lives in, and off, the forest is a simple but crucial truth: To save an ecosystem of nature, you need an ecosystem of markets and governance.

“You need a new model of economic development — one that is based on raising people’s standards of living by maintaining their natural capital, not just by converting that natural capital to ranching or industrial farming or logging,” said José María Silva, vice president for South America of Conservation International.

Right now people protecting the rainforest are paid a pittance — compared with those who strip it — even though we now know that the rainforest provides everything from keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere to maintaining the flow of freshwater into rivers.

The good news is that Brazil has put in place all the elements of a system to compensate its forest-dwellers for maintaining the forests. Brazil has already set aside 43 percent of the Amazon rainforest for conservation and for indigenous peoples. Another 19 percent of the Amazon, though, has already been deforested by farmers and ranchers.

So the big question is what will happen to the other 38 percent. The more we get the Brazilian system to work, the more of that 38 percent will be preserved and the less carbon reductions the whole world would have to make. But it takes money.

The residents of the Tapajós reserve are already organized into cooperatives that sell eco-tourism on rainforest trails, furniture and other wood products made from sustainable selective logging and a very attractive line of purses made from “ecological leather,” a k a, rainforest rubber. They also get government subsidies.

Sergio Pimentel, 48, explained to me that he used to farm about five acres of land for subsistence, but now is using only about one acre to support his family of six. The rest of the income comes through the co-op’s forest businesses. “We were born inside the forest,” he added. “So we know the importance of it being preserved, but we need better access to global markets for the products we make here. Can you help us with that?”

There are community co-ops like this all over the protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. But this system needs money — money to expand into more markets, money to maintain police monitoring and enforcement and money to improve the productivity of farming on already degraded lands so people won’t eat up more rainforest. That is why we need to make sure that whatever energy-climate bill comes out of the U.S. Congress, and whatever framework comes out of the Copenhagen conference next month, they include provisions for financing rainforest conservation systems like those in Brazil. The last 38 percent of the Amazon is still up for grabs. It is there for us to save. Your grandchildren will thank you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opini ... nted=print
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November 15, 2009
Lost There, Felt Here
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Belem, Brazil

“One million dollars?”

The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.

What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”

O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.

Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?

An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?

Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.

“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”

I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.

Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.

“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”

Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?

*****
November 15, 2009
Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.

Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.

Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?

“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but this forest is our home.”

No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is — or more accurately, used to be — a thick, staggeringly beautiful forest in western Kenya, capturing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feeding more than a dozen lakes and rivers across the region, even contributing to the flow of the Nile.

But in the past 15 years, because of ill-planned settlement schemes (the government essentially handed out chunks of forest to cronies), 25 percent of the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. The Ogiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswahili word “haribika,” which means spoiled. Scientists say the environmental destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried up lakes.

The results were painfully obvious this summer when East Africa was hit by one of the worst droughts in years. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hydropower, the water shortage meant blackouts, which many Kenyans believe contributed to the recent spike in crime and unemployment.

Suddenly, the Kenyan government seemed to spring into action, commissioning hefty environmental reports and insisting on ejecting all settlers from the Mau Forest so that the government could plant millions of trees and get the country’s water sources churning again. But the sudden environmental altruism has bred suspicion as well. Many Ogiek wonder if Kenyan politicians, notorious as among the world’s most corrupt, are driven by another kind of green.

“The government wants that forest for economic reasons, not conservation reasons,” said Towett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. “The only people who are going to benefit are the saw-millers.”

Almost as if to prove his point, beyond the bird chirps and cow bells tinkling across the smooth green hills was a different noise, a deeper, steadier noise, like a growl: bulldozers, many of them. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that timber companies are continuing to chew up large tracts of the Mau, knocking down giant trees and turning them into doors and plywood for export.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Julius Kavita, this area’s district commissioner, when asked what was going on.

Mr. Kavita said it was “complicated” and left it at that. But Kenyan environmental groups contend that powerful politicians control the timber companies, just as they control the dairies, the tea farms and other engines of Kenya’s economy.

To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into “native reserves” where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek’s eyes, for little else.

The persecution continued after Kenya’s independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away.

Mr. Kavita said the Ogiek, compared with the outside settlers who have chopped down trees to make cornfields, were “so kind to the forest.” But he was noncommittal on whether the Ogiek would get a special exemption from the planned evictions.

Nowadays, many of the same people who used to derisively refer to Ogiek as dorobo are claiming to be Ogiek themselves, “Ogiek originals,” in the hope they might get a break, too.

This could be a problem because the Ogiek are not great record keepers. Recent reports indicate that 8 of 10 Ogiek cannot read. Their total population is estimated at 5,000 to 20,000, many of them balancing their traditions with the trappings of modern life. It is not uncommon to see an Ogiek man with a quiver of eagle feather arrows in one fist and a cellphone in the other.

“I have one question,” said an Ogiek boy in a village near Marashoni. “Will the government evict us or not?”

Another young man tramped off into the woods to check a honey trap at the top of a tall tree. He was carrying a smoking coconut — “to make the bees sleep,” he explained — and wearing an antelope skin pouch and a pair of muddy sneakers. The last thing he did before shimmying up the bark and disappearing into the leaves was to kick off his shoes, a symbol of the world he was leaving behind, however fleetingly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world ... nted=print
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November 29, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
Before the Climate Conference, a Weather Report
By HANNE-VIBEKE HOLST, ZAKES MDA, EDGARD TELLES RIBEIRO and YOKO TAWADA.

President Obama and other world leaders will gather in Copenhagen next week to discuss climate change. Though this is a global issue, it’s also a profoundly local one. For this reason, the Op-Ed editors asked writers from four different continents to report on the climate changes they’ve experienced close to home. Here are their dispatches.


Denmark in the Wind
By HANNE-VIBEKE HOLST
In Copenhagen, the once moderate-to-fresh winds are now more often storms.

South Africa’s Fire Kingdom
By ZAKES MDA
In Cape Town, a rise in unpredictable and more ferocious fires are destroying the ecosystem.

The Penquins of Brazil
By EDGARD TELLES RIBEIRO
In Rio de Janeiro, shifiting ocean currents and water temperatures have changed bird migration patterns.

In Japan, Concerns Blossom
By YOKO TAWADA
In Tokyo, it no longer snows in winter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opini ... nted=print
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Suppressing science
Is Climategate world's biggest hoax?

Calgary HeraldDecember 3, 2009

On the eve of next week's Copenhagen climate summit, the evidence couldn't be more embarrassing for proponents of global warming. Leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU), one of the world's leading climate change research centres, indicate that prominent scientists cooked the books to make the case for man-made global warming.

Perhaps the scientists were just joking in some of the e-mails, as they now claim, and that they used "poorly chosen words." If the East Anglia scientists were serious about everything in those e-mails, it's a bombshell.

Misconduct at an institute as respected and influential as Hadley -- including the manipulation and deletion of data and deliberate attempts to suppress peer-reviewed papers skeptical of global warming, as the e-mailsindicate-- would undermine the very basis of an issue that is driving much of the world agenda. Global warming, endorsed by the national science academies of every major industrialized nation, would not only be flawed science, it would be the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the world.

It's an incredible assertion that is difficult to swallow, especially with the Alberta government spending billions on carbon sequestration.

The e-mails indicate an agenda-driven willingness among a group of like-minded scientists to influence what research gets published. In one 2003 e-mail, a scientist suggests boycotting the journal Climate Research, and manipulating its editors or getting them fired, for publishing articles contrary to the views of the Hadley CRU. In another message, the head of the Hadley climate unit, Philip Jones, wrote that he would try to exclude papers written by climate skeptics from a 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange(IPCC). He vowed in the e-mail to "keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

If he wasn't kidding, Jones's e-mail, and others like it, are distressing. On Tuesday, Jones announced his resignation while the school investigates the e-mails that indicate scientific and professional misconduct have been perpetrated by Jones and others.

Even those who accept the need to act on the theory of man-made global warming-- including this paper--can't deny that all science should be allowed to speak for itself. Nothing should be suppressed. As U.S. climatologist and global warming skeptic Roy Spencer notes: "Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting IPCC politics, not to find out how nature works. The 'data spin' is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science."

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

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December 6, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Will Big Business Save the Earth?
By JARED DIAMOND
Los Angeles

THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.

But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.

As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.

What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.

Let’s start with Wal-Mart. Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.

Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.

Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.

One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.

Coca-Cola’s problems are different from Wal-Mart’s in that they are largely long-term. The key ingredient in Coke products is water. The company produces its beverages in about 200 countries through local franchises, all of which require a reliable local supply of clean fresh water.

But water supplies are under severe pressure around the world, with most already allocated for human use. The little remaining unallocated fresh water is in remote areas unsuitable for beverage factories, like Arctic Russia and northwestern Australia.

Coca-Cola can’t meet its water needs just by desalinizing seawater, because that requires energy, which is also increasingly expensive. Global climate change is making water scarcer, especially in the densely populated temperate-zone countries, like the United States, that are Coca-Cola’s main customers. Most competing water use around the world is for agriculture, which presents sustainability problems of its own.

Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture. One company goal is to make its plants water-neutral, returning to the environment water in quantities equal to the amount used in beverages and their production. Another goal is to work on the conservation of seven of the world’s river basins, including the Rio Grande, Yangtze, Mekong and Danube — all of them sites of major environmental concerns besides supplying water for Coca-Cola.

These long-term goals are in addition to Coca-Cola’s short-term cost-saving environmental practices, like recycling plastic bottles, replacing petroleum-based plastic in bottles with organic material, reducing energy consumption and increasing sales volume while decreasing water use.

The third company is Chevron. Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.

First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.

Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.

In view of all those advantages that businesses gain from environmentally sustainable policies, why do such policies face resistance from some businesses and many politicians? The objections often take the form of one-liners.

• We have to balance the environment against the economy. The assumption underlying this statement is that measures promoting environmental sustainability inevitably yield a net economic cost rather than a profit. This line of thinking turns the truth upside down. Economic reasons furnish the strongest motives for sustainability, because in the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.

Americans learned that lesson from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when, as a result of government agencies balking for a decade at spending several hundred million dollars to fix New Orleans’s defenses, we suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage — not to mention thousands of dead Americans. Likewise, John Holdren, the top White House science adviser, estimates that solving problems of climate change would cost the United States 2 percent of our gross domestic product by the year 2050, but that not solving those problems would damage the economy by 20 percent to 30 percent of G.D.P.

• Technology will solve our problems. Yes, technology can contribute to solving problems. But major technological advances require years to develop and put in place, and regularly turn out to have unanticipated side effects — consider the destruction of the atmosphere’s ozone layer by the nontoxic, nonflammable chlorofluorocarbons initially hailed for replacing poisonous refrigerant gases.

• World population growth is leveling off and won’t be the problem that we used to fear. It’s true that the rate of world population growth has been decreasing. However, the real problem isn’t people themselves, but the resources that people consume and the waste that they produce. Per-person average consumption rates and waste production rates, now 32 times higher in rich countries than in poor ones, are rising steeply around the world, as developing countries emulate industrialized nations’ lifestyles.

• It’s futile to preach to us Americans about lowering our standard of living: we will never sacrifice just so other people can raise their standard of living. This conflates consumption rates with standards of living: they are only loosely correlated, because so much of our consumption is wasteful and doesn’t contribute to our quality of life. Once basic needs are met, increasing consumption often doesn’t increase happiness.

Replacing a car that gets 15 miles per gallon with a more efficient model wouldn’t lower one’s standard of living, but would help improve all of our lives by reducing the political and military consequences of our dependence on imported oil. Western Europeans have lower per-capita consumption rates than Americans, but enjoy a higher standard of living as measured by access to medical care, financial security after retirement, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and public transport.

NOT surprisingly, the problem of climate change has attracted its own particular crop of objections.

• Even experts disagree about the reality of climate change. That was true 30 years ago, and some experts still disagreed a decade ago. Today, virtually every climatologist agrees that average global temperatures, warming rates and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the earth’s recent past, and that the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions by humans. Instead, the questions still being debated concern whether average global temperatures will increase by 13 degrees or “only” by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, and whether humans account for 90 percent or “only” 85 percent of the global warming trend.

• The magnitude and cause of global climate change are uncertain. We shouldn’t adopt expensive countermeasures until we have certainty. In other spheres of life — picking a spouse, educating our children, buying life insurance and stocks, avoiding cancer and so on — we admit that certainty is unattainable, and that we must decide as best we can on the basis of available evidence. Why should the impossible quest for certainty paralyze us solely about acting on climate change? As Mr. Holdren, the White House adviser, expressed it, not acting on climate change would be like being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

• Global warming will be good for us, by letting us grow crops in places formerly too cold for agriculture. The term “global warming” is a misnomer; we should instead talk about global climate change, which isn’t uniform. The global average temperature is indeed rising, but many areas are becoming drier, and frequencies of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Some areas will be winners, while others will be losers. Most of us will be losers, because the temperate zones where most people live are becoming drier.

•It’s useless for the United States to act on climate change, when we don’t know what China will do. Actually, China will arrive at this week’s Copenhagen climate change negotiations with a whole package of measures to reduce its “carbon intensity.”

While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.

On each of these issues, American businesses are going to play as much or more of a role in our progress as the government. And this isn’t a bad thing, as corporations know they have a lot to gain by establishing environmentally friendly business practices.

My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don’t have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment. As for the rest of us, we should get over the misimpression that American business cares only about immediate profits, and we should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opini ... nted=print
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December 20, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Off to the Races
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen

I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change — the “Earth Day” strategy and the “Earth Race” strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need.

Indeed, anyone who watched the chaotic way this conference was “organized,” and the bickering by delegates with which it finished, has to ask whether this 17-year U.N. process to build a global framework to roll back global warming is broken: too many countries — 193 — and too many moving parts. I leave here feeling more strongly than ever that America needs to focus on its own Earth Race strategy instead. Let me explain.

The Earth Day strategy said that the biggest threat to mankind is climate change, and we as a global community have to hold hands and attack this problem with a collective global mechanism for codifying and verifying everyone’s carbon-dioxide emissions and reductions and to transfer billions of dollars in clean technologies to developing countries to help them take part.

But as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil told this conference, this Earth Day framework only works “if countries take responsibility to meet their targets” and if the rich nations really help the poor ones buy clean power sources.

That was never going to happen at scale in the present global economic climate. The only way it might happen is if we had “a perfect storm” — a storm big enough to finally end the global warming debate but not so big that it ended the world.

Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.

Does that mean this whole Earth Day strategy is a waste? No. The scientific understanding about the climate that this U.N. process has generated and the general spur to action it provides is valuable. And the mechanism this conference put in place to enable developed countries and companies to offset their emissions by funding protection of tropical rain forests, if it works, would be hugely valuable.

Still, I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s.

Therefore, the goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.

In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth.

Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”

Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.

If you start the conversation with “climate” you might get half of America to sign up for action. If you start the conversation with giving birth to a “whole new industry” — one that will make us more energy independent, prosperous, secure, innovative, respected and able to out-green China in the next great global industry — you get the country.

For good reason: Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.

An Earth Race led by America — built on markets, economic competition, national self-interest and strategic advantage — is a much more self-sustaining way to reduce carbon emissions than a festival of voluntary, nonbinding commitments at a U.N. conference. Let the Earth Race begin.

The public editor is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opini ... nted=print
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'Follow the Islamic way to save the world,' Prince Charles urges environmentalists
By Rebecca English
Last updated at 1:46 AM on 10th June 2010

Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic 'spiritual principles' in order to protect the environment.

In an hour-long speech, the heir to the throne argued that man's destruction of the world was contrary to the scriptures of all religions - but particularly those of Islam.

He said the current 'division' between man and nature had been caused not just by industrialisation, but also by our attitude to the environment - which goes against the grain of 'sacred traditions'.

Outspoken: Prince Charles speaks to Islamic studies scholars at Oxford. He argued that man's destruction of the world was particularly contrary to Islam
Charles, who is a practising Christian and will become the head of the Church of England when he succeeds to the throne, spoke in depth about his own study of the Koran which, he said, tells its followers that there is 'no separation between man and nature' and says we must always live within our environment's limits.

The prince was speaking to an audience of scholars at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies - which attempts to encourage a better understanding of the culture and civilisation of the religion.

His speech, merging religion with his other favourite subject, the environment, marked the 25th anniversary of the organisation, of which he is patron.

He added: 'The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason - and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us.
'Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with creation.'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0qPvQ8CcU

Full text of the speech:
http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speeche ... 16346.html

A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales titled Islam and the Environment, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
9th June 2010

Vice Chancellor, Your Royal Highnesses, Director, Ladies and Gentlemen.

It is a very great pleasure for me to be here today to help you celebrate the Oxford Centre's twenty-fifth anniversary. Whereas bits of your Patron are dropping off after the past quarter of a century, I find quite a few bits of the Centre still being added! However, I cannot tell you how encouraged I am that in addition to the Prince of Wales Fellowship, the number of fellowships you now offer continues to grow and also that this Summer you will welcome the fifth group of young people on your Young Muslim Leadership programme which is run in association with my charities. This is a vital contribution to the process of boosting the self-esteem of young Muslims – about whom I care deeply.

It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.

I am slightly alarmed that it is now seventeen years since I came here to the Sheldonian to deliver a lecture for the Centre that tried to do just this. I called it “Islam and the West” and, from what I can tell, it clearly struck a chord, and not just here in the U.K. I am still reminded of what I said, particularly when I travel in the Islamic world – in fact, because it was printed, believe it or not, it is the only speech I have ever made which continues to produce a small return!

I wanted to give that lecture to address the dangers of the ignorance and misunderstanding that I felt were growing between the Islamic world and the West in the aftermath of the Cold War. Since then, the situation has both improved and worsened, depending on where you look. Certainly the sorts of advances made by the Oxford Centre have helped to build confidence and understanding, but we all know only too well how some of the things I warned of in that lecture have since come to pass, both here and elsewhere in the world. So it is tremendously important that we continue to work to heal the differences and overcome the misconceptions that still exist. I remain confident that this is possible because there are many values we all share that have the powerful capacity to bind us, rather than what happens when those values are forgotten – or purposefully ignored.

Healing division is also my theme today, but this time it is not the divisions between cultures I want to explore. It is the division that poses a much more fundamental threat to the health and well-being of us all. It is the widening division we are seeing in so many ways between humanity and Nature.

Many of Nature's vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization. How they will manage if millions more people are to achieve Western levels of consumption is highly disturbing to contemplate. The problems are only going to get much worse. And they are very real. Whatever you might have read in the newspapers, particularly about climate change in the run up to the Copenhagen conference last year, we face many related and very serious problems that are a matter of accurate, scientific record.

The actual facts are that over the last half century, for instance, we have destroyed at least thirty per cent of the world's tropical rainforests and if we continue to chop them down at the present rate, by 2050 we will end up with a very disturbing situation. In fact, in the three years since I started my Rainforest Project to try and help find an innovative solution to tropical deforestation, over 30 million hectares have been lost, and with them this planet has lost about 80,000 species. When you consider that a given area of equatorial trees evaporates eight times as much rainwater as an equivalent patch of ocean, you quickly start to see how their disappearance will affect the productivity of the Earth. They produce billions of tonnes of water every day and without that rainfall the world's food security will become very unstable.

But there are other facts too. In the last fifty years our industrialized approach to farming has degraded a third of the Earth's top soil. That is a fact. We have also fished the oceans so extensively that if we continue at the same rate for much longer we are likely to see the collapse of global fisheries in forty years from now. Another fact. Then there are the colossal amounts of waste that pollute the Earth – the many dead zones where nothing can live in many major river estuaries and various parts of the oceans, or those immense rafts of plastic that now float about in the Pacific. Would you believe that one of them, off the coast of California, is made up of 100 million tonnes of plastic and it has doubled in size in just the last decade. It is now at least six times the size of the United Kingdom. And we call ourselves civilized!

These are all very real problems and they are facts – all of them, the obvious results of the comprehensive industrialization of life. But what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world's sacred traditions, including Islam.

What surprises me, I have to say, is that, quite apart from whether or not we value the sacred traditions as much as we should, the blunt economic facts make the predominant approach increasingly irrational. I imagine that few of you are familiar with the interim report of the United Nations study called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study which came out in 2008. It painted a salutary picture of what we lose in straightforward financial terms by our destruction of natural systems and the absence of their services to the world. In the first place they calculated that we destroy around 50 billion dollars worth of a system that produces these services every year. By mapping the loss of those services over a forty year period, their estimate is that, in financial terms, the global economy incurs an annual loss of between 2 and 4.5 trillion dollars – every single year.

To put that figure into some sort of perspective, the recent crash in the world's banking system caused a one-off loss of just 2 trillion dollars. I wonder why the bigger annual loss does not attract the same kind of Media frenzy as the banking crisis did?

This should demonstrate the flaw in the sum that does not need an Oxbridge mathematician to understand – that Nature's finite resources, divided by our ever-more rapacious desire for continuous economic growth, does not work out. We are clearly living beyond our means, already consuming the Earth's capital resources faster than she can replenish them.

Over the years, I have pointed out again and again that our environmental problems cannot be solved simply by applying yet more and more of our brilliant green technology – important though it is. It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well.

When I say this, everybody nods sagely, but I get the impression that many are often unwilling to embrace what I am really referring to, perhaps because the missing element sits outside the parameters of the prevailing secular view. It is this “missing element” that I would like to examine today.

In short, when we hear talk of an “environmental crisis” or even of a “financial crisis,” I would suggest that this is actually describing the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is a crisis in our relationship with – and our perception of – Nature, and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least two hundred years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us.

So I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide “crises” does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen.

In general, we live within a culture that does not believe very much in the soul anymore – or if it does, won’t admit to it publicly for fear of being thought old fashioned, out of step with “modern imperatives” or “anti-scientific.” The empirical view of the world, which measures it and tests it, has become the only view to believe. A purely mechanistic approach to problems has somehow assumed a position of great authority and this has encouraged the widespread secularisation of society that we see today. This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith. It is also despite the fact that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God. I am aware of one recent survey that suggests over seventy per cent of scientists do so.

I must say, I find this rather baffling. If this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural world in so many damaging ways?

I suppose it must be to do with who pays the fiddler. Over the last two centuries, science has become ever more firmly yoked to the ambitions of commerce. Because there are such big economic benefits from such a union, society has been persuaded that there is nothing wrong here. And so, a great deal of empirical research is now driven by the imperative that its findings must be employed to maximum, financial effect, whatever the impact this may have on the Earth’s long-term capacity to endure.

This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in Nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works and how we fit within the scheme of things. As a result, Nature has been completely objectified – “She” has become an “it” – and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.

Understanding the world from a mechanical point of view and then employing that knowledge has, of course, always been part of the development of human civilization, but as our technology has become ever more sophisticated and our industrialized methods so much more powerful, so the level of destruction is now potentially all the more widespread and un-containable, especially if you add into this mix the emphasis we have on consumerism.

It was that great scientist, Goethe, who saw life as the masculine principle striving endlessly to reach the “eternal feminine” – what the Greeks called “Sophia,” or wisdom. It is a striving, he said, fired by the force of love. I am not sure that this is quite the way things happen today. Our striving in the industrialized world is certainly not fired by a love of wisdom. It is far more focussed on the desire for the greatest possible financial profit.

This ignores the spiritual teachings of traditions like Islam, which recognize that it is not our animal needs that are absolute; it is our spiritual essence, an essence made for the infinite. But with consumerism now such a key element in our economic model, our natural, spiritual desire for the infinite is constantly being reflected towards the finite. Our spiritual perspective has been flattened and made earthbound and we are persuaded to channel all of our natural, never-ending desire for what Islamic poets called “the Beloved” towards nothing but more and more material commodities. Unfortunately we forget that our spiritual desire can never be completely satisfied. It is rightly a never-ending desire. But when that desire is focussed only on the earthly, it becomes potentially disastrous. The hunger for yet more and more things creates an alarming vacuum and, as we are now realizing, this does great harm to the Earth and creates a never ending unhappiness for many, many people.

I hope you can just begin to see my point. The utter dominance of the mechanistic approach of science over everything else, including religion, has “de-souled” the dominant world view, and that includes our perception of Nature. As soul is elbowed out of the picture, our deeper link with the natural world is severed. Our sense of the spiritual relationship between humanity, the Earth and her great diversity of life has become dim. The entire emphasis is all on the mechanical process of increasing growth in the economy, of making every process more “efficient” and achieving as much convenience as possible. None of which could be said to be an ambition of God. And so, unfashionable though it is to suggest it, I am keen to stress here the need to heal this divide within ourselves. How else can we heal the divide between East and West unless we reconcile the East and West within ourselves? Everything in Nature is a paradox and seems to carry within itself the paradox of opposites. Curiously, this maintains the essential balance. Only human beings seem to introduce imbalance. The task is surely to reconnect ourselves with the wisdom found in Nature which is stressed by each of the sacred traditions in their own way.

My understanding of Islam is that it warns that to deny the reality of our inner being leads to an inner darkness which can quickly extend outwards into the world of Nature. If we ignore the calling of the soul, then we destroy Nature. To understand this we have to remember that we are Nature, not inanimate objects like stones; we reflect the universal patterns of Nature. And in this way, we are not a part that can somehow disengage itself and take a purely objective view.

From what I know of the Qu’ran, again and again it describes the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent power. It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an “intelligibility” and that there is no separation between Man and Nature, precisely because there is no separation between the natural world and God. It offers a completely integrated view of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter are all part of one living, conscious whole. We are, therefore, finite beings contained by an infinitude, and each of us is a microcosm of the whole. This suggests to me that Nature is a knowing partner, never a mindless slave to humanity, and we are Her tenants; God's guests for all too short a time.

If I may quote the Qu’ran, “Have you considered: if your water were to disappear into the Earth, who then could bring you gushing water?” This is the Divine hospitality that offers us our provisions and our dwelling places, our clothing, tools and transport. The Earth is robust and prolific, but also delicate, subtle, complex and diverse and so our mark must always be gentle – or the water will disappear, as it is doing in places like the Punjab in India. Industrialized farming methods there rely upon the use of high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilizers, both of which need a lot more energy and a lot more water as well. As a consequence the water table has dropped dramatically – I have been there, I have seen it – so far, by three feet a year. Punjabi farmers are now having to dig expensive bore holes over 200 feet deep to get at what remains of the water and, as a result, their debts become ever deeper and the salt rises to the surface contaminating the soil.

This is not a sustainable way of growing food and maintaining the well-being of communities. It does not respect Divine hospitality. The costs it incurs will have to be borne by those who will inherit what is fast becoming the ruined and frayed fabric of life. So for their sake, we have to acknowledge that the immediate, short-term financial benefits of our predominant, mechanistic approach are too expensive to continue to dominate our way of life.

This happens when traditional principles and practices are abandoned – and with them, all sense of reverence for the Earth which is an inseparable element in an integrated and spiritually grounded tradition like Islam – just as it was once firmly embedded in the philosophical heritage of Western thought. The Stoics of Ancient Greece, for instance, held that “right knowledge,” as they called it, is gained by living in agreement with Nature, where there is a correspondence or a sympathy between the truth of things, thought and action. They saw it as our duty to achieve an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos.

This incidentally is also the teaching of Judaism. The Book of Genesis says that God placed Mankind in the garden “to tend it and take care of it,” to serve and conserve it for the sake of future generations. “Adamah” in Hebrew means “the one hewn from the Earth,” so Adam is a child of the Earth. In my own tradition of Christianity, the immanence of God is made explicit by the incarnation of Christ. But let us also not forget that throughout the Christian New Testament, Christ often refers to Himself as “the Son of Man” which, in Hebrew, is “Ben Adam.” He, too, is a “son of the Earth,” surely making the same explicit connection between human nature and the whole of Nature.

Even the apocryphal Gnostic texts are imbued with the same principle. The fragments of one of the oldest, ascribed to Mary Magdalene, instructs us that “Attachment to matter gives rise to passion against Nature. Thus, trouble arises in the whole body; this is why I tell you; be in harmony.” In all cases the message is clear. Our specific purpose is to “earth” Heaven. So, to separate ourselves within an inner darkness, leads to what the Irish poet, WB Yeats, warned of at the start of the Twentieth Century. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” he wrote, “things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.”

The traditional way of life within Islam is very clear about the “centre” that holds the relationship together. From what I know of its core teachings and commentaries, the important principle we must keep in mind is that there are limits to the abundance of Nature. These are not arbitrary limits, they are the limits imposed by God and, as such, if my understanding of the Qu'ran is correct, Muslims are commanded not to transgress them.

Such instruction is hard to square if all you do is found your understanding of the world on empirical terms alone. Four hundred years of relying on trying and testing the facts scientifically has established the view that spirituality and religious faith are outdated expressions of superstitious belief. After all, empiricism has proved how the world fits together and it is nothing to do with a “Supreme Being.” There is no empirical evidence for the existence of God so, therefore, Q.E.D, God does not exist. It is a very reasonable, rational argument, and I presume it can be applied to “thought” too. After all, no brain scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought, nor a piece of love, and it never will. So, Q.E.D., that must mean “thought” and “love” do not exist either!

Clearly there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul. This is why it consistently elbows soul out of the picture.

But we do have other kinds of “language,” as Islam well knows, and they are much better at dealing with the realm of the soul and matters of meaning. Each is a different aspect of our language, in fact. Each deals with different aspects of the truth and if you put empiricism, philosophy and the spiritual perception of life together, just as the Islamic tradition at its best and richest has always done, then they tend to complement each other rather well.

Take the difference this made in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, as an example, during the so-called “Golden Age of Islam.” It was a period which gave rise to a spectacular flowering of scientific advancement, but all of it was underpinned by an age-old philosophical understanding of reality and grounded in a profound spirituality, which included a deep reverence for the Natural world. Theirs was an integrated vision of the world, reflecting the timeless truth that all life is rooted in the unity of the Creator. This is the testimony of faith, is it not, embodied in the contemplative implication of the formless essence of the Qur'an's haqîqa? It is the notion of Tawhîd, the oneness of all things within the embrace of the Divine unity.

Islamic writers express it so well. Ibn Khaldûn, for instance, who taught that “all creatures are subject to a regular and orderly system. Causes are linked to effects where each is connected with the other.” Or the great Shabistâri in Fourteenth Century Persia, who talked of the world being “a mirror from head to foot, in every atom a hundred blazing suns where a world dwells in the heart of a millet seed.” Words that resonate, don't you think, with William Blake's famous lines, “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.”

Other Western poets have captured this truth too. William Wordsworth, perhaps one of the greatest of all our Nature poets, describes “a sense sublime of something far more inter-fused… a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought and rolls through all things.” I quote the poets because they help us identify this “sense sublime” and inspire reverence for the created world.

Reverence is not science-based knowledge. It is an experience always mediated by love, sometimes induced by it; and love comes from relationship. If you take away reverence and reduce our spiritual relationship with life, then you open yourself up to the idea that we can be little more than a chance group of isolated, self-obsessed individuals, disconnected from life’s innate presence and un-anchored by any sense of duty to the rest of the world. We are free to act without responsibility. Thus we turn a blind eye to those islands of plastic in the sea, or to the treatment meted out to animals in factory farms. And it is why the so-called “precautionary principle” is so often thrown out of the window.

This is the principle that would make us think twice if, say, we were to climb into a vehicle that happens to have a ninety per cent chance of crashing. Instead, because the danger is not proven beyond doubt, we think it is safe to embark upon the journey. This is how we proceed in many significant fields – in matters like genetic modification or climate change. We go on denying that there may be side-effects, even if our intuition warns us to be cautious, or even if there is some related evidence. Recently, for instance, the news emerged that, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honey bee colonies in the United States failed to survive the Winter. More than three million colonies in the U.S. and billions of honeybees worldwide have died. Scientists say they are no nearer to knowing what is causing this catastrophic collapse, but there is plenty of evidence that modern pesticides have played their part. Given that bees, like nearly every other bug, are insects, I would have thought it was rather obvious. And yet we carry on with a narrow-minded, mechanistic approach to industrialized farming with all its focus on high yields at whatever price. So we lace the fields with pesticides that kill insects. It is quite bizarre how we continue to entrust our food security to the very substances that are destroying the harmonic cycle which produces our food. It really is a form of collective hubris and I often wonder if those who practise such well-exercised scepticism in these matters will ever see that “the Emperor is wearing no clothes?”

This, then, is why the wisdom and learning offered by a sacred tradition like Islam matters – and, if I may say so, why those who hold and strive to preserve their sacred traditions in different parts of the world have every reason to become more confident of their ground. The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity. It is both Islam’s noble heritage and a priceless gift to the rest of the world. And yet, so often, that wisdom is now obscured by the dominant drive towards Western materialism – the feeling that to be truly “modern” you have to ape the West.

To counter that tendency I have done what I can with my School of Traditional Arts to nurture and support traditional and sacred craft skills – not least those of Islam – because they keep alive a perspective that we sorely need, even though short-term fashion deems them to be irrelevant. The geometry and patterning that are taught at the School are the basis of the many crafts that have been all but abandoned in many parts of the world, including the Islamic world. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that they are being forgotten because they reflect the spiritual mathematics found everywhere in Nature. As Islam teaches very specifically, it is a patterning that reflects the very ground of our being. It is the Divine imagination, so to speak; the ineffable presence that is the sacred breath of life. As the Seventeenth Century mystic, Ibn Âshir, puts it, by the practice of these arts you “see the One who manifests in the form, not the form by itself.”

For many in the modern world this is hard to understand because the view of God has become so distorted. “God” is seen as being, somehow, outside “His” creation, rather than part of its unfolding – what the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Being the principle that underlines the Cosmos, the Cosmos is the result of God knowing it and of it knowing the uncreated God. Notice the emphasis there on “un”-created. It is of profound importance. The basis of all existence is in this relationship.

I suspect the reason why this is such an unfashionable view is that the deep-seated experience of participation in the living, creative presence of God is offered to us in all traditions not by empiricism, but by revelation. This is a rare and precious gift and only given to those whose supreme humanity and capacity for great humility achieves a mastery over the ego. It comes at the moment when “the knower and the known” become one – the moment when the mind of Man comes into union with the mind of God.

This, of course, is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view, but revelation is a very different kind of knowing from scientific, evidence-based knowledge, and I cannot stress the point strongly enough; by dismissing such a process and discarding what it offers to humankind, we throw away a very important lifeline for the future.

I must say, once you do blend the different languages – the empirical and the spiritual together as I am suggesting, and as I have been trying to say for so long – then you do begin to wonder why the sceptics think the desire to work in harmony with Nature is so unscientific. Why is it deemed so worthwhile to abandon our true relationship with the “beingness” of all things; to limit ourselves to the science of manipulation, rather than immerse ourselves in the wider science of understanding? They seem such spurious arguments, because, as Islam clearly understands, it is actually impossible to divorce human beings from Nature’s patterns and processes. The Qur’an is considered to be the “last Revelation” but it clearly acknowledges which book is the first. That book is the great book of creation, of Nature herself, which has been taken too much for granted in our modern world and needs to be restored to its original position.

So, with all this in mind, I would like to set you a challenge, if I may; a challenge that I hope will be conveyed beyond this audience today. It is the challenge to mobilize Islamic scholars, poets and artists, as well as those craftsmen, engineers and scientists who work with and within the Islamic tradition, to identify the general ideas, the teachings and the practical techniques within the tradition which encourage us to work with the grain of Nature rather than against it. I would urge you to consider whether we can learn anything from the Islamic culture's profound understanding of the natural world to help us all in the fearsome challenges we face. Are there, for instance, any that could help preserve our precious marine eco-systems and fisheries? Are there any traditional methods of avoiding damage to all of Nature’s systems that revive the principle of sustainability within Islam?

To give you an idea of what I mean, let me offer a few examples drawn from the work done by my School of Traditional Arts, where project workers have shown that re-introducing traditional craft skills brings a coherence to peoples' daily lives, perhaps because they fuse the spiritual with the practical.

Since I founded it, the School has helped restore these skills in places as far afield as Jordan and Nigeria. It also helps to build bridges within communities in this country which have suffered the worst fractures. In Burnley in Lancashire, for instance, project workers have been teaching children from many backgrounds an integrated view of the world using the patterns of Islamic sacred geometry. This has not just inspired the imagination of the children taking part, but their teachers too. They tell me they have discovered a much more integrated approach to education, where maths and art are not alien to one another, but are seen as two sides of the same coin and directly rooted in Nature's patterns and processes.

In Afghanistan, I have only recently managed to see the work being done under the umbrella of what we have called “the Turquoise Mountain Foundation” – an initiative I launched some four years ago – which is running similar education programmes and craft training courses. It is also helping with the urban regeneration of the old historic quarter of the city by guiding people to start businesses using the craft skills they have learned.

For example, in the building of schools, people are being shown how to use mud-bricks which are a quarter of the price of the concrete blocks used by other agencies. They are also resistant to earthquakes, whereas concrete is not. And they cope much better with extremes of temperature – mud-brick buildings are cooler in the Summer and warmer in the Winter. What is more, they use local labour and local, natural materials. So these schools are a good example of how traditional wisdom blends with modern needs. After all, you can still use computers and other modern technology in a mud-brick building! And more comfortably, too, given it is more suited to local conditions.

When I finally did manage to reach Kabul earlier this year – after several years of trying – what I saw was truly remarkable. It proved to me that teaching and employing traditional crafts is an effective way of re-introducing the kinds of techniques that are benign to the natural environment. They are also capable of restoring a cultural balance in peoples' minds. By encouraging a wider celebration of the traditional, ancient culture of Afghanistan, these skills help in a very practical way to counteract the oppressive effects of extremism in all its forms, both religious and secular. This is how traditional wisdom works. It is not a theory or a science written down. Its wisdom is discovered through practice and in action.

These are schemes that are close to my heart, but the Oxford Centre keeps me informed of many others. Working in Muslim countries, the World Wildlife Fund has found that trying to convey the importance of conservation is much easier if it is transmitted by religious leaders whose reference is Qur'anic teaching. In Zanzibar, they had little success trying to reduce spear-fishing and the use of dragnets, which were destroying the coral reefs. But when the guidance came from the Qur'an, there was a notable change in behaviour. Or in Indonesia and in Malaysia, where former poachers are being deterred in the same way from destroying the last remaining tigers.

And it is not just such interventions that are important. It is mystifying, for instance, that the modern world completely ignores the time-honoured feats of engineering in the ancient world. The Qanats of Iran, for example, that still provide water for thousands of people in what would otherwise be desert conditions. These underground canals – unbelievably 170,000 miles of them – keep the water from the mountains moving down the tunnels using gravity alone. And the water in every village is then kept fresh by the way the storage towers keep the air flowing freely, moved by the wind.

In Spain, the irrigation systems constructed 1200 years ago also still work perfectly, as does the way in which the water is managed by the local population – a way of operating devised before the Muslim rule in Spain disintegrated. The same sorts of Islamic management schemes operate in other parts of the world too, like the “hima” zones in Saudi Arabia which set aside land for use as pasture. These are all examples of how prophetic teaching, in this case framed by the guidance of the Qu'ran, maintains a long term view of things and keeps the danger of a self-interested form of short-term economics at bay.

I am sure that if an organization like the Oxford Centre could help to establish a global forum on “Islam and the Environment” many more very practical, traditional approaches like these could become more widely applied. They may range from science and technology to agriculture, healthcare, architecture and education. Think what could be achieved if mothers and fathers, the teachers in madrassas and Imams, all sought to demonstrate to children how to translate Islamic teachings into practical action – how to blend traditional knowledge and awareness of Nature's needs with the best of what we know now.

This is certainly something I feel we have to do in the one final issue I have to mention as I close. Perhaps a few facts and figures might demonstrate why.

When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just three hundred thousand. Today, just over sixty years later, it is home to twenty million. Thirty-five thousand people live in every square mile of the city, and its population increases by another six hundred thousand every year.

I choose Lagos as an example. I could have chosen Mumbai, Cairo or Mexico City; wherever you look, the world's population is increasing fast. It goes up by the equivalent of the entire population of the United Kingdom every year. Which means that this poor planet of ours, which already struggles to sustain 6.8 billion people, will somehow have to support over 9 billion people within fifty years. In the Arab world, sixty per cent of the population is now under the age of thirty. That will mean, in some way or other, 100 million new jobs will have to be created in that region alone over the next ten to fifteen years.

I am well aware that the very long term prediction is that population may go down. 150 years from now the trends suggest there may be as few as four billion people, maybe even just two billion, but there is no getting away from the fact that in the short term, in the next fifty years, we face monumental problems as the figures rocket. No mega-city can ever hope to catch up with the present expansion in their numbers to provide adequate healthcare, education, transport, food and shelter for so many. Nor can the Earth herself sustain us all, when the demands and pressures on her bounty worldwide are becoming so intense.

I know it is a complicated issue. The experts suggest that, in theory, the Earth could support 9 billion people, but not if a vast proportion is consuming the world’s resources at present Western levels. So the changes have to be essentially two-fold. It would certainly help if the acceleration slowed down, but it would also help if the world reduced its desire to consume.

I have been following carefully the findings of my British Asian Trust in India which has been helping to run a women's education project in a drought-prone region of Maharashtra called Satara. They have noticed that a real difference can be made when women are able to become more involved in the running of the community. This is also the experience in Bangladesh. I have long been fascinated by Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It operates micro-credit schemes that offer loans to the poorest communities through a bank which is now ninety per cent owned by the rural poor. Interestingly, where the loans are managed by the women of the community, the birth rate has gone down. The impact of these sorts of schemes, of education and the provision of family planning services, has been widespread. Whereas in the 1980s, the average family in Bangladesh had six children, now the average figure is three. But with mega-cities growing as they are, I fear there is little chance these sorts of schemes can help the plight of many millions of people unless we all face up to the fact more honestly than we do that one of the biggest causes of high birth rates remains cultural.

It raises some very difficult moral questions, I know, but do we not each one of us carry the same responsibility towards the Earth? It is surely time to ask if we can come to a view that balances the traditional attitude to the sacred nature of life on the one hand with, on the other, those teachings within each of the sacred traditions that urge humankind to keep within the limits of Nature’s benevolence and bounty.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have endured all this with patience and fortitude. You have also given a very good impression of listening to my own personal thoughts on the perspective opened up by Islamic teaching. I have wanted to convey them to you because it always moves me to be reminded that, from the perspective of traditional Islamic teaching, the destruction of the Earth is represented as the destruction of a prayerful being.

Whichever faith tradition we come from, the fact at the heart of the matter is the same. Our inheritance from our creator is at stake. It will be no good at the end of the day as we sit amidst the wreckage, trying to console ourselves that it was all done for the best possible reasons of development and the betterment of Mankind. The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason – and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us. Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with Creation.

The Modernist ideology that has dominated the Western outlook for a century implies that “tradition” is backward looking. What I have tried to explain today is that this is far from true. Tradition is the accumulation of the knowledge and wisdom that we should be offering to the next generation. It is, therefore, visionary – it looks forward.

Turning to the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world, does not mean locking us into some sort of cultural and technological immobility. As the English writer G.K. Chesterton put it, “real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as a root.” I would also remind you of the words of Oxford’s very own C.S. Lewis, who pointed out that “sometimes you do have to turn the clock back if it is telling the wrong time” – that there is nothing “progressive” about being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge that we have taken the wrong road. If we realize that we are travelling in the wrong direction, the only sensible thing to do is to admit it and retrace our steps back to where we first went wrong. As Lewis put it, “going back can sometimes be the quickest way forward.” It is the most progressive thing we could do.

All of the mounting evidence is telling us that we are, indeed, on the wrong road, so you might think it would be wise to draw on the timeless guidance that comes from our intuitive sense of the origin of all things to which we are rooted. Nature's rhythms, her cycles and her processes, are our guides to this uncreated, originating voice. They are our greatest teachers because they are expressions of Divine Unity. Which is why there is a profound truth in that seemingly simple, old saying of the nomads – that “the best of all Mosques is Nature herself.”
Last edited by kmaherali on Sun Jun 27, 2010 10:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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June 15, 2010, 6:53 pm
Road Kill in the Serengeti?
By OLIVIA JUDSON

Felix Borner

An aerial view of the wildebeest migration in the central Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.

Imagine. You are lying in the grass in the east African savannah, watching wildebeest fording a shallow river. You can hear the funny grunting noises they make, and as they pass by, you can feel the impact of their hooves on the ground and smell their rich animal smell. You see their kicking heels, their beautiful sleek bodies. Then you look up, and you realize that the herd stretches as far as you can see, that the plain is dark with wildebeest. If you were to wait for them all to pass, you would be there for days.

The sight is magnificent, primal and profoundly moving. It is the wildebeest migration.

Every year, more than a million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, move through the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem of Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains. In the course of a year, an individual wildebeest may cover as much as 2,100 kilometers. (That’s more than 1,300 miles — which is further than the distance between New York and New Orleans.) It is the last great migration on Earth.

But for how much longer? A large part of the migration takes place within the vast Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and there are reports that the Tanzanian government is preparing to build a major road through the northern part of the park: through a designated wilderness area, through the migration route.

Roads are catastrophic for wildlife. The experiment has been done again and again all over the world: we know. Among the problems: roads allow the easy spread of invasive plant species, as car tires often carry their seeds. Roads also allow the rapid spread of animal diseases, and lead to an increase in poaching, building and other human activities.

But by far the biggest problem is that roads fragment habitats and disrupt animal movements. Many animals are reluctant to cross roads, even those with little traffic. And when there is a lot of traffic, the lives of people and animals are both at risk.


Grant Hopcraft

A female wildebeest with her month-old calf. The usual solution is to fence the road to protect the cars. Doing this here would likely end the migration, cause the collapse of the wildebeest population — and destroy the Serengeti as we know it.

The reason is that the lands to the north of the proposed road remain wet when the lands to the south have become dry. Unable to reach the water, tens of thousands of animals would die of hunger and thirst; many would become tangled in the fence. Building the road with animal tunnels or overpasses, as has been done in Canada and other countries, would be expensive and impractical; moreover, it probably would not work, as wildebeest are sensitive to disturbance. They already avoid areas frequented by poachers, and are alarmed by cars.

And if the migration stopped, the Serengeti would cease to be the Serengeti, for the wildebeest define the ecosystem and drive its dynamics. The migration is the reason the wildebeest are so numerous: it allows them to transcend the limitations imposed by local supplies of food, water and predators. And in their travels, the animals spread nutrients throughout the system. They fertilize plants with their urine and dung, and trample the soil. By doing so, they help to maintain a diverse array of plants, insects and birds, and are themselves food for large numbers of lions and hyenas.

Wildebeest also help to maintain large numbers of humans. Tourism accounts for 8 percent of gross domestic product in Tanzania, and more than 600,000 jobs. If the migration stopped, tourism would likely decline. After all, there would be much less to see.

Good roads are, of course, an important part of economic development. They connect isolated communities, and allow for the trucking of commodities between inland areas and port cities. One of the challenges of conservation is balancing the needs of humans today while protecting the resources of tomorrow.


Felix Borner

Wildebeest already face challenges on their journey, including crossing rivers, like the Masai Mara above in Kenya, and navigating through the homeranges of more than 2,500 lions and over 7,000 hyena that live in the Serengeti.

But the peculiar thing about this road is that it is not a case of animals versus people. There is an alternative — a road to the south of the park that would connect five times more people, and cost less to build. It would also be easier, since the landscape there is flatter; and it would not affect the animal migrations. And the northern road has been vigorously rejected on environmental grounds before.

Even more peculiar: up to now, the government of Tanzania has had an outstanding record of conservation. Around a quarter of the country’s area is managed with a view to preserving wildlife, and at 50,000 square kilometers (almost 20,000 square miles) the Selous Game Reserve is the largest protected area in Africa. Tanzania boasts seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites, of which four are nature reserves — including the Serengeti National Park.

Moreover, the president of Tanzania, Dr. Jakaya Kikwete, is known for his interest in nature. When six black rhinos arrived in the Serengeti in May — they were flown in from South Africa as part of a rhino relocation program — the president himself was there to meet them, and he has often spoken of the importance of the parks to Tanzania. Indeed, he sometimes quotes Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere:

“The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa. These wild creatures amid the wild places they inhabit are not only important as a resource of wonder and inspiration but are an integral part of our natural resources and our future livelihood and wellbeing. In accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife we solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power to make sure that our children’s grand-children will be able to enjoy this rich and precious heritage.”

It is not clear why the Serengeti road is being considered: I was unable to reach anyone in the Tanzanian government who would comment. But what is clear is that one of the most marvelous and awe-inspiring sights on the planet might soon vanish, killed by a road.


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Notes and more at:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... n&emc=tya3
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