Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Following the Food Chain back to Iraq Richard Manning writes: More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets. The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq. David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years. (03/03/04) The Evolution of Societal Intelligence Tom Atlee writes: Have you ever been in a stupid group made up of intelligent people? I mean, each person in the group is pretty smart and creative, but when they get together they seem to get in each other's way? They can't seem to make decisions, they fight, they can't get things done. Or maybe they make decisions that are unimaginative - or even destructive. Or they just go round and round as the world passes them by. Or maybe the groups you know have a strong leader. If the leader is good, maybe the group acts intelligently - makes good decisions, gets things done. But maybe the leader is bad... or maybe people are rebelling against a good or so-so leader... or maybe a good leader burns out and the group flounders. Or maybe some group you know has a unifying ideology or belief that holds them all together - until someone tries to do something creative or different... Have you experienced these things? Have you ever seen them among activists in social change movements? I have. And I've also experienced a few rare groups where everyone's a peer, where leadership is shared, where a special kind of energy among them allows them to explore and solve problems together, successfully. I've watched people with very different ideas, backgrounds, aptitudes and knowledge using that diversity creatively. They come up with brilliant solutions and proposals - better than any of them could have come up with alone. The group seems more intelligent than its individual members. Seeing these extremes, and observing what a large role these dynamics play in efforts to make a better world, I've chosen to study them, to see what I can learn. (03/03/04) Bee's Threatened BBC Environment -- French beekeepers say about 90 billion of their insects have been killed over the last 10 years by a pesticide. The chemical, used on crops including maize and sunflowers, damages the bees' sense of direction so they become lost. It is used in the UK on several crops, though not in exactly the way it is used in France, and British beekeepers have been urged to be on their guard. UK apiarists say the value of bees to the agricultural economy is immense, and they fear bees are becoming rarer. The chemical implicated in the loss of French bees is imidacloprid, marketed under a variety of names including Gaucho. It is slowly released in the plants, protecting them against insect attack by destroying their ability to find their way. A London newspaper, the Observer, reported: "Almost immediately after the chemicals were introduced 10 years ago, beekeepers reported that their bees were becoming disoriented and dying. Within a few years honey production in south-west France fell by 60%. According to the chairman of the national beekeepers' association, Jean-Marie Sirvins, a third of the country's 1.5 million registered hives disappeared. As a result, France has had to import up to 24,000 tons of honey annually." The pesticide companies say their products are not responsible for killing the bees. There are no reports of any ill effects from applications of imidacloprid in the UK, where it is licensed for use on beet. There are restrictions on its use when the plants are in flower, or for spraying the foliage. But Richard Jones, the director of the International Bee Research Association, told BBC News Online: "Beekeepers here have to be on the alert." (03/03/04)  California Oak Plague in Britain BBC Environment -- Plants affected by "sudden oak death" in Cornwall are to be destroyed and parts of infected gardens cordoned off under new government measures. Nine British trees have been affected by the disease which has destroyed thousands of acres of woodland in the United States. Environment minister Ben Bradshaw is introducing border controls to prevent a similar disaster in Britain. He fears it could become a worse problem than Dutch elm disease. "The evidence from California and the [rest of the] US is that it has ravaged 80% of their native oaks, and we don't want to see that happening here to our native beech, chestnut and other trees," he said. The disease is caused by a fungus, known as Phytophthora ramorum. Three disease sites have been identified in Cornwall, and at each one it is thought the fungus has spread to trees from rhododendron bushes. At the Lost Gardens of Heligan, rhododendrons are being controversially burned under the orders of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) because it says the plants showed signs of the disease. Mr Bradshaw defended the action, saying the host plants for the disease in this country were rhododendrons and other non-native, imported shrubs, which tended to be found in many historic gardens and nurseries. "That's where it has been found and it is important we take tough measures now to prevent the disease spreading outside those gardens and into our native woodland." (03/03/04) Once a Water Planet? BBC Science -- Nasa says its Mars rover Opportunity has shown unequivocally that the Red Planet had the right conditions to support life some time in its history. The rover has revealed the rocks at its landing site were once in contact with substantial amounts of liquid water. "These rocks were modified in liquid water and may have been precipitated in water," said scientist Steve Squyres. Opportunity has been studying the local geology at a location called Meridiani Planum since its landing on 25 January. Professor Squyres, the principal investigator on the rover's science payload, said his team had been engaged in a fine analysis of a section of layered bedrock at the landing site. "For the last two weeks we've been attacking it with every piece of our hardware and the puzzle pieces have been falling into place," he told a special news conference at the US space agency's headquarters in Washington DC. "Were these rocks acted upon, were they altered by liquid water? The answer to that question is, definitively, yes." He said there were several key lines of evidence to support the conclusion. These included the rocks' physical appearance. Their cross-bedding, the presence of small spherules and indentations all pointed to water modification. The rover's instruments also detected high levels of sulphate salts which on Earth would normally form in water or, after formation, be highly altered by long exposures to water. (03/03/04) 5:56:48 AM

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