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Wednesday, August 21, 2002
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Secretary of State Colin Powell will lead the American delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from August 26 through September 4. President George W. Bush made the announcement late Monday, giving no explanation as to why he will not be attending the summit to join 106 other world leaders on the speaker's podium. The World Summit on Sustainable Development is sponsored by the United Nations as a 10 year follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which was attended by then President George H.W. Bush, father of the current President. Other heads of government and heads of state who are on the speakers list in Johannesburg include all the other leaders of G8 countries - UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Italian President Silvio Berlusconi and Russia's Vladimir Putin among them. President Bush has been under pressure from Republican Party and conservative lobbyists not to attend the summit. As those who read this page regularly know, Earth is suffering a humanity made CRISIS. Many of our problems stem from the fact that we have no one who speaks for the EARTH. All points of view are paraochial and only address the LOCAL and SHORT SIGHTED concerns of their speakers. In American those local and short sighted concerns are always about making money for large corporations. (08/21/02) | |
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From Chaordic Commons: The ultimate success of a chaordic design process has as much to do with careful and effective project management as it does with an elegant design for a chaordic organization. A great number of things need to be achieved simultaneously, and each step depends on those that precede it. Many key elements are common sense; others are well known project management skills. A few are unique to the chaordic design process What follows is a summary of some of what we have learned and how we have tried to structure our own approach. The requisite caveat is that our own experience is evolving rapidly and we are already experimenting with variations on these themes! There is no absolutely right or wrong way to undertake a chaordic design process, but most organization design and development initiatives tend to go through four major phases: Exploration, Design, Launch and Operation. (08/21/02) | |
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New York Times -- United Nations demographers who once predicted the earth's population would peak at 12 billion over the next century or two are scaling back their estimates. Instead, they cautiously predict, the world's population will peak at 10 billion before 2200, when it may begin declining. Some experts are wary of too much optimism, however. At the Population Council, an independent research organization in New York, Dr. John Bongaarts has studied population declines in various countries over the last half century. He questions the assumption that when fertility declines begin they will continue to go down at the same pace, especially if good family planning services are not widely available. Sharp fertility declines in many industrialized and middle-income countries had already challenged another old belief: that culture and religion would thwart efforts to cut fertility. In Italy, a Roman Catholic country whose big families were the stuff of cinema, family size is shrinking faster than anywhere else in Europe, and the population is aging rapidly as fewer children are born. Islamic Iran has also had great success with family planning. ... Only a few years ago, some experts argued that economic development and education for women were necessary precursors for declines in population growth. Today, village women and slum families in some of the poorest countries are beginning to prove them wrong, as fertility rates drop faster than predicted toward the replacement level — 2.1 children for the average mother, one baby to replace each parent, plus a fraction to compensate for unexpected deaths in the overall population. A few decades ago in certain countries like Brazil, Egypt, India and Mexico fertility rates were as high as five or six. (08/21/02) | |
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New York Times -- Biophilia is the term coined by the Harvard naturalist Dr. Edward O. Wilson to describe what he saw as humanity's "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes," and to be drawn toward nature, to feel an affinity for it, a love, a craving. Who has not experienced the thrill of biophilia? You see a fine, fat maple tree ablaze with the sugared tannins of autumn, or the sun glittering on the Hudson River in an explosion of diamonds and for a moment you wish you were Julie Andrews: the hills are alive! But then you stumble through a bush and emerge covered with ticks. Or you watch a bunch of Hitchcockian crows maul and kill a baby squirrel. You try to tell yourself, c'est la guerre, there are too many squirrels anyway, but in fact you resent this chronic mouthiness of nature, these endless rounds of attack and snack, and you're grateful anew for four walls and DEET. Nature is a mother in so many ways, and that means you adore her and depend on her but at times she's pure Medea. And all of these messy, contradictory feelings are natural. In the two decades since Dr. Wilson published "Biophilia," many other researchers have explored the meaning of nature-lust, and its components, and the extent to which we are possessed by it. They have found evidence of biophilia everywhere. Americans are said to be sports nuts, for example, yet more people in this country attend zoos every year than they do all professional sporting events combined. Of the many luxuries that money can buy, the most coveted has long been a pristine view: lakeside, seaside, mountainside, Central Park. (08/21/02) | |
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CNN Money -- >>Qwest Communications International Inc. said Tuesday it is selling its phone book business for $7,050 million as the troubled telecom company moves to cut its debt load.<< What in hell would make a phone book business worth 7,050 million dollars? >>Qwest will continue to provide local phone service in all those states and will use the new directory company exclusively in those states. It said it will use the proceeds of the sale to reduce debt. It had $20,400 million of long-term borrowing on its balance sheet at the end of last quarter, along with $5,900 million of short-term borrowing. It has also seen its debt downgraded to so-called "junk bond" status.<< Quest stock has dropped from $24 a share to under $1 a share. Obviously no one would invest in this company, but a better question is why would the banks loan it 26,300 million dollars ? No wonder corporate America is bankrupt! (08/21/02) | |
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New York Times -- As America faces its largest outbreak yet of illness caused by West Nile virus — 251 cases so far this year, and as many as 1,000 expected — inevitable questions arise. Why here? Why now? Until 1999, the disease had never even been detected in North America. No one knows how the virus came to the United States. But it made itself at home, and by 2001 had infected 29 species of mosquitoes, 100 species of birds and many mammals, including humans. It has now reached 36 states and the District of Columbia. Dr. Paul R. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard Medical School, said an important consequence of warming was an increase in "extreme weather events" — droughts punctuated by torrential rains. Drought, he said, helps the mosquito species Culex pipiens, which plays a major role in spreading West Nile. He added that drought might also wipe out darning needles, dragonflies and amphibians, which destroy mosquitoes. Drought may also aid the spread of infection by drawing thirsty birds to the pools and puddles where mosquitoes breed. "Hot weather plays a role, too," Dr. Epstein said. "Warmth increases the rate at which pathogens mature inside mosquitoes." (08/21/02) | |
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New York Times -- "We've come through a period of finally understanding the nature and magnitude of humanity's transformation of the earth," Dr. Clark said. "Having realized it, can we become clever enough at a big enough scale to be able to maintain the rates of progress? I think we can." Some scientists say it is anthropocentric hubris to think people understand the living planet well enough to know how to manage it. But that prospect is attracting more than 100 world leaders and thousands of other participants to the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development, which starts on Monday in Johannesburg. No matter what they come up with, ice ages, volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates will dwarf human activities in the long run. But communities and countries face concrete choices in the next decade that are likely to determine the quality of human life and the environment well into the 22nd century. Human activity is such a pervasive influence on the planet's ecological framework that it is no longer possible to separate people and nature. (08/21/02) | |
6:10:30 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
9/3/2002; 6:03:29 AM.
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