Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Unilateral Disarmament T. K. Mahadevan writes: The supreme tragedy of our time is that we are trying to fit old, habitual solutions to a problem of epic proportions, the like of which man had not faced since he first took to a gregarious life on earth. We have lost, or perhaps never achieved, the capacity for epic thinking. We seem unable to accustom ourselves to the bizarre challenges that face us. The revolutions in science have given us the power of quick and disastrous invention but not the power of dauntless thinking. Our machines increasingly resemble men and imitate their subtle ways - but alas, how near we ourselves are to the condition of a robot, tottering along set grooves of thought and action, afraid to venture out into new and unknown ways, and pathetically suspicious of anything that might upset our accustomed ways and valuations. Disarmament is not a new problem. In the sense of a penal destruction or reduction of the armament of a defeated country, disarmament is perhaps as old as war itself. In the sense of a reduction and limitation of national armament by general international agreement -what now mostly goes by the vogue-word of Arms Control - it was first discussed in The Hague Conference of 1899 and is thus virtually a product of the twentieth century. In the more comprehensive sense of an abolition of all armament - the only sense that can have any meaning to us in the thermonuclear age - disarmament came into the arena of international discussion only after the Great War and the founding of the League of Nations, and even then only in a lackadaisical, half-hearted way. It took Hitler, the World War and Hiroshima for nations to think of disarmament seriously. ... we cannot have national security and international disarmament at one and the same time. One will eventually have to be sacrificed to the other - and which shall that one be? The answer is clear. Unless we are either insane or inhuman, or both, there is no doubt we shall all opt for the saving of humanity and human civilization rather than the illusory pursuit of our own, private, national safety. In the final analysis, the case for unilateral disarmament stands or falls by how we answer two simple questions: (a) Is there any known method, other than a unilateral act of courage and sacrifice, by which the besetting fear of one nation for another can be rooted out? (b) Even if unilateral disarmament were to fail, will the failure be as catastrophic to humanity as the continuance of the arms race which is implicit in the never-ending process of negotiated disarmament? We can improve upon many things that Gandhi taught us - his religion and philosophy, even his economics and politics - but we cannot improve upon this central theme-song of his whole life, this concept of daring, unilateral action – satyagraha - which finds its culmination in his call for unilateral disarmament. (09/24/03) The Joseph Strategy David Ehrenfeld writes: WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF THE DRAMATIC STORY of Joseph and his brothers, told in the Book of Genesis, they think first of the Canaanite family drama -- of a brother abused and brought low by his siblings -- ending in one of the most moving family reconciliations in all literature. Less often considered is the subplot of the story: Joseph's accurate prediction of impending environmental catastrophe -- drought and famine -- and his masterful strategy for avoiding disaster by taking steps while resources were still abundant. Sold into slavery, Joseph becomes known as a skilled interpreter of dreams, a talent that comes to the ears of Pharaoh, who has been troubled by two dreams that his advisors cannot explain. The dreams are similar: in one, seven fat cows emerge from the Nile to graze, followed by seven emaciated cows which swallow them up; in the other, seven full, healthy heads of grain are eaten up by seven thin, shriveled ones. The repetition of the theme in two dreams was believed a sign that God was about to bring these events to pass. Pharaoh sends for Joseph. Joseph's interpretation of the dreams is that there will be seven years of abundant harvest, followed by seven years of famine. Therefore, he suggests to Pharaoh with breathtaking boldness, you should appoint a wise and discreet man who will oversee Egypt, and who will organize the collecting of one-fifth of the grain during the years of plenty, to be stored in granaries in the cities and doled out during the years of famine. AT THE HEART OF JOSEPH'S STRATEGY was a simple lesson: In a world of changing fortunes, long-term survival of an individual or a country can often be achieved by saving during the good years. This is a profoundly conservative strategy, one that must have evolved along with the development of agriculture, which from the early days was largely based on the planting of annual grain crops. This lesson has been ignored in more recent history. In the 1920s, times were good; during the postwar boom many people believed prosperity would last forever, and they spent lavishly on every kind of luxury. Then, in 1929, came the crash, followed by the Great Depression, a shattering experience for millions. Personal and corporate bankruptcies were legion, and survivors lived the rest of their lives obsessed by the need for savings and insurance. In 2003, a new generation is repeating the mistakes of the '20s. We have an administration that calls itself conservative, yet countenances with equanimity a rising tide of bankruptcies and unemployment, and a deficit of more than six trillion dollars. We are allowing our state and federal legislators to borrow against pension plans and Social Security funds as if tomorrow will never come. This fiscal nonchalance shows how little we remember the Depression and its grim teaching: All parties sooner or later come to an end, as many who put their life savings into high-tech stocks have realized. Our party, like the revels of the carefree summer of 1929, is ending, too. Grave troubles concerning the environment, health, security, food, and water have already begun to arrive. But the mother of them all is the dwindling global supply of cheap energy, upon which modern civilization and global commerce utterly depend. Here is a fundamental problem that will not go away. All of the oil in Iraq, all of the oil in the Caspian region, all of the oil in Russia, all of the oil that may be under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and all of the potential supplies that have yet to be discovered and developed anywhere will not be enough to meet the increasingly ravenous demand of industry, transportation, agribusiness, consumerism, and other modern sinkholes for cheap energy, even in the short term. (09/24/03) Let Them Eat Guns! Common Dreams -- "Despite pervasive problems of poverty in Latin America, the United States' focus on military rather than economic aid to the region is increasing," according to Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the in America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF), one of the groups that sponsored the new study. Colombia, the biggest recipient of U.S. aid globally after Israel and Egypt, has received by far the most assistance--both military and economic--in the region for the last several years, and the sheer volume of aid as a proportion of all aid going to Latin America dominates the regional picture. ... Spurred by the wars on drugs and terrorism, levels of U.S. military aid to Latin America have more than tripled over the last five years, according to a new report released here Monday by three foreign policy groups. And even as Washington has intensified its training of military and security forces in Central and Southeast Asia and the Middle East as part of its "war on terrorism," Latin America soldiers and police received the most U.S. training of any region--13,000 Latin American personnel out of a total of 34,000 worldwide. Moreover, at a time when the region's economies are stagnating or even shrinking, throwing millions more people into poverty, total U.S. military aid to Latin America now almost equals the amount of money Washington is devoting to social or economic development there. (09/24/03) Asian Elephants Endangered BBC Nature -- Farmers defending their crops have become a bigger hazard to elephants than poachers in many Asian countries.  And the United Nations says that of the hundreds of thousands of elephants which used to roam wild in Asia, only about 16,000 remain. In India on average one human and one elephant dies each day in the struggle for space. These issues are on the table at a conference of elephant conservationists which opened in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, on Friday. An adult elephant needs hundreds of square kilometres to roam around in but dwindling forest cover and human encroachment mean the animals are forced to come into villages and eat crops to survive. Angry farmers defend their livelihood by killing and maiming elephants using home-made shotguns and crude traps that inflict terrible injuries. The elephants retaliate by attacking humans, tossing them around with their trunks or crushing their heads with their giant feet. In many countries, unplanned or unauthorised development causes additional problems, randomly dividing up elephant habitats or blocking their seasonal migration routes. (09/24/03) Hungry Killer Whales Decimate Sea Life BBC Nature -- Hungry killer whales deprived of their traditional food by commercial whaling have turned on seals, sea lions and sea otters, scientists in the US suggest. Killer whales fed mainly on giant whales in the past but numbers have fallen by 86% since the last world war. Deprived of their giant prey, they have turned on smaller mammals, leading to dramatic falls in population size. The American team came up with their theory after examining decades of climate and marine population records. The collapses of harbour seal, fur seal, sea lion and sea otter populations in the North Pacific are part of a domino effect, say Alan Springer of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Jim Estes of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their collaborators. The chain of events began with the killing of hundreds of thousands of baleen and sperm whales in the North Pacific between 1946 and 1979. Hungry killer whales had to look elsewhere for a meal and they turned to harbour seals, the scientists suggest in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The harbour seal population collapsed over a period from the early 1970s until the early 1980s. Fur seals followed between the mid 1970s and the mid 1980s, then sea lions between the late 1970s and the 1990s. The collapse of the sea otter population began in the 1990s and continues today, they say. (09/24/03) Polar Warming: Arctic Ice Shelf Splits BBC Nature -- The largest ice shelf in the Arctic has fractured, releasing all the water from the freshwater lake it dammed. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is located on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory. The huge mass of floating ice, which has been in place for at least 3,000 years, is now in two major pieces. The scientists who report the break-up in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) say it is further evidence of ongoing and accelerated climate change in the north polar region. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, which is 443 square kilometres in size, now has a major crack that runs right through it from north to south. The scientists say the fracturing - which has been developing since the spring of 2000 - is the end result of a three-decade-long decline. "We're now seeing some very extensive fractures in it that extend many kilometres horizontally across the ice-shelf; and they extend all the way through from the top to the bottom, many tens of metres through the ice shelf. And we've never seen fractures like this," Dr Jeffries told the BBC. They warn that major free-floating ice islands could pose a danger to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea. The immediate consequence of the rupture has been the loss of almost all of the freshwater from the Northern Hemisphere's largest epishelf lake (a body of mostly freshwater trapped behind an ice shelf). ... "Computer models show quite convincingly that global climate change would be manifested first and amplified in the polar regions and in particular in the Arctic," Dr Jeffries said  "Our observations at Ward Hunt Ice Shelf fit in with a broader picture of Arctic change which fits in with our understanding of how the Arctic climate would respond to global change." (09/24/03) 7:12:44 AM

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