Photos at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/opini ... ?th&emc=th
July 16, 2010
Our Beaker Is Starting to Boil
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
David Breashears is one of America’s legendary mountain climbers, a man who has climbed Mount Everest five times and led the Everest IMAX film team in 1996.
These days, Mr. Breashears is still climbing the Himalayas, but he is lugging more than pitons and ice axes. He’s also carrying special cameras to document stunning declines in glaciers on the roof of the world.
Mr. Breashears first reached the top of Everest in 1983, and in many subsequent trips to the region he noticed the topography changing, the glaciers shrinking. So he dug out archive photos from early Himalayan expeditions, and then journeyed across ridges and crevasses to photograph from the exact same spots.
The pairs of matched photographs, old and new, are staggering. Time and again, the same glaciers have shrunk drastically in every direction, often losing hundreds of feet in height.
“I was just incredulous,” he told me. “We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.”
Mr. Breashears led me through a display of these paired photographs at the Asia Society in New York. One 1921 photo by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who died near the summit of Everest three years later, shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier. Mr. Breashears located the very spot from which Mallory had snapped that photo and took another — only it is a different scene, because the glacier has lost 330 feet of vertical ice.
Some research in social psychology suggests that our brains are not well adapted to protect ourselves from gradually encroaching harms. We evolved to be wary of saber-toothed tigers and blizzards, but not of climate change — and maybe that’s also why we in the news media tend to cover weather but not climate. The upshot is that we’re horrifyingly nonchalant at the prospect that rising carbon emissions may devastate our favorite planet.
NASA says that the January-through-June period this year was the hottest globally since measurements began in 1880. The Web site ClimateProgress.org, which calls for more action on climate change, suggests that 2010 is likely to be the warmest year on record. Likewise, the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University says that the months of May and June had the lowest snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere since the lab began satellite observations in 1967.
So signs of danger abound, but like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, we seem unable to rouse ourselves.
(Actually, it seems that frogs will not remain in a beaker that is slowly heated. Snopes.com quotes a distinguished zoologist as saying that frogs become agitated as the temperature slowly rises and struggle to escape, although it does not specify how the zoologist knows this.)
From our own beaker, we’ve watched with glazed eyes as glaciers have retreated worldwide. Glacier National Park now has only about 25 glaciers, compared with around 150 a century ago. In the Himalayas, the shrinkage seems to be accelerating, with Chinese scientific measurements suggesting that some glaciers are now losing up to 26 feet in height per year.
Orville Schell, who runs China programs at the Asia Society, described passing a series of pagodas as he approached the Mingyong Glacier on the Tibetan plateau. The pagodas were viewing platforms, and had to be rebuilt as the glacier retreated: this monumental, almost eternal force of nature seemed mortally wounded.
“A glacier is a giant part of the alpine landscape, something we always saw as immortal,” Mr. Schell said. “But now this glacier is dying before our eyes.”
An Indian glaciologist, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, now at the Stimson Center in Washington, told me that most Himalayan glaciers are in retreat for three reasons. First is the overall warming tied to carbon emissions. Second, rain and snow patterns are changing, so that less new snow is added to replace what melts. Third, pollution from trucks and smoke covers glaciers with carbon soot so that their surfaces become darker and less reflective — causing them to melt more quickly.
The retreat of the glaciers threatens agriculture downstream. A study published last month in Science magazine indicated that glacier melt is essential for the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers, while less important a component of the Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The potential disappearance of the glaciers, the report said, is “threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people” in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins.
We Americans have been galvanized by the oil spill on our gulf coast, because we see tar balls and dead sea birds as visceral reminders of our hubris in deep sea drilling. The melting glaciers should be a similar warning of our hubris — and of the consequences that the earth will face for centuries unless we address carbon emissions today.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.
Environment and Spirituality
Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself
Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments – and people generally – should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict.” Yet, the Earth is still here. “It’s a survivor.”
Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.” For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.
Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future,” he says, “not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control.” Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.
Prof. Laughlin is the co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for physics. Brilliantly imagined, incisively expressed and vastly entertaining, Prof. Laughlin’s essay on climate change (What the Earth Knows) has been adapted from his forthcoming book on the future of fossil fuels. (His 2008 book, The Crime of Reason, documented pervasive government and corporate “sequestering” of scientific knowledge.)
You can’t discuss climate change, Prof. Laughlin says, without looking backward across geologic time. He puts ordinary rainfall into perspective to illustrate the point. The rain that now falls on the world in a normal year measures a metre – “about the height of a golden retriever.” The rain that has fallen since the beginning of the Industrial Age measures 200 metres. The rain that has fallen since the age of dinosaurs would fill Earth’s oceans 20,000 times. The rain that has fallen since oxygen formed would fill the entire world 100 times.
Yet, the amount of water in Earth’s oceans hasn’t changed significantly in all of this time. In Earth’s most recent glacial melting, 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose by one centimetre a year for 10,000 years – and then abruptly stopped. The heat required to produce this melting was 10 times the total energy consumption of all human civilization.
Excess carbon in the atmosphere? It happens all the time. And Earth deals with it. Anything that humans do to mitigate it will be a waste of time. Governments and citizens delude themselves when they think they can make a difference.
“The Earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation,” Prof. Laughlin writes. “It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator and television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car.
“These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the Earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: All the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air and none is left to burn.”
The Earth will dissolve the bulk of this atmospheric carbon dioxide in its oceans, a process that will take roughly 1,000 years. (The oceans now hold 30 trillion tons of carbon – 30 times the world’s coal reserves.) Over tens of thousands of years, the Earth will transfer excess carbon dioxide into rocks, a process that will ultimately restore carbon dioxide concentrations to the same level that prevailed before humans existed.
How do we know the Earth will turn excess carbon dioxide into limestone? We know because the world’s carbon dioxide levels are determined “by a geologic regulatory process.” The proof is in Earth’s rocks.
Prof. Laughlin concedes that excess carbon dioxide could – “in a handful of examples” – contribute to the extinction of species. He cites corals as an example. But he insists that keeping carbon in the ground for a little while longer won’t make much difference to animal or to organism.
The real extinction problem, he says, is human population pressure: habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, overharvesting, species invasion. This is a distinction of great importance because it might help direct environmental concern to goals that people can actually achieve: Forget Gaia, save a marsh; forget the planet, save a frog.
The Earth regulates climate change in geologic time, Prof. Laughlin says, “without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on, Prof. Laughlin says. So should we.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... le1642767/
Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments – and people generally – should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict.” Yet, the Earth is still here. “It’s a survivor.”
Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.” For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.
Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future,” he says, “not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control.” Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.
Prof. Laughlin is the co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for physics. Brilliantly imagined, incisively expressed and vastly entertaining, Prof. Laughlin’s essay on climate change (What the Earth Knows) has been adapted from his forthcoming book on the future of fossil fuels. (His 2008 book, The Crime of Reason, documented pervasive government and corporate “sequestering” of scientific knowledge.)
You can’t discuss climate change, Prof. Laughlin says, without looking backward across geologic time. He puts ordinary rainfall into perspective to illustrate the point. The rain that now falls on the world in a normal year measures a metre – “about the height of a golden retriever.” The rain that has fallen since the beginning of the Industrial Age measures 200 metres. The rain that has fallen since the age of dinosaurs would fill Earth’s oceans 20,000 times. The rain that has fallen since oxygen formed would fill the entire world 100 times.
Yet, the amount of water in Earth’s oceans hasn’t changed significantly in all of this time. In Earth’s most recent glacial melting, 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose by one centimetre a year for 10,000 years – and then abruptly stopped. The heat required to produce this melting was 10 times the total energy consumption of all human civilization.
Excess carbon in the atmosphere? It happens all the time. And Earth deals with it. Anything that humans do to mitigate it will be a waste of time. Governments and citizens delude themselves when they think they can make a difference.
“The Earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation,” Prof. Laughlin writes. “It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator and television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car.
“These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the Earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: All the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air and none is left to burn.”
The Earth will dissolve the bulk of this atmospheric carbon dioxide in its oceans, a process that will take roughly 1,000 years. (The oceans now hold 30 trillion tons of carbon – 30 times the world’s coal reserves.) Over tens of thousands of years, the Earth will transfer excess carbon dioxide into rocks, a process that will ultimately restore carbon dioxide concentrations to the same level that prevailed before humans existed.
How do we know the Earth will turn excess carbon dioxide into limestone? We know because the world’s carbon dioxide levels are determined “by a geologic regulatory process.” The proof is in Earth’s rocks.
Prof. Laughlin concedes that excess carbon dioxide could – “in a handful of examples” – contribute to the extinction of species. He cites corals as an example. But he insists that keeping carbon in the ground for a little while longer won’t make much difference to animal or to organism.
The real extinction problem, he says, is human population pressure: habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, overharvesting, species invasion. This is a distinction of great importance because it might help direct environmental concern to goals that people can actually achieve: Forget Gaia, save a marsh; forget the planet, save a frog.
The Earth regulates climate change in geologic time, Prof. Laughlin says, “without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on, Prof. Laughlin says. So should we.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... le1642767/
Trees for Food, Fuel and Fodder
“Small-holder and community forestry should be included in the carbon trading system.”
Geneva, January 2011—The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which has planted over 100 million trees in Asia and Africa, has made a commitment to plant over 10 million more trees.
The commitment by the Geneva-based development organization coincides with the world-wide launch of the International Year of Forests.
“By planting trees, we have supported biodiversity, restored degraded forests, revived rural communities and provided carbon sequestration to combat climate change,” said David Boyer, Director of the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment. “But the best way to increase the number of trees on the planet is to provide incentives for their propagation and preservation.”
“In areas where there is intense competition for firewood, for example, sustainable tree planting can be seen as a way of providing jobs and building assets, not just as a good thing to do. We see sustainable tree planting having a significant impact on both poverty alleviation and the environment.”
In Pakistan, AKDN works both on the supply and demand sides. Rural communities know that sustainably managed agro-forestry provides dividends in the form of food, fuel and fodder, so AKDN has worked with one million people in northern Pakistan to plant over 100 million trees and bring 90,000 hectares of marginalized land under cultivation.
At the same time, it has introduced more efficient stoves that cut both biomass consumption and wood-gathering time by 50 percent (the programme has won both an Alcan Prize for Sustainability (2005) and a World Habitat Award (2006)). Over 250 mini-hydroelectric plants drawing water from mountain streams power remote communities in another prize-winning programme that cuts fuel-wood consumption (the programme has won a number of awards, including an Ashden Award, or “Green Oscar”, in 2004).
Near Nairobi, Kenya, a project company of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, Frigoken, processes the output of 75,000 small-holding green bean farmers, but in 2010 it also trained unemployed young people to produce tree seedlings. Over half a million seedlings were planted in village nurseries. The programme won the 2010 Total Eco Challenge. Another similar AKDN programme on the Kenyan coast produced and planted 500,000 seedlings in 2009. An additional 1.2 million seedlings were propagated and planted in 2010.
The Serena Hotels Group (also an AKDN project company) has planted over one million trees in the Mt. Kenya National Park and the Amboseli National Park in a programme, called “Planting a Tree for Africa”, which expects to plant 10 million trees in Kenya alone.
“Ensuring that sustainable small-holder and community forestry is included in the carbon trading system will help the rural poor generate income gains, meet environmental and carbon mitigation needs while reducing community vulnerability,” says David Boyer.
For more information:
Sam Pickens, AKDN Communications
Aga Khan Development Network
1-3 avenue de la paix
Tel. 022 909 7200
Email: info@akdn.org
Notes:
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) was founded by His Highness the Aga Khan. The nine AKDN agencies work to improve the welfare and prospects of people in the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa. The annual budget of the eight non-profit agencies is in excess of US$500 million. The 90 project companies of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), which is incorporated as a for-profit development agency under Swiss law, operate as commercial entities but all surpluses are reinvested in further development activity.
http://www.akdn.org/Content/1045
“Small-holder and community forestry should be included in the carbon trading system.”
Geneva, January 2011—The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which has planted over 100 million trees in Asia and Africa, has made a commitment to plant over 10 million more trees.
The commitment by the Geneva-based development organization coincides with the world-wide launch of the International Year of Forests.
“By planting trees, we have supported biodiversity, restored degraded forests, revived rural communities and provided carbon sequestration to combat climate change,” said David Boyer, Director of the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment. “But the best way to increase the number of trees on the planet is to provide incentives for their propagation and preservation.”
“In areas where there is intense competition for firewood, for example, sustainable tree planting can be seen as a way of providing jobs and building assets, not just as a good thing to do. We see sustainable tree planting having a significant impact on both poverty alleviation and the environment.”
In Pakistan, AKDN works both on the supply and demand sides. Rural communities know that sustainably managed agro-forestry provides dividends in the form of food, fuel and fodder, so AKDN has worked with one million people in northern Pakistan to plant over 100 million trees and bring 90,000 hectares of marginalized land under cultivation.
At the same time, it has introduced more efficient stoves that cut both biomass consumption and wood-gathering time by 50 percent (the programme has won both an Alcan Prize for Sustainability (2005) and a World Habitat Award (2006)). Over 250 mini-hydroelectric plants drawing water from mountain streams power remote communities in another prize-winning programme that cuts fuel-wood consumption (the programme has won a number of awards, including an Ashden Award, or “Green Oscar”, in 2004).
Near Nairobi, Kenya, a project company of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, Frigoken, processes the output of 75,000 small-holding green bean farmers, but in 2010 it also trained unemployed young people to produce tree seedlings. Over half a million seedlings were planted in village nurseries. The programme won the 2010 Total Eco Challenge. Another similar AKDN programme on the Kenyan coast produced and planted 500,000 seedlings in 2009. An additional 1.2 million seedlings were propagated and planted in 2010.
The Serena Hotels Group (also an AKDN project company) has planted over one million trees in the Mt. Kenya National Park and the Amboseli National Park in a programme, called “Planting a Tree for Africa”, which expects to plant 10 million trees in Kenya alone.
“Ensuring that sustainable small-holder and community forestry is included in the carbon trading system will help the rural poor generate income gains, meet environmental and carbon mitigation needs while reducing community vulnerability,” says David Boyer.
For more information:
Sam Pickens, AKDN Communications
Aga Khan Development Network
1-3 avenue de la paix
Tel. 022 909 7200
Email: info@akdn.org
Notes:
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) was founded by His Highness the Aga Khan. The nine AKDN agencies work to improve the welfare and prospects of people in the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa. The annual budget of the eight non-profit agencies is in excess of US$500 million. The 90 project companies of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), which is incorporated as a for-profit development agency under Swiss law, operate as commercial entities but all surpluses are reinvested in further development activity.
http://www.akdn.org/Content/1045
April 11, 2012
Why Trees MatterBy JIM ROBBINS
Helena, Mont.
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.
We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.
For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.
Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.
What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.
Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.
Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.
A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.
Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”
Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opini ... h_20120412
Why Trees MatterBy JIM ROBBINS
Helena, Mont.
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.
We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.
For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.
Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.
What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.
Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.
Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.
A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.
Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”
Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opini ... h_20120412
The Chickadee’s Guide to Gardening
In Your Garden, Choose Plants That Help the Environment
OXFORD, Pa. — I GREW up thinking little of plants. I was interested in snakes and turtles, then insects and, eventually, birds. Now I like plants. But I still like the life they create even more.
Plants are as close to biological miracles as a scientist could dare admit. After all, they allow us, and nearly every other species, to eat sunlight, by creating the nourishment that drives food webs on this planet. As if that weren’t enough, plants also produce oxygen, build topsoil and hold it in place, prevent floods, sequester carbon dioxide, buffer extreme weather and clean our water. Considering all this, you might think we gardeners would value plants for what they do. Instead, we value them for what they look like.
When we design our home landscapes, too many of us choose beautiful plants from all over the world, without considering their ability to support life within our local ecosystems.
Last summer I did a simple experiment at home to measure just how different the plants we use for landscaping can be in supporting local animals. I compared a young white oak in my yard with one of the Bradford pears in my neighbor’s yard. Both trees are the same size, but Bradford pears are ornamentals from Asia, while white oaks are native to eastern North America. I walked around each tree and counted the caterpillars on their leaves at head height. I found 410 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 19 different species), and only one caterpillar (an inchworm) on the Bradford pear.
Was this a fluke? Hardly. The next day I repeated my survey on a different white oak and Bradford pear. This time I found 233 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 15 species) and, again, only one on the Bradford pear.
Why such huge differences? It’s simple: Plants don’t want to be eaten, so they have loaded their tissues with nasty chemicals that would kill most insects if eaten. Insects do eat plants, though, and they achieve this by adapting to the chemical defenses of just one or two plant lineages. So some have evolved to eat oak trees without dying, while others have specialized in native cherries or ashes and so on.
But local insects have only just met Bradford pears, in an evolutionary sense, and have not had the time — millennia — required to adapt to their chemical defenses. And so Bradford pears stand virtually untouched in my neighbor’s yard.
In the past, we thought this was a good thing. After all, Asian ornamentals were planted to look pretty, and we certainly didn’t want insects eating them. We were happy with our perfect pears, burning bushes, Japanese barberries, porcelain berries, golden rain trees, crape myrtles, privets, bush honeysuckles and all the other foreign ornamentals.
But there are serious ecological consequences to such choices, and another exercise you can do at home makes them clear. This spring, if you live in North America, put up a chickadee nest box in your yard. If you are lucky, a pair of chickadees will move in and raise a family. While they are feeding their young, watch what the chickadees bring to the nest: mostly caterpillars. Both parents take turns feeding the chicks, enabling them to bring a caterpillar to the nest once every three minutes. And they do this from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. for each of the 16 to 18 days it takes the chicks to fledge. That’s a total of 350 to 570 caterpillars every day, depending on how many chicks they have. So, an incredible 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars are required to make one clutch of chickadees.
And chickadees are tiny birds: just a third of an ounce. What if you wanted to support red-bellied woodpeckers in your yard, a bird that is about eight times heavier than a chickadee? How many caterpillars would that take?
What we plant in our landscapes determines what can live in our landscapes. Controlling what grows in our yards is like playing God. By favoring productive species, we can create life, and by using nonnative plants, we can prevent it.
An American yard dominated by Asian ornamentals does not produce nearly the quantity and diversity of insects needed for birds to reproduce. Some might argue that we should just let those birds breed “in nature.” That worked in the past, but now there simply is not enough “nature” left. And it shows. Many bird species in North America have declined drastically in the past 40 years.
Fortunately, more and more gardeners are realizing that their yards offer one of the most empowering conservation options we have, and are sharing their properties with the nature around them.
By the way, you might assume that my oak was riddled with unsightly caterpillar holes, but not so. Since birds eat most of the caterpillars before they get very large, from 10 feet away the oak looked as perfect as a Bradford pear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opini ... d=45305309
In Your Garden, Choose Plants That Help the Environment
OXFORD, Pa. — I GREW up thinking little of plants. I was interested in snakes and turtles, then insects and, eventually, birds. Now I like plants. But I still like the life they create even more.
Plants are as close to biological miracles as a scientist could dare admit. After all, they allow us, and nearly every other species, to eat sunlight, by creating the nourishment that drives food webs on this planet. As if that weren’t enough, plants also produce oxygen, build topsoil and hold it in place, prevent floods, sequester carbon dioxide, buffer extreme weather and clean our water. Considering all this, you might think we gardeners would value plants for what they do. Instead, we value them for what they look like.
When we design our home landscapes, too many of us choose beautiful plants from all over the world, without considering their ability to support life within our local ecosystems.
Last summer I did a simple experiment at home to measure just how different the plants we use for landscaping can be in supporting local animals. I compared a young white oak in my yard with one of the Bradford pears in my neighbor’s yard. Both trees are the same size, but Bradford pears are ornamentals from Asia, while white oaks are native to eastern North America. I walked around each tree and counted the caterpillars on their leaves at head height. I found 410 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 19 different species), and only one caterpillar (an inchworm) on the Bradford pear.
Was this a fluke? Hardly. The next day I repeated my survey on a different white oak and Bradford pear. This time I found 233 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 15 species) and, again, only one on the Bradford pear.
Why such huge differences? It’s simple: Plants don’t want to be eaten, so they have loaded their tissues with nasty chemicals that would kill most insects if eaten. Insects do eat plants, though, and they achieve this by adapting to the chemical defenses of just one or two plant lineages. So some have evolved to eat oak trees without dying, while others have specialized in native cherries or ashes and so on.
But local insects have only just met Bradford pears, in an evolutionary sense, and have not had the time — millennia — required to adapt to their chemical defenses. And so Bradford pears stand virtually untouched in my neighbor’s yard.
In the past, we thought this was a good thing. After all, Asian ornamentals were planted to look pretty, and we certainly didn’t want insects eating them. We were happy with our perfect pears, burning bushes, Japanese barberries, porcelain berries, golden rain trees, crape myrtles, privets, bush honeysuckles and all the other foreign ornamentals.
But there are serious ecological consequences to such choices, and another exercise you can do at home makes them clear. This spring, if you live in North America, put up a chickadee nest box in your yard. If you are lucky, a pair of chickadees will move in and raise a family. While they are feeding their young, watch what the chickadees bring to the nest: mostly caterpillars. Both parents take turns feeding the chicks, enabling them to bring a caterpillar to the nest once every three minutes. And they do this from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. for each of the 16 to 18 days it takes the chicks to fledge. That’s a total of 350 to 570 caterpillars every day, depending on how many chicks they have. So, an incredible 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars are required to make one clutch of chickadees.
And chickadees are tiny birds: just a third of an ounce. What if you wanted to support red-bellied woodpeckers in your yard, a bird that is about eight times heavier than a chickadee? How many caterpillars would that take?
What we plant in our landscapes determines what can live in our landscapes. Controlling what grows in our yards is like playing God. By favoring productive species, we can create life, and by using nonnative plants, we can prevent it.
An American yard dominated by Asian ornamentals does not produce nearly the quantity and diversity of insects needed for birds to reproduce. Some might argue that we should just let those birds breed “in nature.” That worked in the past, but now there simply is not enough “nature” left. And it shows. Many bird species in North America have declined drastically in the past 40 years.
Fortunately, more and more gardeners are realizing that their yards offer one of the most empowering conservation options we have, and are sharing their properties with the nature around them.
By the way, you might assume that my oak was riddled with unsightly caterpillar holes, but not so. Since birds eat most of the caterpillars before they get very large, from 10 feet away the oak looked as perfect as a Bradford pear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opini ... d=45305309
Earth is on the edge of a Sixth Extinction
Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.
This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear some 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet.
This time though, we’re the asteroid.
At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the book 'The Sixth Extinction,' sees it.
"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."
In 'The Sixth Extinction' Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.
It took scientists a long time to accept the idea that entire species could disappear
It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.
It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from " a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.
This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications.
One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.
Here's Kolbert:
"No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one."
We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.
Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.
"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."
That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century — unless we start taking action now.
NOW WATCH: Here's how much sex happy couples have every month
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ear ... lsignoutmd
Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.
This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear some 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet.
This time though, we’re the asteroid.
At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the book 'The Sixth Extinction,' sees it.
"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."
In 'The Sixth Extinction' Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.
It took scientists a long time to accept the idea that entire species could disappear
It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.
It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from " a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.
This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications.
One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.
Here's Kolbert:
"No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one."
We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.
Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.
"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."
That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century — unless we start taking action now.
NOW WATCH: Here's how much sex happy couples have every month
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ear ... lsignoutmd
Kill the Lights, Not the Birds
As many as a billion birds die each year in this country as they attempt to follow their seasonal routes — flying north in summer months, south in winter. Because many songbirds, sea birds, and other avians rely on stars to navigate, they grow confused by artificial lights. As a result, these birds die in droves as their ancient routes are interrupted by tall, brightly lit, glass buildings.
We can’t unplug the nation for the birds, of course. But bird lovers in New York can celebrate another conversion in their intrepid campaign to dim non-essential lights during the bird migration seasons. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York promised on Monday to begin right away turning off excess lights in state buildings from midnight until dawn as the birds fly across his state.
Mr. Cuomo said state buildings will shut down extra lighting from April 15 through May 31, when birds come to the northeast to breed, and from August 15 through Nov. 15 when they head for softer climates as far away as the Caribbean. He called it “a simple step to help protect these migrating birds that make their home in New York’s forest, lakes and rivers.”
Erin Crotty, executive director for Audubon New York, says this modest change is more than that. “It is critically important from a conservation perspective,” she said. Besides being a source of joy for many people, birds are a vital part of our agriculture and our ecosystem. As Ms. Crotty puts it, “When birds thrive, people prosper.”
Birds are starting to gain more human supporters. In Chicago, about 100 downtown buildings now go dark in migration seasons. Minnesota has started turning out lights in state buildings. In New York City, the Empire State Building has been shutting down decorative lights for decades to save the birds. Other city landlords joined the lights-out program for skyscrapers almost 10 years ago. Many of the city’s most famous towers like the Chrysler Building and the Time Warner towers now shut down non-essential lights after midnight. It saves birds, and, of course, electricity.
Bright lights once helped define human success, a triumph over the limits and perils of nighttime. Now we know that dimming those lights can mean a different kind of success — the survival of thousands and thousands of migrating birds.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
As many as a billion birds die each year in this country as they attempt to follow their seasonal routes — flying north in summer months, south in winter. Because many songbirds, sea birds, and other avians rely on stars to navigate, they grow confused by artificial lights. As a result, these birds die in droves as their ancient routes are interrupted by tall, brightly lit, glass buildings.
We can’t unplug the nation for the birds, of course. But bird lovers in New York can celebrate another conversion in their intrepid campaign to dim non-essential lights during the bird migration seasons. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York promised on Monday to begin right away turning off excess lights in state buildings from midnight until dawn as the birds fly across his state.
Mr. Cuomo said state buildings will shut down extra lighting from April 15 through May 31, when birds come to the northeast to breed, and from August 15 through Nov. 15 when they head for softer climates as far away as the Caribbean. He called it “a simple step to help protect these migrating birds that make their home in New York’s forest, lakes and rivers.”
Erin Crotty, executive director for Audubon New York, says this modest change is more than that. “It is critically important from a conservation perspective,” she said. Besides being a source of joy for many people, birds are a vital part of our agriculture and our ecosystem. As Ms. Crotty puts it, “When birds thrive, people prosper.”
Birds are starting to gain more human supporters. In Chicago, about 100 downtown buildings now go dark in migration seasons. Minnesota has started turning out lights in state buildings. In New York City, the Empire State Building has been shutting down decorative lights for decades to save the birds. Other city landlords joined the lights-out program for skyscrapers almost 10 years ago. Many of the city’s most famous towers like the Chrysler Building and the Time Warner towers now shut down non-essential lights after midnight. It saves birds, and, of course, electricity.
Bright lights once helped define human success, a triumph over the limits and perils of nighttime. Now we know that dimming those lights can mean a different kind of success — the survival of thousands and thousands of migrating birds.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
When Humans Declared War on Fish
ON Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of a campaign of violence against our taxonomic classes, one that has resulted in trillions of casualties.
Oddly, the war itself was a great reprieve for many marine species. Just as Axis and Allied submarines and mines made the transportation of war matériel a highly perilous endeavor, they similarly interfered with fishing. The ability to catch staple seafoods, like cod, declined markedly. Freed from human pursuit, overexploited species multiplied in abundance.
But World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans. Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous, but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s catch for months at a time.
Even human resources developed during the war were later redirected toward fishing: Japanese fighter pilots adept at spotting subsurface Allied submarines were later retrained to look for whales. Likewise, more than a few former Allied pilots found postwar employment hunting bluefin tuna and Atlantic menhaden.
In some ways, the “war machine” wasn’t a metaphor. Across South Asia, leftover explosives were “recycled” for “bomb fishing,” an obscenely destructive way of killing coastal fish, which turned many coral reefs into rubble fields. And the technological overkill continued into the Cold War era: Satellite imagery and GPS technology originally intended to track the movements of the Soviet nuclear arsenal eventually allowed well-populated fish habitats to be clearly identified from space.
Because the war incentivized the creation of ships with much longer oceangoing ranges, it also meant that fishing was transformed from a local endeavor into a global one. “Industrial fishing,” maybe the first globalized economic enterprise, meant the wholesale, permanent occupation of marine ecosystems, instead of the local raids practiced by previous generations.
In addition, emerging economies of scale meant that it wasn’t just the target fish that suffered. With the invention of postwar super trawlers that scooped up everything in their path, a sort of scorched-earth approach to fishing became commonplace.
Taken collectively, the rise of postwar fishing technology meant that the global reported catch rose from some 15 million metric tons at war’s end to 85 million metric tons today — the equivalent, in weight, of the entire human population at the turn of the 20th century, removed from the sea each and every year.
Only the turn of the third millennium saw a new kind of reprieve, this time not caused by human adversity, but by the insight that we need to make peace with other species as well. Growing signs of exhaustion and failure in global fisheries made humans reconsider the totality of their assault.
Marine protected areas, an environmental version of a demilitarized zone, started to spring up, and now cover some 3.5 percent of the ocean. Countries formerly at war began to work together to hammer out new deals for fish, exemplified by both the recent revision of the Common Fisheries Policy in Europe and new efforts underway at the United Nations to better regulate fishing on the high seas, the 60 percent of the oceans outside national control.
Collateral damage to sharks, turtles, whales and sea birds is increasingly becoming unacceptable. And some of those same technologies once used to kill fish with precision are now being used to save them: War-inspired satellite technology is being deployed to identify and pursue rogue vessels fishing illegally.
But in remembering the end of World War II and the deliberate steps that led to a lasting peace, we might contemplate a broader Marshall Plan, which would further restrain our destructive tendencies and technological powers elsewhere, not just in fishing the oceans, but in mining, drilling and otherwise exploiting them.
To be sure, the postwar assault on fish mostly sprang from an honorable intention to feed a growing human population that boomed in a prosperous postwar world. But as in war, everybody loses when there is nothing left to fight for. Only when we fully embrace that simple fact, and act accordingly, will our celebrations resonate among what the author Henry Beston called those “other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opini ... pe=article
ON Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of a campaign of violence against our taxonomic classes, one that has resulted in trillions of casualties.
Oddly, the war itself was a great reprieve for many marine species. Just as Axis and Allied submarines and mines made the transportation of war matériel a highly perilous endeavor, they similarly interfered with fishing. The ability to catch staple seafoods, like cod, declined markedly. Freed from human pursuit, overexploited species multiplied in abundance.
But World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans. Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous, but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s catch for months at a time.
Even human resources developed during the war were later redirected toward fishing: Japanese fighter pilots adept at spotting subsurface Allied submarines were later retrained to look for whales. Likewise, more than a few former Allied pilots found postwar employment hunting bluefin tuna and Atlantic menhaden.
In some ways, the “war machine” wasn’t a metaphor. Across South Asia, leftover explosives were “recycled” for “bomb fishing,” an obscenely destructive way of killing coastal fish, which turned many coral reefs into rubble fields. And the technological overkill continued into the Cold War era: Satellite imagery and GPS technology originally intended to track the movements of the Soviet nuclear arsenal eventually allowed well-populated fish habitats to be clearly identified from space.
Because the war incentivized the creation of ships with much longer oceangoing ranges, it also meant that fishing was transformed from a local endeavor into a global one. “Industrial fishing,” maybe the first globalized economic enterprise, meant the wholesale, permanent occupation of marine ecosystems, instead of the local raids practiced by previous generations.
In addition, emerging economies of scale meant that it wasn’t just the target fish that suffered. With the invention of postwar super trawlers that scooped up everything in their path, a sort of scorched-earth approach to fishing became commonplace.
Taken collectively, the rise of postwar fishing technology meant that the global reported catch rose from some 15 million metric tons at war’s end to 85 million metric tons today — the equivalent, in weight, of the entire human population at the turn of the 20th century, removed from the sea each and every year.
Only the turn of the third millennium saw a new kind of reprieve, this time not caused by human adversity, but by the insight that we need to make peace with other species as well. Growing signs of exhaustion and failure in global fisheries made humans reconsider the totality of their assault.
Marine protected areas, an environmental version of a demilitarized zone, started to spring up, and now cover some 3.5 percent of the ocean. Countries formerly at war began to work together to hammer out new deals for fish, exemplified by both the recent revision of the Common Fisheries Policy in Europe and new efforts underway at the United Nations to better regulate fishing on the high seas, the 60 percent of the oceans outside national control.
Collateral damage to sharks, turtles, whales and sea birds is increasingly becoming unacceptable. And some of those same technologies once used to kill fish with precision are now being used to save them: War-inspired satellite technology is being deployed to identify and pursue rogue vessels fishing illegally.
But in remembering the end of World War II and the deliberate steps that led to a lasting peace, we might contemplate a broader Marshall Plan, which would further restrain our destructive tendencies and technological powers elsewhere, not just in fishing the oceans, but in mining, drilling and otherwise exploiting them.
To be sure, the postwar assault on fish mostly sprang from an honorable intention to feed a growing human population that boomed in a prosperous postwar world. But as in war, everybody loses when there is nothing left to fight for. Only when we fully embrace that simple fact, and act accordingly, will our celebrations resonate among what the author Henry Beston called those “other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opini ... pe=article
Chemo for the Planet
What’s the best way to reduce the chances of climate change wreaking havoc on Earth?
The most obvious answer — one we’ve known for years now — is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere. This can be done, for instance, by putting a price on carbon and thus create powerful market incentives for industries to lower their carbon footprint. Or by moving to renewable energy sources. Or by changing people’s behavior so that our collective actions radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel the world needs to power itself.
Despite this knowledge, however, few policies have been put in place to spur any of that. In the United States, the effective price of carbon, as Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman point out in their new book, “Climate Shock” is “about zero” (aside from California). Fossil fuels remain the world’s default energy source, and — despite the impressive growth of global solar capacity over the last decade — that’s likely to be the case for decades to come. A carbon tax on the worst emitters has gotten nowhere.
So maybe we need to start thinking about coming at the climate-change problem from a different direction. Instead of hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use, maybe it’s time to at least consider using technology to keep climate change at bay.
The deliberate use of technology to manipulate the environment — usually in the context of fighting climate change — is called geoengineering. One method is carbon capture, traditionally conceived as a process that sucks up carbon from the air and buries it in the ground. A second is called solar radiation management, which uses techniques like shooting sulfate particles into the stratosphere in order to reflect or divert solar radiation back into space. This very effect was illustrated after the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the air, the volcano caused global temperatures to fall, temporarily, by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to Wagner and Weitzman.
Somewhat to my surprise, a good portion of Wagner’s and Weitzman’s book is devoted to the subject of geoengineering, especially solar radiation management, which they describe as relatively inexpensive and technologically feasible, with a serious bang for the buck. The reason I was surprised is that the authors have solid environmental credentials — Weitzman is an environmental economist at Harvard, and Wagner is a senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund — and many environmental groups object to the very idea of geoengineering. They even object to research into the subject, viewing the desire to manipulate nature as immoral. Ben Schreiber of Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, recently described discussions about geoengineering as a “dangerous distraction.”
“Geoengineering presumes that we can apply a dramatic technological fix to climate disruption,” he said, “instead of facing the reality that we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions.”
Schreiber was reacting to two reports by a National Academy of Sciences panel that came out just a week before “Climate Shock.” The reports concluded that, while “climate intervention is no substitute for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions,” the politics around carbon reduction have been so fractious that the day could well come when geoengineering was needed as part of a “portfolio” of responses to global warming. It urged further study for both methods, and, in particular, called for the establishment of a research program to examine the possible risks of solar radiation management.
Wagner and Weitzman do not deny the potential risks; indeed, they write quite cautiously about geoengineering. Wagner told me that it should be thought of as a last resort — something the world could turn to if it had to. He described it as a kind of “chemotherapy for the planet” — something you hope you don’t have to use, but you are ready to use if the need arises. And that requires doing research now to prepare for the future.
David Keith, a scientist who is perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering, told me that he believes that solar radiation management should be used even if decent carbon policies became law. “It has substantial benefits,” he said. “That would be true whether we were cutting emissions or not.”
But he also acknowledged that more research is needed. “If you put sulfur into the atmosphere, will there be a risk of ozone loss?” he said, as an example of the kind of risk that needed to be studied.
There is another kind of risk, of course: the risk that if people thought a technological solution were available to “solve” climate change, it would make it even less likely that they would collectively agree to do what is needed to be done to reduce carbon emissions. It is yet another reason that many environmentalists object to geoengineering.
Still, if disaster is truly approaching, wouldn’t you rather be safe than sorry?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... 05309&_r=0
What’s the best way to reduce the chances of climate change wreaking havoc on Earth?
The most obvious answer — one we’ve known for years now — is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere. This can be done, for instance, by putting a price on carbon and thus create powerful market incentives for industries to lower their carbon footprint. Or by moving to renewable energy sources. Or by changing people’s behavior so that our collective actions radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel the world needs to power itself.
Despite this knowledge, however, few policies have been put in place to spur any of that. In the United States, the effective price of carbon, as Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman point out in their new book, “Climate Shock” is “about zero” (aside from California). Fossil fuels remain the world’s default energy source, and — despite the impressive growth of global solar capacity over the last decade — that’s likely to be the case for decades to come. A carbon tax on the worst emitters has gotten nowhere.
So maybe we need to start thinking about coming at the climate-change problem from a different direction. Instead of hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use, maybe it’s time to at least consider using technology to keep climate change at bay.
The deliberate use of technology to manipulate the environment — usually in the context of fighting climate change — is called geoengineering. One method is carbon capture, traditionally conceived as a process that sucks up carbon from the air and buries it in the ground. A second is called solar radiation management, which uses techniques like shooting sulfate particles into the stratosphere in order to reflect or divert solar radiation back into space. This very effect was illustrated after the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the air, the volcano caused global temperatures to fall, temporarily, by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to Wagner and Weitzman.
Somewhat to my surprise, a good portion of Wagner’s and Weitzman’s book is devoted to the subject of geoengineering, especially solar radiation management, which they describe as relatively inexpensive and technologically feasible, with a serious bang for the buck. The reason I was surprised is that the authors have solid environmental credentials — Weitzman is an environmental economist at Harvard, and Wagner is a senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund — and many environmental groups object to the very idea of geoengineering. They even object to research into the subject, viewing the desire to manipulate nature as immoral. Ben Schreiber of Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, recently described discussions about geoengineering as a “dangerous distraction.”
“Geoengineering presumes that we can apply a dramatic technological fix to climate disruption,” he said, “instead of facing the reality that we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions.”
Schreiber was reacting to two reports by a National Academy of Sciences panel that came out just a week before “Climate Shock.” The reports concluded that, while “climate intervention is no substitute for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions,” the politics around carbon reduction have been so fractious that the day could well come when geoengineering was needed as part of a “portfolio” of responses to global warming. It urged further study for both methods, and, in particular, called for the establishment of a research program to examine the possible risks of solar radiation management.
Wagner and Weitzman do not deny the potential risks; indeed, they write quite cautiously about geoengineering. Wagner told me that it should be thought of as a last resort — something the world could turn to if it had to. He described it as a kind of “chemotherapy for the planet” — something you hope you don’t have to use, but you are ready to use if the need arises. And that requires doing research now to prepare for the future.
David Keith, a scientist who is perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering, told me that he believes that solar radiation management should be used even if decent carbon policies became law. “It has substantial benefits,” he said. “That would be true whether we were cutting emissions or not.”
But he also acknowledged that more research is needed. “If you put sulfur into the atmosphere, will there be a risk of ozone loss?” he said, as an example of the kind of risk that needed to be studied.
There is another kind of risk, of course: the risk that if people thought a technological solution were available to “solve” climate change, it would make it even less likely that they would collectively agree to do what is needed to be done to reduce carbon emissions. It is yet another reason that many environmentalists object to geoengineering.
Still, if disaster is truly approaching, wouldn’t you rather be safe than sorry?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Speakers stress need for sustainable mass transit system
KARACHI: The world’s single-largest environmental health risk is air pollution, said Dr Zafar Fatimi, the head of environmental health sciences at the Aga Khan University Hospital.
He was speaking at a seminar organised by the Pakistan Sustainable Transport (Pakstran) at the Pearl Continental hotel on Thursday. The seminar aimed to raise awareness about the significance of sustainable transport systems, the adverse impacts of carbon emissions and the issues faced by mass transit systems in the country.
Dr Fatimi said that air pollution not only had an adverse impact on human health, but also affected agriculture and climate and contributed significantly to global warming. He suggested that public transport regulation and control could contribute to containing the congestion and emission issues.
Dr Mir Shabbar Ali, chairperson of the urban and infrastructure department at the NED University, said that public transport was the safest, cheapest and most efficient mode of commuting.
“The transport sector in Pakistan is directly linked to economic, social development and environmental issues and all possible measures must be taken to improve the urban transport infrastructure,” said Mahmood Akhtar Cheema, the country representative of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Pakistan. He appreciated the involvement of the media in maintaining a positive approach towards the issue of public transport in the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th, 2015.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/893938/spea ... it-system/
KARACHI: The world’s single-largest environmental health risk is air pollution, said Dr Zafar Fatimi, the head of environmental health sciences at the Aga Khan University Hospital.
He was speaking at a seminar organised by the Pakistan Sustainable Transport (Pakstran) at the Pearl Continental hotel on Thursday. The seminar aimed to raise awareness about the significance of sustainable transport systems, the adverse impacts of carbon emissions and the issues faced by mass transit systems in the country.
Dr Fatimi said that air pollution not only had an adverse impact on human health, but also affected agriculture and climate and contributed significantly to global warming. He suggested that public transport regulation and control could contribute to containing the congestion and emission issues.
Dr Mir Shabbar Ali, chairperson of the urban and infrastructure department at the NED University, said that public transport was the safest, cheapest and most efficient mode of commuting.
“The transport sector in Pakistan is directly linked to economic, social development and environmental issues and all possible measures must be taken to improve the urban transport infrastructure,” said Mahmood Akhtar Cheema, the country representative of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Pakistan. He appreciated the involvement of the media in maintaining a positive approach towards the issue of public transport in the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th, 2015.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/893938/spea ... it-system/
Unnatural Beings
Are machines becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
Artificial intelligence is big on the big screen this year, from the sexy female robots of Ex Machina to the superheroes in the Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hollywood often reflects real-world technological advances, such as those in the field of robotics: last year, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman became the first computer to pass the Turing test—based on Alan Turing’s famous poser: “Can machines think?”—in which a computer must convince a human more than 30 percent of the time that it too is human. Eugene Goostman managed this for 33 percent of the time, although there is disagreement over how valid the test was. Some believe that computers will take over the human world—they are already replacing humans in the workplace, from factory floors to complex monitoring of hospital patients, and our dependence on smartphones and data systems suggests they already have taken over.
But as machines become more humanlike, aren’t we humans meeting them halfway? Are computers not simply an extension of our brains? Our inventions may better resemble humans, but we are becoming more machine-like in the process. Are we no longer a natural species, or are we simply a part of nature that has evolved to become less “natural”?
We have shifted our evolutionary pathway with medical advances to save those who would naturally die in infancy. We have surmounted the limitations that restrict other species by creating artificial environments and external sources of energy. A 72-year-old man now has the same chance of dying as a 30-year-old caveman. We are supernatural: we can fly without wings and dive without gills, we can grow new body parts from cells or build mechanical replacements, we can survive killer diseases and be resuscitated after death, we can communicate with people thousands of miles away, control the biodiversity of life, the direction a river flows, even the temperature of the atmosphere—and all this after being conceived in glass.
Rather than fearing a sci-fi scenario where robots take over the world, we should perhaps be looking more closely at the way our newly powerful species is taking over nature. And asking: Can unnatural humans think intelligently?
https://theamericanscholar.org/unnatura ... urce=email
Are machines becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
Artificial intelligence is big on the big screen this year, from the sexy female robots of Ex Machina to the superheroes in the Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hollywood often reflects real-world technological advances, such as those in the field of robotics: last year, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman became the first computer to pass the Turing test—based on Alan Turing’s famous poser: “Can machines think?”—in which a computer must convince a human more than 30 percent of the time that it too is human. Eugene Goostman managed this for 33 percent of the time, although there is disagreement over how valid the test was. Some believe that computers will take over the human world—they are already replacing humans in the workplace, from factory floors to complex monitoring of hospital patients, and our dependence on smartphones and data systems suggests they already have taken over.
But as machines become more humanlike, aren’t we humans meeting them halfway? Are computers not simply an extension of our brains? Our inventions may better resemble humans, but we are becoming more machine-like in the process. Are we no longer a natural species, or are we simply a part of nature that has evolved to become less “natural”?
We have shifted our evolutionary pathway with medical advances to save those who would naturally die in infancy. We have surmounted the limitations that restrict other species by creating artificial environments and external sources of energy. A 72-year-old man now has the same chance of dying as a 30-year-old caveman. We are supernatural: we can fly without wings and dive without gills, we can grow new body parts from cells or build mechanical replacements, we can survive killer diseases and be resuscitated after death, we can communicate with people thousands of miles away, control the biodiversity of life, the direction a river flows, even the temperature of the atmosphere—and all this after being conceived in glass.
Rather than fearing a sci-fi scenario where robots take over the world, we should perhaps be looking more closely at the way our newly powerful species is taking over nature. And asking: Can unnatural humans think intelligently?
https://theamericanscholar.org/unnatura ... urce=email
Skyrocketing Extinctions Put Humans at Risk
“We can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way—the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history.”
So write Gerardo Ceballos, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Ecology, and his co-authors in a blunt and frightening paper published on Friday in the journal Science Advances. They compared contemporary rates of extinction to the baseline rate before human activity began affecting the environment, and found that species today are disappearing at rates far above the baseline.
Under their most conservative estimates, mammal species have gone extinct at 28 times the baseline rate since 1900, and amphibian species have gone extinct at 22 times the baseline. A less conservative estimate puts those numbers at 55 and 100. If baseline rates had held, the number of species lost in the last century alone would have taken 800 to 10,000 years to go extinct.
Previous studies have also found big increases in extinction rates, but they’ve used less conservative measures and attracted some skepticism. Dr. Ceballos and his team wanted to use extremely conservative estimates of the current extinction rate — if they found a large increase even using those numbers, they’d have especially convincing evidence that we are indeed in a period of mass extinction.
That mass extinction, said Dr. Ceballos, is caused by habitat destruction, pollution, trade in products made from endangered species and climate change.
And unless we make big changes, we face an immeasurable loss. “Imagine a world without lions, without rhinos, without elephants, without birds,” said Dr. Ceballos. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
The forces that are causing animal extinctions threaten us too. In the next few decades, habitat destruction and climate change could cause ecosystems around the world to collapse, Dr. Ceballos said, taking with them the benefits they provide, like maintaining the balance of gases in the atmosphere. “Every time we lose a species,” he said, we draw closer to “a complete collapse of civilization as we understand it.”
He and his team tried to make their paper extremely straightforward to drive the risk home to a general audience. For those disturbed by their conclusions, he offered a few recommendations for stemming the tide of extinctions: Drive an electric car or a hybrid if you can afford to, eat less meat (again, if you can afford to) and avoid products that contribute to habitat destruction (some containing palm oil, for example). And, he added, we need to put pressure on governments to enforce endangered species protections. “What is at stake,” he said, “is the survival of mankind.”
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
“We can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way—the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history.”
So write Gerardo Ceballos, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Ecology, and his co-authors in a blunt and frightening paper published on Friday in the journal Science Advances. They compared contemporary rates of extinction to the baseline rate before human activity began affecting the environment, and found that species today are disappearing at rates far above the baseline.
Under their most conservative estimates, mammal species have gone extinct at 28 times the baseline rate since 1900, and amphibian species have gone extinct at 22 times the baseline. A less conservative estimate puts those numbers at 55 and 100. If baseline rates had held, the number of species lost in the last century alone would have taken 800 to 10,000 years to go extinct.
Previous studies have also found big increases in extinction rates, but they’ve used less conservative measures and attracted some skepticism. Dr. Ceballos and his team wanted to use extremely conservative estimates of the current extinction rate — if they found a large increase even using those numbers, they’d have especially convincing evidence that we are indeed in a period of mass extinction.
That mass extinction, said Dr. Ceballos, is caused by habitat destruction, pollution, trade in products made from endangered species and climate change.
And unless we make big changes, we face an immeasurable loss. “Imagine a world without lions, without rhinos, without elephants, without birds,” said Dr. Ceballos. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
The forces that are causing animal extinctions threaten us too. In the next few decades, habitat destruction and climate change could cause ecosystems around the world to collapse, Dr. Ceballos said, taking with them the benefits they provide, like maintaining the balance of gases in the atmosphere. “Every time we lose a species,” he said, we draw closer to “a complete collapse of civilization as we understand it.”
He and his team tried to make their paper extremely straightforward to drive the risk home to a general audience. For those disturbed by their conclusions, he offered a few recommendations for stemming the tide of extinctions: Drive an electric car or a hybrid if you can afford to, eat less meat (again, if you can afford to) and avoid products that contribute to habitat destruction (some containing palm oil, for example). And, he added, we need to put pressure on governments to enforce endangered species protections. “What is at stake,” he said, “is the survival of mankind.”
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
The true meaning of life is to plant trees,
under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
- Nelson Henderson
This land, this water, this air, this planet -
this is our legacy to our young.
- Paul Tsongas
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,
we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology.
We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created,
not just as it looked when we got through with it.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
Consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
- Wilma Mankiller
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet.
We all breathe the same air.
We all cherish our children's future.
And we are all mortal.
- John F. Kennedy
under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
- Nelson Henderson
This land, this water, this air, this planet -
this is our legacy to our young.
- Paul Tsongas
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,
we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology.
We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created,
not just as it looked when we got through with it.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
Consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
- Wilma Mankiller
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet.
We all breathe the same air.
We all cherish our children's future.
And we are all mortal.
- John F. Kennedy
Are We Too Many?
What to do about global population growth
A journalist called me the other day to ask if I would “speak about the unspeakable”: isn’t it true, she said, that if our human population weren’t so large, we wouldn’t have so many environmental problems?
More than seven billion people already inhabit the planet, and by 2050, there may be as many as 10 billion. It took us 50,000 years to reach the first billion, but barely more than a decade to add the most recent billion. The negative effects of so many people competing for Earth’s limited resources are everywhere to be seen.
So what do you propose, I teased, slaughtering half the world’s population? Of course not. She described a charity trying to create sustainable villages in Madagascar that is promoting family planning to reduce the villagers’ environmental footprint—shouldn’t that be practiced everywhere?
It already is. Population growth is slowing, with many countries now in negative growth. The rate peaked around 1968 (the year when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published, and since then has declined by about 50 percent. The average woman in a developing country (outside of China) now has three kids rather than six. Globally, that number stands at 2.36, roughly equal to the “replacement rate” (2.33), which, accounting for child and maternal deaths, is the number of children a woman needs to have, on average, to maintain the current population.
Some countries have actively promoted contraceptive use, later motherhood, and female education to reduce family size. China, the most populous nation, introduced a controversial one-child policy in 1978, which has prevented hundreds of millions of potential births. However, social engineering has turned out to be less effective than economic growth in reducing family size: over the same period, Taiwan, in moving from “developing” to “developed” status, has seen a slightly larger reduction in fertility than China.
As people get richer, better educated, and urban, and as resources such as family land become scarcer, women will continue to have fewer children. It may be that as fertility declines, the global population will fall. Such a shift is already happening in parts of the rich world, such as Japan. The social consequences of this are enormous. Wealthy societies will increasingly have to rely on immigration to support the generational population disparity.
Women still have large families in some places, and there, as elsewhere, they should have access to family planning as a fundamental human right. Smaller families may well bring environmental benefits, but promoting family planning programs on that basis alone makes me very uncomfortable.
Rather than focusing on population growth as the preeminent environmental problem, we need to accept our growing numbers and look to what we can acceptably change. And it’s no secret that it comes down to our use of resources. If product engineers were made to consider the 10-billion global population during the design phase, for example, they could create products that are more durable, longer-lasting, and more easily dismantled for efficient recycling of their materials. Energy could be generated from nonpolluting sources. Instead of wasting 40 percent of our food, as we do now, we could farm, store, transport, and eat it more efficiently.
Until the next population-decimating pandemic sweeps the globe, we need to make our large number part of the environmental solution rather than the problem.
Gaia Vince is a journalist whose 2.5-year trek around 40 countries to witness the effects of humanity’s planetary changes is the subject of her book, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.
https://theamericanscholar.org/are-we-t ... urce=email
What to do about global population growth
A journalist called me the other day to ask if I would “speak about the unspeakable”: isn’t it true, she said, that if our human population weren’t so large, we wouldn’t have so many environmental problems?
More than seven billion people already inhabit the planet, and by 2050, there may be as many as 10 billion. It took us 50,000 years to reach the first billion, but barely more than a decade to add the most recent billion. The negative effects of so many people competing for Earth’s limited resources are everywhere to be seen.
So what do you propose, I teased, slaughtering half the world’s population? Of course not. She described a charity trying to create sustainable villages in Madagascar that is promoting family planning to reduce the villagers’ environmental footprint—shouldn’t that be practiced everywhere?
It already is. Population growth is slowing, with many countries now in negative growth. The rate peaked around 1968 (the year when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published, and since then has declined by about 50 percent. The average woman in a developing country (outside of China) now has three kids rather than six. Globally, that number stands at 2.36, roughly equal to the “replacement rate” (2.33), which, accounting for child and maternal deaths, is the number of children a woman needs to have, on average, to maintain the current population.
Some countries have actively promoted contraceptive use, later motherhood, and female education to reduce family size. China, the most populous nation, introduced a controversial one-child policy in 1978, which has prevented hundreds of millions of potential births. However, social engineering has turned out to be less effective than economic growth in reducing family size: over the same period, Taiwan, in moving from “developing” to “developed” status, has seen a slightly larger reduction in fertility than China.
As people get richer, better educated, and urban, and as resources such as family land become scarcer, women will continue to have fewer children. It may be that as fertility declines, the global population will fall. Such a shift is already happening in parts of the rich world, such as Japan. The social consequences of this are enormous. Wealthy societies will increasingly have to rely on immigration to support the generational population disparity.
Women still have large families in some places, and there, as elsewhere, they should have access to family planning as a fundamental human right. Smaller families may well bring environmental benefits, but promoting family planning programs on that basis alone makes me very uncomfortable.
Rather than focusing on population growth as the preeminent environmental problem, we need to accept our growing numbers and look to what we can acceptably change. And it’s no secret that it comes down to our use of resources. If product engineers were made to consider the 10-billion global population during the design phase, for example, they could create products that are more durable, longer-lasting, and more easily dismantled for efficient recycling of their materials. Energy could be generated from nonpolluting sources. Instead of wasting 40 percent of our food, as we do now, we could farm, store, transport, and eat it more efficiently.
Until the next population-decimating pandemic sweeps the globe, we need to make our large number part of the environmental solution rather than the problem.
Gaia Vince is a journalist whose 2.5-year trek around 40 countries to witness the effects of humanity’s planetary changes is the subject of her book, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.
https://theamericanscholar.org/are-we-t ... urce=email
The Risks of Assisting Evolution
THERE are four locked doors guarding a specialized lab at the Harvard School of Public Health. The doors are meant to prevent insects inside the lab from venturing out — which is essential, because researchers behind those doors are re-engineering mosquitoes by cutting and pasting bits of DNA with tools unimaginable a decade ago.
If researchers can figure out the right combination of genes, they’ll manufacture a mosquito resistant to malaria, which could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But geneticists, bioethicists and others who understand the implications of this new technology are apprehensive. To an astonishing degree, these new tools, which include a technique called Crispr-Cas9, allow us to bend evolution to our will. But will we harness these new technologies to help our planet? Or spark an ecological catastrophe?
In university labs, corporate R&D centers and even inside amateur D.I.Y. laboratories, researchers are creating genetically modified organisms at an unprecedented pace. This biotechnological revolution is so fast-moving that it hasn’t yet fully filtered into the public’s awareness or policy makers’ oversight. The implications of Crispr are now intensely debated by medical researchers, especially since Chinese scientists used the method earlier this year to modify human embryos. But there are few similar conversations about the implications of these technologies for ecosystems, even though those impacts will most likely be more transformative for our planet’s future.
These new tools are much more precise and easy to use than past versions. Researchers can cut and paste DNA into just about any animal, plant or fungus. Whereas modified genes were once likely to be stamped out if by chance they made it into the wild, today’s technologies can supercharge a genetic chain reaction: A technique called “gene drive” ensures a modified gene will be inherited with nearly 100 percent success. This is valuable in making sure that a desirable new gene, like one resistant to the malaria parasite, spreads once introduced into a mosquito population. It also means a mistake can’t easily be taken back.
As scientists, policy makers and citizens, we need to start debating how much genetic tinkering we should allow in the wild and what regulations need to be in place. On the one hand, these new tools could help us cope with many risks to humans and animals, including climate change. Coral could be buffered against warming ocean water through the introduction of heat-tolerant genes. Genes from successful species could be used to help rescue imperiled ones. The method could be used as a form of molecular CPR, helping species adjust to our changed planet more quickly than they could on their own.
But the ecological risks of these manipulations are real and poorly understood. We can’t fully predict the consequences of releasing self-propagating genes into the wild. Encoding a self-destruct gene, for example by altering sex-determining genes so the population eventually ends up entirely male, could be a way to battle invasive species like zebra mussels or coral-destroying sea stars. But such genes could potentially leak to places where these species actually play important ecological roles — and could even jump to other species through interbreeding. Re-engineered genes that escape from crop weeds and spread as a result of gene drive could devastate other ecosystems. Moreover, our understanding of how genomes function is still far from the point where we can change genes and be certain we aren’t creating bigger unintended consequences.
Just about everyone agrees that regulation is urgently needed, but no one has much of an idea what it should look like. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the nonhuman impact of gene drive is expected next spring. In the meantime, two actions could vastly improve prospects for successful and balanced regulation.
First, we need to clarify who has jurisdiction over gene-editing projects. Our current system is inadequate and confusing. A transgenic mosquito release in Florida by the company Oxitec is being evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; a similar proposal for a moth release in New York is being overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Agencies vary widely in their review processes, and the current uncertainty about who’s in charge means that some ventures can fall through the cracks. The White House needs to issue clear guidelines.
Second, we need to pay for studies that explore the potential impacts of these technologies on the environment. Right now, there’s little incentive to explore the risks. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and other groups evaluating those risks have virtually no data to work with. A recent report by the Wilson Center notes that from 2008 to 14, less than 1 percent of synthetic biology funding went toward risk research in the United States, lower than in other emerging technologies. Foundations that are investing mightily in gene-editing technologies should commit to footing some of the bill for research on the environmental risks.
And finally, we need to encourage a public conversation about these technologies. At the end of the day, the escape of a few Harvard mosquitoes will not be the most pressing problem our ecosystems will face. But to confront the big challenges, we’ll need an informed and educated public, sophisticated oversight and a broad conversation about what kinds of advances and risks we want to embrace. We need protections that are stronger than multiple doors.
Elizabeth Alter is an assistant professor of biology at City University of New York, York College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/opini ... pe=article
THERE are four locked doors guarding a specialized lab at the Harvard School of Public Health. The doors are meant to prevent insects inside the lab from venturing out — which is essential, because researchers behind those doors are re-engineering mosquitoes by cutting and pasting bits of DNA with tools unimaginable a decade ago.
If researchers can figure out the right combination of genes, they’ll manufacture a mosquito resistant to malaria, which could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But geneticists, bioethicists and others who understand the implications of this new technology are apprehensive. To an astonishing degree, these new tools, which include a technique called Crispr-Cas9, allow us to bend evolution to our will. But will we harness these new technologies to help our planet? Or spark an ecological catastrophe?
In university labs, corporate R&D centers and even inside amateur D.I.Y. laboratories, researchers are creating genetically modified organisms at an unprecedented pace. This biotechnological revolution is so fast-moving that it hasn’t yet fully filtered into the public’s awareness or policy makers’ oversight. The implications of Crispr are now intensely debated by medical researchers, especially since Chinese scientists used the method earlier this year to modify human embryos. But there are few similar conversations about the implications of these technologies for ecosystems, even though those impacts will most likely be more transformative for our planet’s future.
These new tools are much more precise and easy to use than past versions. Researchers can cut and paste DNA into just about any animal, plant or fungus. Whereas modified genes were once likely to be stamped out if by chance they made it into the wild, today’s technologies can supercharge a genetic chain reaction: A technique called “gene drive” ensures a modified gene will be inherited with nearly 100 percent success. This is valuable in making sure that a desirable new gene, like one resistant to the malaria parasite, spreads once introduced into a mosquito population. It also means a mistake can’t easily be taken back.
As scientists, policy makers and citizens, we need to start debating how much genetic tinkering we should allow in the wild and what regulations need to be in place. On the one hand, these new tools could help us cope with many risks to humans and animals, including climate change. Coral could be buffered against warming ocean water through the introduction of heat-tolerant genes. Genes from successful species could be used to help rescue imperiled ones. The method could be used as a form of molecular CPR, helping species adjust to our changed planet more quickly than they could on their own.
But the ecological risks of these manipulations are real and poorly understood. We can’t fully predict the consequences of releasing self-propagating genes into the wild. Encoding a self-destruct gene, for example by altering sex-determining genes so the population eventually ends up entirely male, could be a way to battle invasive species like zebra mussels or coral-destroying sea stars. But such genes could potentially leak to places where these species actually play important ecological roles — and could even jump to other species through interbreeding. Re-engineered genes that escape from crop weeds and spread as a result of gene drive could devastate other ecosystems. Moreover, our understanding of how genomes function is still far from the point where we can change genes and be certain we aren’t creating bigger unintended consequences.
Just about everyone agrees that regulation is urgently needed, but no one has much of an idea what it should look like. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the nonhuman impact of gene drive is expected next spring. In the meantime, two actions could vastly improve prospects for successful and balanced regulation.
First, we need to clarify who has jurisdiction over gene-editing projects. Our current system is inadequate and confusing. A transgenic mosquito release in Florida by the company Oxitec is being evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; a similar proposal for a moth release in New York is being overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Agencies vary widely in their review processes, and the current uncertainty about who’s in charge means that some ventures can fall through the cracks. The White House needs to issue clear guidelines.
Second, we need to pay for studies that explore the potential impacts of these technologies on the environment. Right now, there’s little incentive to explore the risks. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and other groups evaluating those risks have virtually no data to work with. A recent report by the Wilson Center notes that from 2008 to 14, less than 1 percent of synthetic biology funding went toward risk research in the United States, lower than in other emerging technologies. Foundations that are investing mightily in gene-editing technologies should commit to footing some of the bill for research on the environmental risks.
And finally, we need to encourage a public conversation about these technologies. At the end of the day, the escape of a few Harvard mosquitoes will not be the most pressing problem our ecosystems will face. But to confront the big challenges, we’ll need an informed and educated public, sophisticated oversight and a broad conversation about what kinds of advances and risks we want to embrace. We need protections that are stronger than multiple doors.
Elizabeth Alter is an assistant professor of biology at City University of New York, York College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/opini ... pe=article
Contaminating Our Bodies With Everyday Products
IN recent weeks, two major medical organizations have issued independent warnings about toxic chemicals in products all around us. Unregulated substances, they say, are sometimes linked to breast and prostate cancer, genital deformities, obesity, diabetes and infertility.
“Widespread exposure to toxic environmental chemicals threatens healthy human reproduction,” the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics warned in a landmark statement last month.
The warnings are a reminder that the chemical industry has inherited the mantle of Big Tobacco, minimizing science and resisting regulation in ways that cause devastating harm to unsuspecting citizens.
In the 1950s, researchers were finding that cigarettes caused cancer, but the political system lagged in responding. Now the same thing is happening with toxic chemicals.
The gynecology federation’s focus is on endocrine disrupters, chemicals that imitate sex hormones and often confuse the body. Endocrine disrupters are found in pesticides, plastics, shampoos and cosmetics, cash register receipts, food can linings, flame retardants and countless other products.
“Exposure to toxic chemicals during pregnancy and lactation is ubiquitous,” the organization cautioned, adding that virtually every pregnant woman in America has at least 43 different chemical contaminants in her body. It cited a National Cancer Institute report finding that “to a disturbing extent babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’”
This warning now represents the medical mainstream. It was drafted by experts from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the World Health Organization, Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and similar groups.
Such medical professionals are on the front lines. They are the ones confronting rising cases of hypospadias, a birth defect in which boys are born with a urethra opening on the side of the penis rather than at the tip. They are the ones treating women with breast cancer. Both are conditions linked to early exposure to endocrine disrupters.
The other major organization that recently issued a warning is the Endocrine Society, the international association of doctors and scientists who deal with the hormone system.
“Emerging evidence ties endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure to two of the biggest public health threats facing society — diabetes and obesity,” the Endocrine Society said in announcing its 150-page “scientific statement.” It added that “mounting evidence” also ties endocrine disrupters to infertility, prostate cancer, undescended testicles, testicular cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer and neurological issues. Sometimes these problems apparently arise in adults because of exposures decades earlier in fetal stages.
“The threat is particularly great when unborn children are exposed,” the Endocrine Society warned.
Tracey J. Woodruff of the University of California, San Francisco notes, “One myth about chemicals is that the U.S. government makes sure they’re safe before they go on the marketplace.” In fact, most are assumed to be safe unless proved otherwise.
Of the 80,000 or more chemicals in global commerce today, only a tiny share have been rigorously screened for safety. Even when a substance is retired because of health concerns, the replacement chemical may be just as bad.
“It’s frustrating to see the same story over and over,” Professor Woodruff said. “Animal studies, in vitro tests or early human studies show that chemical A causes adverse effects. The chemical industry says, ‘Those are bad studies, show me the human evidence.’ The human evidence takes years and requires that people get sick. We should not have to use the public as guinea pigs.”
Europe is moving toward testing chemicals before they go on the market, but the United States is a laggard because of the power of the chemical lobby. Chemical safety legislation now before the Senate would require the Environmental Protection Agency to start a safety assessment of only 25 chemicals in the first five years — and House legislation isn’t much better.
Continue reading the main story
“There are almost endless parallels with the tobacco industry,” says Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of the journal Endocrinology.
For now, experts say the best approach is for people to try to protect themselves. Especially for women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, and for young children, try to eat organic, reduce the use of plastics, touch cash register receipts as little as possible, try to avoid flame-retardant couches and consult the consumer guides at ewg.org.
The chemical lobby spent the equivalent of $121,000 per member of Congress last year, so expect chemical companies to enjoy strong quarterly profits, more boys to be born with hypospadias and more women to die unnecessarily of breast cancer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opini ... pe=article
IN recent weeks, two major medical organizations have issued independent warnings about toxic chemicals in products all around us. Unregulated substances, they say, are sometimes linked to breast and prostate cancer, genital deformities, obesity, diabetes and infertility.
“Widespread exposure to toxic environmental chemicals threatens healthy human reproduction,” the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics warned in a landmark statement last month.
The warnings are a reminder that the chemical industry has inherited the mantle of Big Tobacco, minimizing science and resisting regulation in ways that cause devastating harm to unsuspecting citizens.
In the 1950s, researchers were finding that cigarettes caused cancer, but the political system lagged in responding. Now the same thing is happening with toxic chemicals.
The gynecology federation’s focus is on endocrine disrupters, chemicals that imitate sex hormones and often confuse the body. Endocrine disrupters are found in pesticides, plastics, shampoos and cosmetics, cash register receipts, food can linings, flame retardants and countless other products.
“Exposure to toxic chemicals during pregnancy and lactation is ubiquitous,” the organization cautioned, adding that virtually every pregnant woman in America has at least 43 different chemical contaminants in her body. It cited a National Cancer Institute report finding that “to a disturbing extent babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’”
This warning now represents the medical mainstream. It was drafted by experts from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the World Health Organization, Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and similar groups.
Such medical professionals are on the front lines. They are the ones confronting rising cases of hypospadias, a birth defect in which boys are born with a urethra opening on the side of the penis rather than at the tip. They are the ones treating women with breast cancer. Both are conditions linked to early exposure to endocrine disrupters.
The other major organization that recently issued a warning is the Endocrine Society, the international association of doctors and scientists who deal with the hormone system.
“Emerging evidence ties endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure to two of the biggest public health threats facing society — diabetes and obesity,” the Endocrine Society said in announcing its 150-page “scientific statement.” It added that “mounting evidence” also ties endocrine disrupters to infertility, prostate cancer, undescended testicles, testicular cancer, breast cancer, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer and neurological issues. Sometimes these problems apparently arise in adults because of exposures decades earlier in fetal stages.
“The threat is particularly great when unborn children are exposed,” the Endocrine Society warned.
Tracey J. Woodruff of the University of California, San Francisco notes, “One myth about chemicals is that the U.S. government makes sure they’re safe before they go on the marketplace.” In fact, most are assumed to be safe unless proved otherwise.
Of the 80,000 or more chemicals in global commerce today, only a tiny share have been rigorously screened for safety. Even when a substance is retired because of health concerns, the replacement chemical may be just as bad.
“It’s frustrating to see the same story over and over,” Professor Woodruff said. “Animal studies, in vitro tests or early human studies show that chemical A causes adverse effects. The chemical industry says, ‘Those are bad studies, show me the human evidence.’ The human evidence takes years and requires that people get sick. We should not have to use the public as guinea pigs.”
Europe is moving toward testing chemicals before they go on the market, but the United States is a laggard because of the power of the chemical lobby. Chemical safety legislation now before the Senate would require the Environmental Protection Agency to start a safety assessment of only 25 chemicals in the first five years — and House legislation isn’t much better.
Continue reading the main story
“There are almost endless parallels with the tobacco industry,” says Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of the journal Endocrinology.
For now, experts say the best approach is for people to try to protect themselves. Especially for women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, and for young children, try to eat organic, reduce the use of plastics, touch cash register receipts as little as possible, try to avoid flame-retardant couches and consult the consumer guides at ewg.org.
The chemical lobby spent the equivalent of $121,000 per member of Congress last year, so expect chemical companies to enjoy strong quarterly profits, more boys to be born with hypospadias and more women to die unnecessarily of breast cancer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opini ... pe=article
The Unnatural Kingdom
If technology helps us save the wilderness, will the wilderness still be wild?
Excerpt:
More and more, though, as we humans devour habitat, and as hardworking biologists — thank heaven — use the best tools available to protect whatever wild creatures remain, we approach that perhaps inevitable time when every predator-prey interaction, every live birth and every death in every species supported by the terrestrial biosphere, will be monitored and manipulated by the human hive mind.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/sunda ... 87722&_r=0
If technology helps us save the wilderness, will the wilderness still be wild?
Excerpt:
More and more, though, as we humans devour habitat, and as hardworking biologists — thank heaven — use the best tools available to protect whatever wild creatures remain, we approach that perhaps inevitable time when every predator-prey interaction, every live birth and every death in every species supported by the terrestrial biosphere, will be monitored and manipulated by the human hive mind.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/sunda ... 87722&_r=0
The Global Solution to Extinction
Excerpt:
But today the dream is at risk. Civilization is at last turning green, albeit only pale green. Our attention remains focused on the physical environment — on pollution, the shortage of fresh water, the shrinkage of arable land and, of course, the great, wrathful demon that threatens all our lives, human-forced climate change. But Earth’s living environment, including all its species and all the ecosystems they compose, has continued to receive relatively little attention. This is a huge strategic mistake. If we save the living environment of Earth, we will also save the physical, nonliving environment, because each depends on the other. But if we work to save only the physical environment, as we seem bent on doing, we will lose them both.
So, what exactly is the current condition of the living environment, in particular its biological diversity and stability? How are we handling this critical element of Earth’s sustainability?
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opini ... ef=opinion
Excerpt:
But today the dream is at risk. Civilization is at last turning green, albeit only pale green. Our attention remains focused on the physical environment — on pollution, the shortage of fresh water, the shrinkage of arable land and, of course, the great, wrathful demon that threatens all our lives, human-forced climate change. But Earth’s living environment, including all its species and all the ecosystems they compose, has continued to receive relatively little attention. This is a huge strategic mistake. If we save the living environment of Earth, we will also save the physical, nonliving environment, because each depends on the other. But if we work to save only the physical environment, as we seem bent on doing, we will lose them both.
So, what exactly is the current condition of the living environment, in particular its biological diversity and stability? How are we handling this critical element of Earth’s sustainability?
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opini ... ef=opinion
All is One
God is all there is - God includes everything,
all possibility and all action,
for Spirit is the invisible essence and substance of all form.
- Ernest Holmes
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity;
so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
- Henry David Thoreau
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,
so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the
organization of the entire tapestry.
- Richard P. Feynman
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
- Charles Ives
Today's affirmation:
I am one with the Earth,
with the Water,
with the Fire,
with the Air that I breathe,
with all Living Things,
and we are one with Spirit.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
******
The Saint and the Skyscraper
KARACHI, Pakistan — I live in a neighborhood by the shore made famous by the eighth-century saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi. He has been the city’s designated trouble-shooter since he arrived here as a horse trader. If you have an urgent problem that the living can’t help with, you walk up the stairs of the shrine. You offer a prayer and maybe a handful of rose petals. Your problem may not be solved immediately, but you come out feeling better.
So confident are Karachiites of Ghazi’s power that whenever there is a storm warning, instead of running away, they rush to the sea to have some fun. This city has had its share of troubles — water shortages, ethnic strife, gang wars, criminalized local politics — but for more than 12 centuries Ghazi has protected it from the fury of the Arabian Sea.
Now Karachi’s savior saint is himself in trouble. Ghazi has a new upstart neighbor: the Bahria Icon Towers, a pair of buildings including one 62 stories high that will be Pakistan’s highest building and the country’s first proper skyscraper. The project, though unfinished, doesn’t just dwarf the saint’s shrine; it has surrounded it with ugly prison-like walls, making the shrine invisible and very, very difficult to access.
Like any wise saint living by the sea, Ghazi, according to folklore, chose to set his shrine at the top of a hillock. Its green and white striped dome used to be visible from miles away. Its open courtyards and surrounding empty spaces have hosted thousands of people every day, and hundreds of thousands on public holidays and on the anniversary of Ghazi’s death. People come for prayer, music, food and rendezvous. The shrine hosts a nonstop party for the kind of people who don’t get invited to parties.
Ghazi’s new neighbor will have corporate offices, luxury apartments and shopping malls with international brands. Its ads promise a life full of aromatherapy, desserts decorated with spun sugar and happy, healthy babies bobbing in infinity pools. Bahria Icon Towers is expecting lots of cars, for corporate workers and the residents of luxury apartments. The developers have built a multistory car park and a flyover with a network of underpasses. A “gift to the people,” they never forget to tell us.
The affluent residents of the area resisted initially, but gave up after the developers dug up entire roads around the shrine and went to court to get an injunction so they could keep going. The courts also relented because, frankly, who can resist the lure of a skyscraper?
Now that the flyover and underpasses are complete, the area has become so labyrinthine that if Ghazi himself passed by he would need all his saintly powers to navigate the entrance to his own shrine. That is, if he recognized it all. After citizens warned that the skyscraper might damage the structure of the shrine, the developers decided to build huge sand-colored concrete walls around it. A “gift to the people.”
The green and white dome and the blue and white striped exterior of the shrine that were the emblem of the city have disappeared from its skyline. Ghazi, who once lorded over Karachi, has been practically imprisoned in an ugly giant riad-like villa.
Pakistan is dotted with shrines of saints with great reputations. There’s the one who cures diabetes. The one who will give you a son. The one who can get your son off death row. And all the ones who wrote great poetry and made brilliant music that have survived centuries.
But love for Abdullah Shah Ghazi is so widespread that even people who don’t believe in mosques, prayer or spiritual healing walk up to his shrine with secret wishes and plastic bags full of petals. A suicide attack in 2010, which left at least seven people dead, didn't scare visitors away.
Ghazi’s shrine is a last-chance saloon for those who can’t go to the government and can’t afford a therapist. For those who can’t talk to their sister or whose sister won’t talk to them; for those with sick babies or who are desperate for babies; for newly married couples or for people who want their spouses back. It’s the only public place in Karachi where people can break down and cry and everyone around them will understand.
Many of the regulars here are sweaty, smelly people, and they will never be allowed inside the Bahria Icon Towers. Who will protect them now that property developers are threatening Ghazi? And who will protect all of us from the elements?
There was a time when the Arabian Sea lapped at the shrine’s feet. Over the decades the sea has been pushed back, and all around the shrine miles and miles of land have been reclaimed so that posh mansions and shopping areas could be built.
This is the development model Karachi has followed. There are signal-free corridors for car owners, but hardly any footpaths for the millions who walk to work. There are air-conditioned shopping malls for affluent consumers, but the police hound street vendors claiming they’re a threat to public order.
McDonald’s occupies the prime spot on the beach, and that’s become the smelliest part. Developers cared more about the parking lot than the sewage system, and waste is being dumped in the Arabian Sea.
But then who needs the sea, or a saint to protect us against it, when we can have infinity pools in the sky?
Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/opini ... ef=opinion
God is all there is - God includes everything,
all possibility and all action,
for Spirit is the invisible essence and substance of all form.
- Ernest Holmes
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity;
so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
- Henry David Thoreau
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,
so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the
organization of the entire tapestry.
- Richard P. Feynman
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
- Charles Ives
Today's affirmation:
I am one with the Earth,
with the Water,
with the Fire,
with the Air that I breathe,
with all Living Things,
and we are one with Spirit.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
******
The Saint and the Skyscraper
KARACHI, Pakistan — I live in a neighborhood by the shore made famous by the eighth-century saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi. He has been the city’s designated trouble-shooter since he arrived here as a horse trader. If you have an urgent problem that the living can’t help with, you walk up the stairs of the shrine. You offer a prayer and maybe a handful of rose petals. Your problem may not be solved immediately, but you come out feeling better.
So confident are Karachiites of Ghazi’s power that whenever there is a storm warning, instead of running away, they rush to the sea to have some fun. This city has had its share of troubles — water shortages, ethnic strife, gang wars, criminalized local politics — but for more than 12 centuries Ghazi has protected it from the fury of the Arabian Sea.
Now Karachi’s savior saint is himself in trouble. Ghazi has a new upstart neighbor: the Bahria Icon Towers, a pair of buildings including one 62 stories high that will be Pakistan’s highest building and the country’s first proper skyscraper. The project, though unfinished, doesn’t just dwarf the saint’s shrine; it has surrounded it with ugly prison-like walls, making the shrine invisible and very, very difficult to access.
Like any wise saint living by the sea, Ghazi, according to folklore, chose to set his shrine at the top of a hillock. Its green and white striped dome used to be visible from miles away. Its open courtyards and surrounding empty spaces have hosted thousands of people every day, and hundreds of thousands on public holidays and on the anniversary of Ghazi’s death. People come for prayer, music, food and rendezvous. The shrine hosts a nonstop party for the kind of people who don’t get invited to parties.
Ghazi’s new neighbor will have corporate offices, luxury apartments and shopping malls with international brands. Its ads promise a life full of aromatherapy, desserts decorated with spun sugar and happy, healthy babies bobbing in infinity pools. Bahria Icon Towers is expecting lots of cars, for corporate workers and the residents of luxury apartments. The developers have built a multistory car park and a flyover with a network of underpasses. A “gift to the people,” they never forget to tell us.
The affluent residents of the area resisted initially, but gave up after the developers dug up entire roads around the shrine and went to court to get an injunction so they could keep going. The courts also relented because, frankly, who can resist the lure of a skyscraper?
Now that the flyover and underpasses are complete, the area has become so labyrinthine that if Ghazi himself passed by he would need all his saintly powers to navigate the entrance to his own shrine. That is, if he recognized it all. After citizens warned that the skyscraper might damage the structure of the shrine, the developers decided to build huge sand-colored concrete walls around it. A “gift to the people.”
The green and white dome and the blue and white striped exterior of the shrine that were the emblem of the city have disappeared from its skyline. Ghazi, who once lorded over Karachi, has been practically imprisoned in an ugly giant riad-like villa.
Pakistan is dotted with shrines of saints with great reputations. There’s the one who cures diabetes. The one who will give you a son. The one who can get your son off death row. And all the ones who wrote great poetry and made brilliant music that have survived centuries.
But love for Abdullah Shah Ghazi is so widespread that even people who don’t believe in mosques, prayer or spiritual healing walk up to his shrine with secret wishes and plastic bags full of petals. A suicide attack in 2010, which left at least seven people dead, didn't scare visitors away.
Ghazi’s shrine is a last-chance saloon for those who can’t go to the government and can’t afford a therapist. For those who can’t talk to their sister or whose sister won’t talk to them; for those with sick babies or who are desperate for babies; for newly married couples or for people who want their spouses back. It’s the only public place in Karachi where people can break down and cry and everyone around them will understand.
Many of the regulars here are sweaty, smelly people, and they will never be allowed inside the Bahria Icon Towers. Who will protect them now that property developers are threatening Ghazi? And who will protect all of us from the elements?
There was a time when the Arabian Sea lapped at the shrine’s feet. Over the decades the sea has been pushed back, and all around the shrine miles and miles of land have been reclaimed so that posh mansions and shopping areas could be built.
This is the development model Karachi has followed. There are signal-free corridors for car owners, but hardly any footpaths for the millions who walk to work. There are air-conditioned shopping malls for affluent consumers, but the police hound street vendors claiming they’re a threat to public order.
McDonald’s occupies the prime spot on the beach, and that’s become the smelliest part. Developers cared more about the parking lot than the sewage system, and waste is being dumped in the Arabian Sea.
But then who needs the sea, or a saint to protect us against it, when we can have infinity pools in the sky?
Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/opini ... ef=opinion
The Scourge of the Ivory Trade
The World Wildlife Fund reported early this month that ivory poaching has reduced the elephant population in Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve — one of the largest wilderness areas in Africa — by 90 percent in just four decades. At this rate, there will be no elephants left in Selous just six years from now. Tanzania isn’t alone: Mozambique lost half its elephants to poachers in the five years before 2015. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, poachers killed off 20 percent of Africa’s elephants.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/opini ... d=71987722
The World Wildlife Fund reported early this month that ivory poaching has reduced the elephant population in Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve — one of the largest wilderness areas in Africa — by 90 percent in just four decades. At this rate, there will be no elephants left in Selous just six years from now. Tanzania isn’t alone: Mozambique lost half its elephants to poachers in the five years before 2015. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, poachers killed off 20 percent of Africa’s elephants.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/opini ... d=71987722
Aesthetic Foundations of Ecological Responsibility
by M. Ali Lakhani
God is Beautiful, and He loves Beauty.
(Saying of Prophet Muhammad)
...the earth is beautiful only through its link with Heaven.
(Frithjof Schuon1)
It will seem obvious to anyone considering the issue of ecological responsibility that the subject involves a moral dimension, but it may be less
apparent why at its root it engages an aesthetic sensibility, one that requires us to enquire into the nature of 'beauty' itself. The apparently tenuous connection between our moral responsibility and our aesthetic sensibility may appear less remote when we consider a statement made by Henry David Thoreau (d. 1862) in his Journal (June 21, 1852): "The perception of beauty is a moral test." The basis for this statement is, as traditional philosophers have always known, that our discernment of reality (Truth), our moral core (Goodness), and our aesthetic sensibility (Beauty) are all inter-connected. To enquire into the nature of the world around us therefore requires us to delve into our own inner nature – in fact, to understand the very nature of Nature itself.
More....
http://www.qscience.com/doi/pdfplus/10. ... ronment.12
by M. Ali Lakhani
God is Beautiful, and He loves Beauty.
(Saying of Prophet Muhammad)
...the earth is beautiful only through its link with Heaven.
(Frithjof Schuon1)
It will seem obvious to anyone considering the issue of ecological responsibility that the subject involves a moral dimension, but it may be less
apparent why at its root it engages an aesthetic sensibility, one that requires us to enquire into the nature of 'beauty' itself. The apparently tenuous connection between our moral responsibility and our aesthetic sensibility may appear less remote when we consider a statement made by Henry David Thoreau (d. 1862) in his Journal (June 21, 1852): "The perception of beauty is a moral test." The basis for this statement is, as traditional philosophers have always known, that our discernment of reality (Truth), our moral core (Goodness), and our aesthetic sensibility (Beauty) are all inter-connected. To enquire into the nature of the world around us therefore requires us to delve into our own inner nature – in fact, to understand the very nature of Nature itself.
More....
http://www.qscience.com/doi/pdfplus/10. ... ronment.12
Against ‘Sustainability’
Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism in the late 18th century. In this version, environmentalism was born as the good twin to evil industrialization. Today, when we talk about ecological sustainability and environmental preservation, we typically still understand them in terms of a battle between nature and industry.
For environmental thinkers, the prequel to this origin story involves Descartes, and he is an arch-villain. By restricting the sphere of knowledge to only “clear and distinct ideas,” Descartes in effect reduced the natural world to its mathematical aspect. In doing so, he set the stage for a purely scientific, technological worldview, cleared the way for the domination of nature by industry, and prepared philosophy for Nietzsche’s dramatic declaration of the death of God.
This story has been told ad nauseam in philosophy classrooms and in books of environmental thought. What is given less consideration is the way that, as the Christian God retreated after Descartes, the attributes traditionally ascribed to Him — goodness, perfection and permanence — were in different ways transposed onto the body of nature.
Such idealizations of nature can be found in the work of the German Romantics (like Schiller, Hölderlin and Goethe), the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, et al) and later in that of the American transcendentalists, most notably Emerson and Thoreau. Much of this work directly counters the philosophical view of nature that reigned in centuries before them.
For Aristotle, the primary principle of nature — “physis” — is change, and what changes can never be perfect: If a perfect form were to change, it would necessarily become imperfect. For Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, the state of nature was harsh, and man’s life in that pure state, “nasty, brutish and short.” According to Hobbes, a person who chose to live in the woods would thereby renounce the very thing that made her human, and forfeit her ability to reach the divine.
In the late-18th century, though, this framework begins to undergo a reversal — cruel nature is transformed into the Garden of Eden. This identification of nature with the Christian notion of the divine is one foundation of the philosophy of environmental sustainability.
In her 2014 book “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert offers an account of just how changeable and anarchic nature, when viewed in terms of planetary history, really is. Some 200 million years ago, she writes, during the extinction at the end of the Permian period, which killed off perhaps as much as 70 percent of vertebrate species, a mysterious “massive release of carbon” turned the oceans purple and the sky green.
Yet one need not go so far back to observe the changing environment. Events like the disappearance of lions from Europe, as well as the extinction of the mastodon and the woolly mammoth (and climate change), all likely resulted from human activity. But the planet has seen mass extinctions of species and significant alterations to the climate before. The fact that they are traced to the behavior of an individual species only makes them particular, not in some way “unnatural.”
When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? We certainly do not sustain nature “in itself.” Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.
The human activity that has produced these environmental shifts is not isolated to one practice or one epoch, say, the consumption of carbon in the 20th century — though it may be accelerated by this. As Kolbert argues, the rise of Homo sapiens fundamentally altered the planetary ecosystem long before the invention of writing, the birth of René Descartes, or the first diesel pump. By killing off the large fauna, our prehistorical ancestors overturned the food chain that existed before us and began a separate chain of events that is still playing out. It might be that the truest meaning of human being, from the perspective of planetary history, is that we are a mass extinction event.
Mass extinctions are no doubt catastrophic, but they are only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying, rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating.
Among many, the argument against sustainability elicits an emotional response. As the ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes in his book “Ecology Without Nature,” the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature.
In either case, as with any death, first comes denial — we can save nature! — but it eventually gives way to acceptance. Talk about “sustaining” nature, or “preserving” it, only exacerbates this mourning and indulges our melancholia. Like the bereaved who must learn to speak of the dead in the past tense, if we are to move forward in our habitation of the planet, to face the future and not the past, to say “yes” to the anthropocene, we should change our language.
The contemporary French theorist Bruno Latour has also argued for discarding the idea of nature and the entire framework that puts human culture and the natural world in opposition. In its place he suggests we instead consider a unified network of “actants,” human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Nature, after all, includes us in its list of animals, and our products differ in degree, not kind, from those of beavers, bees and spiders. Because we are necessarily engaged with it — with it’s development, history and activity — we cannot simply let nature be, as the deep ecologists wish. And because nature drives and shapes humans in ways we don’t understand, neither can we fully become its “masters and possessors,” as Descartes imagined.
Perhaps the language we now use is a barrier to forging a more constructive (or less destructive) relationship with the rest of the natural world. Rather than talk about preserving ecosystems or animal populations, perhaps instead we should talk about promoting them. We do not preserve a wetland, we promote it; we do not preserve the black rhino, we foster or advance or endorse it. We don’t sustain the climate, we advocate certain carbon levels.
Instead of sustainability, we should instead speak of adaptability, a term that skews away from the idea of a perfect, ordered nature and unchanging industrial-technological conditions, and favors a vision of nature in a state of constant change, even chaos; a vision that values difference and diversity, both biological and cultural. Perhaps this revised language will allow us to see the planet not as a video-game landscape, programmed by God, that we’ve been dropped into and can either preserve or destroy, but as a bustling world of colleagues, both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, over whom we have influence, but who also influence us.
Jeremy Butman is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opini ... ef=opinion
Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism in the late 18th century. In this version, environmentalism was born as the good twin to evil industrialization. Today, when we talk about ecological sustainability and environmental preservation, we typically still understand them in terms of a battle between nature and industry.
For environmental thinkers, the prequel to this origin story involves Descartes, and he is an arch-villain. By restricting the sphere of knowledge to only “clear and distinct ideas,” Descartes in effect reduced the natural world to its mathematical aspect. In doing so, he set the stage for a purely scientific, technological worldview, cleared the way for the domination of nature by industry, and prepared philosophy for Nietzsche’s dramatic declaration of the death of God.
This story has been told ad nauseam in philosophy classrooms and in books of environmental thought. What is given less consideration is the way that, as the Christian God retreated after Descartes, the attributes traditionally ascribed to Him — goodness, perfection and permanence — were in different ways transposed onto the body of nature.
Such idealizations of nature can be found in the work of the German Romantics (like Schiller, Hölderlin and Goethe), the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, et al) and later in that of the American transcendentalists, most notably Emerson and Thoreau. Much of this work directly counters the philosophical view of nature that reigned in centuries before them.
For Aristotle, the primary principle of nature — “physis” — is change, and what changes can never be perfect: If a perfect form were to change, it would necessarily become imperfect. For Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, the state of nature was harsh, and man’s life in that pure state, “nasty, brutish and short.” According to Hobbes, a person who chose to live in the woods would thereby renounce the very thing that made her human, and forfeit her ability to reach the divine.
In the late-18th century, though, this framework begins to undergo a reversal — cruel nature is transformed into the Garden of Eden. This identification of nature with the Christian notion of the divine is one foundation of the philosophy of environmental sustainability.
In her 2014 book “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert offers an account of just how changeable and anarchic nature, when viewed in terms of planetary history, really is. Some 200 million years ago, she writes, during the extinction at the end of the Permian period, which killed off perhaps as much as 70 percent of vertebrate species, a mysterious “massive release of carbon” turned the oceans purple and the sky green.
Yet one need not go so far back to observe the changing environment. Events like the disappearance of lions from Europe, as well as the extinction of the mastodon and the woolly mammoth (and climate change), all likely resulted from human activity. But the planet has seen mass extinctions of species and significant alterations to the climate before. The fact that they are traced to the behavior of an individual species only makes them particular, not in some way “unnatural.”
When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? We certainly do not sustain nature “in itself.” Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.
The human activity that has produced these environmental shifts is not isolated to one practice or one epoch, say, the consumption of carbon in the 20th century — though it may be accelerated by this. As Kolbert argues, the rise of Homo sapiens fundamentally altered the planetary ecosystem long before the invention of writing, the birth of René Descartes, or the first diesel pump. By killing off the large fauna, our prehistorical ancestors overturned the food chain that existed before us and began a separate chain of events that is still playing out. It might be that the truest meaning of human being, from the perspective of planetary history, is that we are a mass extinction event.
Mass extinctions are no doubt catastrophic, but they are only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying, rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating.
Among many, the argument against sustainability elicits an emotional response. As the ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes in his book “Ecology Without Nature,” the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature.
In either case, as with any death, first comes denial — we can save nature! — but it eventually gives way to acceptance. Talk about “sustaining” nature, or “preserving” it, only exacerbates this mourning and indulges our melancholia. Like the bereaved who must learn to speak of the dead in the past tense, if we are to move forward in our habitation of the planet, to face the future and not the past, to say “yes” to the anthropocene, we should change our language.
The contemporary French theorist Bruno Latour has also argued for discarding the idea of nature and the entire framework that puts human culture and the natural world in opposition. In its place he suggests we instead consider a unified network of “actants,” human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Nature, after all, includes us in its list of animals, and our products differ in degree, not kind, from those of beavers, bees and spiders. Because we are necessarily engaged with it — with it’s development, history and activity — we cannot simply let nature be, as the deep ecologists wish. And because nature drives and shapes humans in ways we don’t understand, neither can we fully become its “masters and possessors,” as Descartes imagined.
Perhaps the language we now use is a barrier to forging a more constructive (or less destructive) relationship with the rest of the natural world. Rather than talk about preserving ecosystems or animal populations, perhaps instead we should talk about promoting them. We do not preserve a wetland, we promote it; we do not preserve the black rhino, we foster or advance or endorse it. We don’t sustain the climate, we advocate certain carbon levels.
Instead of sustainability, we should instead speak of adaptability, a term that skews away from the idea of a perfect, ordered nature and unchanging industrial-technological conditions, and favors a vision of nature in a state of constant change, even chaos; a vision that values difference and diversity, both biological and cultural. Perhaps this revised language will allow us to see the planet not as a video-game landscape, programmed by God, that we’ve been dropped into and can either preserve or destroy, but as a bustling world of colleagues, both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, over whom we have influence, but who also influence us.
Jeremy Butman is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opini ... ef=opinion
We Are All Noah Now
HONOLULU — Robert Macfarlane, in his book “Landmarks,” about the connection between words and landscapes, tells a revealing but stunning story about how recent editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (aimed at 7-year-olds) dropped certain “nature words” that its editors deemed less relevant to the lives of modern children. These included “acorn,” “dandelion,” “fern,” “nectar,” “otter,” “pasture” and “willow.” The terms introduced in their place, he noted, included “broadband,” “blog,” “cut-and-paste,” “MP3 player” and “voice-mail.”
While this news was first disclosed in 2015, reading it in Macfarlane’s book still shocks me for what it signifies. But who can blame the Oxford editors for dumping Amazon words for Amazon.com ones? Our natural world is rapidly disappearing. Just how fast was the major topic here last week at the global conference held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which I participated in along with some 8,000 scientists, nature reserve specialists and environmentalists.
The dominant theme running through the I.U.C.N.’s seminars was the fact that we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover. When the coral and elephants are all gone, no 3-D printer will be able to recreate them.
In short, we and our kids are rapidly becoming the Noah generation, charged with saving the last pairs. (This is no time to be electing a climate-change denier like Donald Trump for president.)
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/opini ... ef=opinion
HONOLULU — Robert Macfarlane, in his book “Landmarks,” about the connection between words and landscapes, tells a revealing but stunning story about how recent editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (aimed at 7-year-olds) dropped certain “nature words” that its editors deemed less relevant to the lives of modern children. These included “acorn,” “dandelion,” “fern,” “nectar,” “otter,” “pasture” and “willow.” The terms introduced in their place, he noted, included “broadband,” “blog,” “cut-and-paste,” “MP3 player” and “voice-mail.”
While this news was first disclosed in 2015, reading it in Macfarlane’s book still shocks me for what it signifies. But who can blame the Oxford editors for dumping Amazon words for Amazon.com ones? Our natural world is rapidly disappearing. Just how fast was the major topic here last week at the global conference held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which I participated in along with some 8,000 scientists, nature reserve specialists and environmentalists.
The dominant theme running through the I.U.C.N.’s seminars was the fact that we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover. When the coral and elephants are all gone, no 3-D printer will be able to recreate them.
In short, we and our kids are rapidly becoming the Noah generation, charged with saving the last pairs. (This is no time to be electing a climate-change denier like Donald Trump for president.)
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/opini ... ef=opinion
Temperatures Rise, and We’re Cooked
Extract:
That obstinacy confronts a new wave of research showing that climate change is much more harmful than we had imagined.
Until now, the focus has been on rising seas, more intense hurricanes, acidification of oceans, drought and crop failures. But new studies are finding that some of the most important effects will be directly on our bodies and minds.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Extract:
That obstinacy confronts a new wave of research showing that climate change is much more harmful than we had imagined.
Until now, the focus has been on rising seas, more intense hurricanes, acidification of oceans, drought and crop failures. But new studies are finding that some of the most important effects will be directly on our bodies and minds.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opini ... 05309&_r=0
What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first
We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/topsto ... li=AAggNb9
We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/topsto ... li=AAggNb9
The Lost Cultures of Whales
Extract:
The whale families we work with, members of the Eastern Caribbean Clan, are shrinking. Their population is declining by as much as 4 percent a year, as we reported last week in the journal PLOS One, largely a result of climate change and the increasing human presence in these waters. (Whales can be hit by ships or become entangled in fishing gear.) We are not just losing specific whales that we have come to know as individuals; we are losing a way of life, a culture — the accumulated wisdom of generations on how to survive in the deep waters of the Caribbean Sea. They may have lived here for longer than we have walked upright.
Sperm whales live rich and complex lives in a part of the world we find difficult to even explore. And many aspects of their lives appear remarkably similar to our own. Grandmothers, mothers and daughters babysit, defend and raise calves together. Family is critical to surviving in the open ocean, and each has its own way of doing things. The whales live in communities of neighboring families in a multicultural oceanic society.
Behavior is what you do, culture is how you do it. All sperm whales do the same things — feed, swim, babysit, defend, socialize — but how they do them is different around the world. Just as humans use forks or chopsticks, they, too, differ in how they eat, what species of squid they eat, how fast they travel and where they roam, their social behavior, and probably many other ways we still do not understand.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opini ... ef=opinion
Extract:
The whale families we work with, members of the Eastern Caribbean Clan, are shrinking. Their population is declining by as much as 4 percent a year, as we reported last week in the journal PLOS One, largely a result of climate change and the increasing human presence in these waters. (Whales can be hit by ships or become entangled in fishing gear.) We are not just losing specific whales that we have come to know as individuals; we are losing a way of life, a culture — the accumulated wisdom of generations on how to survive in the deep waters of the Caribbean Sea. They may have lived here for longer than we have walked upright.
Sperm whales live rich and complex lives in a part of the world we find difficult to even explore. And many aspects of their lives appear remarkably similar to our own. Grandmothers, mothers and daughters babysit, defend and raise calves together. Family is critical to surviving in the open ocean, and each has its own way of doing things. The whales live in communities of neighboring families in a multicultural oceanic society.
Behavior is what you do, culture is how you do it. All sperm whales do the same things — feed, swim, babysit, defend, socialize — but how they do them is different around the world. Just as humans use forks or chopsticks, they, too, differ in how they eat, what species of squid they eat, how fast they travel and where they roam, their social behavior, and probably many other ways we still do not understand.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opini ... ef=opinion
We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution
Extract:
What would winning a “war” against climate change even look like? McKibben suggests a huge mobilization to produce green technologies, solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. He cites the public seizure and transformation of private factories during World War II that enabled the United States to produce bombers and other instruments that helped win the war.
Certainly greener technologies can help, but solar panels won’t purify Flint’s lead-ridden water or lower asthma rates in the Bronx, some of the highest in the country because of the proximity to trucking lanes. Technology alone can’t address the environmental injustice disproportionately confronting minorities. However, if we understand that the enemy is not our physical environment, but the unjust social relations that allow some to gain at the expense of and risk to others, then technological solutions can be a part, but only a part, of the plan. Crucial to this plan is gaining social control over the private, exploitative and even irresponsible direction of the human-nature metabolism.
For this reason, Naomi Klein has called for solutions that go beyond the technological. She emphasizes, not just green energy, but also “people power.” Her most recent book and film, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” feature a number of grass-roots movements resisting the forces that threaten people’s relationships with their environment — sometimes even in the name of “green” solutions, such as hydroelectric dam projects. We want to follow Klein’s lead in shifting the conceptual focus from technologies of power to relations of power. Despite his recent rhetoric, McKibben follows a similar course.
We urgently need to motivate action, but given the ambiguities and dangers surrounding war rhetoric, we need better orienting language. Perhaps, as some have suggested, “revolution” is the better path.
While world wars aim to decimate enemies and their capacities for violence, “revolutions” aim to transform violence and oppression by empowering people. Instead of a war against physics, a revolution in the control and direction of climate, natural resources and energy policy could enable democratic participation to redress past harms and guide environmental goals of the future. Such a revolution would affirm the right to a clean, healthy environment for all people; it would transform the relationships that regulate our metabolism with nature, relationships that now allow some to profit by denying this right to others. Solar panels alone won’t transform these relationships and secure this right.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/opini ... dline&te=1
Extract:
What would winning a “war” against climate change even look like? McKibben suggests a huge mobilization to produce green technologies, solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. He cites the public seizure and transformation of private factories during World War II that enabled the United States to produce bombers and other instruments that helped win the war.
Certainly greener technologies can help, but solar panels won’t purify Flint’s lead-ridden water or lower asthma rates in the Bronx, some of the highest in the country because of the proximity to trucking lanes. Technology alone can’t address the environmental injustice disproportionately confronting minorities. However, if we understand that the enemy is not our physical environment, but the unjust social relations that allow some to gain at the expense of and risk to others, then technological solutions can be a part, but only a part, of the plan. Crucial to this plan is gaining social control over the private, exploitative and even irresponsible direction of the human-nature metabolism.
For this reason, Naomi Klein has called for solutions that go beyond the technological. She emphasizes, not just green energy, but also “people power.” Her most recent book and film, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” feature a number of grass-roots movements resisting the forces that threaten people’s relationships with their environment — sometimes even in the name of “green” solutions, such as hydroelectric dam projects. We want to follow Klein’s lead in shifting the conceptual focus from technologies of power to relations of power. Despite his recent rhetoric, McKibben follows a similar course.
We urgently need to motivate action, but given the ambiguities and dangers surrounding war rhetoric, we need better orienting language. Perhaps, as some have suggested, “revolution” is the better path.
While world wars aim to decimate enemies and their capacities for violence, “revolutions” aim to transform violence and oppression by empowering people. Instead of a war against physics, a revolution in the control and direction of climate, natural resources and energy policy could enable democratic participation to redress past harms and guide environmental goals of the future. Such a revolution would affirm the right to a clean, healthy environment for all people; it would transform the relationships that regulate our metabolism with nature, relationships that now allow some to profit by denying this right to others. Solar panels alone won’t transform these relationships and secure this right.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/opini ... dline&te=1
Are Your Sperm in Trouble?
Let’s begin with sex.
As a couple finishes its business, millions of sperm begin theirs: rushing toward an egg to fertilize it. But these days, scientists say, an increasing proportion of sperm — now about 90 percent in a typical young man — are misshapen, sometimes with two heads or two tails.
Even when properly shaped, today’s sperm are often pathetic swimmers, veering like drunks or paddling crazily in circles. Sperm counts also appear to have dropped sharply in the last 75 years, in ways that affect our ability to reproduce.
“There’s been a decrease not only in sperm numbers, but also in their quality and swimming capacity, their ability to deliver the goods,” said Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who notes that researchers have also linked semen problems to shorter life expectancy.
Perhaps you were expecting another column about political missteps in Washington, and instead you’ve been walloped with talk of bad swimmers. Yet this isn’t just a puzzling curiosity, but is rather an urgent concern that affects reproduction, possibly even our species’ future.
Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor of the journal Endocrinology, put it to me this way: “Semen quality and fertility in men have decreased. Not everyone who wants to reproduce will be able to. And the costs of male disorders to quality of life, and the economic burden to society, are inestimable.”
Human and animal studies suggest that a crucial culprit is a common class of chemical called endocrine disruptors, found in plastics, cosmetics, couches, pesticides and countless other products. Because of the environmental links, The New Yorker once elegantly referred to the crisis as “silent sperm,” and innumerable studies over 25 years add to the concern that the world’s sperm are in trouble.
And so are men and boys. Apparently related to the problem of declining semen quality is an increase in testicular cancer in many countries; in undescended testicles; and in a congenital malformation of the penis called hypospadias (in which the urethra exits the side or base of the penis instead of the tip). These problems are often found together and are labeled testicular dysgenesis syndrome.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opin ... d=45305309
Let’s begin with sex.
As a couple finishes its business, millions of sperm begin theirs: rushing toward an egg to fertilize it. But these days, scientists say, an increasing proportion of sperm — now about 90 percent in a typical young man — are misshapen, sometimes with two heads or two tails.
Even when properly shaped, today’s sperm are often pathetic swimmers, veering like drunks or paddling crazily in circles. Sperm counts also appear to have dropped sharply in the last 75 years, in ways that affect our ability to reproduce.
“There’s been a decrease not only in sperm numbers, but also in their quality and swimming capacity, their ability to deliver the goods,” said Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who notes that researchers have also linked semen problems to shorter life expectancy.
Perhaps you were expecting another column about political missteps in Washington, and instead you’ve been walloped with talk of bad swimmers. Yet this isn’t just a puzzling curiosity, but is rather an urgent concern that affects reproduction, possibly even our species’ future.
Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor of the journal Endocrinology, put it to me this way: “Semen quality and fertility in men have decreased. Not everyone who wants to reproduce will be able to. And the costs of male disorders to quality of life, and the economic burden to society, are inestimable.”
Human and animal studies suggest that a crucial culprit is a common class of chemical called endocrine disruptors, found in plastics, cosmetics, couches, pesticides and countless other products. Because of the environmental links, The New Yorker once elegantly referred to the crisis as “silent sperm,” and innumerable studies over 25 years add to the concern that the world’s sperm are in trouble.
And so are men and boys. Apparently related to the problem of declining semen quality is an increase in testicular cancer in many countries; in undescended testicles; and in a congenital malformation of the penis called hypospadias (in which the urethra exits the side or base of the penis instead of the tip). These problems are often found together and are labeled testicular dysgenesis syndrome.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opin ... d=45305309
World Water Day 2017: Our polluted waters
Slide show at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/wo ... ailsignout
******
New Zealand declares a river a person
The odd legal status is intended to help prevent pollution and other abuses
IT SOUNDS, admits Chris Finlayson, like a “pretty nutty” idea. Yet the new law that designates the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. Te Urewera, an area of forested hills in the north-east that used to be a national park, became a person for legal purposes in 2014. And around the world companies, foundations and assorted units of government have legal rights and responsibilities independent of the people who staff them. All the same, New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.
The law, which was approved on March 15th, stems from disputes over the Treaty of Waitangi, by which New Zealand’s indigenous Maori ceded sovereignty to British colonialists in 1840. The treaty was supposed to have protected Maori rights and property; it was observed mainly in the breach. In recent years the government has tried to negotiate settlements for breaches of the treaty with different Maori iwi, or tribes. For the Whanganui iwi, the idea of the river as person is nothing new. The iwi professes a deep spiritual connection to the Whanganui: as a local proverb has it, “I am the river and the river is me.” The law acknowledges the river as a “living whole”, rather than trying to carve it up, putting to rest an ownership dispute that has dragged on for 140 years. When it was passed members of the iwi in the gallery of parliament broke into a ten-minute song of celebration.
In practice, two guardians will act for the river, one appointed by the government and one by the iwi. Mr Finlayson, the minister in charge of negotiations tied to the Treaty of Waitangi, hopes the change will help bring those who do environmental damage to the river to book. Under the settlement the government will also pay the iwi NZ$80m ($56m) as compensation for past abuses and set up a fund of NZ$30m to enhance the “health and well-being” of the river. It is one of 82 deals that aim to remedy breaches of the treaty, including one with the Tuhoe iwi that made Te Urewera into a person.
Days after the law passed, an Indian court declared two of the biggest and most sacred rivers in India, the Ganges and Yamuna, to be people too. Making explicit reference to the Whanganui settlement, the court assigned legal “parents” to protect and conserve their waters. Local lawyers think the ruling might help fight severe pollution: the rivers’ defenders will no longer have to prove that discharges into them harm anyone, since any sullying of the waters will now be a crime against the river itself. There is no doubt that of the 1.3bn-odd people in India, the Ganges and the Yamuna must be among the most downtrodden.
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/2171 ... lydispatch
Slide show at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/wo ... ailsignout
******
New Zealand declares a river a person
The odd legal status is intended to help prevent pollution and other abuses
IT SOUNDS, admits Chris Finlayson, like a “pretty nutty” idea. Yet the new law that designates the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. Te Urewera, an area of forested hills in the north-east that used to be a national park, became a person for legal purposes in 2014. And around the world companies, foundations and assorted units of government have legal rights and responsibilities independent of the people who staff them. All the same, New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.
The law, which was approved on March 15th, stems from disputes over the Treaty of Waitangi, by which New Zealand’s indigenous Maori ceded sovereignty to British colonialists in 1840. The treaty was supposed to have protected Maori rights and property; it was observed mainly in the breach. In recent years the government has tried to negotiate settlements for breaches of the treaty with different Maori iwi, or tribes. For the Whanganui iwi, the idea of the river as person is nothing new. The iwi professes a deep spiritual connection to the Whanganui: as a local proverb has it, “I am the river and the river is me.” The law acknowledges the river as a “living whole”, rather than trying to carve it up, putting to rest an ownership dispute that has dragged on for 140 years. When it was passed members of the iwi in the gallery of parliament broke into a ten-minute song of celebration.
In practice, two guardians will act for the river, one appointed by the government and one by the iwi. Mr Finlayson, the minister in charge of negotiations tied to the Treaty of Waitangi, hopes the change will help bring those who do environmental damage to the river to book. Under the settlement the government will also pay the iwi NZ$80m ($56m) as compensation for past abuses and set up a fund of NZ$30m to enhance the “health and well-being” of the river. It is one of 82 deals that aim to remedy breaches of the treaty, including one with the Tuhoe iwi that made Te Urewera into a person.
Days after the law passed, an Indian court declared two of the biggest and most sacred rivers in India, the Ganges and Yamuna, to be people too. Making explicit reference to the Whanganui settlement, the court assigned legal “parents” to protect and conserve their waters. Local lawyers think the ruling might help fight severe pollution: the rivers’ defenders will no longer have to prove that discharges into them harm anyone, since any sullying of the waters will now be a crime against the river itself. There is no doubt that of the 1.3bn-odd people in India, the Ganges and the Yamuna must be among the most downtrodden.
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/2171 ... lydispatch
Garb age
Looking good can be extremely bad for the planet
Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014
STYLE is supposedly for ever. But the garments needed to conjure up eternal chic are spending less time on shop racks and in homes than ever before. Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, as apparel firms’ operations became more efficient, their production cycles became quicker and fashionistas got more for their money. From just a few collections a year, fast-fashion brands such as Zara, owned by Spain’s Inditex, now offer more than 20; Sweden’s H&M manages up to 16.
Dressing to impress has an environmental cost as well as a financial one. From the pesticides poured on cotton fields to the washes in which denim is dunked, making 1kg of fabric generates 23kg of greenhouse gases on average, according to estimates by McKinsey, a consultancy. Because consumers keep almost every type of apparel only half as long as they did 15 years ago, these inputs quickly go to waste. The latest worry is shoppers in the developing world, who have yet to buy as many clothes as rich-world consumers but are fast catching up (see chart).
Most apparel companies know that sooner or later, consumers’ awareness of this subject will rise. That is a worry. Various furores in the 1990s and afterwards over the working conditions of people making goods for firms such as Nike, Walmart and Primark badly damaged brands. The clothing industry cannot afford to appear so ugly again.
One obvious way in which firms can answer environmental concerns is to use renewable energy to power their facilities. Beyond that, they can cut back sharply on water and chemical use; and they can develop new materials and manufacturing processes that reduce inputs.
The record in this regard is mixed. H&M was the largest buyer in the world of “better cotton” last year—that is, cotton produced under a scheme to eliminate the nastiest pesticides and encourage strict water management. It grows in 24 countries and represents about 12% of the 25m tonnes of cotton produced each year globally. Kirsten Brodde of Greenpeace also notes that H&M has eliminated toxic per- and polyfluorinated chemicals from its lines (which are used to make garments waterproof). Nike’s Flyknit method of weaving items, including trainers, reduces waste by 60% in comparison with cutting and sewing. Flyknit products have a large following: revenues from the line came to more than $1bn in the last fiscal year.
But for many firms, research and development into new materials and methods is not a priority. Plenty do not measure their overall environmental impact. And introducing green collections can even carry a risk for brands, reckons Steven Swartz of McKinsey. It is possible that a shopper will move on from wearing a consciously green T-shirt to viewing other kinds of clothing as the trappings of planetary destruction.
A handful of brands encourage customers to recycle old clothes by returning them to stores. But almost all apparel today is made of a mix of materials—very often including polyester. Separating them out is difficult and mechanical methods of recycling degrade fibres. Chemical methods are too expensive to be viable. Shipping second-hand clothes off to countries in Africa and Asia is also a bust. Even if local markets are large enough to absorb them, the poorer quality of polyester-mixed garbs means they do not survive long.
More durable apparel could help. Tom Cridland, a British designer, creates men’s clothing that is designed to last three decades thanks to strong seams and special treatments to prevent shrinking. He expects revenues of $1m this year, but admits that his model will be hard to scale. Patagonia, a maker of climbing and hiking gear, sends vans to campuses to help students patch up jackets and trousers. It helps others with greenery, too. After discovering a type of material for wetsuits that, unlike neoprene, requires no oil to make, Patagonia shared the find with surfing brands such as Quiksilver. Such innovation is badly needed. Style may be forever but today’s model of clothing production is not.
http://www.economist.com/news/business- ... lydispatch
[/i]
Looking good can be extremely bad for the planet
Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014
STYLE is supposedly for ever. But the garments needed to conjure up eternal chic are spending less time on shop racks and in homes than ever before. Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, as apparel firms’ operations became more efficient, their production cycles became quicker and fashionistas got more for their money. From just a few collections a year, fast-fashion brands such as Zara, owned by Spain’s Inditex, now offer more than 20; Sweden’s H&M manages up to 16.
Dressing to impress has an environmental cost as well as a financial one. From the pesticides poured on cotton fields to the washes in which denim is dunked, making 1kg of fabric generates 23kg of greenhouse gases on average, according to estimates by McKinsey, a consultancy. Because consumers keep almost every type of apparel only half as long as they did 15 years ago, these inputs quickly go to waste. The latest worry is shoppers in the developing world, who have yet to buy as many clothes as rich-world consumers but are fast catching up (see chart).
Most apparel companies know that sooner or later, consumers’ awareness of this subject will rise. That is a worry. Various furores in the 1990s and afterwards over the working conditions of people making goods for firms such as Nike, Walmart and Primark badly damaged brands. The clothing industry cannot afford to appear so ugly again.
One obvious way in which firms can answer environmental concerns is to use renewable energy to power their facilities. Beyond that, they can cut back sharply on water and chemical use; and they can develop new materials and manufacturing processes that reduce inputs.
The record in this regard is mixed. H&M was the largest buyer in the world of “better cotton” last year—that is, cotton produced under a scheme to eliminate the nastiest pesticides and encourage strict water management. It grows in 24 countries and represents about 12% of the 25m tonnes of cotton produced each year globally. Kirsten Brodde of Greenpeace also notes that H&M has eliminated toxic per- and polyfluorinated chemicals from its lines (which are used to make garments waterproof). Nike’s Flyknit method of weaving items, including trainers, reduces waste by 60% in comparison with cutting and sewing. Flyknit products have a large following: revenues from the line came to more than $1bn in the last fiscal year.
But for many firms, research and development into new materials and methods is not a priority. Plenty do not measure their overall environmental impact. And introducing green collections can even carry a risk for brands, reckons Steven Swartz of McKinsey. It is possible that a shopper will move on from wearing a consciously green T-shirt to viewing other kinds of clothing as the trappings of planetary destruction.
A handful of brands encourage customers to recycle old clothes by returning them to stores. But almost all apparel today is made of a mix of materials—very often including polyester. Separating them out is difficult and mechanical methods of recycling degrade fibres. Chemical methods are too expensive to be viable. Shipping second-hand clothes off to countries in Africa and Asia is also a bust. Even if local markets are large enough to absorb them, the poorer quality of polyester-mixed garbs means they do not survive long.
More durable apparel could help. Tom Cridland, a British designer, creates men’s clothing that is designed to last three decades thanks to strong seams and special treatments to prevent shrinking. He expects revenues of $1m this year, but admits that his model will be hard to scale. Patagonia, a maker of climbing and hiking gear, sends vans to campuses to help students patch up jackets and trousers. It helps others with greenery, too. After discovering a type of material for wetsuits that, unlike neoprene, requires no oil to make, Patagonia shared the find with surfing brands such as Quiksilver. Such innovation is badly needed. Style may be forever but today’s model of clothing production is not.
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