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Wednesday, February 26, 2003
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William Rees writes: Clearly, any human activity dependent on the consumptive use of ecological resources (forestry, fisheries, agriculture, waste disposal, urban sprawl onto agricultural land) cannot be sustained indefinitely if it uses not only the annual production of the biosphere (the 'interest') but also cuts into the standing stock (the 'capital'). Herein lies the essence of our environmental crisis. Persistent trends in key ecological variables indicate that we have not only been living off the interest but also con-suming our ecological capital. This is the inevitable consequence of exponential material growth in a finite environment. In short, the global economy is cannibalising the biosphere. This means that much of our wealth is illusion. We have simply drawn down one account (the biosphere) to add to another (material wealth). It might even be argued that we have been collectively impoverished in the process. Much potentially renewable ecological capital has been permanently converted into machinery, plant and possessions that will eventually wear out and have to be replaced at the cost of additional resources. ... Through a thermodynamic analysis of food production, Bryson has estimated that about 900 square metres of cropland are required to produce the average per capita food energy requirements assuming year round cropping. With an average growing season of only 180 days, each hectare of agricultural land will theoretically support about 5.5 people. The present world population density is about 3 persons per arable hectare. Hence we are within one population doubling of the 'sunshine limit' to growth and at present rates will reach that limit in 35 years. (02/27/03) | |
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: This is not a criticism of the federal officers who were involved in the adversary containment at the Branch Davidian Church. Clearly the members of that church were heavily armed and dangerous. But as a thought experiment, how would synergic containment work differently than adversary containment? ... Those within the compound would then be ordered to put down their weapons and move out to the perimeter to voluntarily enter into protective custody. Those being contained would have a short time to voluntarily surrender. If there was no response, or a hostile response, the Synergic Containment Force would begin Containment Isolation of the compound. Once Containment Isolation is implemented, nothing goes in. Access to electricity, television, telephone, water, food and all outside supplies are a privilege to members of community in good standing. That privilege is suspended. Nothing goes in. Every thing would stop! Then the Containment Force would sit back and wait for them to come out. Any unarmed member of the church could leave anytime by simply presenting to the rescue corridor for safe escort to the perimeter where they could voluntarily enter protective custody. Once out, no one goes back in unless and until Synergic Containment is lifted. The compound would not be stormed or attacked in anyway. No barrage of noise, loud music, or teargas. They would be left to themselves without phones, television, newspapers, mail, electricity, water, etc.etc.. They are not being punished. The benefits of community are being suspended until they cease all adversity. I expect that most of the members would have come out and surrendered. Perhaps not all. Once each day, the containment force would explicitly communicate with the contained adversaries, reminding them that safety, food, water, shelter and medical care wait for them at the perimeter. It would be made clear that to exit the containment zone, they need only put down their weapons and present to the rescue corridor, or perimeter. Any individual--adult or child--that did so would be given protection, water, food, medical care and shelter. (02/27/03) | |
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The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress -- We are a multidisciplinary network of professionals who are committed to the advancement of intervention for survivors of trauma. The Academy aims to identify expertise among professionals, across disciplines, and to provide meaningful standards for those who work regularly with survivors. Due to the changing spirit of our times, it is critical that we are prepared to respond to the emergent psychological needs of others. (02/27/03) | |
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New York Times -- A panel of experts has strongly criticized the Bush administration's proposed research plan on the risks of global warming, saying that it "lacks most of the elements of a strategic plan" and that its goals cannot be achieved without far more money than the White House has sought for climate research. The 17 experts, in a report issued yesterday, said that without substantial changes, the administration's plan would be unlikely to accomplish the aim laid out by President Bush in several speeches: to help decision makers and the public determine how serious the problem is so that they can make clear choices about how to deal with it. The president has said that more research is needed before the administration can even consider mandatory restrictions on heat-trapping greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The expert panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences at the administration's request, said some of the plan's proposals for new research seemed to rehash questions that had already been largely settled. It also found that the plan listed dozens of disparate research goals without setting priorities — a particularly important failing, it said, inasmuch as the plan is intended to integrate about $1.7 billion a year in climate research now being conducted by more than a dozen agencies. (02/27/03) | |
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New York Times -- The U. S. government announced yesterday that it had approved a type of genetically modified corn that it says could lead to a significant reduction in the use of toxic insecticides. The approval was granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to a corn developed by Monsanto that is resistant to the corn rootworm. This soil-dwelling pest accounted for one out of seven applications of insecticide to all agricultural crops, according to the E.P.A. The resistant corn would require little or no chemicals. "Corn rootworm is the pest that requires the single largest use of conventional pesticides in the United States," said Stephen L. Johnson, the E.P.A.'s assistant administrator for prevention, pesticides and toxic substances. "From an environmental and human health perspective, this product replaces some very significant problematic, or potentially problematic, chemicals." The approval is a boost for Monsanto, which has been struggling with falling earnings, and for biotechnology crops, because it is the first truly new product in some years. Until now the industry has subsisted on variations of two main products: soybeans and other crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, and BT corn and cotton, which are resistant to the corn borer and the cotton bollworm, respectively. The new product is also a form of BT corn, meaning it contains a gene from a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis that causes the plant to produce a toxin that kills the rootworm. (02/27/03) | |
http://www.synearth.net/
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: At home, we share the same living space with friends or family. If I turn the heater thermostat up, the room will become warmer for everyone. Control of that reality is shared. If I start yelling and screaming, things will get much noisier for everyone. Control of that reality is shared. If I make a mess or don't clean up the kitchen, then we are all living in that mess. This is just as true in the workplace, our neighborhoods, our communities, and in fact in the whole world. We live on a single planet, we all share the same water, the same air and the same resources of the single small planet. Because control of reality is shared, if I foul the water or air, I foul your water and your air. Whatever I do, will effect you. Whatever you do, will effect me. If we work together and act responsibly, we can minimize the harm we do each other, and maximize the benefits of solving our problems together. Freedom of action in a shared environment is a privilege, not a right. When we use Synergic Containment to protect a child, we are teaching the child that in a shared environment, he is free to act as long as those actions do not hurt others. We are teaching him to work together and act responsibly. Synergic containment is probably most attractive to parents because it is a technique to control adversary behavior when you love and care about the individual behaving adversarily. Most parents love and care about their children. Containment is about protecting both the victim and the aggressor. It does this by stopping adversary behavior. Now synergic containment could be used just as effectively outside the family. (02/26/03) | |
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Donella H. Meadows et al. write: We went through that entire emotional sequence - grief, loneliness, reluctant responsibility - when we worked on The Club of Rome project twenty years ago. Many other people, through many other kinds of formative events, have gone through a similar sequence. It can be survived. It can even open up new horizons and suggest exciting futures. Those futures will never come to be, however, until the world as a whole turns to face them. The ideas of limits, sustainability, sufficiency, equity, and efficiency are not barriers, not obstacles, not threats. They are guides to a new world. Sustainability, not better weapons or struggles for power or material accumulation, is the ultimate challenge to the energy and creativity of the human race. We think the human race is up to the challenge. We think that a better world is possible, and that the acceptance of physical limits is the first step toward getting there. We see "easing down" from unsustainability not as a sacrifice, but as an opportunity to stop battering against the earth's limits and to start transcending self-imposed and unnecessary limits in human institutions, mindsets, beliefs, and ethics. That is why we finally decided not just to update and reissue The Limits to Growth, but to rewrite it completely and to call it Beyond the Limits. (02/26/03) | |
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BBC Science -- If all goes to plan, the UK in 2020 will look and feel a very different place from today. Round the coast will be wave, tidal and wind farms, generating huge amounts of renewable energy. Buildings will use solar power for heating and ventilation, with perhaps enough left over to sell to the grid. And there will be few pitheads or nuclear power stations dotting the distant horizon. That is the future outlined in the government's Energy White Paper - a low carbon future which will rely increasingly on renewable sources and energy efficiency to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. ... There is massive scope for exploiting the British geography, scoured by the North Atlantic's gales and tides, to generate electricity. And the technology is coming along to store it until it is needed. The UK company Solar Century says it is even possible to use the Sun in the notoriously cloudy UK - because the latest devices rely on light of any sort, not specifically sunlight. It says: "Solar-generated power could provide 10,000 times more energy than the world currently uses. "If we covered a small fraction of the Sahara desert with photo-voltaic cells, we could generate all the world's electricity requirements." The answers are there. Using them would also destroy any argument for securing access to foreign energy supplies, whether Gulf oil or North African gas. All that is needed is governments prepared to think small and to help individuals to make incremental changes. Perhaps it will happen. (02/26/03) | |
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BBC Science -- China and the US are officially joining the largest international science project of the next decade - excepting the International Space Station. The project is the latest stage in the quest to develop fusion power - the energy source of the Sun and other stars. Advocates say it could be cheap and environmentally friendly, though very expensive and time-consuming to develop. Iter, the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor, will be built over the next 10 years at a cost of about $5bn. It will bridge the gap between current fusion reactors and the first ever commercial plant that could follow. Delegations from China and the US joined those from Canada, the European Union, Japan and the Russian Federation at the Eighth Iter Negotiations Meeting held in Russia a few days ago. ... Iter would be the world's largest international cooperative research and development project next to the International Space Station. The goal of Iter is to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer during each individual fusion experiment and in doing so demonstrate essential technologies for a commercial reactor. Iter could begin construction in 2006 and be operational in 2014. Fusion research would last for up to 20 years. (02/25/03) | |
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BBC Science -- Costa Rica has one of the highest indices of biodiversity per area, as it shelters 4% of the world's biological diversity. The country is estimated to have between 12,000 and 14,000 species of plants, 40,000 kinds of beetles, and 20,000 species of butterflies. The National Biodiversity Institute (Inbio) has developed an information management system called Atta to catalogue species at risk from farming and logging. The researchers turned to information technology to help them as Costa Rica has a greater variety of plants, insects and animals in proportion to its size than just about any other country. "The key issue is that we know less than 10% of what we have here and we don't have much time to learn about the 90% that remains," explained Dr Erick Mata Montero, coordinator of information management for the institute. "If we do inventories in a different way using information technology, we can go a lot faster." (02/26/03) | |
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Science News -- A single 2-hour exposure to the microwaves emitted by some cell phones kills brain cells in rats, a group of Swedish researchers claims. If confirmed, the results would be the first to directly link cell-phone radiation to brain damage in any animal. No such evidence exists for people. But with cell-phone use skyrocketing, some scientists recommend precautionary measures—for example, avoiding excessive gabbing on the phones. Digital cell phones send out compressed information through microwave pulses of electromagnetic radiation. ... Those pulses scatter low-level microwave radiation across the brain. To date, convincing evidence linking the phones to serious health problems, such as cancer, is lacking, says Leif G. Salford of Lund University Hospital in Sweden. Even so, he and his colleagues are still looking for such connections. About 10 years ago, they showed that cell-phone radiation causes the protective barrier in rats' brains to leak, permitting blood proteins that are normally kept away from brain tissue to contact neurons. Now, Salford's team reports in a forthcoming Environmental Health Perspectives that this breach of the so-called blood-brain barrier is accompanied by the death of brain cells. (02/26/03) | |
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Science News -- Three experimental drugs designed to thwart HIV have performed well in early tests on AIDS patients. If further testing supports these preliminary findings, the drugs might serve as able stand-ins for existing drugs in patients whose HIV becomes resistant to existing therapies. The three new drugs—unveiled at the 10th Conference on Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections in Boston last week—all hinder HIV but do so by distinctly different means. That's a plus since anti-HIV drugs are often used in combination. All three drugs are still years away from Food and Drug Administration approval. Nevertheless, notes John Mellors, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, these early findings suggest that "the pipeline of new drugs has an impressive number of new candidates. This is a bumper crop." He envisions these drugs as a "second generation" of therapies to replace drugs developed in the 1990s. (02/26/03) | |
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CBS News -- In an exclusive interview with CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein indicated he feels an invasion aimed at unseating him will come soon. Speaking to an American journalist for the first time in about a decade, Saddam also denied his Al Samoud 2 missiles were illegal and challenged President Bush to debate the need for war. The wide-ranging three-hour interview covered Saddam's feelings on his own people, the American public, Osama bin Laden, and what his own fate might be. Saddam made it clear that he takes the threat of war seriously and considers himself prepared, Rather reports. While not treating military conflict as inevitable, the Iraqi leader certainly expects it. (02/25/03) | |
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New York Times -- Prime Minister Tony Blair laid out ambitious plans today to fight global warming by cutting carbon dioxide emissions in Britain by 60 percent in the next five decades and gently criticized President Bush for failing to do more to combat the damaging effects of greenhouse gases. Framing the issue of global warming as one of national security, Mr. Blair said the United States was wrong to back out of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which sought to minimize noxious carbon dioxide fumes. The Bush administration drew the ire of a number of industrialized nations when it backed out of the treaty, arguing that compliance would cost American businesses too much money. But today, in clear disagreement with Britain's foreign policy ally, Mr. Blair said economic growth and environmental awareness can coexist. "Even the Kyoto targets have proved controversial with some countries, notably America," Mr. Blair said at a conference on sustainable development here. "Many see it as a threat to the pursuit of economic growth. I believe this needn't be the case. If we harness new technology, the evidence is mounting that we can achieve a target of 60 percent, and at reasonable cost." The prime minister added, "There will be no genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change." Mr. Blair's proposals on global warming would far exceed the standards of the Kyoto treaty, which would require countries to slash greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. That would amount to a 2 percent cut, Mr. Blair said. In his plan, Britain would cut the carbon dioxide it releases into the atmosphere by 60 percent by 2050. (02/25/03) | |
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BBC News -- US consumer confidence has dropped to its lowest level since October 1993, prompting fears about the prospects for economic recovery. Confidence fell by an unexpectedly-steep 15 points in February, figures from private business group the Conference Board showed. Rising oil prices and the threat of a war with Iraq have been blamed for the gloomy mood. The monthly survey is seen as a barometer of future consumer spending, which makes up about two thirds of the US economy. (02/25/03) | |
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USA Today -- Natural gas prices jumped nearly 40% and heating oil costs hit their highest level on record Monday, developments that point to increases in already bloated home-heating bills. Residential heating oil prices are up 50% from a year ago, when the average winter heating oil bill was $642, the Energy Department says. Bills might approach $1,000 this winter. While natural gas prices are not as easy to track, consumers were reporting similar jumps before Monday's rise. The average household heating bill for natural gas users was $596 last winter. ''Higher natural gas and heating oil prices will cut more into consumer budgets,'' says Jim Williams of WTRG Economics, an energy consultant. ''If you are old enough to remember, it is time to bring out that sweater that President Carter used to wear while encouraging us to turn our thermostats down.'' (02/25/03) | |
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3:51:41 AM
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
2/28/2003; 12:47:03 AM.
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