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Sunday, May 11, 2003
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Arthur Young wrote: Suppose I were to present a plate of food to a child to eat, and the child were to turn the plate upside down, spilling the contents about, and proceed to separate it into different ingredients -- to count the peas, etc. We have been given this marvelous world to experience, but science prefers to analyze it -- a worthy undertaking, but it becomes absurd if the food is not eaten. Analysis may be food for science, but this doesn't mean that the eating of the food should not be included in the theory. So this is my main thesis. Science describes and analyzes the world, finds out the laws of its behavior, but it never occurs to theoretical science that the law of cause and effect can be applied and used for our own benefit -- communication, transportation, all machines -- using the laws of nature to increase our freedom. This cannot be dismissed as mere application and anthropomorphic, because all life does the same. Plants control their metabolism to achieve growth and reproduction; animals learn mobility and are able to achieve short-term goals (including some long-term goals such as migration). This is not just technology; it is the basis of life. (07/11/03) | |
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Herschel Elliott writes: Now for the first time in history, the cumulative effect of human activity has become a major and perhaps the dominant force affecting the Earth's ecosystems. Under these novel conditions, a drastic change is necessary in the way in which ethics itself is conceived and moral practices are justified. Just as Einstein's thought experiment called for a revolution in physical theory, so the general statement of the tragedy of the commons proves that a revolution in moral theory is necessary. Both require the rejection of established belief systems. Einstein's experiment proved that the coordinates of space, time, and mass cannot be simple and unchanging throughout the universe. Hardin's experiment proved that moral principles (such as equal justice, human rights, and moral obligations) cannot be universal and unconditional in all social and environmental contexts. Henceforth, in both disciplines the basic concepts and principles must be recognized to be system-dependent, system-relative. It should be noted, however, that system-relativity is not the same as skeptical relativism. System-relativity allows unequivocal truth claims to be made, but they must change so as to be appropriate for the context in which they occur. Thus as human activity comes to dominate the Earth's ecosystems, the nature of ethics must be differently conceived. Correct ethical behavior can no longer be deduced from a set of principles, rights, and obligations which are invariant in time and universal in application. Instead, ethical behavior must be relative to its most important goal -- to protect and sustain the Earth's diverse yet mutually supporting system of living things. Thereafter the secondary goal of ethics may be addressed, namely, to maximize the quality of human life. (05/11/03) | |
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CNN Science -- Moms, as you reflect on Mother's Day, here's news just for you: Even if your kids have grown up and moved away, they probably still carry a part of you with them. But not in the way you might think. What's more, you probably still carry a part of them. It turns out that even decades after a woman gives birth, she can still have cells in her blood and tissues that came from her children during pregnancy. And by the same token, many adults appear to harbor such cells they picked up from Mom during their time in the womb. As a recent editorial in a pediatrics journal put it, "So you think your mother is always looking over your shoulder? She may be IN your shoulder!" (05/11/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- "Many of us feel that for many years the people who cared the most about fish stocks were the recreational people," said Kate Wing, referring to anglers. Wing, an ocean policy analyst for the National Resources Defense Council, added: "This newest break is frustrating and alarming, and we need to address it because we have the same goal of increased fish stocks. And with very few exceptions, we don't have the fish we once did." Broadly, a Marine Protection Area is a designated area of ocean that is subject to user restrictions as diverse as boating speed limits, prohibitions against picking coral, and curbs on bag limits and certain fishing techniques. The United States has over 300 M.P.A.s, and almost all users — including anglers — embrace them as useful conservation tools. But some M.P.A.'s, generally known as reserves, prohibit all fishing outright, for reasons ranging from a paucity of fish stocks to the desire to eliminate all extractive or intrusive human activities. Reserve-style M.P.A.'s have become a flash point, with anglers fearing that some environmental groups have slipped into the costumes of sheep to do the work of wolves, attacking the national tradition of virtually unrestricted public access to marine fishing. In reserves, even catch-and-release angling with its negligible mortality rate is forbidden. "We've been at the forefront of restricting recreational as well as commercial fishing when the science supported it, even when no environmental groups stood at our side," Ted Venker, a spokesman for the Coastal Conservation Alliance, said. "Our feeling is that excluding the public from a public resource should always be the very last management tool used. The spark that ignited the controversy over M.P.A.'s was struck in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off Santa Barbara, Calif. In 2002, California created no-fishing reserves that include about 20 percent of the 900 square miles of sanctuary that falls under the state's jurisdiction because of the threat posed by overfishing to a number of sedentary, bottom-dwelling species, including cowcod and rockfish. These fish are not helped by catch-and-release regulations, because the act of reeling them up through 200 feet of water kills them. (05/11/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- A group of American lawyers representing more than 30,000 indigenous people in Ecuador filed a $1 billion lawsuit against the ChevronTexaco Corporation yesterday. The suit was filed in Ecuador on behalf of 88 plaintiffs in Lago Agrio, a small oil town in northern Ecuador, and asserts that during two decades of operation, from 1971 to 1992, ChevronTexaco dumped over four million gallons a day of toxic wastewater, contaminated with oil, heavy metals and carcinogens into open pits, estuaries and rivers. It also says the company left behind nearly 350 open waste pits that killed people and animals. "We believe that what ChevronTexaco did in the Ecuador rain forest was not only negligent but might rise to the level of reckless behavior," said Joseph Kohn, a lead lawyer for the plaintiffs and a partner in Kohn, Swift & Graf in Philadelphia. ChevronTexaco denies any wrongdoing and maintains that its practice was consistent with the practices of Ecuador's national oil company, Petro Ecuador, as well as internationally recognized standards. (05/11/03) | |
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New York Time: Environment -- A Bush administration policy to base some regulations on a calculation that the life of each person older than 70 should be valued less than the life of a younger person has antagonized older Americans and environmental groups, and it has stirred tensions among federal agencies. Instead of the traditional assumption that all lives saved from cleaner air are worth the same, administration officials in two environmental studies included an alternative method that used two values, $3.7 million for the life a person younger than 70 and $2.3 million for an older person, a 37 percent difference. Critics call the policy the "senior death discount" and say the administration is turning on older Americans as a rationale to weaken environmental regulations. Today, Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said her agency had never applied the policy in its decision making and never would. "The senior discount factor has been stopped," Mrs. Whitman told reporters at a meeting here. "It has been discontinued. E.P.A. will not, I repeat, not, use an age-adjusted analysis in decision making." (05/11/03) | |
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New York Time:Environment -- Asbestos should be banned from all new products sold in the United States, according to a draft study from a panel that included doctors, business and government experts and union representatives. The use of asbestos, a heat-resistant mineral put in insulation, roofing tiles and brakes, has fallen drastically since the early 1970's, when it was conclusively linked to lung and other cancers. Asbestos mining ended in the United States last year. Still, more than 26 million pounds of asbestos, mainly from mines in Canada, was added to brakes, roofing materials and other products in 2001, compared with 1.5 billion pounds in 1972. An additional 90 million pounds of cement that contained asbestos was imported from Mexico or Canada in 2001, according to the study. The study, titled Asbestos Strategies, was conducted by the Global Environment and Technology Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes environmentally friendly development, under a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. Its conclusions were reported this week by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Prolonged exposure to asbestos has been proved to cause cancer and asbestosis, a painful and sometimes fatal scarring of the lungs. But scientists continue to debate the risks of low levels of exposure. The rates of mesothelioma, a fatal cancer caused by asbestos that takes 20 to 40 years to develop, peaked in the mid-1990's and have fallen slightly since, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. In 2000, a person younger than 55 had one in a million chance of developing mesothelioma. Levels of serious asbestosis have also dropped. Nevertheless, many scientists say that even low levels of asbestos can sometimes cause mesothelioma, and when asbestos is found in the air, building owners can be forced to remove it at great expense. Many European countries already ban asbestos, and the European Union has said that all its members must ban it by 2005. (05/11/03) | |
7:12:19 AM 
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2003
Timothy Wilken.
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6/3/2003; 5:44:47 AM.
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