Monday, September 22, 2003

Universal Disarmament Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it."  ... Charles C. Walker wrote: The necessity for universal disarmament is generally recognized. How to achieve it has been the subject of prolonged and frustrating debate. The tendency has been for discussion to polarize into contrasting positions: negotiations vs. unilateral actions; all at once vs. step by step; security first vs. disarmament first. It is not surprising that deep-seated differences should have arisen. Disarmament means the liquidation of the war system. This is a formidable task, no less a task than replacing a system which has functioned for six thousand years. The emergence of a new international system in which war has been eradicated and a stable peace effected will be one of the great landmarks in human history. Inevitably it will bring in its wake far-reaching changes in human attitudes, behaviour and institutions. A task of this size and complexity cannot be accomplished without the dedicated labour of many people working at various facets of the problem. The time has come when it is both necessary and possible to coordinate several approaches to working for disarmament, and to develop a comprehensive strategy of action. (09/22/03) More on Shumei Natural Agriculture In Part 1 of this three-part series, Lisa M. Hamilton introduced the concepts of Shumei Natural Agriculture. She sketched the history and culture of farming changes in Japan through the centuries, and invited readers to develop a different yardstick to evaluate this Eastern farming practice. In this story, she outlines the agricultural impact of the U.S. occupation, industrialization and the rise of the organic movement in the 20th Century. ...  Japan now has national standards for organic certification, but the system remains plagued by its past. Vestiges of the industry from 20 years ago now promote “low-input” food, and many consumers feel safe enough knowing their food has just less and fewer pesticides. Even those who do buy certified organic food can’t be sure of its purity, as the national standards are filled with loopholes that allow for pesticides and the transfer of GE-products and pharmaceuticals into the food stream. While the paths have been different, even opposite, the forefront of Japan’s organic movement now parallels that in America. Rather than look to large certification agencies to legitimize their practice, farmers and consumers are building relationships of trust that come from personal interaction. The method of choice is the CSA program, and many are not even certified organic—they don’t need to be. After years of ambiguity and deception, consumers are recognizing that the most reliable seal is that of a handshake. Go to an organic farm in Japan and it will probably be similar to its parallel in the States. Maybe the place will be smaller (and tidier), but they will follow the same methods of cover cropping and composting, and strive for food that looks, tastes, and feels the best it can. Call a Natural Agriculture farm “organic” and you’ll quickly be corrected. To the farmer, it’s as inaccurate as calling his land conventional. They might look similar in using no pesticides or chemical fertilizers, or in promoting the health of the whole farm rather than cranking out a product, but the motivation and the technique are fundamentally different. (09/22/03) Taking Equality Seriously ThomHartmann.com -- Tom Athanasiou writes: Conventional approaches to environmental protection are at an impasse. Despite local successes, they’re only slowing the larger destruction, and they do not promise a desirable path for the South, not in time. Nor do they engage the problem of social inequality, or the related globalization debate, both of which promise to be of immense significance in the evolution of green politics. “Environmental justice,” a term that has come into common usage in the last two decades in the United States, is probably the best name for the alternative. The term originally denoted the goal of anti-toxics campaigners who, in one of the more exciting developments of recent years, managed to cast a former public secret—that poor and nonwhite people are more likely to be the victims of pollution and unhealthy environments than their paler, more affluent brethren—into a shape that could not simply be accepted as “the way things are.” As such, it defined a key alternative to conventional environmental politics, and laid out a larger challenge for the green movement as a whole, for it married the traditional concerns of ecology to the substrate issues of class- and race-based injustice. Unfortunately, it must be said, and I do not say this happily, that the traditional environmental-justice movement, with its focus on toxics, seems to have stalled, at least as a challenge to the dominant techno-managerialism of an increasingly professionalized environmental movement. Or, to put it another way, the environmental justice movement has triumphed, but only rhetorically. The language of “equity” has become ubiquitous, but in practice, environmental “equity” gets far more lip service than real respect. To be sure, the traditional environmental-justice movement can hardly be counted out. Far from it. There are plenty of signs that a large non-rhetorical movement for global environmental justice is emerging. My claim, here, is only that this movement must find new ways to stand for equity, and that one particularly promising approach, based on asserting equal claims to limited “environmental spaces,” has received too little attention. The claims of justice, when asserted in tandem with the recognition that we inhabit finite environmental spaces, only become more powerful. In fact, a sophisticated recognition of the finitude of the natural world (one that avoids the simple-minded overstatement of the past) can help make the claims of justice concrete, and even to quantify them, and in so doing it can help to inoculate us against both greenwashing and soft-headed politics. To that end, this paper offers a (very) brief explication of environmental-space analysis, and, by way of an example, a longer discussion of global warming. Its goal is to suggest that the environmental-space approach can clarify both the demands of justice and the gravity of our situation. (09/22/03) Big Fish Story BBC Nature -- A skeleton of the biggest fish ever to inhabit the world's oceans has been put on display in Glasgow. The fish, a leedsichthys problematicus - or Big Meg as the fossil has been nicknamed - measures more than 15 metres in length. Experts believe it would have swum the Middle Jurassic seas 155 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs dominated the land. With more than 900 bones collected, Big Meg is said to be the most complete specimen in any collection in the world. Jeff Liston, vertebrate researcher at the Hunterian Museum, said work to repair the specimen only began five years ago. But he said after much reconstruction, Big Meg looks a little more like a fish with many large bones from the her skull, as well as some bones from the fins. Mr Liston said: "The dorsal fin alone is over a metre long. The really large marine animals of today like whale sharks or basking sharks feed on plankton, which is what we believe Meg did. "There are no teeth on this fish, but it had huge amounts of gill rakers which it would use to filter plankton and small prey from the water." (09/22/03) Galileo Probe Ends in Blaze of Glory BBC Science -- The Galileo space craft has been destroyed in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The US space agency probe was sent hurtling into the gas-giant at nearly 50 kilometres per second (108,000 mph) to avoid any chance of it contaminating local moons. ... The destruction of the space craft brings to an end one of the most successful ever voyages of planetary exploration. The Nasa probe has returned a treasure trove of data. The space craft was named after 17th Century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who discovered Jupiter's four main moons - Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. The probe's launch from the space shuttle Atlantis in 1989 had been delayed by the Challenger disaster and there were several technical glitches along the way. In the end, though, it surpassed all expectations.  Galileo travelled more than four and a half billion kilometres (nearly three billion miles).It circled Jupiter 34 times, sending back 14,000 pictures and other data over the course of seven years."Galileo has provided a fantastic database that will be a rich source of progress in the planetary sciences for years or decades to come," said Fred Taylor, professor of physics at Oxford University, UK, who has worked on the mission for 30 years. "The mission has provided key information about Jupiter and its place in the Solar System." ... The mission team decided last year that Galileo should end its days in a blaze of glory. With the space craft almost out of fuel and power, Nasa did not want to risk it colliding with one of Jupiter's moons. There was a slim chance that a microbe from Earth could have hitched a ride on the probe. Of particular concern was the ice-crusted moon Europa, which, thanks to Galileo, scientists now suspect harbours a salty ocean beneath its surface and possibly microbial life. If the probe had crashed into Europa, this could have compromised future attempts to search for life there. (09/22/03) New Treatment for Parkinson's Disease BBC Health -- Cells taken from cloned mouse embryos have been used to successfully treat a condition similar to Parkinson's disease in humans. The breakthrough, by US researchers, could assist the search for a cure for the common brain condition. The embryonic "stem cells", reports the journal Nature Biotechnology, were grown into new tissue which was implanted into the mouse brain. ... The team, from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is not the first to use embryonic stem cells to treat Parkinsonism in mice, but they are the first to use cells which were cloned from the "patient". Although embyronic stem cells - taken from a five-day-old embryo, are all the same, they have the ability, when placed in the right biochemical conditions, to be transformed into any cell type in the body. In theory, they could provide an inexhaustible supply of different tissue types to replace those lost through injury or illness. Cells were taken from the tail of the mouse, then their genetic material extracted and used to create cloned embryos. The stem cells were taken from these and, in a laboratory culture, and body chemicals used to "persuade" them to shift, stage by stage, from this state into the type of brain cells that their Parkinsonism mice were lacking. These were then selected and implanted back into the mouse brain to see if they made a difference. The researchers found that the mouse symptoms disappeared. Dr Lorenz Studer, head of the Stem Cell and Tumor Biology Laboratory at the center, and the lead researcher on the study, told BBC News Online that the study was "proof of principle" that cloned embryonic stem cells could be reliably transformed into a variety of useful cell types. (09/22/03) 8:20:20 AM

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