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Sunday, March 23, 2003
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This morning, a reader from Greece, a Mr. Stefan Mittman forwarded me a copy of the American Declaration of Independence without comment. Perhaps this document written 227 years ago deserves a another look. Especially pertinent in this time of war are the list of grievances. (03/23/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- ORÊT DES PINS, Haiti, March 22 — In a musty shop near the capital's dilapidated cemetery, Josue Termidor takes a rasp, gently sanding a coffin made of avocado tree planks. A decade ago, the coffin would have been carved from heavy mahogany. "All the good wood is gone," says Mr. Termidor, 32, his fingernails caked with putty used to seal the brittle wood. "It's got harder to make a living, and the lack of wood makes families disappointed and the dead angry." Once blanketed by lush forests, Haiti is now nearly 90 percent deforested. Competing against a demand that has far exceeded supply, the Caribbean nation loses more than 30 million trees a year to provide wood, fuel and work to a desperate population. "The peasants cutting down the trees make even less," added Mr. Termidor, flanked by a metallic mauve "tête-boeuf" or first-class coffin. Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, leader of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, has been unable to tackle poverty, unemployment and political instability, let alone the environmental tragedy. (03/23/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- IDYLLWILD, Calif., March 19 — As its name suggests, this mountain hamlet more than 5,000 feet above the desert floor near Palm Springs is endowed with many gifts of nature: centuries-old pines, rare and endangered species, bucolic lakes and stunning vistas. But it is what lies beneath that has taken center stage recently: a battle is being waged over spring water and whether it is a commodity to sell or a resource to protect. For Paul Black, a retiree whose Idyllwild Mountain Spring Water Works Inc. has been selling water to bottlers from his property here for nearly seven years, the issue is one of practicality. "I see a very effective use of the water," said Mr. Black, who Riverside County officials estimate is taking 28,000 gallons of it a day from his parcel of slightly more than an acre. "It's safe, clean drinking water. Would you let it go, or would you do something with it?" But Mr. Black has his share of opponents, residents of the area who have hired lawyers in a determined effort to put an end to his operation. They accuse him of failing to do required environmental studies and operating without the proper permits, and note that he has long engaged in a commercial venture on property zoned residential. "People come here to see flowing creeks and forests and alpine animals and birds," said one opponent, Chuck Stroud, a board member of the local Mountain Resources Conservancy. "These are all intrinsic to the vitality of our community." The natural springs, Mr. Stroud argues, are part of an intricate network of resources that help support the area's environmental balance, particularly in times of drought, as now. That drought, coupled with an infestation of beetles, is decimating cedars and pines, leaving huge brown swaths on the mountainsides. (03/23/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has begun a campaign it calls, portentously, "Operation End Extremism." The purpose is to expose "the increasing burden U.S. soldiers face on military training bases because of irrational enforcement of environmental laws." The whole thing might be dismissed as another ideological stunt from the committee's reactionary chairman, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, were it not for the fact that the Pentagon is trying to do the same thing. With White House backing, the Defense Department has asked Congress to approve a program it calls the "Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative," which would broadly exempt military bases and some operations from environmental regulation. The Pentagon's basic complaint, echoed by Mr. Inhofe, is that the laws governing air pollution, toxic waste dumps, endangered species and even marine mammals — most of which have been on the books for decades — interfere with training and readiness exercises necessary for national security. The Pentagon thus seeks a host of exemptions. For instance, it would ease the hazardous waste laws to exclude explosives and other potentially toxic material on firing ranges. It seeks exemptions from the Endangered Species Act whenever its duty under that law to protect animals interferes with training operations. And, environmentalists say, the proposed law could transfer to state governments the enormous costs of cleaning up thousands of contaminated sites on military property. Of particular interest is the Marine Mammals Protection Act, which is also the first target on Mr. Inhofe's hit list. The act is the nation's one legal instrument for protecting whales, dolphins, sea otters, manatees and the like. But the Navy claims that protecting these creatures restricts its ability to test sonar and other underwater detection devices. A recent court-ordered settlement makes about one million square miles of ocean available for such testing but that, apparently, is insufficient.(03/23/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- For most of the last 23 years, the Audubon Society has held a spring migration count here from March 15 to May 15, aimed mainly at tallying birds of prey. Its fall migration count is held at Cape May, N.J., as birds head south. Both of these locations, by virtue of geography and ecology, are ideal for the activity, said Scott Barnes, a naturalist at the society's Sandy Hook Bird Observatory. In recent years, Mr. Barnes said, the society has formally expanded the count to include loons, cormorants, gannets, herons and egrets. Informally, it is also asking counters to keep track of other species. "We are doing it because we are curious, and it is a good tool for outreach while showing the importance of Sandy Hook for all types of birds," Mr. Barnes said. "It is also raw material for researchers, and it could tell us things that affect the global warming debates, the impact of weather from year to year on migration of various species and help alert us to rare birds." Last year, 3,301 raptors were counted, 3,585 gannets, 141 blue herons, 339 glossy ibis and 765 blue jays. It can be hard to observe furtive raptors, such as hawks, kestrels, peregrines and other falcons, while they are roosting, hunting or mating, Mr. Barnes said. So the twice-a-year migration counts provide an important census. For hawks, migration is a hurried affair, literally done on the fly. They are so eager to get to their spring roost and mating grounds that they show little concern about avoiding detection. (03/23/03) | |
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This must all seem a little naive this morning. Oh well! ...
Seek the truth and the truth will set you free. Peace is the way. Love is the answer. Harmony is the result. The purpose of education, whether religious or secular, is to help a person function effectively in society. War is not effective either for the individual or society. All true religions teach peace. The Golden Rule is a peaceful principle because it produces equity. We should share our wealth with our brothers and sisters because we are all part of the same human family. All teachings which divide us are false and all prophets who preach such division are false prophets. (03/20/03) | |
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As Frida Berrigan reported over a year ago: Congress is debating a Bush administration defense budget of 343.2 billion dollars, an increase of 32.6 billion over last year. This increase would mean that military spending would account for more than half of all discretionary spending (money that Congress must allocate each year). This is good news to the weapons industry and while pink slips and hiring freezes are spreading like an epidemic from sector to sector, the top weapons manufacturers are awaiting new orders, holding job fairs, planning Initial Public Offerings, raising new capital and gaining new attention on the stock market. As Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, remarked "the whole mind set of military spending changed on Sept. 11. The most fundamental thing about defense spending is that threats drive defense spending. It’s now going to be easier to fund almost anything". So, what better time to be Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman or even the beleaguered Boeing? The war in Afghanistan is an unequivocal success- despite friendly fire incidents, bombing accidents, mounting civilian casualties and the recent crash of a 280 million dollar B-1 bomber- and the Bush administration is already listing new countries targeted for military action, with Somalia, Yemen and Iraq topping the list. It is a good time to be in the war business. (03/20/03) | |
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BBC Nature -- A scheme to manage human waste in a way more beneficial to the environment is to be launched in Beijing in time for the Olympic games. So far, trials of ecological sanitation - Ecosan - have not received high prominence, although a three-year project has seen some aspects installed in 19 different urban areas in Mali. But by 2006, the entire suburb of Yangsong, a newly built area of the Chinese capital, will use Ecosan as its waste treatment system. Ecosan techniques include the separation of urine from faeces, the use of "biogas" as fuel, and the re-use of "greywater", the waste water from showers, baths and clothes washing. ... In particular, urine is rich is the element phosphorous, an essential component of fertiliser. ...a study at Kyoto University has found that a simple application of magnesium to urine extracts 97% of the phosphorous present in it. Small amounts of the dye indigo are also present, which likewise can be extracted and used. Furthermore, urine does not even have to be treated to provide great advantages. Experiments in the US have found that corn grown using substantial quantities of urine grew 50% bigger than corn grown using none at all. But these benefits can only be realised if urine is separated from other waste material at source. (03/20/03) | |
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BBC Science -- Across West Africa, fishing communities are under mounting pressure as fish stocks are depleted year by year. ... Over the last 10 years, the fishermen have seen their catches decline. Despite staying at sea for longer, the fishermen are catching less. The fish they are catching are also smaller - too small to be fit for human consumption, they complain. "We are suffering," complains Eric Therson who owns three canoes in Elmina. ... The Chief Fisheries Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Alhaji Jallow, confirmed the fishermen's observations. According to him, studies conducted with the assistance of the Norwegian Government have shown that the demersal, or deep-sea fish stock, has been significantly depleted. (03/20/03) | |
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BBC Science -- Professor Holmes Rolston III, a philosopher leading the international debate on environmental ethics, has been awarded the one-million-dollar Templeton Prize. It is the world's most lucrative annual prize for an individual and is given to raise awareness of how scientific research can lead to discoveries about spirituality. Previous recipients have included Mother Teresa of Calcutta; Paul Davies, a mathematical physicist who examined the philosophical and theological implications of discoveries in quantum physics and cosmology; and mathematician John Polkinghorne who sought to reconcile the Big Bang with religious perceptions. Holmes Rolston, Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, US, is sometimes referred to as the "father of environmental ethics". ... "Our planetary crisis is one of spiritual information," he told BBC News Online, "not so much sustainable development, certainly not escalating consumption, but using the Earth with justice and charity. Science cannot take us there, religion perhaps can." Professor Rolston has criticised the US Government for paying too much attention to Iraq while failing to address the bigger problem of global warming. "Global warming is a bigger threat to the world than Saddam Hussein," he said. (03/20/03) | |
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Washington Post -- "On the brink of war with Iraq, Americans should be prepared for what we hope will be as precise, short a conflict as possible, but there are many unknowns and it could be a matter of some duration," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "We do not know." "Americans ought to be prepared for loss of life," he said. (03/20/03) | |
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Scott Rosenberg writes: Moments like the present offer a strange sense of suspension on the edge of a precipice. War is 99 percent inevitable. Yet I keep thinking, what if? Surely... But... Forty-eight hours offers a million opportunities to leave the road we are on. But it is a road that Bush and Cheney chose long ago, and these are not the sorts of men to suffer 11th-hour pangs of remorse for unnecessary bloodshed. The nation -- and the world -- know that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous dictator. The moral or strategic logic that makes this precise moment the time to depose him remains obscure, however. And in that obscurity we are forced back on the suspicion that the timing, for Bush, is a matter of political convenience (first war, then 2004) and logistical efficiency (can't have a quarter of a million troops sitting around idly, losing morale). And those seem like poor reasons to begin dropping thousands of bombs and killing thousands of people. (03/20/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- After nearly a year of talks, Alcoa completed agreements yesterday with the government of Iceland and with Landsvirkjun, the national power company of Iceland, to build a $1.1 billion aluminum smelter at Reydarfjordur in the wild, thinly populated and economically depressed northeastern part of the country. The plant will be the sole customer of a controversial hydroelectric power project that Landsvirkjun is building in a wilderness area. The project, with dams and tunnels that will capture and use billions of gallons of glacial melt water from two rivers, is to cost $3 billion, equivalent to one-third of the country's annual gross domestic product. ...100 scenic waterfalls and 22 square miles of reindeer habitat will be lost when the reservoirs are filled. (03/20/03) | |
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Thomas L. Friedman writes: President Bush is fond of cowboy imagery, so here's an image that comes to mind about our pending war with Iraq. In most cowboy movies the good guys round up a posse before they ride into town and take on the black hats. We're doing just the opposite. We're riding into Baghdad pretty much alone and hoping to round up a posse after we get there. I hope we do, because it may be the only way we can get out with ourselves, and the town, in one piece. This column has argued throughout this debate that removing Saddam Hussein and helping Iraq replace his regime with a decent, accountable government that can serve as a model in the Middle East is worth doing — not because Iraq threatens us with its weapons, but because we are threatened by a collection of failing Arab-Muslim states, which churn out way too many young people who feel humiliated, voiceless and left behind. We have a real interest in partnering with them for change. This column has also argued, though, that such a preventive war is so unprecedented and mammoth a task — taking over an entire country from a standing start and rebuilding it — that it had to be done with maximum U.N legitimacy and with as many allies as possible. President Bush has failed to build that framework before going to war. Though the Bush team came to office with this Iraq project in mind, it has pursued a narrow, ideological and bullying foreign policy that has alienated so many people that by the time it wanted to rustle up a posse for an Iraq war, too many nations were suspicious of its motives. (03/19/03) | |
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Maureen Dowd writes: Sometimes I feel as if I've spent half my adult life covering a President Bush as he squares off against Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator who invades his neighbors and gasses his own people. But while on the surface this seems like Groundhog War, the father-and-son duels in the sun with Saddam are breathtakingly different. The philosophical gulf between 41's gulf war and 43's gulf war is profound and cataclysmic — it has sent the whole world into a frenzy — yet it can be summed up in a single pronoun. "The big I," as Bush senior calls it. The first President Bush was often teased about his loopy syntax. But it was a way of speaking that signified the modesty and self-effacement his mother had insisted upon. He was so afraid to sound arrogant if he used the first person singular that he often just dropped the subject of a sentence and went straight to the verb. "Mother always lectured us — in a kinder, gentler way — against using the big I," Poppy Bush said. He is so shy of "I" that he has never written a personal memoir. Even though he came to politics with a sparse resume, compared with his dad's stuffed one, the cocky W. was always more comfortable with the first person perpendicular. When I asked him during the 2000 campaign about why he hadn't inherited his father's phobia about the dreaded singular pronoun, he laughed and self-deprecatingly replied, "That's the difference between a Phi Beta Kappa and a gentleman's C." During his war overture on Monday night, W. was not afraid of the first-person spotlight: "This danger will be removed. . . . That duty falls to me as commander in chief by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep." (03/19/03) | |
7:53:56 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
4/1/2003; 5:17:02 AM.
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