Monday, September 01, 2003

Co-Operation in American Farming Fred Whitehead writes: One of the most enduring figures in American culture is the farmer as Rugged Individualist -- sturdy, sunburned, standing proudly in fields among bounteous crops or herds. It’s an image found in the frontiersman of the 18th century, up through the lithographs of John Steuart Curry in the 1940s. Thomas Jefferson believed that such an independent yeoman was and should be the foundation of the Republic. Yet the reality was often very different. Farmers have confronted numerous adversities from nature, such as droughts and grasshopper plagues. Yet they faced all such things with stoicism. Curiously, we learn from the encyclopedia that in ancient Greek philosophy, the Stoic was one who firmly believed that all life, including humans, were part of nature. If our farmers may be said to be Stoics, it is probably because of their close dependence on nature and their intimate knowledge of her cyclical ways. Stoics do not easily give up. They will weather any storm, endure any tribulation. My grandfather, who came to Kansas in 1888 when he was 2, remembered that a terrible drought greeted the family. Essentially, he said, it did not rain for 10 years. But the family stayed. Among farming folk, the land is everything: You hold on to it no matter what. Farmers were not entirely isolated. They joined to break sod, to raise barns, to help harvest crops in case of sickness. They were individualists, but recognized the need and value of human community. (09/01/03) Selling Out our Forests Edward O. Wilson writes: The fires that have savaged forests of western North America this summer are the ecologist's equivalent of a perfect storm. The combination of record drought, high temperatures and abnormally thick layering of fallen debris has turned millions of acres into tinderboxes that await only a lightning strike or stray campfire ember to ignite. The best way to avoid catastrophic fires is by trimming undergrowth and clearing debris, combined with natural burns of the kind that have sustained healthy forests in past millennia. Those procedures, guided by science and surgically precise forestry, can return forests to near their equilibrium condition, in which only minimal further intervention would be needed. The worst way to create healthy forests, on the other hand, is to thin trees via increased logging, as proposed by the Bush administration. The health-by-logging approach arises primarily from an economic motivation in forest management, and reveals the wide separation between two opposing views concerning the best use of U.S. forests. The administration, seeing the forests as a source of extractive wealth, presses for more logging and road-building in wilderness areas. Its strategists appear determined to mute or override the provision of the 1976 National Forest Management Act requiring that forest plans "provide for the diversity of plant and animal communities." Environmentalists and ecologists, defending the provision, continue to argue that America's national forests are a priceless reservoir of biological diversity, as well as a historical treasure. In this view, the forests represent a public trust too valuable to be managed as tree farms for the production of pulp, paper and lumber. The economic argument for increased road-building and logging is unfounded. It is contradicted by the U.S. Forest Service's own measure of forests' contributions to the nation's economy. Of the $35 billion yielded in 1999 (the last year for which a comprehensive accounting was published), 77.8 percent came from recreation, fish and wildlife, only 13.7 percent from timber harvest, and the modest remainder from mining and ranching. Roughly the same disproportion existed in the percentages of the 822,000 jobs generated by national forests. (09/01/03) Heat Wave Deepens Food Crisis in Europe Common Dreams -- This summer's heatwave has drastically cut harvests across Europe, plunging the world into an unprecedented food crisis, startling new official figures show. Separate calculations by two leading institutions monitoring the global harvest show that the scorching weather has severely reduced European grain production, ensuring that the world will not produce enough to feed itself for the fourth year in succession, and plunging stocks to the lowest level on record. And experts predict that the damage to crops will be found to be even greater when the full cost of the heat is known. They say that, as a result, food prices will rise worldwide, and hunger will increase in the world's poorest countries. And they warn that this is just a foretaste of what will happen as global warming takes hold. Sunshine and warmth are, of course, good for plants and there were hopes that this year's good summer would produce a bumper harvest. But excessive heat and low rainfall damage crops, and the heatwave - which brought temperatures of more than 100F to Britain for the first time, and gave France 11 consecutive days above 95F, killing more than 11,000 people - has done enormous damage. The US Department of Agriculture has cut its forecast for this year's grain harvest by 32 million tons, mainly because of the European crop reductions. On Thursday, the International Grains Council - an intergovernmental body - reduced its own prediction even further, by 36 million tons, as a result of "heat and drought, particularly in Europe." The damage has been most severe in Eastern Europe, which is now bringing in its worst wheat crop in three decades: in Ukraine, the harvest has been cut from 21 million tons last year to five million, while Romania has its worst crop on record. Germany is the worst-hit EU country: some farmers in the south-east have lost half their grain harvest. Official British figures will not be published until October. The final tally of the summer's damage is likely to be worse still. Lester Brown, the president of Washington's authoritative Earth Policy Institute, predicts that it will cut another 20 million tons off the world harvest, making this a catastrophic year. It has come at a time when world food supplies were already at their most precarious ever. The world has eaten more grain than it has produced every year so far this century, driving stocks well below the safety margin to their lowest levels in the 40 years that records have been kept. The amount of grain produced for each person on earth is now less than at any time in more than three decades.(09/01/03) Does Nuclear Power have a Future? BBC Technology -- Nuclear reprocessing was once seen as the key to a virtually unlimited supply of power. But British Nuclear Fuels (BFNL) has acknowledged that one of Britain's best known nuclear plants - Sellafield, in Cumbria - is likely to cease its reprocessing activities in the next decade.Its thermal oxide reprocessing plant - Thorp - is running at only about half capacity and major difficulties have been encountered trying to dispose of a highly radioactive liquid by-product. High relative costs, public fears over safety and proliferation, and the difficulties of disposing safely of highly radioactive waste products have left the future of nuclear power in doubt. ... Plutonium - along with depleted uranium, one of the products of reprocessing - is particularly hard to dispose of safely. One method is vitrification, in which the highly radioactive liquid waste product is converted into glass blocks for eventual disposal. But the material is particularly hard to handle, as Sellafield's managers have discovered to their cost. The method is inefficient. Vitrification plants have repeatedly broken down and cannot dispose of the waste quickly enough to allow Thorp to run at full speed. Due to its long half-life, this type of plutonium is also vulnerable to deliberate retrieval - and could fall into the wrong hands, a spectre viewed with particular horror in the current political climate. ... Jean McSorley, Greenpeace's nuclear campaign coordinator, believes the sensible response to whether nuclear energy is viable was decided long ago. "Nuclear energy was a dream - and now it's well and truly shattered," she said. ... "If nuclear power is the answer to climate change, the question must have been very badly phrased. To present one major hazard as the solution to another major hazard is a nonsense. This is a dinosaur mentality that resists change. We know that alternatives are out there... that the renewables work." (09/01/03) Smarter than They Look BBC News -- Fish are socially intelligent creatures who do not deserve their reputation as the dim-wits of the animal kingdom, according to a group of leading scientists. Rather than simply being instinct-driven, the group says fish are cunning, manipulative and even cultured. The three experts from the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews and Leeds said there had been huge changes in science's understanding of the psychological and mental abilities of fish in the last few years. Writing in the journal Fish and Fisheries, biologists Calum Brown, Keven Laland and Jens Krause said fish were now seen as highly intelligent creatures. They said: "Gone (or at least obsolete) is the image of fish as drudging and dim-witted pea-brains, driven largely by 'instinct',' with what little behavioural flexibility they possess being severely hampered by an infamous 'three-second memory'. Now, fish are regarded as steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions, and co-operating to inspect predators and catch food." Recent research had shown that fish recognised individual "shoal mates", social prestige and even tracked relationships. Scientists had also observed them using tools, building complex nests and exhibiting long-term memories. The scientists added: "Although it may seem extraordinary to those comfortably used to pre-judging animal intelligence on the basis of brain volume, in some cognitive domains, fishes can even be favourably compared to non-human primates." (09/01/03) 1:43:06 AM

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