Why people are cool to global warming
By Nigel Hannaford,
Calgary Herald
July 25, 2009
Why, asks U of C biology professor David Mayne Reid, do so many people not accept the data of climate change?
He suggests no less than seven reasons, and does so in a refreshing departure from the condescending tone more usually heard from that side of the argument. Our skepticism is driven, he proposes, by fear, genetics, short-term thinking, selfishness, ignorance, a mistakenly humble view of our own capacity to affect change and the sinister machinations of lobbies with something to gain.
There is some truth to some of this.
Human beings are, for instance, given to seeking their own good at the expense of others. In democracies, humanity's horizon is also limited by election cycles typically extending no more than five years. Countries where governments do not present themselves regularly for a new mandate and should therefore be able to look decades ahead, do not in fact fare any better. To understand the limits of human planning, one need only review the troubled history of Russia or China when the Communists ran things, or Saudi Arabia today that still manages to be broke despite its vast oil revenues.
And, while fear is responsible for human responses as damaging as an arms race or as personal as refusing to stop and help someone in need, we do indeed have just such a capacity for denial of experience as Reid proposes. (This is not always a bad thing: If we did not, there would be precious few second marriages, some of which actually turn out spectacularly well).
Nevertheless, there are two straightforward answers to Reid's ostensibly rhetorical question.
People remain skeptical for two reasons.
First, notwithstanding Reid's rejection of what he calls the "hubris" argument --that "it is arrogant to believe humans could disturb a vast global ecosystem," our powers to disrupt things are indeed pathetic when compared to planetary and extraterrestrial forces. He offers examples, some of which are indeed testaments to human folly. However, it is one thing to overfish a species to the brink of extinction, or degrade the soil of a once-fertile watershed, but it is a task of an altogether different magnitude to influence an atmosphere that we know has fluctuated wildly all on its own in the not-so-distant past, and far beyond most pessimistic predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC's worst-case scenario, for instance, posits a 30-centimetre rise in sea levels over the next century, caused by melting ice sheets and the expansion of sea water in a warming atmosphere. Al Gore came up with six metres for his film, An Inconvenient Truth, by calculating what might happen in the unlikely event that human activity caused the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to entirely disappear.
But, mother nature mocks us. Thirty thousand years ago, human influence on the atmosphere was negligible, but the sea level was 135 metres lower than it is today. Meanwhile, fossil beaches suggest 5,000 years ago, it was two metres higher than today.
True the sea level has risen 30 centimetres in the last 100 years: But, given the dramatics of the last ice age, humanity's effect must be seen as amateur, even if validated. After all, the energy the Earth receives from the sun vastly dwarfs all other planetary sources put together, including mankind's efforts. As the Pembina Institute observes on its website promoting solar energy, "In 20 minutes, the amount of solar energy falling on the Earth could power the planet for one year."
Second, predictions of global climate are based on modelling. That is, a researcher feeds assumptions into a computer, which then generates a result. I wouldn't go so far as to call this futile, but obviously the conclusion can only be as comprehensive as the assumptions, and climate is nothing if not chaotic.
Some models, the so-called hockey stick graph purporting to show a sharp rise in global temperature in the last 100 years for example, have proved fatally vulnerable to statistical analysis. Even the best of them cannot account for random events--major volcanic activity for instance or, as Australian climate researcher Chris De Freitas observes in a paper released Thursday, the unforeseen warming effects of the Pacific El Nino current. Worse for the modellers, models based on current observations do little to account for past conditions, which throws their future predictions into doubt.
People may be all the dumb things Reid says they are--there's a reason why the Bible calls us sheep --but they understand that when forecasting weather two weeks out is hit and miss, it's hard to have confidence in climate predictions for the year 2109.
To be blunt, scientists who believe in anthropogenic global warming have yet to prove their case.
Some people will choose to believe them anyway, which is their right. Others, fearing in their own way some of them may be as agenda-driven as they believe their opponents to be, still ask for better evidence.
Reid will find it frustrating, but if trillions of dollars are to be spent, that too is their right.
nhannaford@theherald. canWest.com
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*****
July 25, 2009
An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.
But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.
“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.
“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”
Multimedia and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/scien ... ?th&emc=th
Environment and Spirituality
Painkiller plant cures a world of ills
By Reese Halter, For The Calgary HeraldJuly 26, 2009
For thousands of years, the First Nations people have known the importance of respecting all living things. There certainly seems a natural cure for every ailment that afflicts humankind; the caveat is that we must not continue to dismantle all the wild ecosystems.
One of the most amazing plants that I have come across over the past quarter of a century of studying plants is the South Pacific noni or Morinda citrifolia.
This small blossoming shrub with its dark, glossy, 300-millimetre-long evergreen leaves are indigenous to Tahiti, southeastern Asia and Australia. It has been naturalized in China, India, parts of Africa and the Americas.
About 1,500 years ago, the Polynesians took noni seeds with them as they colonized the South Pacific Islands including Hawaii.
The noni plant produces egg-shaped fruits with indented pit-marks. Its tasteless yellowish white skin becomes near transparent when the fruit ripens. The ripened pulp, on the other hand, smells of strong cheese and the extracted pulp juice is quite bitter.
The fruits contain reddish-brown seeds that float in the ocean and accounts for noni's widespread global distribution.
Noni flourishes under harsh environmental conditions including the onslaught of salt, drought, sandy Australian soils, porous volcanic Hawaiian soils and nutrient poor limestone soils of Guam.
Noni fruit was an important food source for Australian, Burmese, Fijian and Samonian Aboriginals, and the red dye from the bark and yellow dye from the roots were used extensively by these peoples.
Noni roots, flowers, seeds, leaves, bark and fruits contain more than 140 nutraceuticals or medicinal extracts that act synergistically in the human body.
I recommend only using organically certified products.
Noni fruits contain 800 times more proxeronine than pineapple. Proxeronine is converted in the human body into a group of nitrogenous compounds-- the main constituent being xeronine. Xeronine enables all human cells the ability to work more efficiently in addition to correcting deficiencies and repairing damaged cells.
Noni's medicinal properties are known to enhance the thyroid and thymus glands, which fend off infections.
Moreover, noni boosts the human immune system by bolstering macrophages and lymphocytes--two integral parts of our defence system.
Incredibly, noni's medicinal properties help the human body attain homeostasis or a state of being normal. For instance, noni will correct blood sugar if it's too high or too low or if the body's acidity is too high or too low.
Japanese scientists isolated the compound damnacanthal from noni fruit, which inhibits some precancerous cells and thus tumour growth. Noni has also been shown to be effective in raising T-cell counts in victims suffering from AIDS. And noni is an effective treatment for type II diabetes.
Scopoletin is a plant nutrient found in noni fruit, which helps dilate blood vessels and successfully reduces high blood pressure.
Noni has terrific antibacterial properties able to combat Shingella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus morganii, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus aureus and Escherichia coli.
Noni contains a class of unsaturated hydrocarbons called terpenes--key components of essential plant oils which help rejuvenate cells, and possess strong analgesic actions that relieve pain.
In fact, in a study group of 8,000 patients in the U. S., over three quarters of the people that took noni reported relief from arthritis, bursitis, fibromyalgia and carpal tunnel syndrome.
Noni is also an anti-inflammatory and antihistaminic that efficiently fights allergies. It reduces menstrual cramps and it lessens the need for men with an enlarged prostate to urinate at night.
Veterinarians have experienced tremendous success using noni in treating pain, inflammation and as an anthelmintic or ridding animals of worms.
The use of noni obviates the need for pharmaceutical muscle relaxants, antiinflammatory and steroids.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that controls appetite, mood and anger and noni has a powerful serotonin binding capacity, which helps people who suffer from sleep disorder. Furthermore, noni provides relief for those suffering from depressions, nausea, digestive problems, diarrhea, anxiety, arrhythmias --or irregular heartbeat --and it has been proven to lower cholesterol.
Noni increases energy and endurance, and it helps reduce weight.
Noni is safe for children and pregnant or lactating mothers.
This remarkable South Pacific plant packs a tremendous punch and is worthy of being front and centre in your medicine cabinet.
Reese Halter is a public speaker and conservation biologist. His upcoming book is entitled the incomparable honey bee, rocky mountain books. He can be contacted through www.drreese.Com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
By Reese Halter, For The Calgary HeraldJuly 26, 2009
For thousands of years, the First Nations people have known the importance of respecting all living things. There certainly seems a natural cure for every ailment that afflicts humankind; the caveat is that we must not continue to dismantle all the wild ecosystems.
One of the most amazing plants that I have come across over the past quarter of a century of studying plants is the South Pacific noni or Morinda citrifolia.
This small blossoming shrub with its dark, glossy, 300-millimetre-long evergreen leaves are indigenous to Tahiti, southeastern Asia and Australia. It has been naturalized in China, India, parts of Africa and the Americas.
About 1,500 years ago, the Polynesians took noni seeds with them as they colonized the South Pacific Islands including Hawaii.
The noni plant produces egg-shaped fruits with indented pit-marks. Its tasteless yellowish white skin becomes near transparent when the fruit ripens. The ripened pulp, on the other hand, smells of strong cheese and the extracted pulp juice is quite bitter.
The fruits contain reddish-brown seeds that float in the ocean and accounts for noni's widespread global distribution.
Noni flourishes under harsh environmental conditions including the onslaught of salt, drought, sandy Australian soils, porous volcanic Hawaiian soils and nutrient poor limestone soils of Guam.
Noni fruit was an important food source for Australian, Burmese, Fijian and Samonian Aboriginals, and the red dye from the bark and yellow dye from the roots were used extensively by these peoples.
Noni roots, flowers, seeds, leaves, bark and fruits contain more than 140 nutraceuticals or medicinal extracts that act synergistically in the human body.
I recommend only using organically certified products.
Noni fruits contain 800 times more proxeronine than pineapple. Proxeronine is converted in the human body into a group of nitrogenous compounds-- the main constituent being xeronine. Xeronine enables all human cells the ability to work more efficiently in addition to correcting deficiencies and repairing damaged cells.
Noni's medicinal properties are known to enhance the thyroid and thymus glands, which fend off infections.
Moreover, noni boosts the human immune system by bolstering macrophages and lymphocytes--two integral parts of our defence system.
Incredibly, noni's medicinal properties help the human body attain homeostasis or a state of being normal. For instance, noni will correct blood sugar if it's too high or too low or if the body's acidity is too high or too low.
Japanese scientists isolated the compound damnacanthal from noni fruit, which inhibits some precancerous cells and thus tumour growth. Noni has also been shown to be effective in raising T-cell counts in victims suffering from AIDS. And noni is an effective treatment for type II diabetes.
Scopoletin is a plant nutrient found in noni fruit, which helps dilate blood vessels and successfully reduces high blood pressure.
Noni has terrific antibacterial properties able to combat Shingella, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus morganii, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus aureus and Escherichia coli.
Noni contains a class of unsaturated hydrocarbons called terpenes--key components of essential plant oils which help rejuvenate cells, and possess strong analgesic actions that relieve pain.
In fact, in a study group of 8,000 patients in the U. S., over three quarters of the people that took noni reported relief from arthritis, bursitis, fibromyalgia and carpal tunnel syndrome.
Noni is also an anti-inflammatory and antihistaminic that efficiently fights allergies. It reduces menstrual cramps and it lessens the need for men with an enlarged prostate to urinate at night.
Veterinarians have experienced tremendous success using noni in treating pain, inflammation and as an anthelmintic or ridding animals of worms.
The use of noni obviates the need for pharmaceutical muscle relaxants, antiinflammatory and steroids.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that controls appetite, mood and anger and noni has a powerful serotonin binding capacity, which helps people who suffer from sleep disorder. Furthermore, noni provides relief for those suffering from depressions, nausea, digestive problems, diarrhea, anxiety, arrhythmias --or irregular heartbeat --and it has been proven to lower cholesterol.
Noni increases energy and endurance, and it helps reduce weight.
Noni is safe for children and pregnant or lactating mothers.
This remarkable South Pacific plant packs a tremendous punch and is worthy of being front and centre in your medicine cabinet.
Reese Halter is a public speaker and conservation biologist. His upcoming book is entitled the incomparable honey bee, rocky mountain books. He can be contacted through www.drreese.Com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
In defence of climatology
By David Mayne Reid,
For The Calgary Herald
August 18, 2009
Let me answer criticisms of my column "Why do so many not accept climate change data?" Although these criticisms (shown below in quotation marks) have been refuted by many others, many times, I will try again.
"Humans are insignificant. They can't affect the climate. Climate shows enormous natural variability."
No one debates climate variability. While natural factors, solar activity and volcanoes affect climate, humans are a potent additional factor, forcing climate change. William Ruddiman's hypothesis is worth study. His data suggests ancient agriculture and deforestation caused increases in greenhouse gases and began a global warming trend millennia ago. However, if you need hard facts, look at the devastating effects of 6.5 billion humans who, in 100 years, have radically altered the composition of the global atmosphere by increasing CO2, methane and N2O. Through habitat destruction and over-exploitation we are causing mass extinction of numerous land and marine species. The rate of species loss is unprecedented in the history of Earth. In 50 years there will be virtually no tropical rainforest, and marine fisheries will be a thing of the past. We have used most of the world's easily available phosphate. Without phosphate fertilizer there is no food.
The catalogue of human-caused environmental devastation is horrifyingly long. Don't tell me human actions are globally insignificant. Remember, even small changes in temperature, rainfall (remember Alberta drought 2001) or sea level devastate agriculture and economies.
"Most climate scientists have left-wing political agendas."
Nonsense, they come from all political stripes. Scientists are employed to make predictions: will a cancer spread; will an engineering structure collapse; will pine bark beetle advance? All scientists I know reach their conclusions without political motivation. It is not their fault if their deductions are unpalatable to some. Scientists examine the data, and try to make rational conclusions. There is no political agenda.
"It is not warming."
Sorry, it is. One must look at the long-term big picture and overall trends. Mean global temperatures are rising. It is misguided to compare today's temperature to one anomalous warm year in the '90s, or an earlier brief cool period. Contrary to the critics, Mann's "hockey stick graph" showing rapid temperature increase stands up well to recent statistical analysis. Yes, there is substantial year-to-year variation, but look at the overall temperature trend. It is warming.
"Prediction by computer modelling is useless."
Wrong, it is an effective tool. It is irrational for people to accept computer modelling for aircraft and bridge design and cancer research, but not climate studies.
Some argue modelling has no value because it failed to predict the economic collapse. Untrue, many economists predicted collapse but were ignored and publicly vilified, because those in power were too busy making money, and were deaf to bad news.
Some claim climate modelling only shows non-causally related correlations. For example, warming is correlated with human height AND greenhouse gas levels. Thus it is argued that the correlation between greenhouse gas and global temperature is meaningless. This is false logic. There is obviously no connection between human height and temperature, but greenhouse gases trap heat. Causality exists.
Computer modelling is the only technique for examining vast data sets and is an effective way to handle complex climate information. Model validity has been tested by using older climate data to see how it predicts today's climate. While not perfect, these models work well and so far they are the best and only guide to the future. Critics seem to argue that since modelling is not perfect, we should reject this tool, and forget about the fate of future generations. Nonsense, models work, they are improving, so let's use the tools we have, but constantly sharpen them.
While climate critics distrust modelling they fail to offer alternative techniques.
"They can't predict tomorrow's weather. How can they predict climate in 50 years?"
"Weather" and "climate" are different. "Weather" is the atmospheric condition at a specific time and place; impossible to predict with 100 per cent accuracy. Only a lunatic would claim that in Calgary at 10 a. m. on Jan. 1, 2100, the temperature will be Xo C. However, "climate" is the prevailing atmospheric conditions averaged over many years. Climate scientists do not give precise weather predictions for specific dates, but suggest trends, such as: Much of the Earth will warm over the next 100 years.
Even if the link between increased greenhouse gas and warming was somehow shown to be weak, that humans have dramatically altered the composition of the Earth's atmosphere in the blink of the eye in geological terms, warns us of our ability to cause negative environmental changes on a grand scale. If we continue to pollute the environment like this, something bad will inevitably happen. Climate scientists conclude it has already started.
The downside of legislating reductions in pollution will be substantial cost to the energy industry and job losses. The cost of their products will rise. The upside of pollution reduction is that the ecosystem and human health will improve, health-care costs decrease, profitable new industries using energy-efficient technologies, pollution reduction and alternative energy will grow, offsetting the above financial problems. Increased efficiency will preserve fossil fuels for future generations when cleaner technologies are available.
Less efficient, polluting companies will disappear.
Forward-thinking intellectually nimble industries will take their place. We will live in a cleaner, healthier world with a more sustainable economy. Sounds like a nice place to live.
David Mayne Reid Is A Professor Of Biology At The University Of Calgary.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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By David Mayne Reid,
For The Calgary Herald
August 18, 2009
Let me answer criticisms of my column "Why do so many not accept climate change data?" Although these criticisms (shown below in quotation marks) have been refuted by many others, many times, I will try again.
"Humans are insignificant. They can't affect the climate. Climate shows enormous natural variability."
No one debates climate variability. While natural factors, solar activity and volcanoes affect climate, humans are a potent additional factor, forcing climate change. William Ruddiman's hypothesis is worth study. His data suggests ancient agriculture and deforestation caused increases in greenhouse gases and began a global warming trend millennia ago. However, if you need hard facts, look at the devastating effects of 6.5 billion humans who, in 100 years, have radically altered the composition of the global atmosphere by increasing CO2, methane and N2O. Through habitat destruction and over-exploitation we are causing mass extinction of numerous land and marine species. The rate of species loss is unprecedented in the history of Earth. In 50 years there will be virtually no tropical rainforest, and marine fisheries will be a thing of the past. We have used most of the world's easily available phosphate. Without phosphate fertilizer there is no food.
The catalogue of human-caused environmental devastation is horrifyingly long. Don't tell me human actions are globally insignificant. Remember, even small changes in temperature, rainfall (remember Alberta drought 2001) or sea level devastate agriculture and economies.
"Most climate scientists have left-wing political agendas."
Nonsense, they come from all political stripes. Scientists are employed to make predictions: will a cancer spread; will an engineering structure collapse; will pine bark beetle advance? All scientists I know reach their conclusions without political motivation. It is not their fault if their deductions are unpalatable to some. Scientists examine the data, and try to make rational conclusions. There is no political agenda.
"It is not warming."
Sorry, it is. One must look at the long-term big picture and overall trends. Mean global temperatures are rising. It is misguided to compare today's temperature to one anomalous warm year in the '90s, or an earlier brief cool period. Contrary to the critics, Mann's "hockey stick graph" showing rapid temperature increase stands up well to recent statistical analysis. Yes, there is substantial year-to-year variation, but look at the overall temperature trend. It is warming.
"Prediction by computer modelling is useless."
Wrong, it is an effective tool. It is irrational for people to accept computer modelling for aircraft and bridge design and cancer research, but not climate studies.
Some argue modelling has no value because it failed to predict the economic collapse. Untrue, many economists predicted collapse but were ignored and publicly vilified, because those in power were too busy making money, and were deaf to bad news.
Some claim climate modelling only shows non-causally related correlations. For example, warming is correlated with human height AND greenhouse gas levels. Thus it is argued that the correlation between greenhouse gas and global temperature is meaningless. This is false logic. There is obviously no connection between human height and temperature, but greenhouse gases trap heat. Causality exists.
Computer modelling is the only technique for examining vast data sets and is an effective way to handle complex climate information. Model validity has been tested by using older climate data to see how it predicts today's climate. While not perfect, these models work well and so far they are the best and only guide to the future. Critics seem to argue that since modelling is not perfect, we should reject this tool, and forget about the fate of future generations. Nonsense, models work, they are improving, so let's use the tools we have, but constantly sharpen them.
While climate critics distrust modelling they fail to offer alternative techniques.
"They can't predict tomorrow's weather. How can they predict climate in 50 years?"
"Weather" and "climate" are different. "Weather" is the atmospheric condition at a specific time and place; impossible to predict with 100 per cent accuracy. Only a lunatic would claim that in Calgary at 10 a. m. on Jan. 1, 2100, the temperature will be Xo C. However, "climate" is the prevailing atmospheric conditions averaged over many years. Climate scientists do not give precise weather predictions for specific dates, but suggest trends, such as: Much of the Earth will warm over the next 100 years.
Even if the link between increased greenhouse gas and warming was somehow shown to be weak, that humans have dramatically altered the composition of the Earth's atmosphere in the blink of the eye in geological terms, warns us of our ability to cause negative environmental changes on a grand scale. If we continue to pollute the environment like this, something bad will inevitably happen. Climate scientists conclude it has already started.
The downside of legislating reductions in pollution will be substantial cost to the energy industry and job losses. The cost of their products will rise. The upside of pollution reduction is that the ecosystem and human health will improve, health-care costs decrease, profitable new industries using energy-efficient technologies, pollution reduction and alternative energy will grow, offsetting the above financial problems. Increased efficiency will preserve fossil fuels for future generations when cleaner technologies are available.
Less efficient, polluting companies will disappear.
Forward-thinking intellectually nimble industries will take their place. We will live in a cleaner, healthier world with a more sustainable economy. Sounds like a nice place to live.
David Mayne Reid Is A Professor Of Biology At The University Of Calgary.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Poorest pay highest price for warming
By Wangari Maathai, For The Calgary Herald
September 18, 2009
In my home country of Kenya, a major drought is wreaking havoc on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Crops are shrivelled, cattle are dying--and there is an imminent threat of widespread hunger and starvation.
The situation is desperate and heartbreaking--but unfortunately, not completely surprising.
Decades of environmental mismanagement, coupled with global warming, is making extreme weather like droughts, hurricanes, floods, cyclones and erratic rainfalls a more regular occurrence everywhere. However, scientists say that 'developing countries,' especially those in Africa, whose economies are already precarious and where so many people, especially women, depend directly on the natural world for food, water and fuel, are being hardest hit. Mother Nature is, for much of the world's population, a rapidly diminishing source of human security.
In Darfur, for example, the lack of water is fuelling conflict as different groups fight over access to limited farm and pasture land, and deal with rapid desertification. Last summer, when I visited refugee camps in Eastern Chad, next to door to Darfur, I met an overwhelming number of women who had been raped while gathering firewood. Deforestation obliges women to walk farther and farther from the camps--and thus put themselves at risk of sexual violence.
The effects of climate change on individuals in poor countries--including Sudan, Zambia, Bangladesh and India--are well documented. A recent Oxfam report calculates that 26 million people have already been forced to migrate by climate change and other forms of degradation of the environment. In fact, by the middle of this century, such environmental refugees could number 200 million people.
The tragedy is that those hardest hit are least responsible. Per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world's least developed countries, for example, are almost negligible. Around 100 countries, most of them poor, account for only three per cent of global emissions. Canada is among the high-emitting countries on a per-capita basis, a minority club of major polluters that of course includes its neighbour to the south.
Whenever I come to Canada, people ask what they can do to help. Canada is a land of immigrants, and so many Canadians come from countries that are hardest hit by climate change. Equally important, the Canadians I meet seem anxious about the effects of climate change on themselves and others--and understand that their country bears responsibility for the problem and must help those global warming is hurting most.
My answer to this question is about leadership, because Canada's leadership and position counts in the international arena. Next week, the UN holds its Special Session on Climate Change in New York, and the G-20 nations will meet in Pittsburg. Canada can help turn the world's governments turn a corner in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit this December. Canada's leadership should include not only committing to slashing carbon emissions more aggressively, but also supporting significant financing to help developing countries adapt to climate change and utilize new technologies so they, too, can effectively reduce their emissions.
Of course, doing the right thing is not always easy. It is not yet clear, for example, how Canada can effectively fight climate change at home and still allow the tarsands to keep expanding. As an energy producing country, Canada is obviously struggling with some of the issues that are key to solving the global emissions problem. The world is watching closely how Canada manages this challenge. And with a global recession still raging, Canada will not be alone among the G-20 countries in trying to figure out how to find funding on the scale required-- some $150 billion a year.
But failure to make the investment now will come with a much higher price tag--and soon. Global warming and environmental degradation is making the world a far less secure place, not just for the citizens of Darfur, Kenya and Bangladesh-- but also for us all. The struggle for natural resources, and the costly wars that result, inevitably bring problems right to the front door of each Canadian.
A 'green deal' in Copenhagen which includes support for adaptation to climate change so vulnerable communities can stay where they are, access and afford-ability of green technology (particularly for energy) and protection of forests and trees--forest destruction or degradation accounts for up to one-fifth of all global carbon emissions--makes good sense for everyone. It is for this reason that the former prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin, and I accepted an invitation from the British and Norwegian governments to be co-chairs of the Congo Basin Forest Fund.
Climate financing is not charity. It is a strategic investment in tropical forests and natural resources that provide ecosystem services such as wood, clean drinking water and climate regulations and in turn nurture low-carbon economies in regions of the world beset by problems that include extreme poverty and widespread food insecurity. It will also create new jobs in low carbon goods and services, utilizing the sort of technology that Canada is in a good position to share with the rest of the world. Canada can show that it is a world leader by doing the right--and responsible --thing, and thus demonstrating that we are all in this together.
Wangari Maathai, The 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, Is The Founder Of The Green Belt Move-Ment ( greenbeltmovement.org)And A Co-founder Of The Nobel Women's Initiative (nobel- womensinitiative.org).She Is In Calgary Today To Speak At The Power Within--the Power Of Women Series At The Telus Convention Centre.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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By Wangari Maathai, For The Calgary Herald
September 18, 2009
In my home country of Kenya, a major drought is wreaking havoc on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Crops are shrivelled, cattle are dying--and there is an imminent threat of widespread hunger and starvation.
The situation is desperate and heartbreaking--but unfortunately, not completely surprising.
Decades of environmental mismanagement, coupled with global warming, is making extreme weather like droughts, hurricanes, floods, cyclones and erratic rainfalls a more regular occurrence everywhere. However, scientists say that 'developing countries,' especially those in Africa, whose economies are already precarious and where so many people, especially women, depend directly on the natural world for food, water and fuel, are being hardest hit. Mother Nature is, for much of the world's population, a rapidly diminishing source of human security.
In Darfur, for example, the lack of water is fuelling conflict as different groups fight over access to limited farm and pasture land, and deal with rapid desertification. Last summer, when I visited refugee camps in Eastern Chad, next to door to Darfur, I met an overwhelming number of women who had been raped while gathering firewood. Deforestation obliges women to walk farther and farther from the camps--and thus put themselves at risk of sexual violence.
The effects of climate change on individuals in poor countries--including Sudan, Zambia, Bangladesh and India--are well documented. A recent Oxfam report calculates that 26 million people have already been forced to migrate by climate change and other forms of degradation of the environment. In fact, by the middle of this century, such environmental refugees could number 200 million people.
The tragedy is that those hardest hit are least responsible. Per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world's least developed countries, for example, are almost negligible. Around 100 countries, most of them poor, account for only three per cent of global emissions. Canada is among the high-emitting countries on a per-capita basis, a minority club of major polluters that of course includes its neighbour to the south.
Whenever I come to Canada, people ask what they can do to help. Canada is a land of immigrants, and so many Canadians come from countries that are hardest hit by climate change. Equally important, the Canadians I meet seem anxious about the effects of climate change on themselves and others--and understand that their country bears responsibility for the problem and must help those global warming is hurting most.
My answer to this question is about leadership, because Canada's leadership and position counts in the international arena. Next week, the UN holds its Special Session on Climate Change in New York, and the G-20 nations will meet in Pittsburg. Canada can help turn the world's governments turn a corner in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit this December. Canada's leadership should include not only committing to slashing carbon emissions more aggressively, but also supporting significant financing to help developing countries adapt to climate change and utilize new technologies so they, too, can effectively reduce their emissions.
Of course, doing the right thing is not always easy. It is not yet clear, for example, how Canada can effectively fight climate change at home and still allow the tarsands to keep expanding. As an energy producing country, Canada is obviously struggling with some of the issues that are key to solving the global emissions problem. The world is watching closely how Canada manages this challenge. And with a global recession still raging, Canada will not be alone among the G-20 countries in trying to figure out how to find funding on the scale required-- some $150 billion a year.
But failure to make the investment now will come with a much higher price tag--and soon. Global warming and environmental degradation is making the world a far less secure place, not just for the citizens of Darfur, Kenya and Bangladesh-- but also for us all. The struggle for natural resources, and the costly wars that result, inevitably bring problems right to the front door of each Canadian.
A 'green deal' in Copenhagen which includes support for adaptation to climate change so vulnerable communities can stay where they are, access and afford-ability of green technology (particularly for energy) and protection of forests and trees--forest destruction or degradation accounts for up to one-fifth of all global carbon emissions--makes good sense for everyone. It is for this reason that the former prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin, and I accepted an invitation from the British and Norwegian governments to be co-chairs of the Congo Basin Forest Fund.
Climate financing is not charity. It is a strategic investment in tropical forests and natural resources that provide ecosystem services such as wood, clean drinking water and climate regulations and in turn nurture low-carbon economies in regions of the world beset by problems that include extreme poverty and widespread food insecurity. It will also create new jobs in low carbon goods and services, utilizing the sort of technology that Canada is in a good position to share with the rest of the world. Canada can show that it is a world leader by doing the right--and responsible --thing, and thus demonstrating that we are all in this together.
Wangari Maathai, The 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, Is The Founder Of The Green Belt Move-Ment ( greenbeltmovement.org)And A Co-founder Of The Nobel Women's Initiative (nobel- womensinitiative.org).She Is In Calgary Today To Speak At The Power Within--the Power Of Women Series At The Telus Convention Centre.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 6&sponsor=
Scientists pull an about face on global warming
By Lorne Gunter, For The Calgary Herald
September 19, 2009 9:03 AM
Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?
Or if Don Cherry claimed suddenly to like European hockey players who wear visors and float around the ice, never bodychecking opponents.
Or Jack Layton insisted that unions are ruining the economy by distorting wages and protecting unproductive workers.
Or Stephen Harper began arguing that it makes good economic sense for Ottawa to own a car company. (Oh, wait, that one happened.) But at least, the Tories-buy-GM aberration made all the papers and newscasts.
When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?
Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.
Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference--an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change --Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."
The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.
But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.
"How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."
But it is increasingly clear that global warming is on hiatus for the time being. And that is not what the UN, the alarmist scientists or environmentalists predicted. For the past dozen years, since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, it has been beaten into our heads with the force and repetition of the rowing drum on a slave galley that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100.
While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the face: None of the alarmist drummers ever predicted anything like a 30-year pause in their apocalyptic scenario.
Latif says he expects warming to resume in 2020 or 2030.
In the past year, two other groups of scientists--one in Germany, the second in the United States--have come to the same conclusion: Warming is on hold, likely because of a cooling of the Earth's upper oceans, but it will resume.
But how is that knowable? How can Latif and the others state with certainty that after this long and unforeseen cooling, dangerous man-made heating will resume? They failed to observe the current cooling for years after it had begun, how then can their predictions for the resumption of dangerous warming be trusted?
My point is they cannot. It's true the supercomputer models Latif and other modellers rely on for their dire predictions are becoming more accurate. But getting the future correct is far trickier. Chances are some unforeseen future changes will throw the current predictions out of whack long before the forecast resumption of warming.
Lorne Gunter is a columnist with the Edmonton Journal and National Post.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=
By Lorne Gunter, For The Calgary Herald
September 19, 2009 9:03 AM
Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?
Or if Don Cherry claimed suddenly to like European hockey players who wear visors and float around the ice, never bodychecking opponents.
Or Jack Layton insisted that unions are ruining the economy by distorting wages and protecting unproductive workers.
Or Stephen Harper began arguing that it makes good economic sense for Ottawa to own a car company. (Oh, wait, that one happened.) But at least, the Tories-buy-GM aberration made all the papers and newscasts.
When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?
Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.
Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference--an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change --Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."
The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.
But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.
"How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."
But it is increasingly clear that global warming is on hiatus for the time being. And that is not what the UN, the alarmist scientists or environmentalists predicted. For the past dozen years, since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, it has been beaten into our heads with the force and repetition of the rowing drum on a slave galley that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100.
While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the face: None of the alarmist drummers ever predicted anything like a 30-year pause in their apocalyptic scenario.
Latif says he expects warming to resume in 2020 or 2030.
In the past year, two other groups of scientists--one in Germany, the second in the United States--have come to the same conclusion: Warming is on hold, likely because of a cooling of the Earth's upper oceans, but it will resume.
But how is that knowable? How can Latif and the others state with certainty that after this long and unforeseen cooling, dangerous man-made heating will resume? They failed to observe the current cooling for years after it had begun, how then can their predictions for the resumption of dangerous warming be trusted?
My point is they cannot. It's true the supercomputer models Latif and other modellers rely on for their dire predictions are becoming more accurate. But getting the future correct is far trickier. Chances are some unforeseen future changes will throw the current predictions out of whack long before the forecast resumption of warming.
Lorne Gunter is a columnist with the Edmonton Journal and National Post.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=
latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate2-2009oct02,0,3269860.story
latimes.com
Climate summit delegates like state's planned carbon trading market
Governors, premiers and environmental officials from around the world attend the conference in Los Angeles, co-sponsored by the United Nations.
By Margot Roosevelt
October 2, 2009
Manoel Silva de Cunha, leader of a group of 200,000 Brazilian forest-dwellers, was blunt about why he traveled this week from the Amazon to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Summit.
The rubber tappers, nut gatherers and fishermen who live off tropical forests want money from American corporations to help them preserve the trees that cool the planet.
"These companies have polluted a lot," he said. "They have to make up for it."
Many of the 1,200 delegates who crowded into Century City's Hyatt Regency this week came with similar hopes: to cash in on California's expertise, its technology and the multimillion-dollar carbon trading market it plans to launch in 2012.
While Congress dithers over national climate legislation, and negotiators wrangle over a global treaty, governors, premiers and environmental officials from 70 states and provinces around the world gathered, as Schwarzenegger put it, for "action, action, action."
This year's gabfest is double the size of California's first climate summit last year and, for the first time, is co-sponsored by the United Nations.
Whatever greenhouse gas targets are ultimately adopted by national governments, it will be up to localities to "protect your forests from fire, your water supplies from contamination and your coastlines from erosion," Olav Kjorven, a U.N. assistant secretary general, told the group.
California, he added, has "blazed a path for other regional governments around the world to follow."
Some 20% of planet-heating emissions result from the burning of tropical forests and their conversion to soybean fields and cattle ranches.
But forests, which are complex to regulate, were not part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty that is to be revised in Copenhagen in December. Negotiators are debating whether wealthy nations will compensate such countries as Brazil and Indonesia to preserve trees, which store vast amounts of carbon.
Several dozen local officials and environmental groups from forest-rich nations gathered in Los Angeles for two days before this week's summit to discuss rules, similar to those recently adopted in California, to measure the carbon in their forests and provide credits to companies willing to pay for offsetting industrial emissions.
A country, or even a province, that develops trustworthy regulations and enforcement could be eligible to tap into California's planned cap-and-trade program or a broader system proposed for seven Western states and four Canadian provinces. Such a carbon trading system could funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to such communities as Brazilian rubber tappers, Indonesian island dwellers and Tanzanian villagers.
On Wednesday, Schwarzenegger officials signed an agreement with representatives of Mexican states to explore whether California's carbon rules could be adapted to preserve Sierra Madre forests, which harbor monarch butterflies.
Today, California officials are expected to finalize a partnership with the Chinese province of Jiangsu to share energy technology.
Why collaborate when companies from both nations are competing furiously over green technology? "California is the most energy-efficient state in the nation," said Secretary Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. "We want to sell our technology to them."
California officials are also exploring common ground with the Chinese to limit cement plant emissions in both countries, Adams said. California cement executives complain that if the state cracks down on their plants, they will have to import most of their cement from China, where controls are less stringent.
No public money was spent on the summit, according to administration officials. They refused to reveal the total cost of the event or confirm news reports that corporations paid between $100,000 and $250,000 to sponsor the gathering.
On the podium, Schwarzenegger thanked the Aga Khan, a philanthropist who focuses on development projects in the Middle East and Africa, as "one of the main sponsors." Panels including "The Evolution of Offsets" to "Opportunities for Industry in a Carbon Constrained World" featured video screens saying they were "graciously sponsored" by Shell Oil and other companies, many of which have a financial stake in proposed climate regulations.
margot.roosevelt @latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... rint.story
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
latimes.com
Climate summit delegates like state's planned carbon trading market
Governors, premiers and environmental officials from around the world attend the conference in Los Angeles, co-sponsored by the United Nations.
By Margot Roosevelt
October 2, 2009
Manoel Silva de Cunha, leader of a group of 200,000 Brazilian forest-dwellers, was blunt about why he traveled this week from the Amazon to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Summit.
The rubber tappers, nut gatherers and fishermen who live off tropical forests want money from American corporations to help them preserve the trees that cool the planet.
"These companies have polluted a lot," he said. "They have to make up for it."
Many of the 1,200 delegates who crowded into Century City's Hyatt Regency this week came with similar hopes: to cash in on California's expertise, its technology and the multimillion-dollar carbon trading market it plans to launch in 2012.
While Congress dithers over national climate legislation, and negotiators wrangle over a global treaty, governors, premiers and environmental officials from 70 states and provinces around the world gathered, as Schwarzenegger put it, for "action, action, action."
This year's gabfest is double the size of California's first climate summit last year and, for the first time, is co-sponsored by the United Nations.
Whatever greenhouse gas targets are ultimately adopted by national governments, it will be up to localities to "protect your forests from fire, your water supplies from contamination and your coastlines from erosion," Olav Kjorven, a U.N. assistant secretary general, told the group.
California, he added, has "blazed a path for other regional governments around the world to follow."
Some 20% of planet-heating emissions result from the burning of tropical forests and their conversion to soybean fields and cattle ranches.
But forests, which are complex to regulate, were not part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty that is to be revised in Copenhagen in December. Negotiators are debating whether wealthy nations will compensate such countries as Brazil and Indonesia to preserve trees, which store vast amounts of carbon.
Several dozen local officials and environmental groups from forest-rich nations gathered in Los Angeles for two days before this week's summit to discuss rules, similar to those recently adopted in California, to measure the carbon in their forests and provide credits to companies willing to pay for offsetting industrial emissions.
A country, or even a province, that develops trustworthy regulations and enforcement could be eligible to tap into California's planned cap-and-trade program or a broader system proposed for seven Western states and four Canadian provinces. Such a carbon trading system could funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to such communities as Brazilian rubber tappers, Indonesian island dwellers and Tanzanian villagers.
On Wednesday, Schwarzenegger officials signed an agreement with representatives of Mexican states to explore whether California's carbon rules could be adapted to preserve Sierra Madre forests, which harbor monarch butterflies.
Today, California officials are expected to finalize a partnership with the Chinese province of Jiangsu to share energy technology.
Why collaborate when companies from both nations are competing furiously over green technology? "California is the most energy-efficient state in the nation," said Secretary Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. "We want to sell our technology to them."
California officials are also exploring common ground with the Chinese to limit cement plant emissions in both countries, Adams said. California cement executives complain that if the state cracks down on their plants, they will have to import most of their cement from China, where controls are less stringent.
No public money was spent on the summit, according to administration officials. They refused to reveal the total cost of the event or confirm news reports that corporations paid between $100,000 and $250,000 to sponsor the gathering.
On the podium, Schwarzenegger thanked the Aga Khan, a philanthropist who focuses on development projects in the Middle East and Africa, as "one of the main sponsors." Panels including "The Evolution of Offsets" to "Opportunities for Industry in a Carbon Constrained World" featured video screens saying they were "graciously sponsored" by Shell Oil and other companies, many of which have a financial stake in proposed climate regulations.
margot.roosevelt @latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... rint.story
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
October 31, 2009
French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME
PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.
Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.
But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.
“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world ... &th&emc=th
French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME
PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.
Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.
But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.
“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world ... &th&emc=th
November 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Trucks, Trains and Trees
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Tapajós National Forest, Brazil
No matter how many times you hear them, there are some statistics that just bowl you over. The one that always stuns me is this: Imagine if you took all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world and added up their exhaust every year. The amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, all those cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships collectively emit into the atmosphere is actually less than the carbon emissions every year that result from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are now losing a tropical forest the size of New York State every year, and the carbon that releases into the atmosphere now accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global emissions contributing to climate change.
It is going to be a long time before we transform the world’s transportation fleet so it is emission-free. But right now — like tomorrow — we could eliminate 17 percent of all global emissions if we could halt the cutting and burning of tropical forests. But to do that requires putting in place a whole new system of economic development — one that makes it more profitable for the poorer, forest-rich nations to preserve and manage their trees rather than to chop them down to make furniture or plant soybeans.
Without a new system for economic development in the timber-rich tropics, you can kiss the rainforests goodbye. The old model of economic growth will devour them. The only Amazon your grandchildren will ever relate to is the one that ends in dot-com and sells books.
To better understand this issue, I’m visiting the Tapajós National Forest in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon on a trip organized by Conservation International and the Brazilian government. Flying in here by prop plane from Manaus, you can understand why the Amazon rainforest is considered one of the lungs of the world. Even from 20,000 feet, all you see in every direction is an unbroken expanse of rainforest treetops that, from the air, looks like a vast and endless carpet of broccoli.
Once on the ground, we drove from Santarém into Tapajós, where we met with the community cooperative that manages the eco-friendly businesses here that support the 8,000 local people living in this protected forest. What you learn when you visit with a tiny Brazilian community that actually lives in, and off, the forest is a simple but crucial truth: To save an ecosystem of nature, you need an ecosystem of markets and governance.
“You need a new model of economic development — one that is based on raising people’s standards of living by maintaining their natural capital, not just by converting that natural capital to ranching or industrial farming or logging,” said José María Silva, vice president for South America of Conservation International.
Right now people protecting the rainforest are paid a pittance — compared with those who strip it — even though we now know that the rainforest provides everything from keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere to maintaining the flow of freshwater into rivers.
The good news is that Brazil has put in place all the elements of a system to compensate its forest-dwellers for maintaining the forests. Brazil has already set aside 43 percent of the Amazon rainforest for conservation and for indigenous peoples. Another 19 percent of the Amazon, though, has already been deforested by farmers and ranchers.
So the big question is what will happen to the other 38 percent. The more we get the Brazilian system to work, the more of that 38 percent will be preserved and the less carbon reductions the whole world would have to make. But it takes money.
The residents of the Tapajós reserve are already organized into cooperatives that sell eco-tourism on rainforest trails, furniture and other wood products made from sustainable selective logging and a very attractive line of purses made from “ecological leather,” a k a, rainforest rubber. They also get government subsidies.
Sergio Pimentel, 48, explained to me that he used to farm about five acres of land for subsistence, but now is using only about one acre to support his family of six. The rest of the income comes through the co-op’s forest businesses. “We were born inside the forest,” he added. “So we know the importance of it being preserved, but we need better access to global markets for the products we make here. Can you help us with that?”
There are community co-ops like this all over the protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. But this system needs money — money to expand into more markets, money to maintain police monitoring and enforcement and money to improve the productivity of farming on already degraded lands so people won’t eat up more rainforest. That is why we need to make sure that whatever energy-climate bill comes out of the U.S. Congress, and whatever framework comes out of the Copenhagen conference next month, they include provisions for financing rainforest conservation systems like those in Brazil. The last 38 percent of the Amazon is still up for grabs. It is there for us to save. Your grandchildren will thank you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Trucks, Trains and Trees
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Tapajós National Forest, Brazil
No matter how many times you hear them, there are some statistics that just bowl you over. The one that always stuns me is this: Imagine if you took all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world and added up their exhaust every year. The amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, all those cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships collectively emit into the atmosphere is actually less than the carbon emissions every year that result from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are now losing a tropical forest the size of New York State every year, and the carbon that releases into the atmosphere now accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global emissions contributing to climate change.
It is going to be a long time before we transform the world’s transportation fleet so it is emission-free. But right now — like tomorrow — we could eliminate 17 percent of all global emissions if we could halt the cutting and burning of tropical forests. But to do that requires putting in place a whole new system of economic development — one that makes it more profitable for the poorer, forest-rich nations to preserve and manage their trees rather than to chop them down to make furniture or plant soybeans.
Without a new system for economic development in the timber-rich tropics, you can kiss the rainforests goodbye. The old model of economic growth will devour them. The only Amazon your grandchildren will ever relate to is the one that ends in dot-com and sells books.
To better understand this issue, I’m visiting the Tapajós National Forest in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon on a trip organized by Conservation International and the Brazilian government. Flying in here by prop plane from Manaus, you can understand why the Amazon rainforest is considered one of the lungs of the world. Even from 20,000 feet, all you see in every direction is an unbroken expanse of rainforest treetops that, from the air, looks like a vast and endless carpet of broccoli.
Once on the ground, we drove from Santarém into Tapajós, where we met with the community cooperative that manages the eco-friendly businesses here that support the 8,000 local people living in this protected forest. What you learn when you visit with a tiny Brazilian community that actually lives in, and off, the forest is a simple but crucial truth: To save an ecosystem of nature, you need an ecosystem of markets and governance.
“You need a new model of economic development — one that is based on raising people’s standards of living by maintaining their natural capital, not just by converting that natural capital to ranching or industrial farming or logging,” said José María Silva, vice president for South America of Conservation International.
Right now people protecting the rainforest are paid a pittance — compared with those who strip it — even though we now know that the rainforest provides everything from keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere to maintaining the flow of freshwater into rivers.
The good news is that Brazil has put in place all the elements of a system to compensate its forest-dwellers for maintaining the forests. Brazil has already set aside 43 percent of the Amazon rainforest for conservation and for indigenous peoples. Another 19 percent of the Amazon, though, has already been deforested by farmers and ranchers.
So the big question is what will happen to the other 38 percent. The more we get the Brazilian system to work, the more of that 38 percent will be preserved and the less carbon reductions the whole world would have to make. But it takes money.
The residents of the Tapajós reserve are already organized into cooperatives that sell eco-tourism on rainforest trails, furniture and other wood products made from sustainable selective logging and a very attractive line of purses made from “ecological leather,” a k a, rainforest rubber. They also get government subsidies.
Sergio Pimentel, 48, explained to me that he used to farm about five acres of land for subsistence, but now is using only about one acre to support his family of six. The rest of the income comes through the co-op’s forest businesses. “We were born inside the forest,” he added. “So we know the importance of it being preserved, but we need better access to global markets for the products we make here. Can you help us with that?”
There are community co-ops like this all over the protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. But this system needs money — money to expand into more markets, money to maintain police monitoring and enforcement and money to improve the productivity of farming on already degraded lands so people won’t eat up more rainforest. That is why we need to make sure that whatever energy-climate bill comes out of the U.S. Congress, and whatever framework comes out of the Copenhagen conference next month, they include provisions for financing rainforest conservation systems like those in Brazil. The last 38 percent of the Amazon is still up for grabs. It is there for us to save. Your grandchildren will thank you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opini ... nted=print
November 15, 2009
Lost There, Felt Here
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Belem, Brazil
“One million dollars?”
The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.
What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”
O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.
Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?
An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?
Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.
“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”
I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.
Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.
“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”
Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?
*****
November 15, 2009
Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.
Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.
Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?
“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but this forest is our home.”
No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is — or more accurately, used to be — a thick, staggeringly beautiful forest in western Kenya, capturing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feeding more than a dozen lakes and rivers across the region, even contributing to the flow of the Nile.
But in the past 15 years, because of ill-planned settlement schemes (the government essentially handed out chunks of forest to cronies), 25 percent of the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. The Ogiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswahili word “haribika,” which means spoiled. Scientists say the environmental destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried up lakes.
The results were painfully obvious this summer when East Africa was hit by one of the worst droughts in years. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hydropower, the water shortage meant blackouts, which many Kenyans believe contributed to the recent spike in crime and unemployment.
Suddenly, the Kenyan government seemed to spring into action, commissioning hefty environmental reports and insisting on ejecting all settlers from the Mau Forest so that the government could plant millions of trees and get the country’s water sources churning again. But the sudden environmental altruism has bred suspicion as well. Many Ogiek wonder if Kenyan politicians, notorious as among the world’s most corrupt, are driven by another kind of green.
“The government wants that forest for economic reasons, not conservation reasons,” said Towett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. “The only people who are going to benefit are the saw-millers.”
Almost as if to prove his point, beyond the bird chirps and cow bells tinkling across the smooth green hills was a different noise, a deeper, steadier noise, like a growl: bulldozers, many of them. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that timber companies are continuing to chew up large tracts of the Mau, knocking down giant trees and turning them into doors and plywood for export.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Julius Kavita, this area’s district commissioner, when asked what was going on.
Mr. Kavita said it was “complicated” and left it at that. But Kenyan environmental groups contend that powerful politicians control the timber companies, just as they control the dairies, the tea farms and other engines of Kenya’s economy.
To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into “native reserves” where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek’s eyes, for little else.
The persecution continued after Kenya’s independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away.
Mr. Kavita said the Ogiek, compared with the outside settlers who have chopped down trees to make cornfields, were “so kind to the forest.” But he was noncommittal on whether the Ogiek would get a special exemption from the planned evictions.
Nowadays, many of the same people who used to derisively refer to Ogiek as dorobo are claiming to be Ogiek themselves, “Ogiek originals,” in the hope they might get a break, too.
This could be a problem because the Ogiek are not great record keepers. Recent reports indicate that 8 of 10 Ogiek cannot read. Their total population is estimated at 5,000 to 20,000, many of them balancing their traditions with the trappings of modern life. It is not uncommon to see an Ogiek man with a quiver of eagle feather arrows in one fist and a cellphone in the other.
“I have one question,” said an Ogiek boy in a village near Marashoni. “Will the government evict us or not?”
Another young man tramped off into the woods to check a honey trap at the top of a tall tree. He was carrying a smoking coconut — “to make the bees sleep,” he explained — and wearing an antelope skin pouch and a pair of muddy sneakers. The last thing he did before shimmying up the bark and disappearing into the leaves was to kick off his shoes, a symbol of the world he was leaving behind, however fleetingly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world ... nted=print
Lost There, Felt Here
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Belem, Brazil
“One million dollars?”
The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.
What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”
O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.
Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?
An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?
Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.
“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”
I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.
Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.
“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”
Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?
*****
November 15, 2009
Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.
Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.
Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?
“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but this forest is our home.”
No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is — or more accurately, used to be — a thick, staggeringly beautiful forest in western Kenya, capturing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feeding more than a dozen lakes and rivers across the region, even contributing to the flow of the Nile.
But in the past 15 years, because of ill-planned settlement schemes (the government essentially handed out chunks of forest to cronies), 25 percent of the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. The Ogiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswahili word “haribika,” which means spoiled. Scientists say the environmental destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried up lakes.
The results were painfully obvious this summer when East Africa was hit by one of the worst droughts in years. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hydropower, the water shortage meant blackouts, which many Kenyans believe contributed to the recent spike in crime and unemployment.
Suddenly, the Kenyan government seemed to spring into action, commissioning hefty environmental reports and insisting on ejecting all settlers from the Mau Forest so that the government could plant millions of trees and get the country’s water sources churning again. But the sudden environmental altruism has bred suspicion as well. Many Ogiek wonder if Kenyan politicians, notorious as among the world’s most corrupt, are driven by another kind of green.
“The government wants that forest for economic reasons, not conservation reasons,” said Towett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. “The only people who are going to benefit are the saw-millers.”
Almost as if to prove his point, beyond the bird chirps and cow bells tinkling across the smooth green hills was a different noise, a deeper, steadier noise, like a growl: bulldozers, many of them. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that timber companies are continuing to chew up large tracts of the Mau, knocking down giant trees and turning them into doors and plywood for export.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Julius Kavita, this area’s district commissioner, when asked what was going on.
Mr. Kavita said it was “complicated” and left it at that. But Kenyan environmental groups contend that powerful politicians control the timber companies, just as they control the dairies, the tea farms and other engines of Kenya’s economy.
To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into “native reserves” where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek’s eyes, for little else.
The persecution continued after Kenya’s independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away.
Mr. Kavita said the Ogiek, compared with the outside settlers who have chopped down trees to make cornfields, were “so kind to the forest.” But he was noncommittal on whether the Ogiek would get a special exemption from the planned evictions.
Nowadays, many of the same people who used to derisively refer to Ogiek as dorobo are claiming to be Ogiek themselves, “Ogiek originals,” in the hope they might get a break, too.
This could be a problem because the Ogiek are not great record keepers. Recent reports indicate that 8 of 10 Ogiek cannot read. Their total population is estimated at 5,000 to 20,000, many of them balancing their traditions with the trappings of modern life. It is not uncommon to see an Ogiek man with a quiver of eagle feather arrows in one fist and a cellphone in the other.
“I have one question,” said an Ogiek boy in a village near Marashoni. “Will the government evict us or not?”
Another young man tramped off into the woods to check a honey trap at the top of a tall tree. He was carrying a smoking coconut — “to make the bees sleep,” he explained — and wearing an antelope skin pouch and a pair of muddy sneakers. The last thing he did before shimmying up the bark and disappearing into the leaves was to kick off his shoes, a symbol of the world he was leaving behind, however fleetingly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world ... nted=print
November 29, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
Before the Climate Conference, a Weather Report
By HANNE-VIBEKE HOLST, ZAKES MDA, EDGARD TELLES RIBEIRO and YOKO TAWADA.
President Obama and other world leaders will gather in Copenhagen next week to discuss climate change. Though this is a global issue, it’s also a profoundly local one. For this reason, the Op-Ed editors asked writers from four different continents to report on the climate changes they’ve experienced close to home. Here are their dispatches.
Denmark in the Wind
By HANNE-VIBEKE HOLST
In Copenhagen, the once moderate-to-fresh winds are now more often storms.
South Africa’s Fire Kingdom
By ZAKES MDA
In Cape Town, a rise in unpredictable and more ferocious fires are destroying the ecosystem.
The Penquins of Brazil
By EDGARD TELLES RIBEIRO
In Rio de Janeiro, shifiting ocean currents and water temperatures have changed bird migration patterns.
In Japan, Concerns Blossom
By YOKO TAWADA
In Tokyo, it no longer snows in winter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributors
Before the Climate Conference, a Weather Report
By HANNE-VIBEKE HOLST, ZAKES MDA, EDGARD TELLES RIBEIRO and YOKO TAWADA.
President Obama and other world leaders will gather in Copenhagen next week to discuss climate change. Though this is a global issue, it’s also a profoundly local one. For this reason, the Op-Ed editors asked writers from four different continents to report on the climate changes they’ve experienced close to home. Here are their dispatches.
Denmark in the Wind
By HANNE-VIBEKE HOLST
In Copenhagen, the once moderate-to-fresh winds are now more often storms.
South Africa’s Fire Kingdom
By ZAKES MDA
In Cape Town, a rise in unpredictable and more ferocious fires are destroying the ecosystem.
The Penquins of Brazil
By EDGARD TELLES RIBEIRO
In Rio de Janeiro, shifiting ocean currents and water temperatures have changed bird migration patterns.
In Japan, Concerns Blossom
By YOKO TAWADA
In Tokyo, it no longer snows in winter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opini ... nted=print
Suppressing science
Is Climategate world's biggest hoax?
Calgary HeraldDecember 3, 2009
On the eve of next week's Copenhagen climate summit, the evidence couldn't be more embarrassing for proponents of global warming. Leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU), one of the world's leading climate change research centres, indicate that prominent scientists cooked the books to make the case for man-made global warming.
Perhaps the scientists were just joking in some of the e-mails, as they now claim, and that they used "poorly chosen words." If the East Anglia scientists were serious about everything in those e-mails, it's a bombshell.
Misconduct at an institute as respected and influential as Hadley -- including the manipulation and deletion of data and deliberate attempts to suppress peer-reviewed papers skeptical of global warming, as the e-mailsindicate-- would undermine the very basis of an issue that is driving much of the world agenda. Global warming, endorsed by the national science academies of every major industrialized nation, would not only be flawed science, it would be the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the world.
It's an incredible assertion that is difficult to swallow, especially with the Alberta government spending billions on carbon sequestration.
The e-mails indicate an agenda-driven willingness among a group of like-minded scientists to influence what research gets published. In one 2003 e-mail, a scientist suggests boycotting the journal Climate Research, and manipulating its editors or getting them fired, for publishing articles contrary to the views of the Hadley CRU. In another message, the head of the Hadley climate unit, Philip Jones, wrote that he would try to exclude papers written by climate skeptics from a 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange(IPCC). He vowed in the e-mail to "keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
If he wasn't kidding, Jones's e-mail, and others like it, are distressing. On Tuesday, Jones announced his resignation while the school investigates the e-mails that indicate scientific and professional misconduct have been perpetrated by Jones and others.
Even those who accept the need to act on the theory of man-made global warming-- including this paper--can't deny that all science should be allowed to speak for itself. Nothing should be suppressed. As U.S. climatologist and global warming skeptic Roy Spencer notes: "Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting IPCC politics, not to find out how nature works. The 'data spin' is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 5&sponsor=
Is Climategate world's biggest hoax?
Calgary HeraldDecember 3, 2009
On the eve of next week's Copenhagen climate summit, the evidence couldn't be more embarrassing for proponents of global warming. Leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU), one of the world's leading climate change research centres, indicate that prominent scientists cooked the books to make the case for man-made global warming.
Perhaps the scientists were just joking in some of the e-mails, as they now claim, and that they used "poorly chosen words." If the East Anglia scientists were serious about everything in those e-mails, it's a bombshell.
Misconduct at an institute as respected and influential as Hadley -- including the manipulation and deletion of data and deliberate attempts to suppress peer-reviewed papers skeptical of global warming, as the e-mailsindicate-- would undermine the very basis of an issue that is driving much of the world agenda. Global warming, endorsed by the national science academies of every major industrialized nation, would not only be flawed science, it would be the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the world.
It's an incredible assertion that is difficult to swallow, especially with the Alberta government spending billions on carbon sequestration.
The e-mails indicate an agenda-driven willingness among a group of like-minded scientists to influence what research gets published. In one 2003 e-mail, a scientist suggests boycotting the journal Climate Research, and manipulating its editors or getting them fired, for publishing articles contrary to the views of the Hadley CRU. In another message, the head of the Hadley climate unit, Philip Jones, wrote that he would try to exclude papers written by climate skeptics from a 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange(IPCC). He vowed in the e-mail to "keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
If he wasn't kidding, Jones's e-mail, and others like it, are distressing. On Tuesday, Jones announced his resignation while the school investigates the e-mails that indicate scientific and professional misconduct have been perpetrated by Jones and others.
Even those who accept the need to act on the theory of man-made global warming-- including this paper--can't deny that all science should be allowed to speak for itself. Nothing should be suppressed. As U.S. climatologist and global warming skeptic Roy Spencer notes: "Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting IPCC politics, not to find out how nature works. The 'data spin' is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 5&sponsor=
December 6, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Will Big Business Save the Earth?
By JARED DIAMOND
Los Angeles
THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.
But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.
As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.
Let’s start with Wal-Mart. Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.
Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.
Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.
One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.
Coca-Cola’s problems are different from Wal-Mart’s in that they are largely long-term. The key ingredient in Coke products is water. The company produces its beverages in about 200 countries through local franchises, all of which require a reliable local supply of clean fresh water.
But water supplies are under severe pressure around the world, with most already allocated for human use. The little remaining unallocated fresh water is in remote areas unsuitable for beverage factories, like Arctic Russia and northwestern Australia.
Coca-Cola can’t meet its water needs just by desalinizing seawater, because that requires energy, which is also increasingly expensive. Global climate change is making water scarcer, especially in the densely populated temperate-zone countries, like the United States, that are Coca-Cola’s main customers. Most competing water use around the world is for agriculture, which presents sustainability problems of its own.
Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture. One company goal is to make its plants water-neutral, returning to the environment water in quantities equal to the amount used in beverages and their production. Another goal is to work on the conservation of seven of the world’s river basins, including the Rio Grande, Yangtze, Mekong and Danube — all of them sites of major environmental concerns besides supplying water for Coca-Cola.
These long-term goals are in addition to Coca-Cola’s short-term cost-saving environmental practices, like recycling plastic bottles, replacing petroleum-based plastic in bottles with organic material, reducing energy consumption and increasing sales volume while decreasing water use.
The third company is Chevron. Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.
First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.
Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.
In view of all those advantages that businesses gain from environmentally sustainable policies, why do such policies face resistance from some businesses and many politicians? The objections often take the form of one-liners.
• We have to balance the environment against the economy. The assumption underlying this statement is that measures promoting environmental sustainability inevitably yield a net economic cost rather than a profit. This line of thinking turns the truth upside down. Economic reasons furnish the strongest motives for sustainability, because in the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.
Americans learned that lesson from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when, as a result of government agencies balking for a decade at spending several hundred million dollars to fix New Orleans’s defenses, we suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage — not to mention thousands of dead Americans. Likewise, John Holdren, the top White House science adviser, estimates that solving problems of climate change would cost the United States 2 percent of our gross domestic product by the year 2050, but that not solving those problems would damage the economy by 20 percent to 30 percent of G.D.P.
• Technology will solve our problems. Yes, technology can contribute to solving problems. But major technological advances require years to develop and put in place, and regularly turn out to have unanticipated side effects — consider the destruction of the atmosphere’s ozone layer by the nontoxic, nonflammable chlorofluorocarbons initially hailed for replacing poisonous refrigerant gases.
• World population growth is leveling off and won’t be the problem that we used to fear. It’s true that the rate of world population growth has been decreasing. However, the real problem isn’t people themselves, but the resources that people consume and the waste that they produce. Per-person average consumption rates and waste production rates, now 32 times higher in rich countries than in poor ones, are rising steeply around the world, as developing countries emulate industrialized nations’ lifestyles.
• It’s futile to preach to us Americans about lowering our standard of living: we will never sacrifice just so other people can raise their standard of living. This conflates consumption rates with standards of living: they are only loosely correlated, because so much of our consumption is wasteful and doesn’t contribute to our quality of life. Once basic needs are met, increasing consumption often doesn’t increase happiness.
Replacing a car that gets 15 miles per gallon with a more efficient model wouldn’t lower one’s standard of living, but would help improve all of our lives by reducing the political and military consequences of our dependence on imported oil. Western Europeans have lower per-capita consumption rates than Americans, but enjoy a higher standard of living as measured by access to medical care, financial security after retirement, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and public transport.
NOT surprisingly, the problem of climate change has attracted its own particular crop of objections.
• Even experts disagree about the reality of climate change. That was true 30 years ago, and some experts still disagreed a decade ago. Today, virtually every climatologist agrees that average global temperatures, warming rates and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the earth’s recent past, and that the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions by humans. Instead, the questions still being debated concern whether average global temperatures will increase by 13 degrees or “only” by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, and whether humans account for 90 percent or “only” 85 percent of the global warming trend.
• The magnitude and cause of global climate change are uncertain. We shouldn’t adopt expensive countermeasures until we have certainty. In other spheres of life — picking a spouse, educating our children, buying life insurance and stocks, avoiding cancer and so on — we admit that certainty is unattainable, and that we must decide as best we can on the basis of available evidence. Why should the impossible quest for certainty paralyze us solely about acting on climate change? As Mr. Holdren, the White House adviser, expressed it, not acting on climate change would be like being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
• Global warming will be good for us, by letting us grow crops in places formerly too cold for agriculture. The term “global warming” is a misnomer; we should instead talk about global climate change, which isn’t uniform. The global average temperature is indeed rising, but many areas are becoming drier, and frequencies of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Some areas will be winners, while others will be losers. Most of us will be losers, because the temperate zones where most people live are becoming drier.
•It’s useless for the United States to act on climate change, when we don’t know what China will do. Actually, China will arrive at this week’s Copenhagen climate change negotiations with a whole package of measures to reduce its “carbon intensity.”
While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.
On each of these issues, American businesses are going to play as much or more of a role in our progress as the government. And this isn’t a bad thing, as corporations know they have a lot to gain by establishing environmentally friendly business practices.
My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don’t have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment. As for the rest of us, we should get over the misimpression that American business cares only about immediate profits, and we should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Will Big Business Save the Earth?
By JARED DIAMOND
Los Angeles
THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.
But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.
As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.
Let’s start with Wal-Mart. Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.
Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.
Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.
One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.
Coca-Cola’s problems are different from Wal-Mart’s in that they are largely long-term. The key ingredient in Coke products is water. The company produces its beverages in about 200 countries through local franchises, all of which require a reliable local supply of clean fresh water.
But water supplies are under severe pressure around the world, with most already allocated for human use. The little remaining unallocated fresh water is in remote areas unsuitable for beverage factories, like Arctic Russia and northwestern Australia.
Coca-Cola can’t meet its water needs just by desalinizing seawater, because that requires energy, which is also increasingly expensive. Global climate change is making water scarcer, especially in the densely populated temperate-zone countries, like the United States, that are Coca-Cola’s main customers. Most competing water use around the world is for agriculture, which presents sustainability problems of its own.
Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture. One company goal is to make its plants water-neutral, returning to the environment water in quantities equal to the amount used in beverages and their production. Another goal is to work on the conservation of seven of the world’s river basins, including the Rio Grande, Yangtze, Mekong and Danube — all of them sites of major environmental concerns besides supplying water for Coca-Cola.
These long-term goals are in addition to Coca-Cola’s short-term cost-saving environmental practices, like recycling plastic bottles, replacing petroleum-based plastic in bottles with organic material, reducing energy consumption and increasing sales volume while decreasing water use.
The third company is Chevron. Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.
First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.
Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.
In view of all those advantages that businesses gain from environmentally sustainable policies, why do such policies face resistance from some businesses and many politicians? The objections often take the form of one-liners.
• We have to balance the environment against the economy. The assumption underlying this statement is that measures promoting environmental sustainability inevitably yield a net economic cost rather than a profit. This line of thinking turns the truth upside down. Economic reasons furnish the strongest motives for sustainability, because in the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.
Americans learned that lesson from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when, as a result of government agencies balking for a decade at spending several hundred million dollars to fix New Orleans’s defenses, we suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage — not to mention thousands of dead Americans. Likewise, John Holdren, the top White House science adviser, estimates that solving problems of climate change would cost the United States 2 percent of our gross domestic product by the year 2050, but that not solving those problems would damage the economy by 20 percent to 30 percent of G.D.P.
• Technology will solve our problems. Yes, technology can contribute to solving problems. But major technological advances require years to develop and put in place, and regularly turn out to have unanticipated side effects — consider the destruction of the atmosphere’s ozone layer by the nontoxic, nonflammable chlorofluorocarbons initially hailed for replacing poisonous refrigerant gases.
• World population growth is leveling off and won’t be the problem that we used to fear. It’s true that the rate of world population growth has been decreasing. However, the real problem isn’t people themselves, but the resources that people consume and the waste that they produce. Per-person average consumption rates and waste production rates, now 32 times higher in rich countries than in poor ones, are rising steeply around the world, as developing countries emulate industrialized nations’ lifestyles.
• It’s futile to preach to us Americans about lowering our standard of living: we will never sacrifice just so other people can raise their standard of living. This conflates consumption rates with standards of living: they are only loosely correlated, because so much of our consumption is wasteful and doesn’t contribute to our quality of life. Once basic needs are met, increasing consumption often doesn’t increase happiness.
Replacing a car that gets 15 miles per gallon with a more efficient model wouldn’t lower one’s standard of living, but would help improve all of our lives by reducing the political and military consequences of our dependence on imported oil. Western Europeans have lower per-capita consumption rates than Americans, but enjoy a higher standard of living as measured by access to medical care, financial security after retirement, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and public transport.
NOT surprisingly, the problem of climate change has attracted its own particular crop of objections.
• Even experts disagree about the reality of climate change. That was true 30 years ago, and some experts still disagreed a decade ago. Today, virtually every climatologist agrees that average global temperatures, warming rates and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the earth’s recent past, and that the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions by humans. Instead, the questions still being debated concern whether average global temperatures will increase by 13 degrees or “only” by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, and whether humans account for 90 percent or “only” 85 percent of the global warming trend.
• The magnitude and cause of global climate change are uncertain. We shouldn’t adopt expensive countermeasures until we have certainty. In other spheres of life — picking a spouse, educating our children, buying life insurance and stocks, avoiding cancer and so on — we admit that certainty is unattainable, and that we must decide as best we can on the basis of available evidence. Why should the impossible quest for certainty paralyze us solely about acting on climate change? As Mr. Holdren, the White House adviser, expressed it, not acting on climate change would be like being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
• Global warming will be good for us, by letting us grow crops in places formerly too cold for agriculture. The term “global warming” is a misnomer; we should instead talk about global climate change, which isn’t uniform. The global average temperature is indeed rising, but many areas are becoming drier, and frequencies of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Some areas will be winners, while others will be losers. Most of us will be losers, because the temperate zones where most people live are becoming drier.
•It’s useless for the United States to act on climate change, when we don’t know what China will do. Actually, China will arrive at this week’s Copenhagen climate change negotiations with a whole package of measures to reduce its “carbon intensity.”
While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.
On each of these issues, American businesses are going to play as much or more of a role in our progress as the government. And this isn’t a bad thing, as corporations know they have a lot to gain by establishing environmentally friendly business practices.
My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don’t have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment. As for the rest of us, we should get over the misimpression that American business cares only about immediate profits, and we should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opini ... nted=print
December 20, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Off to the Races
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen
I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change — the “Earth Day” strategy and the “Earth Race” strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need.
Indeed, anyone who watched the chaotic way this conference was “organized,” and the bickering by delegates with which it finished, has to ask whether this 17-year U.N. process to build a global framework to roll back global warming is broken: too many countries — 193 — and too many moving parts. I leave here feeling more strongly than ever that America needs to focus on its own Earth Race strategy instead. Let me explain.
The Earth Day strategy said that the biggest threat to mankind is climate change, and we as a global community have to hold hands and attack this problem with a collective global mechanism for codifying and verifying everyone’s carbon-dioxide emissions and reductions and to transfer billions of dollars in clean technologies to developing countries to help them take part.
But as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil told this conference, this Earth Day framework only works “if countries take responsibility to meet their targets” and if the rich nations really help the poor ones buy clean power sources.
That was never going to happen at scale in the present global economic climate. The only way it might happen is if we had “a perfect storm” — a storm big enough to finally end the global warming debate but not so big that it ended the world.
Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.
Does that mean this whole Earth Day strategy is a waste? No. The scientific understanding about the climate that this U.N. process has generated and the general spur to action it provides is valuable. And the mechanism this conference put in place to enable developed countries and companies to offset their emissions by funding protection of tropical rain forests, if it works, would be hugely valuable.
Still, I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s.
Therefore, the goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.
In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth.
Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”
Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.
If you start the conversation with “climate” you might get half of America to sign up for action. If you start the conversation with giving birth to a “whole new industry” — one that will make us more energy independent, prosperous, secure, innovative, respected and able to out-green China in the next great global industry — you get the country.
For good reason: Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.
An Earth Race led by America — built on markets, economic competition, national self-interest and strategic advantage — is a much more self-sustaining way to reduce carbon emissions than a festival of voluntary, nonbinding commitments at a U.N. conference. Let the Earth Race begin.
The public editor is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Off to the Races
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen
I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change — the “Earth Day” strategy and the “Earth Race” strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need.
Indeed, anyone who watched the chaotic way this conference was “organized,” and the bickering by delegates with which it finished, has to ask whether this 17-year U.N. process to build a global framework to roll back global warming is broken: too many countries — 193 — and too many moving parts. I leave here feeling more strongly than ever that America needs to focus on its own Earth Race strategy instead. Let me explain.
The Earth Day strategy said that the biggest threat to mankind is climate change, and we as a global community have to hold hands and attack this problem with a collective global mechanism for codifying and verifying everyone’s carbon-dioxide emissions and reductions and to transfer billions of dollars in clean technologies to developing countries to help them take part.
But as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil told this conference, this Earth Day framework only works “if countries take responsibility to meet their targets” and if the rich nations really help the poor ones buy clean power sources.
That was never going to happen at scale in the present global economic climate. The only way it might happen is if we had “a perfect storm” — a storm big enough to finally end the global warming debate but not so big that it ended the world.
Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.
Does that mean this whole Earth Day strategy is a waste? No. The scientific understanding about the climate that this U.N. process has generated and the general spur to action it provides is valuable. And the mechanism this conference put in place to enable developed countries and companies to offset their emissions by funding protection of tropical rain forests, if it works, would be hugely valuable.
Still, I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s.
Therefore, the goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.
In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth.
Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”
Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.
If you start the conversation with “climate” you might get half of America to sign up for action. If you start the conversation with giving birth to a “whole new industry” — one that will make us more energy independent, prosperous, secure, innovative, respected and able to out-green China in the next great global industry — you get the country.
For good reason: Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.
An Earth Race led by America — built on markets, economic competition, national self-interest and strategic advantage — is a much more self-sustaining way to reduce carbon emissions than a festival of voluntary, nonbinding commitments at a U.N. conference. Let the Earth Race begin.
The public editor is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opini ... nted=print
'Follow the Islamic way to save the world,' Prince Charles urges environmentalists
By Rebecca English
Last updated at 1:46 AM on 10th June 2010
Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic 'spiritual principles' in order to protect the environment.
In an hour-long speech, the heir to the throne argued that man's destruction of the world was contrary to the scriptures of all religions - but particularly those of Islam.
He said the current 'division' between man and nature had been caused not just by industrialisation, but also by our attitude to the environment - which goes against the grain of 'sacred traditions'.
Outspoken: Prince Charles speaks to Islamic studies scholars at Oxford. He argued that man's destruction of the world was particularly contrary to Islam
Charles, who is a practising Christian and will become the head of the Church of England when he succeeds to the throne, spoke in depth about his own study of the Koran which, he said, tells its followers that there is 'no separation between man and nature' and says we must always live within our environment's limits.
The prince was speaking to an audience of scholars at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies - which attempts to encourage a better understanding of the culture and civilisation of the religion.
His speech, merging religion with his other favourite subject, the environment, marked the 25th anniversary of the organisation, of which he is patron.
He added: 'The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason - and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us.
'Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with creation.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0qPvQ8CcU
Full text of the speech:
http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speeche ... 16346.html
A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales titled Islam and the Environment, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
9th June 2010
Vice Chancellor, Your Royal Highnesses, Director, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a very great pleasure for me to be here today to help you celebrate the Oxford Centre's twenty-fifth anniversary. Whereas bits of your Patron are dropping off after the past quarter of a century, I find quite a few bits of the Centre still being added! However, I cannot tell you how encouraged I am that in addition to the Prince of Wales Fellowship, the number of fellowships you now offer continues to grow and also that this Summer you will welcome the fifth group of young people on your Young Muslim Leadership programme which is run in association with my charities. This is a vital contribution to the process of boosting the self-esteem of young Muslims – about whom I care deeply.
It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.
I am slightly alarmed that it is now seventeen years since I came here to the Sheldonian to deliver a lecture for the Centre that tried to do just this. I called it “Islam and the West” and, from what I can tell, it clearly struck a chord, and not just here in the U.K. I am still reminded of what I said, particularly when I travel in the Islamic world – in fact, because it was printed, believe it or not, it is the only speech I have ever made which continues to produce a small return!
I wanted to give that lecture to address the dangers of the ignorance and misunderstanding that I felt were growing between the Islamic world and the West in the aftermath of the Cold War. Since then, the situation has both improved and worsened, depending on where you look. Certainly the sorts of advances made by the Oxford Centre have helped to build confidence and understanding, but we all know only too well how some of the things I warned of in that lecture have since come to pass, both here and elsewhere in the world. So it is tremendously important that we continue to work to heal the differences and overcome the misconceptions that still exist. I remain confident that this is possible because there are many values we all share that have the powerful capacity to bind us, rather than what happens when those values are forgotten – or purposefully ignored.
Healing division is also my theme today, but this time it is not the divisions between cultures I want to explore. It is the division that poses a much more fundamental threat to the health and well-being of us all. It is the widening division we are seeing in so many ways between humanity and Nature.
Many of Nature's vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization. How they will manage if millions more people are to achieve Western levels of consumption is highly disturbing to contemplate. The problems are only going to get much worse. And they are very real. Whatever you might have read in the newspapers, particularly about climate change in the run up to the Copenhagen conference last year, we face many related and very serious problems that are a matter of accurate, scientific record.
The actual facts are that over the last half century, for instance, we have destroyed at least thirty per cent of the world's tropical rainforests and if we continue to chop them down at the present rate, by 2050 we will end up with a very disturbing situation. In fact, in the three years since I started my Rainforest Project to try and help find an innovative solution to tropical deforestation, over 30 million hectares have been lost, and with them this planet has lost about 80,000 species. When you consider that a given area of equatorial trees evaporates eight times as much rainwater as an equivalent patch of ocean, you quickly start to see how their disappearance will affect the productivity of the Earth. They produce billions of tonnes of water every day and without that rainfall the world's food security will become very unstable.
But there are other facts too. In the last fifty years our industrialized approach to farming has degraded a third of the Earth's top soil. That is a fact. We have also fished the oceans so extensively that if we continue at the same rate for much longer we are likely to see the collapse of global fisheries in forty years from now. Another fact. Then there are the colossal amounts of waste that pollute the Earth – the many dead zones where nothing can live in many major river estuaries and various parts of the oceans, or those immense rafts of plastic that now float about in the Pacific. Would you believe that one of them, off the coast of California, is made up of 100 million tonnes of plastic and it has doubled in size in just the last decade. It is now at least six times the size of the United Kingdom. And we call ourselves civilized!
These are all very real problems and they are facts – all of them, the obvious results of the comprehensive industrialization of life. But what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world's sacred traditions, including Islam.
What surprises me, I have to say, is that, quite apart from whether or not we value the sacred traditions as much as we should, the blunt economic facts make the predominant approach increasingly irrational. I imagine that few of you are familiar with the interim report of the United Nations study called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study which came out in 2008. It painted a salutary picture of what we lose in straightforward financial terms by our destruction of natural systems and the absence of their services to the world. In the first place they calculated that we destroy around 50 billion dollars worth of a system that produces these services every year. By mapping the loss of those services over a forty year period, their estimate is that, in financial terms, the global economy incurs an annual loss of between 2 and 4.5 trillion dollars – every single year.
To put that figure into some sort of perspective, the recent crash in the world's banking system caused a one-off loss of just 2 trillion dollars. I wonder why the bigger annual loss does not attract the same kind of Media frenzy as the banking crisis did?
This should demonstrate the flaw in the sum that does not need an Oxbridge mathematician to understand – that Nature's finite resources, divided by our ever-more rapacious desire for continuous economic growth, does not work out. We are clearly living beyond our means, already consuming the Earth's capital resources faster than she can replenish them.
Over the years, I have pointed out again and again that our environmental problems cannot be solved simply by applying yet more and more of our brilliant green technology – important though it is. It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well.
When I say this, everybody nods sagely, but I get the impression that many are often unwilling to embrace what I am really referring to, perhaps because the missing element sits outside the parameters of the prevailing secular view. It is this “missing element” that I would like to examine today.
In short, when we hear talk of an “environmental crisis” or even of a “financial crisis,” I would suggest that this is actually describing the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is a crisis in our relationship with – and our perception of – Nature, and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least two hundred years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us.
So I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide “crises” does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen.
In general, we live within a culture that does not believe very much in the soul anymore – or if it does, won’t admit to it publicly for fear of being thought old fashioned, out of step with “modern imperatives” or “anti-scientific.” The empirical view of the world, which measures it and tests it, has become the only view to believe. A purely mechanistic approach to problems has somehow assumed a position of great authority and this has encouraged the widespread secularisation of society that we see today. This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith. It is also despite the fact that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God. I am aware of one recent survey that suggests over seventy per cent of scientists do so.
I must say, I find this rather baffling. If this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural world in so many damaging ways?
I suppose it must be to do with who pays the fiddler. Over the last two centuries, science has become ever more firmly yoked to the ambitions of commerce. Because there are such big economic benefits from such a union, society has been persuaded that there is nothing wrong here. And so, a great deal of empirical research is now driven by the imperative that its findings must be employed to maximum, financial effect, whatever the impact this may have on the Earth’s long-term capacity to endure.
This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in Nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works and how we fit within the scheme of things. As a result, Nature has been completely objectified – “She” has become an “it” – and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.
Understanding the world from a mechanical point of view and then employing that knowledge has, of course, always been part of the development of human civilization, but as our technology has become ever more sophisticated and our industrialized methods so much more powerful, so the level of destruction is now potentially all the more widespread and un-containable, especially if you add into this mix the emphasis we have on consumerism.
It was that great scientist, Goethe, who saw life as the masculine principle striving endlessly to reach the “eternal feminine” – what the Greeks called “Sophia,” or wisdom. It is a striving, he said, fired by the force of love. I am not sure that this is quite the way things happen today. Our striving in the industrialized world is certainly not fired by a love of wisdom. It is far more focussed on the desire for the greatest possible financial profit.
This ignores the spiritual teachings of traditions like Islam, which recognize that it is not our animal needs that are absolute; it is our spiritual essence, an essence made for the infinite. But with consumerism now such a key element in our economic model, our natural, spiritual desire for the infinite is constantly being reflected towards the finite. Our spiritual perspective has been flattened and made earthbound and we are persuaded to channel all of our natural, never-ending desire for what Islamic poets called “the Beloved” towards nothing but more and more material commodities. Unfortunately we forget that our spiritual desire can never be completely satisfied. It is rightly a never-ending desire. But when that desire is focussed only on the earthly, it becomes potentially disastrous. The hunger for yet more and more things creates an alarming vacuum and, as we are now realizing, this does great harm to the Earth and creates a never ending unhappiness for many, many people.
I hope you can just begin to see my point. The utter dominance of the mechanistic approach of science over everything else, including religion, has “de-souled” the dominant world view, and that includes our perception of Nature. As soul is elbowed out of the picture, our deeper link with the natural world is severed. Our sense of the spiritual relationship between humanity, the Earth and her great diversity of life has become dim. The entire emphasis is all on the mechanical process of increasing growth in the economy, of making every process more “efficient” and achieving as much convenience as possible. None of which could be said to be an ambition of God. And so, unfashionable though it is to suggest it, I am keen to stress here the need to heal this divide within ourselves. How else can we heal the divide between East and West unless we reconcile the East and West within ourselves? Everything in Nature is a paradox and seems to carry within itself the paradox of opposites. Curiously, this maintains the essential balance. Only human beings seem to introduce imbalance. The task is surely to reconnect ourselves with the wisdom found in Nature which is stressed by each of the sacred traditions in their own way.
My understanding of Islam is that it warns that to deny the reality of our inner being leads to an inner darkness which can quickly extend outwards into the world of Nature. If we ignore the calling of the soul, then we destroy Nature. To understand this we have to remember that we are Nature, not inanimate objects like stones; we reflect the universal patterns of Nature. And in this way, we are not a part that can somehow disengage itself and take a purely objective view.
From what I know of the Qu’ran, again and again it describes the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent power. It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an “intelligibility” and that there is no separation between Man and Nature, precisely because there is no separation between the natural world and God. It offers a completely integrated view of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter are all part of one living, conscious whole. We are, therefore, finite beings contained by an infinitude, and each of us is a microcosm of the whole. This suggests to me that Nature is a knowing partner, never a mindless slave to humanity, and we are Her tenants; God's guests for all too short a time.
If I may quote the Qu’ran, “Have you considered: if your water were to disappear into the Earth, who then could bring you gushing water?” This is the Divine hospitality that offers us our provisions and our dwelling places, our clothing, tools and transport. The Earth is robust and prolific, but also delicate, subtle, complex and diverse and so our mark must always be gentle – or the water will disappear, as it is doing in places like the Punjab in India. Industrialized farming methods there rely upon the use of high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilizers, both of which need a lot more energy and a lot more water as well. As a consequence the water table has dropped dramatically – I have been there, I have seen it – so far, by three feet a year. Punjabi farmers are now having to dig expensive bore holes over 200 feet deep to get at what remains of the water and, as a result, their debts become ever deeper and the salt rises to the surface contaminating the soil.
This is not a sustainable way of growing food and maintaining the well-being of communities. It does not respect Divine hospitality. The costs it incurs will have to be borne by those who will inherit what is fast becoming the ruined and frayed fabric of life. So for their sake, we have to acknowledge that the immediate, short-term financial benefits of our predominant, mechanistic approach are too expensive to continue to dominate our way of life.
This happens when traditional principles and practices are abandoned – and with them, all sense of reverence for the Earth which is an inseparable element in an integrated and spiritually grounded tradition like Islam – just as it was once firmly embedded in the philosophical heritage of Western thought. The Stoics of Ancient Greece, for instance, held that “right knowledge,” as they called it, is gained by living in agreement with Nature, where there is a correspondence or a sympathy between the truth of things, thought and action. They saw it as our duty to achieve an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos.
This incidentally is also the teaching of Judaism. The Book of Genesis says that God placed Mankind in the garden “to tend it and take care of it,” to serve and conserve it for the sake of future generations. “Adamah” in Hebrew means “the one hewn from the Earth,” so Adam is a child of the Earth. In my own tradition of Christianity, the immanence of God is made explicit by the incarnation of Christ. But let us also not forget that throughout the Christian New Testament, Christ often refers to Himself as “the Son of Man” which, in Hebrew, is “Ben Adam.” He, too, is a “son of the Earth,” surely making the same explicit connection between human nature and the whole of Nature.
Even the apocryphal Gnostic texts are imbued with the same principle. The fragments of one of the oldest, ascribed to Mary Magdalene, instructs us that “Attachment to matter gives rise to passion against Nature. Thus, trouble arises in the whole body; this is why I tell you; be in harmony.” In all cases the message is clear. Our specific purpose is to “earth” Heaven. So, to separate ourselves within an inner darkness, leads to what the Irish poet, WB Yeats, warned of at the start of the Twentieth Century. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” he wrote, “things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.”
The traditional way of life within Islam is very clear about the “centre” that holds the relationship together. From what I know of its core teachings and commentaries, the important principle we must keep in mind is that there are limits to the abundance of Nature. These are not arbitrary limits, they are the limits imposed by God and, as such, if my understanding of the Qu'ran is correct, Muslims are commanded not to transgress them.
Such instruction is hard to square if all you do is found your understanding of the world on empirical terms alone. Four hundred years of relying on trying and testing the facts scientifically has established the view that spirituality and religious faith are outdated expressions of superstitious belief. After all, empiricism has proved how the world fits together and it is nothing to do with a “Supreme Being.” There is no empirical evidence for the existence of God so, therefore, Q.E.D, God does not exist. It is a very reasonable, rational argument, and I presume it can be applied to “thought” too. After all, no brain scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought, nor a piece of love, and it never will. So, Q.E.D., that must mean “thought” and “love” do not exist either!
Clearly there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul. This is why it consistently elbows soul out of the picture.
But we do have other kinds of “language,” as Islam well knows, and they are much better at dealing with the realm of the soul and matters of meaning. Each is a different aspect of our language, in fact. Each deals with different aspects of the truth and if you put empiricism, philosophy and the spiritual perception of life together, just as the Islamic tradition at its best and richest has always done, then they tend to complement each other rather well.
Take the difference this made in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, as an example, during the so-called “Golden Age of Islam.” It was a period which gave rise to a spectacular flowering of scientific advancement, but all of it was underpinned by an age-old philosophical understanding of reality and grounded in a profound spirituality, which included a deep reverence for the Natural world. Theirs was an integrated vision of the world, reflecting the timeless truth that all life is rooted in the unity of the Creator. This is the testimony of faith, is it not, embodied in the contemplative implication of the formless essence of the Qur'an's haqîqa? It is the notion of Tawhîd, the oneness of all things within the embrace of the Divine unity.
Islamic writers express it so well. Ibn Khaldûn, for instance, who taught that “all creatures are subject to a regular and orderly system. Causes are linked to effects where each is connected with the other.” Or the great Shabistâri in Fourteenth Century Persia, who talked of the world being “a mirror from head to foot, in every atom a hundred blazing suns where a world dwells in the heart of a millet seed.” Words that resonate, don't you think, with William Blake's famous lines, “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.”
Other Western poets have captured this truth too. William Wordsworth, perhaps one of the greatest of all our Nature poets, describes “a sense sublime of something far more inter-fused… a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought and rolls through all things.” I quote the poets because they help us identify this “sense sublime” and inspire reverence for the created world.
Reverence is not science-based knowledge. It is an experience always mediated by love, sometimes induced by it; and love comes from relationship. If you take away reverence and reduce our spiritual relationship with life, then you open yourself up to the idea that we can be little more than a chance group of isolated, self-obsessed individuals, disconnected from life’s innate presence and un-anchored by any sense of duty to the rest of the world. We are free to act without responsibility. Thus we turn a blind eye to those islands of plastic in the sea, or to the treatment meted out to animals in factory farms. And it is why the so-called “precautionary principle” is so often thrown out of the window.
This is the principle that would make us think twice if, say, we were to climb into a vehicle that happens to have a ninety per cent chance of crashing. Instead, because the danger is not proven beyond doubt, we think it is safe to embark upon the journey. This is how we proceed in many significant fields – in matters like genetic modification or climate change. We go on denying that there may be side-effects, even if our intuition warns us to be cautious, or even if there is some related evidence. Recently, for instance, the news emerged that, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honey bee colonies in the United States failed to survive the Winter. More than three million colonies in the U.S. and billions of honeybees worldwide have died. Scientists say they are no nearer to knowing what is causing this catastrophic collapse, but there is plenty of evidence that modern pesticides have played their part. Given that bees, like nearly every other bug, are insects, I would have thought it was rather obvious. And yet we carry on with a narrow-minded, mechanistic approach to industrialized farming with all its focus on high yields at whatever price. So we lace the fields with pesticides that kill insects. It is quite bizarre how we continue to entrust our food security to the very substances that are destroying the harmonic cycle which produces our food. It really is a form of collective hubris and I often wonder if those who practise such well-exercised scepticism in these matters will ever see that “the Emperor is wearing no clothes?”
This, then, is why the wisdom and learning offered by a sacred tradition like Islam matters – and, if I may say so, why those who hold and strive to preserve their sacred traditions in different parts of the world have every reason to become more confident of their ground. The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity. It is both Islam’s noble heritage and a priceless gift to the rest of the world. And yet, so often, that wisdom is now obscured by the dominant drive towards Western materialism – the feeling that to be truly “modern” you have to ape the West.
To counter that tendency I have done what I can with my School of Traditional Arts to nurture and support traditional and sacred craft skills – not least those of Islam – because they keep alive a perspective that we sorely need, even though short-term fashion deems them to be irrelevant. The geometry and patterning that are taught at the School are the basis of the many crafts that have been all but abandoned in many parts of the world, including the Islamic world. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that they are being forgotten because they reflect the spiritual mathematics found everywhere in Nature. As Islam teaches very specifically, it is a patterning that reflects the very ground of our being. It is the Divine imagination, so to speak; the ineffable presence that is the sacred breath of life. As the Seventeenth Century mystic, Ibn Âshir, puts it, by the practice of these arts you “see the One who manifests in the form, not the form by itself.”
For many in the modern world this is hard to understand because the view of God has become so distorted. “God” is seen as being, somehow, outside “His” creation, rather than part of its unfolding – what the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Being the principle that underlines the Cosmos, the Cosmos is the result of God knowing it and of it knowing the uncreated God. Notice the emphasis there on “un”-created. It is of profound importance. The basis of all existence is in this relationship.
I suspect the reason why this is such an unfashionable view is that the deep-seated experience of participation in the living, creative presence of God is offered to us in all traditions not by empiricism, but by revelation. This is a rare and precious gift and only given to those whose supreme humanity and capacity for great humility achieves a mastery over the ego. It comes at the moment when “the knower and the known” become one – the moment when the mind of Man comes into union with the mind of God.
This, of course, is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view, but revelation is a very different kind of knowing from scientific, evidence-based knowledge, and I cannot stress the point strongly enough; by dismissing such a process and discarding what it offers to humankind, we throw away a very important lifeline for the future.
I must say, once you do blend the different languages – the empirical and the spiritual together as I am suggesting, and as I have been trying to say for so long – then you do begin to wonder why the sceptics think the desire to work in harmony with Nature is so unscientific. Why is it deemed so worthwhile to abandon our true relationship with the “beingness” of all things; to limit ourselves to the science of manipulation, rather than immerse ourselves in the wider science of understanding? They seem such spurious arguments, because, as Islam clearly understands, it is actually impossible to divorce human beings from Nature’s patterns and processes. The Qur’an is considered to be the “last Revelation” but it clearly acknowledges which book is the first. That book is the great book of creation, of Nature herself, which has been taken too much for granted in our modern world and needs to be restored to its original position.
So, with all this in mind, I would like to set you a challenge, if I may; a challenge that I hope will be conveyed beyond this audience today. It is the challenge to mobilize Islamic scholars, poets and artists, as well as those craftsmen, engineers and scientists who work with and within the Islamic tradition, to identify the general ideas, the teachings and the practical techniques within the tradition which encourage us to work with the grain of Nature rather than against it. I would urge you to consider whether we can learn anything from the Islamic culture's profound understanding of the natural world to help us all in the fearsome challenges we face. Are there, for instance, any that could help preserve our precious marine eco-systems and fisheries? Are there any traditional methods of avoiding damage to all of Nature’s systems that revive the principle of sustainability within Islam?
To give you an idea of what I mean, let me offer a few examples drawn from the work done by my School of Traditional Arts, where project workers have shown that re-introducing traditional craft skills brings a coherence to peoples' daily lives, perhaps because they fuse the spiritual with the practical.
Since I founded it, the School has helped restore these skills in places as far afield as Jordan and Nigeria. It also helps to build bridges within communities in this country which have suffered the worst fractures. In Burnley in Lancashire, for instance, project workers have been teaching children from many backgrounds an integrated view of the world using the patterns of Islamic sacred geometry. This has not just inspired the imagination of the children taking part, but their teachers too. They tell me they have discovered a much more integrated approach to education, where maths and art are not alien to one another, but are seen as two sides of the same coin and directly rooted in Nature's patterns and processes.
In Afghanistan, I have only recently managed to see the work being done under the umbrella of what we have called “the Turquoise Mountain Foundation” – an initiative I launched some four years ago – which is running similar education programmes and craft training courses. It is also helping with the urban regeneration of the old historic quarter of the city by guiding people to start businesses using the craft skills they have learned.
For example, in the building of schools, people are being shown how to use mud-bricks which are a quarter of the price of the concrete blocks used by other agencies. They are also resistant to earthquakes, whereas concrete is not. And they cope much better with extremes of temperature – mud-brick buildings are cooler in the Summer and warmer in the Winter. What is more, they use local labour and local, natural materials. So these schools are a good example of how traditional wisdom blends with modern needs. After all, you can still use computers and other modern technology in a mud-brick building! And more comfortably, too, given it is more suited to local conditions.
When I finally did manage to reach Kabul earlier this year – after several years of trying – what I saw was truly remarkable. It proved to me that teaching and employing traditional crafts is an effective way of re-introducing the kinds of techniques that are benign to the natural environment. They are also capable of restoring a cultural balance in peoples' minds. By encouraging a wider celebration of the traditional, ancient culture of Afghanistan, these skills help in a very practical way to counteract the oppressive effects of extremism in all its forms, both religious and secular. This is how traditional wisdom works. It is not a theory or a science written down. Its wisdom is discovered through practice and in action.
These are schemes that are close to my heart, but the Oxford Centre keeps me informed of many others. Working in Muslim countries, the World Wildlife Fund has found that trying to convey the importance of conservation is much easier if it is transmitted by religious leaders whose reference is Qur'anic teaching. In Zanzibar, they had little success trying to reduce spear-fishing and the use of dragnets, which were destroying the coral reefs. But when the guidance came from the Qur'an, there was a notable change in behaviour. Or in Indonesia and in Malaysia, where former poachers are being deterred in the same way from destroying the last remaining tigers.
And it is not just such interventions that are important. It is mystifying, for instance, that the modern world completely ignores the time-honoured feats of engineering in the ancient world. The Qanats of Iran, for example, that still provide water for thousands of people in what would otherwise be desert conditions. These underground canals – unbelievably 170,000 miles of them – keep the water from the mountains moving down the tunnels using gravity alone. And the water in every village is then kept fresh by the way the storage towers keep the air flowing freely, moved by the wind.
In Spain, the irrigation systems constructed 1200 years ago also still work perfectly, as does the way in which the water is managed by the local population – a way of operating devised before the Muslim rule in Spain disintegrated. The same sorts of Islamic management schemes operate in other parts of the world too, like the “hima” zones in Saudi Arabia which set aside land for use as pasture. These are all examples of how prophetic teaching, in this case framed by the guidance of the Qu'ran, maintains a long term view of things and keeps the danger of a self-interested form of short-term economics at bay.
I am sure that if an organization like the Oxford Centre could help to establish a global forum on “Islam and the Environment” many more very practical, traditional approaches like these could become more widely applied. They may range from science and technology to agriculture, healthcare, architecture and education. Think what could be achieved if mothers and fathers, the teachers in madrassas and Imams, all sought to demonstrate to children how to translate Islamic teachings into practical action – how to blend traditional knowledge and awareness of Nature's needs with the best of what we know now.
This is certainly something I feel we have to do in the one final issue I have to mention as I close. Perhaps a few facts and figures might demonstrate why.
When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just three hundred thousand. Today, just over sixty years later, it is home to twenty million. Thirty-five thousand people live in every square mile of the city, and its population increases by another six hundred thousand every year.
I choose Lagos as an example. I could have chosen Mumbai, Cairo or Mexico City; wherever you look, the world's population is increasing fast. It goes up by the equivalent of the entire population of the United Kingdom every year. Which means that this poor planet of ours, which already struggles to sustain 6.8 billion people, will somehow have to support over 9 billion people within fifty years. In the Arab world, sixty per cent of the population is now under the age of thirty. That will mean, in some way or other, 100 million new jobs will have to be created in that region alone over the next ten to fifteen years.
I am well aware that the very long term prediction is that population may go down. 150 years from now the trends suggest there may be as few as four billion people, maybe even just two billion, but there is no getting away from the fact that in the short term, in the next fifty years, we face monumental problems as the figures rocket. No mega-city can ever hope to catch up with the present expansion in their numbers to provide adequate healthcare, education, transport, food and shelter for so many. Nor can the Earth herself sustain us all, when the demands and pressures on her bounty worldwide are becoming so intense.
I know it is a complicated issue. The experts suggest that, in theory, the Earth could support 9 billion people, but not if a vast proportion is consuming the world’s resources at present Western levels. So the changes have to be essentially two-fold. It would certainly help if the acceleration slowed down, but it would also help if the world reduced its desire to consume.
I have been following carefully the findings of my British Asian Trust in India which has been helping to run a women's education project in a drought-prone region of Maharashtra called Satara. They have noticed that a real difference can be made when women are able to become more involved in the running of the community. This is also the experience in Bangladesh. I have long been fascinated by Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It operates micro-credit schemes that offer loans to the poorest communities through a bank which is now ninety per cent owned by the rural poor. Interestingly, where the loans are managed by the women of the community, the birth rate has gone down. The impact of these sorts of schemes, of education and the provision of family planning services, has been widespread. Whereas in the 1980s, the average family in Bangladesh had six children, now the average figure is three. But with mega-cities growing as they are, I fear there is little chance these sorts of schemes can help the plight of many millions of people unless we all face up to the fact more honestly than we do that one of the biggest causes of high birth rates remains cultural.
It raises some very difficult moral questions, I know, but do we not each one of us carry the same responsibility towards the Earth? It is surely time to ask if we can come to a view that balances the traditional attitude to the sacred nature of life on the one hand with, on the other, those teachings within each of the sacred traditions that urge humankind to keep within the limits of Nature’s benevolence and bounty.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have endured all this with patience and fortitude. You have also given a very good impression of listening to my own personal thoughts on the perspective opened up by Islamic teaching. I have wanted to convey them to you because it always moves me to be reminded that, from the perspective of traditional Islamic teaching, the destruction of the Earth is represented as the destruction of a prayerful being.
Whichever faith tradition we come from, the fact at the heart of the matter is the same. Our inheritance from our creator is at stake. It will be no good at the end of the day as we sit amidst the wreckage, trying to console ourselves that it was all done for the best possible reasons of development and the betterment of Mankind. The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason – and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us. Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with Creation.
The Modernist ideology that has dominated the Western outlook for a century implies that “tradition” is backward looking. What I have tried to explain today is that this is far from true. Tradition is the accumulation of the knowledge and wisdom that we should be offering to the next generation. It is, therefore, visionary – it looks forward.
Turning to the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world, does not mean locking us into some sort of cultural and technological immobility. As the English writer G.K. Chesterton put it, “real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as a root.” I would also remind you of the words of Oxford’s very own C.S. Lewis, who pointed out that “sometimes you do have to turn the clock back if it is telling the wrong time” – that there is nothing “progressive” about being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge that we have taken the wrong road. If we realize that we are travelling in the wrong direction, the only sensible thing to do is to admit it and retrace our steps back to where we first went wrong. As Lewis put it, “going back can sometimes be the quickest way forward.” It is the most progressive thing we could do.
All of the mounting evidence is telling us that we are, indeed, on the wrong road, so you might think it would be wise to draw on the timeless guidance that comes from our intuitive sense of the origin of all things to which we are rooted. Nature's rhythms, her cycles and her processes, are our guides to this uncreated, originating voice. They are our greatest teachers because they are expressions of Divine Unity. Which is why there is a profound truth in that seemingly simple, old saying of the nomads – that “the best of all Mosques is Nature herself.”
By Rebecca English
Last updated at 1:46 AM on 10th June 2010
Prince Charles yesterday urged the world to follow Islamic 'spiritual principles' in order to protect the environment.
In an hour-long speech, the heir to the throne argued that man's destruction of the world was contrary to the scriptures of all religions - but particularly those of Islam.
He said the current 'division' between man and nature had been caused not just by industrialisation, but also by our attitude to the environment - which goes against the grain of 'sacred traditions'.
Outspoken: Prince Charles speaks to Islamic studies scholars at Oxford. He argued that man's destruction of the world was particularly contrary to Islam
Charles, who is a practising Christian and will become the head of the Church of England when he succeeds to the throne, spoke in depth about his own study of the Koran which, he said, tells its followers that there is 'no separation between man and nature' and says we must always live within our environment's limits.
The prince was speaking to an audience of scholars at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies - which attempts to encourage a better understanding of the culture and civilisation of the religion.
His speech, merging religion with his other favourite subject, the environment, marked the 25th anniversary of the organisation, of which he is patron.
He added: 'The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason - and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us.
'Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with creation.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0qPvQ8CcU
Full text of the speech:
http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speeche ... 16346.html
A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales titled Islam and the Environment, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
9th June 2010
Vice Chancellor, Your Royal Highnesses, Director, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a very great pleasure for me to be here today to help you celebrate the Oxford Centre's twenty-fifth anniversary. Whereas bits of your Patron are dropping off after the past quarter of a century, I find quite a few bits of the Centre still being added! However, I cannot tell you how encouraged I am that in addition to the Prince of Wales Fellowship, the number of fellowships you now offer continues to grow and also that this Summer you will welcome the fifth group of young people on your Young Muslim Leadership programme which is run in association with my charities. This is a vital contribution to the process of boosting the self-esteem of young Muslims – about whom I care deeply.
It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.
I am slightly alarmed that it is now seventeen years since I came here to the Sheldonian to deliver a lecture for the Centre that tried to do just this. I called it “Islam and the West” and, from what I can tell, it clearly struck a chord, and not just here in the U.K. I am still reminded of what I said, particularly when I travel in the Islamic world – in fact, because it was printed, believe it or not, it is the only speech I have ever made which continues to produce a small return!
I wanted to give that lecture to address the dangers of the ignorance and misunderstanding that I felt were growing between the Islamic world and the West in the aftermath of the Cold War. Since then, the situation has both improved and worsened, depending on where you look. Certainly the sorts of advances made by the Oxford Centre have helped to build confidence and understanding, but we all know only too well how some of the things I warned of in that lecture have since come to pass, both here and elsewhere in the world. So it is tremendously important that we continue to work to heal the differences and overcome the misconceptions that still exist. I remain confident that this is possible because there are many values we all share that have the powerful capacity to bind us, rather than what happens when those values are forgotten – or purposefully ignored.
Healing division is also my theme today, but this time it is not the divisions between cultures I want to explore. It is the division that poses a much more fundamental threat to the health and well-being of us all. It is the widening division we are seeing in so many ways between humanity and Nature.
Many of Nature's vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization. How they will manage if millions more people are to achieve Western levels of consumption is highly disturbing to contemplate. The problems are only going to get much worse. And they are very real. Whatever you might have read in the newspapers, particularly about climate change in the run up to the Copenhagen conference last year, we face many related and very serious problems that are a matter of accurate, scientific record.
The actual facts are that over the last half century, for instance, we have destroyed at least thirty per cent of the world's tropical rainforests and if we continue to chop them down at the present rate, by 2050 we will end up with a very disturbing situation. In fact, in the three years since I started my Rainforest Project to try and help find an innovative solution to tropical deforestation, over 30 million hectares have been lost, and with them this planet has lost about 80,000 species. When you consider that a given area of equatorial trees evaporates eight times as much rainwater as an equivalent patch of ocean, you quickly start to see how their disappearance will affect the productivity of the Earth. They produce billions of tonnes of water every day and without that rainfall the world's food security will become very unstable.
But there are other facts too. In the last fifty years our industrialized approach to farming has degraded a third of the Earth's top soil. That is a fact. We have also fished the oceans so extensively that if we continue at the same rate for much longer we are likely to see the collapse of global fisheries in forty years from now. Another fact. Then there are the colossal amounts of waste that pollute the Earth – the many dead zones where nothing can live in many major river estuaries and various parts of the oceans, or those immense rafts of plastic that now float about in the Pacific. Would you believe that one of them, off the coast of California, is made up of 100 million tonnes of plastic and it has doubled in size in just the last decade. It is now at least six times the size of the United Kingdom. And we call ourselves civilized!
These are all very real problems and they are facts – all of them, the obvious results of the comprehensive industrialization of life. But what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world's sacred traditions, including Islam.
What surprises me, I have to say, is that, quite apart from whether or not we value the sacred traditions as much as we should, the blunt economic facts make the predominant approach increasingly irrational. I imagine that few of you are familiar with the interim report of the United Nations study called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study which came out in 2008. It painted a salutary picture of what we lose in straightforward financial terms by our destruction of natural systems and the absence of their services to the world. In the first place they calculated that we destroy around 50 billion dollars worth of a system that produces these services every year. By mapping the loss of those services over a forty year period, their estimate is that, in financial terms, the global economy incurs an annual loss of between 2 and 4.5 trillion dollars – every single year.
To put that figure into some sort of perspective, the recent crash in the world's banking system caused a one-off loss of just 2 trillion dollars. I wonder why the bigger annual loss does not attract the same kind of Media frenzy as the banking crisis did?
This should demonstrate the flaw in the sum that does not need an Oxbridge mathematician to understand – that Nature's finite resources, divided by our ever-more rapacious desire for continuous economic growth, does not work out. We are clearly living beyond our means, already consuming the Earth's capital resources faster than she can replenish them.
Over the years, I have pointed out again and again that our environmental problems cannot be solved simply by applying yet more and more of our brilliant green technology – important though it is. It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well.
When I say this, everybody nods sagely, but I get the impression that many are often unwilling to embrace what I am really referring to, perhaps because the missing element sits outside the parameters of the prevailing secular view. It is this “missing element” that I would like to examine today.
In short, when we hear talk of an “environmental crisis” or even of a “financial crisis,” I would suggest that this is actually describing the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is a crisis in our relationship with – and our perception of – Nature, and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least two hundred years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us.
So I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide “crises” does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen.
In general, we live within a culture that does not believe very much in the soul anymore – or if it does, won’t admit to it publicly for fear of being thought old fashioned, out of step with “modern imperatives” or “anti-scientific.” The empirical view of the world, which measures it and tests it, has become the only view to believe. A purely mechanistic approach to problems has somehow assumed a position of great authority and this has encouraged the widespread secularisation of society that we see today. This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith. It is also despite the fact that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God. I am aware of one recent survey that suggests over seventy per cent of scientists do so.
I must say, I find this rather baffling. If this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural world in so many damaging ways?
I suppose it must be to do with who pays the fiddler. Over the last two centuries, science has become ever more firmly yoked to the ambitions of commerce. Because there are such big economic benefits from such a union, society has been persuaded that there is nothing wrong here. And so, a great deal of empirical research is now driven by the imperative that its findings must be employed to maximum, financial effect, whatever the impact this may have on the Earth’s long-term capacity to endure.
This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in Nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works and how we fit within the scheme of things. As a result, Nature has been completely objectified – “She” has become an “it” – and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.
Understanding the world from a mechanical point of view and then employing that knowledge has, of course, always been part of the development of human civilization, but as our technology has become ever more sophisticated and our industrialized methods so much more powerful, so the level of destruction is now potentially all the more widespread and un-containable, especially if you add into this mix the emphasis we have on consumerism.
It was that great scientist, Goethe, who saw life as the masculine principle striving endlessly to reach the “eternal feminine” – what the Greeks called “Sophia,” or wisdom. It is a striving, he said, fired by the force of love. I am not sure that this is quite the way things happen today. Our striving in the industrialized world is certainly not fired by a love of wisdom. It is far more focussed on the desire for the greatest possible financial profit.
This ignores the spiritual teachings of traditions like Islam, which recognize that it is not our animal needs that are absolute; it is our spiritual essence, an essence made for the infinite. But with consumerism now such a key element in our economic model, our natural, spiritual desire for the infinite is constantly being reflected towards the finite. Our spiritual perspective has been flattened and made earthbound and we are persuaded to channel all of our natural, never-ending desire for what Islamic poets called “the Beloved” towards nothing but more and more material commodities. Unfortunately we forget that our spiritual desire can never be completely satisfied. It is rightly a never-ending desire. But when that desire is focussed only on the earthly, it becomes potentially disastrous. The hunger for yet more and more things creates an alarming vacuum and, as we are now realizing, this does great harm to the Earth and creates a never ending unhappiness for many, many people.
I hope you can just begin to see my point. The utter dominance of the mechanistic approach of science over everything else, including religion, has “de-souled” the dominant world view, and that includes our perception of Nature. As soul is elbowed out of the picture, our deeper link with the natural world is severed. Our sense of the spiritual relationship between humanity, the Earth and her great diversity of life has become dim. The entire emphasis is all on the mechanical process of increasing growth in the economy, of making every process more “efficient” and achieving as much convenience as possible. None of which could be said to be an ambition of God. And so, unfashionable though it is to suggest it, I am keen to stress here the need to heal this divide within ourselves. How else can we heal the divide between East and West unless we reconcile the East and West within ourselves? Everything in Nature is a paradox and seems to carry within itself the paradox of opposites. Curiously, this maintains the essential balance. Only human beings seem to introduce imbalance. The task is surely to reconnect ourselves with the wisdom found in Nature which is stressed by each of the sacred traditions in their own way.
My understanding of Islam is that it warns that to deny the reality of our inner being leads to an inner darkness which can quickly extend outwards into the world of Nature. If we ignore the calling of the soul, then we destroy Nature. To understand this we have to remember that we are Nature, not inanimate objects like stones; we reflect the universal patterns of Nature. And in this way, we are not a part that can somehow disengage itself and take a purely objective view.
From what I know of the Qu’ran, again and again it describes the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent power. It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an “intelligibility” and that there is no separation between Man and Nature, precisely because there is no separation between the natural world and God. It offers a completely integrated view of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter are all part of one living, conscious whole. We are, therefore, finite beings contained by an infinitude, and each of us is a microcosm of the whole. This suggests to me that Nature is a knowing partner, never a mindless slave to humanity, and we are Her tenants; God's guests for all too short a time.
If I may quote the Qu’ran, “Have you considered: if your water were to disappear into the Earth, who then could bring you gushing water?” This is the Divine hospitality that offers us our provisions and our dwelling places, our clothing, tools and transport. The Earth is robust and prolific, but also delicate, subtle, complex and diverse and so our mark must always be gentle – or the water will disappear, as it is doing in places like the Punjab in India. Industrialized farming methods there rely upon the use of high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilizers, both of which need a lot more energy and a lot more water as well. As a consequence the water table has dropped dramatically – I have been there, I have seen it – so far, by three feet a year. Punjabi farmers are now having to dig expensive bore holes over 200 feet deep to get at what remains of the water and, as a result, their debts become ever deeper and the salt rises to the surface contaminating the soil.
This is not a sustainable way of growing food and maintaining the well-being of communities. It does not respect Divine hospitality. The costs it incurs will have to be borne by those who will inherit what is fast becoming the ruined and frayed fabric of life. So for their sake, we have to acknowledge that the immediate, short-term financial benefits of our predominant, mechanistic approach are too expensive to continue to dominate our way of life.
This happens when traditional principles and practices are abandoned – and with them, all sense of reverence for the Earth which is an inseparable element in an integrated and spiritually grounded tradition like Islam – just as it was once firmly embedded in the philosophical heritage of Western thought. The Stoics of Ancient Greece, for instance, held that “right knowledge,” as they called it, is gained by living in agreement with Nature, where there is a correspondence or a sympathy between the truth of things, thought and action. They saw it as our duty to achieve an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos.
This incidentally is also the teaching of Judaism. The Book of Genesis says that God placed Mankind in the garden “to tend it and take care of it,” to serve and conserve it for the sake of future generations. “Adamah” in Hebrew means “the one hewn from the Earth,” so Adam is a child of the Earth. In my own tradition of Christianity, the immanence of God is made explicit by the incarnation of Christ. But let us also not forget that throughout the Christian New Testament, Christ often refers to Himself as “the Son of Man” which, in Hebrew, is “Ben Adam.” He, too, is a “son of the Earth,” surely making the same explicit connection between human nature and the whole of Nature.
Even the apocryphal Gnostic texts are imbued with the same principle. The fragments of one of the oldest, ascribed to Mary Magdalene, instructs us that “Attachment to matter gives rise to passion against Nature. Thus, trouble arises in the whole body; this is why I tell you; be in harmony.” In all cases the message is clear. Our specific purpose is to “earth” Heaven. So, to separate ourselves within an inner darkness, leads to what the Irish poet, WB Yeats, warned of at the start of the Twentieth Century. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” he wrote, “things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.”
The traditional way of life within Islam is very clear about the “centre” that holds the relationship together. From what I know of its core teachings and commentaries, the important principle we must keep in mind is that there are limits to the abundance of Nature. These are not arbitrary limits, they are the limits imposed by God and, as such, if my understanding of the Qu'ran is correct, Muslims are commanded not to transgress them.
Such instruction is hard to square if all you do is found your understanding of the world on empirical terms alone. Four hundred years of relying on trying and testing the facts scientifically has established the view that spirituality and religious faith are outdated expressions of superstitious belief. After all, empiricism has proved how the world fits together and it is nothing to do with a “Supreme Being.” There is no empirical evidence for the existence of God so, therefore, Q.E.D, God does not exist. It is a very reasonable, rational argument, and I presume it can be applied to “thought” too. After all, no brain scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought, nor a piece of love, and it never will. So, Q.E.D., that must mean “thought” and “love” do not exist either!
Clearly there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul. This is why it consistently elbows soul out of the picture.
But we do have other kinds of “language,” as Islam well knows, and they are much better at dealing with the realm of the soul and matters of meaning. Each is a different aspect of our language, in fact. Each deals with different aspects of the truth and if you put empiricism, philosophy and the spiritual perception of life together, just as the Islamic tradition at its best and richest has always done, then they tend to complement each other rather well.
Take the difference this made in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, as an example, during the so-called “Golden Age of Islam.” It was a period which gave rise to a spectacular flowering of scientific advancement, but all of it was underpinned by an age-old philosophical understanding of reality and grounded in a profound spirituality, which included a deep reverence for the Natural world. Theirs was an integrated vision of the world, reflecting the timeless truth that all life is rooted in the unity of the Creator. This is the testimony of faith, is it not, embodied in the contemplative implication of the formless essence of the Qur'an's haqîqa? It is the notion of Tawhîd, the oneness of all things within the embrace of the Divine unity.
Islamic writers express it so well. Ibn Khaldûn, for instance, who taught that “all creatures are subject to a regular and orderly system. Causes are linked to effects where each is connected with the other.” Or the great Shabistâri in Fourteenth Century Persia, who talked of the world being “a mirror from head to foot, in every atom a hundred blazing suns where a world dwells in the heart of a millet seed.” Words that resonate, don't you think, with William Blake's famous lines, “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.”
Other Western poets have captured this truth too. William Wordsworth, perhaps one of the greatest of all our Nature poets, describes “a sense sublime of something far more inter-fused… a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought and rolls through all things.” I quote the poets because they help us identify this “sense sublime” and inspire reverence for the created world.
Reverence is not science-based knowledge. It is an experience always mediated by love, sometimes induced by it; and love comes from relationship. If you take away reverence and reduce our spiritual relationship with life, then you open yourself up to the idea that we can be little more than a chance group of isolated, self-obsessed individuals, disconnected from life’s innate presence and un-anchored by any sense of duty to the rest of the world. We are free to act without responsibility. Thus we turn a blind eye to those islands of plastic in the sea, or to the treatment meted out to animals in factory farms. And it is why the so-called “precautionary principle” is so often thrown out of the window.
This is the principle that would make us think twice if, say, we were to climb into a vehicle that happens to have a ninety per cent chance of crashing. Instead, because the danger is not proven beyond doubt, we think it is safe to embark upon the journey. This is how we proceed in many significant fields – in matters like genetic modification or climate change. We go on denying that there may be side-effects, even if our intuition warns us to be cautious, or even if there is some related evidence. Recently, for instance, the news emerged that, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honey bee colonies in the United States failed to survive the Winter. More than three million colonies in the U.S. and billions of honeybees worldwide have died. Scientists say they are no nearer to knowing what is causing this catastrophic collapse, but there is plenty of evidence that modern pesticides have played their part. Given that bees, like nearly every other bug, are insects, I would have thought it was rather obvious. And yet we carry on with a narrow-minded, mechanistic approach to industrialized farming with all its focus on high yields at whatever price. So we lace the fields with pesticides that kill insects. It is quite bizarre how we continue to entrust our food security to the very substances that are destroying the harmonic cycle which produces our food. It really is a form of collective hubris and I often wonder if those who practise such well-exercised scepticism in these matters will ever see that “the Emperor is wearing no clothes?”
This, then, is why the wisdom and learning offered by a sacred tradition like Islam matters – and, if I may say so, why those who hold and strive to preserve their sacred traditions in different parts of the world have every reason to become more confident of their ground. The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity. It is both Islam’s noble heritage and a priceless gift to the rest of the world. And yet, so often, that wisdom is now obscured by the dominant drive towards Western materialism – the feeling that to be truly “modern” you have to ape the West.
To counter that tendency I have done what I can with my School of Traditional Arts to nurture and support traditional and sacred craft skills – not least those of Islam – because they keep alive a perspective that we sorely need, even though short-term fashion deems them to be irrelevant. The geometry and patterning that are taught at the School are the basis of the many crafts that have been all but abandoned in many parts of the world, including the Islamic world. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that they are being forgotten because they reflect the spiritual mathematics found everywhere in Nature. As Islam teaches very specifically, it is a patterning that reflects the very ground of our being. It is the Divine imagination, so to speak; the ineffable presence that is the sacred breath of life. As the Seventeenth Century mystic, Ibn Âshir, puts it, by the practice of these arts you “see the One who manifests in the form, not the form by itself.”
For many in the modern world this is hard to understand because the view of God has become so distorted. “God” is seen as being, somehow, outside “His” creation, rather than part of its unfolding – what the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Being the principle that underlines the Cosmos, the Cosmos is the result of God knowing it and of it knowing the uncreated God. Notice the emphasis there on “un”-created. It is of profound importance. The basis of all existence is in this relationship.
I suspect the reason why this is such an unfashionable view is that the deep-seated experience of participation in the living, creative presence of God is offered to us in all traditions not by empiricism, but by revelation. This is a rare and precious gift and only given to those whose supreme humanity and capacity for great humility achieves a mastery over the ego. It comes at the moment when “the knower and the known” become one – the moment when the mind of Man comes into union with the mind of God.
This, of course, is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view, but revelation is a very different kind of knowing from scientific, evidence-based knowledge, and I cannot stress the point strongly enough; by dismissing such a process and discarding what it offers to humankind, we throw away a very important lifeline for the future.
I must say, once you do blend the different languages – the empirical and the spiritual together as I am suggesting, and as I have been trying to say for so long – then you do begin to wonder why the sceptics think the desire to work in harmony with Nature is so unscientific. Why is it deemed so worthwhile to abandon our true relationship with the “beingness” of all things; to limit ourselves to the science of manipulation, rather than immerse ourselves in the wider science of understanding? They seem such spurious arguments, because, as Islam clearly understands, it is actually impossible to divorce human beings from Nature’s patterns and processes. The Qur’an is considered to be the “last Revelation” but it clearly acknowledges which book is the first. That book is the great book of creation, of Nature herself, which has been taken too much for granted in our modern world and needs to be restored to its original position.
So, with all this in mind, I would like to set you a challenge, if I may; a challenge that I hope will be conveyed beyond this audience today. It is the challenge to mobilize Islamic scholars, poets and artists, as well as those craftsmen, engineers and scientists who work with and within the Islamic tradition, to identify the general ideas, the teachings and the practical techniques within the tradition which encourage us to work with the grain of Nature rather than against it. I would urge you to consider whether we can learn anything from the Islamic culture's profound understanding of the natural world to help us all in the fearsome challenges we face. Are there, for instance, any that could help preserve our precious marine eco-systems and fisheries? Are there any traditional methods of avoiding damage to all of Nature’s systems that revive the principle of sustainability within Islam?
To give you an idea of what I mean, let me offer a few examples drawn from the work done by my School of Traditional Arts, where project workers have shown that re-introducing traditional craft skills brings a coherence to peoples' daily lives, perhaps because they fuse the spiritual with the practical.
Since I founded it, the School has helped restore these skills in places as far afield as Jordan and Nigeria. It also helps to build bridges within communities in this country which have suffered the worst fractures. In Burnley in Lancashire, for instance, project workers have been teaching children from many backgrounds an integrated view of the world using the patterns of Islamic sacred geometry. This has not just inspired the imagination of the children taking part, but their teachers too. They tell me they have discovered a much more integrated approach to education, where maths and art are not alien to one another, but are seen as two sides of the same coin and directly rooted in Nature's patterns and processes.
In Afghanistan, I have only recently managed to see the work being done under the umbrella of what we have called “the Turquoise Mountain Foundation” – an initiative I launched some four years ago – which is running similar education programmes and craft training courses. It is also helping with the urban regeneration of the old historic quarter of the city by guiding people to start businesses using the craft skills they have learned.
For example, in the building of schools, people are being shown how to use mud-bricks which are a quarter of the price of the concrete blocks used by other agencies. They are also resistant to earthquakes, whereas concrete is not. And they cope much better with extremes of temperature – mud-brick buildings are cooler in the Summer and warmer in the Winter. What is more, they use local labour and local, natural materials. So these schools are a good example of how traditional wisdom blends with modern needs. After all, you can still use computers and other modern technology in a mud-brick building! And more comfortably, too, given it is more suited to local conditions.
When I finally did manage to reach Kabul earlier this year – after several years of trying – what I saw was truly remarkable. It proved to me that teaching and employing traditional crafts is an effective way of re-introducing the kinds of techniques that are benign to the natural environment. They are also capable of restoring a cultural balance in peoples' minds. By encouraging a wider celebration of the traditional, ancient culture of Afghanistan, these skills help in a very practical way to counteract the oppressive effects of extremism in all its forms, both religious and secular. This is how traditional wisdom works. It is not a theory or a science written down. Its wisdom is discovered through practice and in action.
These are schemes that are close to my heart, but the Oxford Centre keeps me informed of many others. Working in Muslim countries, the World Wildlife Fund has found that trying to convey the importance of conservation is much easier if it is transmitted by religious leaders whose reference is Qur'anic teaching. In Zanzibar, they had little success trying to reduce spear-fishing and the use of dragnets, which were destroying the coral reefs. But when the guidance came from the Qur'an, there was a notable change in behaviour. Or in Indonesia and in Malaysia, where former poachers are being deterred in the same way from destroying the last remaining tigers.
And it is not just such interventions that are important. It is mystifying, for instance, that the modern world completely ignores the time-honoured feats of engineering in the ancient world. The Qanats of Iran, for example, that still provide water for thousands of people in what would otherwise be desert conditions. These underground canals – unbelievably 170,000 miles of them – keep the water from the mountains moving down the tunnels using gravity alone. And the water in every village is then kept fresh by the way the storage towers keep the air flowing freely, moved by the wind.
In Spain, the irrigation systems constructed 1200 years ago also still work perfectly, as does the way in which the water is managed by the local population – a way of operating devised before the Muslim rule in Spain disintegrated. The same sorts of Islamic management schemes operate in other parts of the world too, like the “hima” zones in Saudi Arabia which set aside land for use as pasture. These are all examples of how prophetic teaching, in this case framed by the guidance of the Qu'ran, maintains a long term view of things and keeps the danger of a self-interested form of short-term economics at bay.
I am sure that if an organization like the Oxford Centre could help to establish a global forum on “Islam and the Environment” many more very practical, traditional approaches like these could become more widely applied. They may range from science and technology to agriculture, healthcare, architecture and education. Think what could be achieved if mothers and fathers, the teachers in madrassas and Imams, all sought to demonstrate to children how to translate Islamic teachings into practical action – how to blend traditional knowledge and awareness of Nature's needs with the best of what we know now.
This is certainly something I feel we have to do in the one final issue I have to mention as I close. Perhaps a few facts and figures might demonstrate why.
When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just three hundred thousand. Today, just over sixty years later, it is home to twenty million. Thirty-five thousand people live in every square mile of the city, and its population increases by another six hundred thousand every year.
I choose Lagos as an example. I could have chosen Mumbai, Cairo or Mexico City; wherever you look, the world's population is increasing fast. It goes up by the equivalent of the entire population of the United Kingdom every year. Which means that this poor planet of ours, which already struggles to sustain 6.8 billion people, will somehow have to support over 9 billion people within fifty years. In the Arab world, sixty per cent of the population is now under the age of thirty. That will mean, in some way or other, 100 million new jobs will have to be created in that region alone over the next ten to fifteen years.
I am well aware that the very long term prediction is that population may go down. 150 years from now the trends suggest there may be as few as four billion people, maybe even just two billion, but there is no getting away from the fact that in the short term, in the next fifty years, we face monumental problems as the figures rocket. No mega-city can ever hope to catch up with the present expansion in their numbers to provide adequate healthcare, education, transport, food and shelter for so many. Nor can the Earth herself sustain us all, when the demands and pressures on her bounty worldwide are becoming so intense.
I know it is a complicated issue. The experts suggest that, in theory, the Earth could support 9 billion people, but not if a vast proportion is consuming the world’s resources at present Western levels. So the changes have to be essentially two-fold. It would certainly help if the acceleration slowed down, but it would also help if the world reduced its desire to consume.
I have been following carefully the findings of my British Asian Trust in India which has been helping to run a women's education project in a drought-prone region of Maharashtra called Satara. They have noticed that a real difference can be made when women are able to become more involved in the running of the community. This is also the experience in Bangladesh. I have long been fascinated by Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It operates micro-credit schemes that offer loans to the poorest communities through a bank which is now ninety per cent owned by the rural poor. Interestingly, where the loans are managed by the women of the community, the birth rate has gone down. The impact of these sorts of schemes, of education and the provision of family planning services, has been widespread. Whereas in the 1980s, the average family in Bangladesh had six children, now the average figure is three. But with mega-cities growing as they are, I fear there is little chance these sorts of schemes can help the plight of many millions of people unless we all face up to the fact more honestly than we do that one of the biggest causes of high birth rates remains cultural.
It raises some very difficult moral questions, I know, but do we not each one of us carry the same responsibility towards the Earth? It is surely time to ask if we can come to a view that balances the traditional attitude to the sacred nature of life on the one hand with, on the other, those teachings within each of the sacred traditions that urge humankind to keep within the limits of Nature’s benevolence and bounty.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have endured all this with patience and fortitude. You have also given a very good impression of listening to my own personal thoughts on the perspective opened up by Islamic teaching. I have wanted to convey them to you because it always moves me to be reminded that, from the perspective of traditional Islamic teaching, the destruction of the Earth is represented as the destruction of a prayerful being.
Whichever faith tradition we come from, the fact at the heart of the matter is the same. Our inheritance from our creator is at stake. It will be no good at the end of the day as we sit amidst the wreckage, trying to console ourselves that it was all done for the best possible reasons of development and the betterment of Mankind. The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason – and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us. Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with Creation.
The Modernist ideology that has dominated the Western outlook for a century implies that “tradition” is backward looking. What I have tried to explain today is that this is far from true. Tradition is the accumulation of the knowledge and wisdom that we should be offering to the next generation. It is, therefore, visionary – it looks forward.
Turning to the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world, does not mean locking us into some sort of cultural and technological immobility. As the English writer G.K. Chesterton put it, “real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as a root.” I would also remind you of the words of Oxford’s very own C.S. Lewis, who pointed out that “sometimes you do have to turn the clock back if it is telling the wrong time” – that there is nothing “progressive” about being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge that we have taken the wrong road. If we realize that we are travelling in the wrong direction, the only sensible thing to do is to admit it and retrace our steps back to where we first went wrong. As Lewis put it, “going back can sometimes be the quickest way forward.” It is the most progressive thing we could do.
All of the mounting evidence is telling us that we are, indeed, on the wrong road, so you might think it would be wise to draw on the timeless guidance that comes from our intuitive sense of the origin of all things to which we are rooted. Nature's rhythms, her cycles and her processes, are our guides to this uncreated, originating voice. They are our greatest teachers because they are expressions of Divine Unity. Which is why there is a profound truth in that seemingly simple, old saying of the nomads – that “the best of all Mosques is Nature herself.”
Last edited by kmaherali on Sun Jun 27, 2010 10:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
June 15, 2010, 6:53 pm
Road Kill in the Serengeti?
By OLIVIA JUDSON
Felix Borner
An aerial view of the wildebeest migration in the central Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.
Imagine. You are lying in the grass in the east African savannah, watching wildebeest fording a shallow river. You can hear the funny grunting noises they make, and as they pass by, you can feel the impact of their hooves on the ground and smell their rich animal smell. You see their kicking heels, their beautiful sleek bodies. Then you look up, and you realize that the herd stretches as far as you can see, that the plain is dark with wildebeest. If you were to wait for them all to pass, you would be there for days.
The sight is magnificent, primal and profoundly moving. It is the wildebeest migration.
Every year, more than a million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, move through the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem of Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains. In the course of a year, an individual wildebeest may cover as much as 2,100 kilometers. (That’s more than 1,300 miles — which is further than the distance between New York and New Orleans.) It is the last great migration on Earth.
But for how much longer? A large part of the migration takes place within the vast Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and there are reports that the Tanzanian government is preparing to build a major road through the northern part of the park: through a designated wilderness area, through the migration route.
Roads are catastrophic for wildlife. The experiment has been done again and again all over the world: we know. Among the problems: roads allow the easy spread of invasive plant species, as car tires often carry their seeds. Roads also allow the rapid spread of animal diseases, and lead to an increase in poaching, building and other human activities.
But by far the biggest problem is that roads fragment habitats and disrupt animal movements. Many animals are reluctant to cross roads, even those with little traffic. And when there is a lot of traffic, the lives of people and animals are both at risk.
Grant Hopcraft
A female wildebeest with her month-old calf. The usual solution is to fence the road to protect the cars. Doing this here would likely end the migration, cause the collapse of the wildebeest population — and destroy the Serengeti as we know it.
The reason is that the lands to the north of the proposed road remain wet when the lands to the south have become dry. Unable to reach the water, tens of thousands of animals would die of hunger and thirst; many would become tangled in the fence. Building the road with animal tunnels or overpasses, as has been done in Canada and other countries, would be expensive and impractical; moreover, it probably would not work, as wildebeest are sensitive to disturbance. They already avoid areas frequented by poachers, and are alarmed by cars.
And if the migration stopped, the Serengeti would cease to be the Serengeti, for the wildebeest define the ecosystem and drive its dynamics. The migration is the reason the wildebeest are so numerous: it allows them to transcend the limitations imposed by local supplies of food, water and predators. And in their travels, the animals spread nutrients throughout the system. They fertilize plants with their urine and dung, and trample the soil. By doing so, they help to maintain a diverse array of plants, insects and birds, and are themselves food for large numbers of lions and hyenas.
Wildebeest also help to maintain large numbers of humans. Tourism accounts for 8 percent of gross domestic product in Tanzania, and more than 600,000 jobs. If the migration stopped, tourism would likely decline. After all, there would be much less to see.
Good roads are, of course, an important part of economic development. They connect isolated communities, and allow for the trucking of commodities between inland areas and port cities. One of the challenges of conservation is balancing the needs of humans today while protecting the resources of tomorrow.
Felix Borner
Wildebeest already face challenges on their journey, including crossing rivers, like the Masai Mara above in Kenya, and navigating through the homeranges of more than 2,500 lions and over 7,000 hyena that live in the Serengeti.
But the peculiar thing about this road is that it is not a case of animals versus people. There is an alternative — a road to the south of the park that would connect five times more people, and cost less to build. It would also be easier, since the landscape there is flatter; and it would not affect the animal migrations. And the northern road has been vigorously rejected on environmental grounds before.
Even more peculiar: up to now, the government of Tanzania has had an outstanding record of conservation. Around a quarter of the country’s area is managed with a view to preserving wildlife, and at 50,000 square kilometers (almost 20,000 square miles) the Selous Game Reserve is the largest protected area in Africa. Tanzania boasts seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites, of which four are nature reserves — including the Serengeti National Park.
Moreover, the president of Tanzania, Dr. Jakaya Kikwete, is known for his interest in nature. When six black rhinos arrived in the Serengeti in May — they were flown in from South Africa as part of a rhino relocation program — the president himself was there to meet them, and he has often spoken of the importance of the parks to Tanzania. Indeed, he sometimes quotes Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere:
“The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa. These wild creatures amid the wild places they inhabit are not only important as a resource of wonder and inspiration but are an integral part of our natural resources and our future livelihood and wellbeing. In accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife we solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power to make sure that our children’s grand-children will be able to enjoy this rich and precious heritage.”
It is not clear why the Serengeti road is being considered: I was unable to reach anyone in the Tanzanian government who would comment. But what is clear is that one of the most marvelous and awe-inspiring sights on the planet might soon vanish, killed by a road.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes and more at:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... n&emc=tya3
Road Kill in the Serengeti?
By OLIVIA JUDSON
Felix Borner
An aerial view of the wildebeest migration in the central Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.
Imagine. You are lying in the grass in the east African savannah, watching wildebeest fording a shallow river. You can hear the funny grunting noises they make, and as they pass by, you can feel the impact of their hooves on the ground and smell their rich animal smell. You see their kicking heels, their beautiful sleek bodies. Then you look up, and you realize that the herd stretches as far as you can see, that the plain is dark with wildebeest. If you were to wait for them all to pass, you would be there for days.
The sight is magnificent, primal and profoundly moving. It is the wildebeest migration.
Every year, more than a million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, move through the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem of Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains. In the course of a year, an individual wildebeest may cover as much as 2,100 kilometers. (That’s more than 1,300 miles — which is further than the distance between New York and New Orleans.) It is the last great migration on Earth.
But for how much longer? A large part of the migration takes place within the vast Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and there are reports that the Tanzanian government is preparing to build a major road through the northern part of the park: through a designated wilderness area, through the migration route.
Roads are catastrophic for wildlife. The experiment has been done again and again all over the world: we know. Among the problems: roads allow the easy spread of invasive plant species, as car tires often carry their seeds. Roads also allow the rapid spread of animal diseases, and lead to an increase in poaching, building and other human activities.
But by far the biggest problem is that roads fragment habitats and disrupt animal movements. Many animals are reluctant to cross roads, even those with little traffic. And when there is a lot of traffic, the lives of people and animals are both at risk.
Grant Hopcraft
A female wildebeest with her month-old calf. The usual solution is to fence the road to protect the cars. Doing this here would likely end the migration, cause the collapse of the wildebeest population — and destroy the Serengeti as we know it.
The reason is that the lands to the north of the proposed road remain wet when the lands to the south have become dry. Unable to reach the water, tens of thousands of animals would die of hunger and thirst; many would become tangled in the fence. Building the road with animal tunnels or overpasses, as has been done in Canada and other countries, would be expensive and impractical; moreover, it probably would not work, as wildebeest are sensitive to disturbance. They already avoid areas frequented by poachers, and are alarmed by cars.
And if the migration stopped, the Serengeti would cease to be the Serengeti, for the wildebeest define the ecosystem and drive its dynamics. The migration is the reason the wildebeest are so numerous: it allows them to transcend the limitations imposed by local supplies of food, water and predators. And in their travels, the animals spread nutrients throughout the system. They fertilize plants with their urine and dung, and trample the soil. By doing so, they help to maintain a diverse array of plants, insects and birds, and are themselves food for large numbers of lions and hyenas.
Wildebeest also help to maintain large numbers of humans. Tourism accounts for 8 percent of gross domestic product in Tanzania, and more than 600,000 jobs. If the migration stopped, tourism would likely decline. After all, there would be much less to see.
Good roads are, of course, an important part of economic development. They connect isolated communities, and allow for the trucking of commodities between inland areas and port cities. One of the challenges of conservation is balancing the needs of humans today while protecting the resources of tomorrow.
Felix Borner
Wildebeest already face challenges on their journey, including crossing rivers, like the Masai Mara above in Kenya, and navigating through the homeranges of more than 2,500 lions and over 7,000 hyena that live in the Serengeti.
But the peculiar thing about this road is that it is not a case of animals versus people. There is an alternative — a road to the south of the park that would connect five times more people, and cost less to build. It would also be easier, since the landscape there is flatter; and it would not affect the animal migrations. And the northern road has been vigorously rejected on environmental grounds before.
Even more peculiar: up to now, the government of Tanzania has had an outstanding record of conservation. Around a quarter of the country’s area is managed with a view to preserving wildlife, and at 50,000 square kilometers (almost 20,000 square miles) the Selous Game Reserve is the largest protected area in Africa. Tanzania boasts seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites, of which four are nature reserves — including the Serengeti National Park.
Moreover, the president of Tanzania, Dr. Jakaya Kikwete, is known for his interest in nature. When six black rhinos arrived in the Serengeti in May — they were flown in from South Africa as part of a rhino relocation program — the president himself was there to meet them, and he has often spoken of the importance of the parks to Tanzania. Indeed, he sometimes quotes Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere:
“The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa. These wild creatures amid the wild places they inhabit are not only important as a resource of wonder and inspiration but are an integral part of our natural resources and our future livelihood and wellbeing. In accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife we solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power to make sure that our children’s grand-children will be able to enjoy this rich and precious heritage.”
It is not clear why the Serengeti road is being considered: I was unable to reach anyone in the Tanzanian government who would comment. But what is clear is that one of the most marvelous and awe-inspiring sights on the planet might soon vanish, killed by a road.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes and more at:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... n&emc=tya3
Photos at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/opini ... ?th&emc=th
July 16, 2010
Our Beaker Is Starting to Boil
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
David Breashears is one of America’s legendary mountain climbers, a man who has climbed Mount Everest five times and led the Everest IMAX film team in 1996.
These days, Mr. Breashears is still climbing the Himalayas, but he is lugging more than pitons and ice axes. He’s also carrying special cameras to document stunning declines in glaciers on the roof of the world.
Mr. Breashears first reached the top of Everest in 1983, and in many subsequent trips to the region he noticed the topography changing, the glaciers shrinking. So he dug out archive photos from early Himalayan expeditions, and then journeyed across ridges and crevasses to photograph from the exact same spots.
The pairs of matched photographs, old and new, are staggering. Time and again, the same glaciers have shrunk drastically in every direction, often losing hundreds of feet in height.
“I was just incredulous,” he told me. “We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.”
Mr. Breashears led me through a display of these paired photographs at the Asia Society in New York. One 1921 photo by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who died near the summit of Everest three years later, shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier. Mr. Breashears located the very spot from which Mallory had snapped that photo and took another — only it is a different scene, because the glacier has lost 330 feet of vertical ice.
Some research in social psychology suggests that our brains are not well adapted to protect ourselves from gradually encroaching harms. We evolved to be wary of saber-toothed tigers and blizzards, but not of climate change — and maybe that’s also why we in the news media tend to cover weather but not climate. The upshot is that we’re horrifyingly nonchalant at the prospect that rising carbon emissions may devastate our favorite planet.
NASA says that the January-through-June period this year was the hottest globally since measurements began in 1880. The Web site ClimateProgress.org, which calls for more action on climate change, suggests that 2010 is likely to be the warmest year on record. Likewise, the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University says that the months of May and June had the lowest snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere since the lab began satellite observations in 1967.
So signs of danger abound, but like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, we seem unable to rouse ourselves.
(Actually, it seems that frogs will not remain in a beaker that is slowly heated. Snopes.com quotes a distinguished zoologist as saying that frogs become agitated as the temperature slowly rises and struggle to escape, although it does not specify how the zoologist knows this.)
From our own beaker, we’ve watched with glazed eyes as glaciers have retreated worldwide. Glacier National Park now has only about 25 glaciers, compared with around 150 a century ago. In the Himalayas, the shrinkage seems to be accelerating, with Chinese scientific measurements suggesting that some glaciers are now losing up to 26 feet in height per year.
Orville Schell, who runs China programs at the Asia Society, described passing a series of pagodas as he approached the Mingyong Glacier on the Tibetan plateau. The pagodas were viewing platforms, and had to be rebuilt as the glacier retreated: this monumental, almost eternal force of nature seemed mortally wounded.
“A glacier is a giant part of the alpine landscape, something we always saw as immortal,” Mr. Schell said. “But now this glacier is dying before our eyes.”
An Indian glaciologist, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, now at the Stimson Center in Washington, told me that most Himalayan glaciers are in retreat for three reasons. First is the overall warming tied to carbon emissions. Second, rain and snow patterns are changing, so that less new snow is added to replace what melts. Third, pollution from trucks and smoke covers glaciers with carbon soot so that their surfaces become darker and less reflective — causing them to melt more quickly.
The retreat of the glaciers threatens agriculture downstream. A study published last month in Science magazine indicated that glacier melt is essential for the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers, while less important a component of the Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The potential disappearance of the glaciers, the report said, is “threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people” in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins.
We Americans have been galvanized by the oil spill on our gulf coast, because we see tar balls and dead sea birds as visceral reminders of our hubris in deep sea drilling. The melting glaciers should be a similar warning of our hubris — and of the consequences that the earth will face for centuries unless we address carbon emissions today.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/opini ... ?th&emc=th
July 16, 2010
Our Beaker Is Starting to Boil
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
David Breashears is one of America’s legendary mountain climbers, a man who has climbed Mount Everest five times and led the Everest IMAX film team in 1996.
These days, Mr. Breashears is still climbing the Himalayas, but he is lugging more than pitons and ice axes. He’s also carrying special cameras to document stunning declines in glaciers on the roof of the world.
Mr. Breashears first reached the top of Everest in 1983, and in many subsequent trips to the region he noticed the topography changing, the glaciers shrinking. So he dug out archive photos from early Himalayan expeditions, and then journeyed across ridges and crevasses to photograph from the exact same spots.
The pairs of matched photographs, old and new, are staggering. Time and again, the same glaciers have shrunk drastically in every direction, often losing hundreds of feet in height.
“I was just incredulous,” he told me. “We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.”
Mr. Breashears led me through a display of these paired photographs at the Asia Society in New York. One 1921 photo by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who died near the summit of Everest three years later, shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier. Mr. Breashears located the very spot from which Mallory had snapped that photo and took another — only it is a different scene, because the glacier has lost 330 feet of vertical ice.
Some research in social psychology suggests that our brains are not well adapted to protect ourselves from gradually encroaching harms. We evolved to be wary of saber-toothed tigers and blizzards, but not of climate change — and maybe that’s also why we in the news media tend to cover weather but not climate. The upshot is that we’re horrifyingly nonchalant at the prospect that rising carbon emissions may devastate our favorite planet.
NASA says that the January-through-June period this year was the hottest globally since measurements began in 1880. The Web site ClimateProgress.org, which calls for more action on climate change, suggests that 2010 is likely to be the warmest year on record. Likewise, the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University says that the months of May and June had the lowest snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere since the lab began satellite observations in 1967.
So signs of danger abound, but like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, we seem unable to rouse ourselves.
(Actually, it seems that frogs will not remain in a beaker that is slowly heated. Snopes.com quotes a distinguished zoologist as saying that frogs become agitated as the temperature slowly rises and struggle to escape, although it does not specify how the zoologist knows this.)
From our own beaker, we’ve watched with glazed eyes as glaciers have retreated worldwide. Glacier National Park now has only about 25 glaciers, compared with around 150 a century ago. In the Himalayas, the shrinkage seems to be accelerating, with Chinese scientific measurements suggesting that some glaciers are now losing up to 26 feet in height per year.
Orville Schell, who runs China programs at the Asia Society, described passing a series of pagodas as he approached the Mingyong Glacier on the Tibetan plateau. The pagodas were viewing platforms, and had to be rebuilt as the glacier retreated: this monumental, almost eternal force of nature seemed mortally wounded.
“A glacier is a giant part of the alpine landscape, something we always saw as immortal,” Mr. Schell said. “But now this glacier is dying before our eyes.”
An Indian glaciologist, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, now at the Stimson Center in Washington, told me that most Himalayan glaciers are in retreat for three reasons. First is the overall warming tied to carbon emissions. Second, rain and snow patterns are changing, so that less new snow is added to replace what melts. Third, pollution from trucks and smoke covers glaciers with carbon soot so that their surfaces become darker and less reflective — causing them to melt more quickly.
The retreat of the glaciers threatens agriculture downstream. A study published last month in Science magazine indicated that glacier melt is essential for the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers, while less important a component of the Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The potential disappearance of the glaciers, the report said, is “threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people” in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins.
We Americans have been galvanized by the oil spill on our gulf coast, because we see tar balls and dead sea birds as visceral reminders of our hubris in deep sea drilling. The melting glaciers should be a similar warning of our hubris — and of the consequences that the earth will face for centuries unless we address carbon emissions today.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.
Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself
Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments – and people generally – should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict.” Yet, the Earth is still here. “It’s a survivor.”
Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.” For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.
Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future,” he says, “not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control.” Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.
Prof. Laughlin is the co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for physics. Brilliantly imagined, incisively expressed and vastly entertaining, Prof. Laughlin’s essay on climate change (What the Earth Knows) has been adapted from his forthcoming book on the future of fossil fuels. (His 2008 book, The Crime of Reason, documented pervasive government and corporate “sequestering” of scientific knowledge.)
You can’t discuss climate change, Prof. Laughlin says, without looking backward across geologic time. He puts ordinary rainfall into perspective to illustrate the point. The rain that now falls on the world in a normal year measures a metre – “about the height of a golden retriever.” The rain that has fallen since the beginning of the Industrial Age measures 200 metres. The rain that has fallen since the age of dinosaurs would fill Earth’s oceans 20,000 times. The rain that has fallen since oxygen formed would fill the entire world 100 times.
Yet, the amount of water in Earth’s oceans hasn’t changed significantly in all of this time. In Earth’s most recent glacial melting, 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose by one centimetre a year for 10,000 years – and then abruptly stopped. The heat required to produce this melting was 10 times the total energy consumption of all human civilization.
Excess carbon in the atmosphere? It happens all the time. And Earth deals with it. Anything that humans do to mitigate it will be a waste of time. Governments and citizens delude themselves when they think they can make a difference.
“The Earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation,” Prof. Laughlin writes. “It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator and television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car.
“These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the Earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: All the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air and none is left to burn.”
The Earth will dissolve the bulk of this atmospheric carbon dioxide in its oceans, a process that will take roughly 1,000 years. (The oceans now hold 30 trillion tons of carbon – 30 times the world’s coal reserves.) Over tens of thousands of years, the Earth will transfer excess carbon dioxide into rocks, a process that will ultimately restore carbon dioxide concentrations to the same level that prevailed before humans existed.
How do we know the Earth will turn excess carbon dioxide into limestone? We know because the world’s carbon dioxide levels are determined “by a geologic regulatory process.” The proof is in Earth’s rocks.
Prof. Laughlin concedes that excess carbon dioxide could – “in a handful of examples” – contribute to the extinction of species. He cites corals as an example. But he insists that keeping carbon in the ground for a little while longer won’t make much difference to animal or to organism.
The real extinction problem, he says, is human population pressure: habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, overharvesting, species invasion. This is a distinction of great importance because it might help direct environmental concern to goals that people can actually achieve: Forget Gaia, save a marsh; forget the planet, save a frog.
The Earth regulates climate change in geologic time, Prof. Laughlin says, “without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on, Prof. Laughlin says. So should we.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... le1642767/
Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments – and people generally – should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict.” Yet, the Earth is still here. “It’s a survivor.”
Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.” For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.
Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future,” he says, “not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control.” Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.
Prof. Laughlin is the co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for physics. Brilliantly imagined, incisively expressed and vastly entertaining, Prof. Laughlin’s essay on climate change (What the Earth Knows) has been adapted from his forthcoming book on the future of fossil fuels. (His 2008 book, The Crime of Reason, documented pervasive government and corporate “sequestering” of scientific knowledge.)
You can’t discuss climate change, Prof. Laughlin says, without looking backward across geologic time. He puts ordinary rainfall into perspective to illustrate the point. The rain that now falls on the world in a normal year measures a metre – “about the height of a golden retriever.” The rain that has fallen since the beginning of the Industrial Age measures 200 metres. The rain that has fallen since the age of dinosaurs would fill Earth’s oceans 20,000 times. The rain that has fallen since oxygen formed would fill the entire world 100 times.
Yet, the amount of water in Earth’s oceans hasn’t changed significantly in all of this time. In Earth’s most recent glacial melting, 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose by one centimetre a year for 10,000 years – and then abruptly stopped. The heat required to produce this melting was 10 times the total energy consumption of all human civilization.
Excess carbon in the atmosphere? It happens all the time. And Earth deals with it. Anything that humans do to mitigate it will be a waste of time. Governments and citizens delude themselves when they think they can make a difference.
“The Earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation,” Prof. Laughlin writes. “It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator and television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car.
“These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the Earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: All the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air and none is left to burn.”
The Earth will dissolve the bulk of this atmospheric carbon dioxide in its oceans, a process that will take roughly 1,000 years. (The oceans now hold 30 trillion tons of carbon – 30 times the world’s coal reserves.) Over tens of thousands of years, the Earth will transfer excess carbon dioxide into rocks, a process that will ultimately restore carbon dioxide concentrations to the same level that prevailed before humans existed.
How do we know the Earth will turn excess carbon dioxide into limestone? We know because the world’s carbon dioxide levels are determined “by a geologic regulatory process.” The proof is in Earth’s rocks.
Prof. Laughlin concedes that excess carbon dioxide could – “in a handful of examples” – contribute to the extinction of species. He cites corals as an example. But he insists that keeping carbon in the ground for a little while longer won’t make much difference to animal or to organism.
The real extinction problem, he says, is human population pressure: habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, overharvesting, species invasion. This is a distinction of great importance because it might help direct environmental concern to goals that people can actually achieve: Forget Gaia, save a marsh; forget the planet, save a frog.
The Earth regulates climate change in geologic time, Prof. Laughlin says, “without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on, Prof. Laughlin says. So should we.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... le1642767/
Trees for Food, Fuel and Fodder
“Small-holder and community forestry should be included in the carbon trading system.”
Geneva, January 2011—The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which has planted over 100 million trees in Asia and Africa, has made a commitment to plant over 10 million more trees.
The commitment by the Geneva-based development organization coincides with the world-wide launch of the International Year of Forests.
“By planting trees, we have supported biodiversity, restored degraded forests, revived rural communities and provided carbon sequestration to combat climate change,” said David Boyer, Director of the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment. “But the best way to increase the number of trees on the planet is to provide incentives for their propagation and preservation.”
“In areas where there is intense competition for firewood, for example, sustainable tree planting can be seen as a way of providing jobs and building assets, not just as a good thing to do. We see sustainable tree planting having a significant impact on both poverty alleviation and the environment.”
In Pakistan, AKDN works both on the supply and demand sides. Rural communities know that sustainably managed agro-forestry provides dividends in the form of food, fuel and fodder, so AKDN has worked with one million people in northern Pakistan to plant over 100 million trees and bring 90,000 hectares of marginalized land under cultivation.
At the same time, it has introduced more efficient stoves that cut both biomass consumption and wood-gathering time by 50 percent (the programme has won both an Alcan Prize for Sustainability (2005) and a World Habitat Award (2006)). Over 250 mini-hydroelectric plants drawing water from mountain streams power remote communities in another prize-winning programme that cuts fuel-wood consumption (the programme has won a number of awards, including an Ashden Award, or “Green Oscar”, in 2004).
Near Nairobi, Kenya, a project company of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, Frigoken, processes the output of 75,000 small-holding green bean farmers, but in 2010 it also trained unemployed young people to produce tree seedlings. Over half a million seedlings were planted in village nurseries. The programme won the 2010 Total Eco Challenge. Another similar AKDN programme on the Kenyan coast produced and planted 500,000 seedlings in 2009. An additional 1.2 million seedlings were propagated and planted in 2010.
The Serena Hotels Group (also an AKDN project company) has planted over one million trees in the Mt. Kenya National Park and the Amboseli National Park in a programme, called “Planting a Tree for Africa”, which expects to plant 10 million trees in Kenya alone.
“Ensuring that sustainable small-holder and community forestry is included in the carbon trading system will help the rural poor generate income gains, meet environmental and carbon mitigation needs while reducing community vulnerability,” says David Boyer.
For more information:
Sam Pickens, AKDN Communications
Aga Khan Development Network
1-3 avenue de la paix
Tel. 022 909 7200
Email: [email protected]
Notes:
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) was founded by His Highness the Aga Khan. The nine AKDN agencies work to improve the welfare and prospects of people in the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa. The annual budget of the eight non-profit agencies is in excess of US$500 million. The 90 project companies of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), which is incorporated as a for-profit development agency under Swiss law, operate as commercial entities but all surpluses are reinvested in further development activity.
http://www.akdn.org/Content/1045
“Small-holder and community forestry should be included in the carbon trading system.”
Geneva, January 2011—The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which has planted over 100 million trees in Asia and Africa, has made a commitment to plant over 10 million more trees.
The commitment by the Geneva-based development organization coincides with the world-wide launch of the International Year of Forests.
“By planting trees, we have supported biodiversity, restored degraded forests, revived rural communities and provided carbon sequestration to combat climate change,” said David Boyer, Director of the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment. “But the best way to increase the number of trees on the planet is to provide incentives for their propagation and preservation.”
“In areas where there is intense competition for firewood, for example, sustainable tree planting can be seen as a way of providing jobs and building assets, not just as a good thing to do. We see sustainable tree planting having a significant impact on both poverty alleviation and the environment.”
In Pakistan, AKDN works both on the supply and demand sides. Rural communities know that sustainably managed agro-forestry provides dividends in the form of food, fuel and fodder, so AKDN has worked with one million people in northern Pakistan to plant over 100 million trees and bring 90,000 hectares of marginalized land under cultivation.
At the same time, it has introduced more efficient stoves that cut both biomass consumption and wood-gathering time by 50 percent (the programme has won both an Alcan Prize for Sustainability (2005) and a World Habitat Award (2006)). Over 250 mini-hydroelectric plants drawing water from mountain streams power remote communities in another prize-winning programme that cuts fuel-wood consumption (the programme has won a number of awards, including an Ashden Award, or “Green Oscar”, in 2004).
Near Nairobi, Kenya, a project company of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, Frigoken, processes the output of 75,000 small-holding green bean farmers, but in 2010 it also trained unemployed young people to produce tree seedlings. Over half a million seedlings were planted in village nurseries. The programme won the 2010 Total Eco Challenge. Another similar AKDN programme on the Kenyan coast produced and planted 500,000 seedlings in 2009. An additional 1.2 million seedlings were propagated and planted in 2010.
The Serena Hotels Group (also an AKDN project company) has planted over one million trees in the Mt. Kenya National Park and the Amboseli National Park in a programme, called “Planting a Tree for Africa”, which expects to plant 10 million trees in Kenya alone.
“Ensuring that sustainable small-holder and community forestry is included in the carbon trading system will help the rural poor generate income gains, meet environmental and carbon mitigation needs while reducing community vulnerability,” says David Boyer.
For more information:
Sam Pickens, AKDN Communications
Aga Khan Development Network
1-3 avenue de la paix
Tel. 022 909 7200
Email: [email protected]
Notes:
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) was founded by His Highness the Aga Khan. The nine AKDN agencies work to improve the welfare and prospects of people in the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa. The annual budget of the eight non-profit agencies is in excess of US$500 million. The 90 project companies of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), which is incorporated as a for-profit development agency under Swiss law, operate as commercial entities but all surpluses are reinvested in further development activity.
http://www.akdn.org/Content/1045
April 11, 2012
Why Trees MatterBy JIM ROBBINS
Helena, Mont.
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.
We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.
For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.
Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.
What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.
Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.
Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.
A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.
Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”
Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opini ... h_20120412
Why Trees MatterBy JIM ROBBINS
Helena, Mont.
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.
We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.
For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.
Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.
What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.
Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.
Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.
A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.
Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”
Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opini ... h_20120412
The Chickadee’s Guide to Gardening
In Your Garden, Choose Plants That Help the Environment
OXFORD, Pa. — I GREW up thinking little of plants. I was interested in snakes and turtles, then insects and, eventually, birds. Now I like plants. But I still like the life they create even more.
Plants are as close to biological miracles as a scientist could dare admit. After all, they allow us, and nearly every other species, to eat sunlight, by creating the nourishment that drives food webs on this planet. As if that weren’t enough, plants also produce oxygen, build topsoil and hold it in place, prevent floods, sequester carbon dioxide, buffer extreme weather and clean our water. Considering all this, you might think we gardeners would value plants for what they do. Instead, we value them for what they look like.
When we design our home landscapes, too many of us choose beautiful plants from all over the world, without considering their ability to support life within our local ecosystems.
Last summer I did a simple experiment at home to measure just how different the plants we use for landscaping can be in supporting local animals. I compared a young white oak in my yard with one of the Bradford pears in my neighbor’s yard. Both trees are the same size, but Bradford pears are ornamentals from Asia, while white oaks are native to eastern North America. I walked around each tree and counted the caterpillars on their leaves at head height. I found 410 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 19 different species), and only one caterpillar (an inchworm) on the Bradford pear.
Was this a fluke? Hardly. The next day I repeated my survey on a different white oak and Bradford pear. This time I found 233 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 15 species) and, again, only one on the Bradford pear.
Why such huge differences? It’s simple: Plants don’t want to be eaten, so they have loaded their tissues with nasty chemicals that would kill most insects if eaten. Insects do eat plants, though, and they achieve this by adapting to the chemical defenses of just one or two plant lineages. So some have evolved to eat oak trees without dying, while others have specialized in native cherries or ashes and so on.
But local insects have only just met Bradford pears, in an evolutionary sense, and have not had the time — millennia — required to adapt to their chemical defenses. And so Bradford pears stand virtually untouched in my neighbor’s yard.
In the past, we thought this was a good thing. After all, Asian ornamentals were planted to look pretty, and we certainly didn’t want insects eating them. We were happy with our perfect pears, burning bushes, Japanese barberries, porcelain berries, golden rain trees, crape myrtles, privets, bush honeysuckles and all the other foreign ornamentals.
But there are serious ecological consequences to such choices, and another exercise you can do at home makes them clear. This spring, if you live in North America, put up a chickadee nest box in your yard. If you are lucky, a pair of chickadees will move in and raise a family. While they are feeding their young, watch what the chickadees bring to the nest: mostly caterpillars. Both parents take turns feeding the chicks, enabling them to bring a caterpillar to the nest once every three minutes. And they do this from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. for each of the 16 to 18 days it takes the chicks to fledge. That’s a total of 350 to 570 caterpillars every day, depending on how many chicks they have. So, an incredible 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars are required to make one clutch of chickadees.
And chickadees are tiny birds: just a third of an ounce. What if you wanted to support red-bellied woodpeckers in your yard, a bird that is about eight times heavier than a chickadee? How many caterpillars would that take?
What we plant in our landscapes determines what can live in our landscapes. Controlling what grows in our yards is like playing God. By favoring productive species, we can create life, and by using nonnative plants, we can prevent it.
An American yard dominated by Asian ornamentals does not produce nearly the quantity and diversity of insects needed for birds to reproduce. Some might argue that we should just let those birds breed “in nature.” That worked in the past, but now there simply is not enough “nature” left. And it shows. Many bird species in North America have declined drastically in the past 40 years.
Fortunately, more and more gardeners are realizing that their yards offer one of the most empowering conservation options we have, and are sharing their properties with the nature around them.
By the way, you might assume that my oak was riddled with unsightly caterpillar holes, but not so. Since birds eat most of the caterpillars before they get very large, from 10 feet away the oak looked as perfect as a Bradford pear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opini ... d=45305309
In Your Garden, Choose Plants That Help the Environment
OXFORD, Pa. — I GREW up thinking little of plants. I was interested in snakes and turtles, then insects and, eventually, birds. Now I like plants. But I still like the life they create even more.
Plants are as close to biological miracles as a scientist could dare admit. After all, they allow us, and nearly every other species, to eat sunlight, by creating the nourishment that drives food webs on this planet. As if that weren’t enough, plants also produce oxygen, build topsoil and hold it in place, prevent floods, sequester carbon dioxide, buffer extreme weather and clean our water. Considering all this, you might think we gardeners would value plants for what they do. Instead, we value them for what they look like.
When we design our home landscapes, too many of us choose beautiful plants from all over the world, without considering their ability to support life within our local ecosystems.
Last summer I did a simple experiment at home to measure just how different the plants we use for landscaping can be in supporting local animals. I compared a young white oak in my yard with one of the Bradford pears in my neighbor’s yard. Both trees are the same size, but Bradford pears are ornamentals from Asia, while white oaks are native to eastern North America. I walked around each tree and counted the caterpillars on their leaves at head height. I found 410 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 19 different species), and only one caterpillar (an inchworm) on the Bradford pear.
Was this a fluke? Hardly. The next day I repeated my survey on a different white oak and Bradford pear. This time I found 233 caterpillars on the white oak (comprising 15 species) and, again, only one on the Bradford pear.
Why such huge differences? It’s simple: Plants don’t want to be eaten, so they have loaded their tissues with nasty chemicals that would kill most insects if eaten. Insects do eat plants, though, and they achieve this by adapting to the chemical defenses of just one or two plant lineages. So some have evolved to eat oak trees without dying, while others have specialized in native cherries or ashes and so on.
But local insects have only just met Bradford pears, in an evolutionary sense, and have not had the time — millennia — required to adapt to their chemical defenses. And so Bradford pears stand virtually untouched in my neighbor’s yard.
In the past, we thought this was a good thing. After all, Asian ornamentals were planted to look pretty, and we certainly didn’t want insects eating them. We were happy with our perfect pears, burning bushes, Japanese barberries, porcelain berries, golden rain trees, crape myrtles, privets, bush honeysuckles and all the other foreign ornamentals.
But there are serious ecological consequences to such choices, and another exercise you can do at home makes them clear. This spring, if you live in North America, put up a chickadee nest box in your yard. If you are lucky, a pair of chickadees will move in and raise a family. While they are feeding their young, watch what the chickadees bring to the nest: mostly caterpillars. Both parents take turns feeding the chicks, enabling them to bring a caterpillar to the nest once every three minutes. And they do this from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. for each of the 16 to 18 days it takes the chicks to fledge. That’s a total of 350 to 570 caterpillars every day, depending on how many chicks they have. So, an incredible 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars are required to make one clutch of chickadees.
And chickadees are tiny birds: just a third of an ounce. What if you wanted to support red-bellied woodpeckers in your yard, a bird that is about eight times heavier than a chickadee? How many caterpillars would that take?
What we plant in our landscapes determines what can live in our landscapes. Controlling what grows in our yards is like playing God. By favoring productive species, we can create life, and by using nonnative plants, we can prevent it.
An American yard dominated by Asian ornamentals does not produce nearly the quantity and diversity of insects needed for birds to reproduce. Some might argue that we should just let those birds breed “in nature.” That worked in the past, but now there simply is not enough “nature” left. And it shows. Many bird species in North America have declined drastically in the past 40 years.
Fortunately, more and more gardeners are realizing that their yards offer one of the most empowering conservation options we have, and are sharing their properties with the nature around them.
By the way, you might assume that my oak was riddled with unsightly caterpillar holes, but not so. Since birds eat most of the caterpillars before they get very large, from 10 feet away the oak looked as perfect as a Bradford pear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opini ... d=45305309
Earth is on the edge of a Sixth Extinction
Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.
This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear some 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet.
This time though, we’re the asteroid.
At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the book 'The Sixth Extinction,' sees it.
"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."
In 'The Sixth Extinction' Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.
It took scientists a long time to accept the idea that entire species could disappear
It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.
It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from " a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.
This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications.
One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.
Here's Kolbert:
"No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one."
We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.
Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.
"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."
That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century — unless we start taking action now.
NOW WATCH: Here's how much sex happy couples have every month
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ear ... lsignoutmd
Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.
This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear some 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet.
This time though, we’re the asteroid.
At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the book 'The Sixth Extinction,' sees it.
"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."
In 'The Sixth Extinction' Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.
It took scientists a long time to accept the idea that entire species could disappear
It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.
It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from " a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.
This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications.
One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.
Here's Kolbert:
"No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one."
We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.
Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.
"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."
That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century — unless we start taking action now.
NOW WATCH: Here's how much sex happy couples have every month
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ear ... lsignoutmd
Kill the Lights, Not the Birds
As many as a billion birds die each year in this country as they attempt to follow their seasonal routes — flying north in summer months, south in winter. Because many songbirds, sea birds, and other avians rely on stars to navigate, they grow confused by artificial lights. As a result, these birds die in droves as their ancient routes are interrupted by tall, brightly lit, glass buildings.
We can’t unplug the nation for the birds, of course. But bird lovers in New York can celebrate another conversion in their intrepid campaign to dim non-essential lights during the bird migration seasons. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York promised on Monday to begin right away turning off excess lights in state buildings from midnight until dawn as the birds fly across his state.
Mr. Cuomo said state buildings will shut down extra lighting from April 15 through May 31, when birds come to the northeast to breed, and from August 15 through Nov. 15 when they head for softer climates as far away as the Caribbean. He called it “a simple step to help protect these migrating birds that make their home in New York’s forest, lakes and rivers.”
Erin Crotty, executive director for Audubon New York, says this modest change is more than that. “It is critically important from a conservation perspective,” she said. Besides being a source of joy for many people, birds are a vital part of our agriculture and our ecosystem. As Ms. Crotty puts it, “When birds thrive, people prosper.”
Birds are starting to gain more human supporters. In Chicago, about 100 downtown buildings now go dark in migration seasons. Minnesota has started turning out lights in state buildings. In New York City, the Empire State Building has been shutting down decorative lights for decades to save the birds. Other city landlords joined the lights-out program for skyscrapers almost 10 years ago. Many of the city’s most famous towers like the Chrysler Building and the Time Warner towers now shut down non-essential lights after midnight. It saves birds, and, of course, electricity.
Bright lights once helped define human success, a triumph over the limits and perils of nighttime. Now we know that dimming those lights can mean a different kind of success — the survival of thousands and thousands of migrating birds.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
As many as a billion birds die each year in this country as they attempt to follow their seasonal routes — flying north in summer months, south in winter. Because many songbirds, sea birds, and other avians rely on stars to navigate, they grow confused by artificial lights. As a result, these birds die in droves as their ancient routes are interrupted by tall, brightly lit, glass buildings.
We can’t unplug the nation for the birds, of course. But bird lovers in New York can celebrate another conversion in their intrepid campaign to dim non-essential lights during the bird migration seasons. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York promised on Monday to begin right away turning off excess lights in state buildings from midnight until dawn as the birds fly across his state.
Mr. Cuomo said state buildings will shut down extra lighting from April 15 through May 31, when birds come to the northeast to breed, and from August 15 through Nov. 15 when they head for softer climates as far away as the Caribbean. He called it “a simple step to help protect these migrating birds that make their home in New York’s forest, lakes and rivers.”
Erin Crotty, executive director for Audubon New York, says this modest change is more than that. “It is critically important from a conservation perspective,” she said. Besides being a source of joy for many people, birds are a vital part of our agriculture and our ecosystem. As Ms. Crotty puts it, “When birds thrive, people prosper.”
Birds are starting to gain more human supporters. In Chicago, about 100 downtown buildings now go dark in migration seasons. Minnesota has started turning out lights in state buildings. In New York City, the Empire State Building has been shutting down decorative lights for decades to save the birds. Other city landlords joined the lights-out program for skyscrapers almost 10 years ago. Many of the city’s most famous towers like the Chrysler Building and the Time Warner towers now shut down non-essential lights after midnight. It saves birds, and, of course, electricity.
Bright lights once helped define human success, a triumph over the limits and perils of nighttime. Now we know that dimming those lights can mean a different kind of success — the survival of thousands and thousands of migrating birds.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
When Humans Declared War on Fish
ON Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of a campaign of violence against our taxonomic classes, one that has resulted in trillions of casualties.
Oddly, the war itself was a great reprieve for many marine species. Just as Axis and Allied submarines and mines made the transportation of war matériel a highly perilous endeavor, they similarly interfered with fishing. The ability to catch staple seafoods, like cod, declined markedly. Freed from human pursuit, overexploited species multiplied in abundance.
But World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans. Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous, but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s catch for months at a time.
Even human resources developed during the war were later redirected toward fishing: Japanese fighter pilots adept at spotting subsurface Allied submarines were later retrained to look for whales. Likewise, more than a few former Allied pilots found postwar employment hunting bluefin tuna and Atlantic menhaden.
In some ways, the “war machine” wasn’t a metaphor. Across South Asia, leftover explosives were “recycled” for “bomb fishing,” an obscenely destructive way of killing coastal fish, which turned many coral reefs into rubble fields. And the technological overkill continued into the Cold War era: Satellite imagery and GPS technology originally intended to track the movements of the Soviet nuclear arsenal eventually allowed well-populated fish habitats to be clearly identified from space.
Because the war incentivized the creation of ships with much longer oceangoing ranges, it also meant that fishing was transformed from a local endeavor into a global one. “Industrial fishing,” maybe the first globalized economic enterprise, meant the wholesale, permanent occupation of marine ecosystems, instead of the local raids practiced by previous generations.
In addition, emerging economies of scale meant that it wasn’t just the target fish that suffered. With the invention of postwar super trawlers that scooped up everything in their path, a sort of scorched-earth approach to fishing became commonplace.
Taken collectively, the rise of postwar fishing technology meant that the global reported catch rose from some 15 million metric tons at war’s end to 85 million metric tons today — the equivalent, in weight, of the entire human population at the turn of the 20th century, removed from the sea each and every year.
Only the turn of the third millennium saw a new kind of reprieve, this time not caused by human adversity, but by the insight that we need to make peace with other species as well. Growing signs of exhaustion and failure in global fisheries made humans reconsider the totality of their assault.
Marine protected areas, an environmental version of a demilitarized zone, started to spring up, and now cover some 3.5 percent of the ocean. Countries formerly at war began to work together to hammer out new deals for fish, exemplified by both the recent revision of the Common Fisheries Policy in Europe and new efforts underway at the United Nations to better regulate fishing on the high seas, the 60 percent of the oceans outside national control.
Collateral damage to sharks, turtles, whales and sea birds is increasingly becoming unacceptable. And some of those same technologies once used to kill fish with precision are now being used to save them: War-inspired satellite technology is being deployed to identify and pursue rogue vessels fishing illegally.
But in remembering the end of World War II and the deliberate steps that led to a lasting peace, we might contemplate a broader Marshall Plan, which would further restrain our destructive tendencies and technological powers elsewhere, not just in fishing the oceans, but in mining, drilling and otherwise exploiting them.
To be sure, the postwar assault on fish mostly sprang from an honorable intention to feed a growing human population that boomed in a prosperous postwar world. But as in war, everybody loses when there is nothing left to fight for. Only when we fully embrace that simple fact, and act accordingly, will our celebrations resonate among what the author Henry Beston called those “other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opini ... pe=article
ON Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning of a campaign of violence against our taxonomic classes, one that has resulted in trillions of casualties.
Oddly, the war itself was a great reprieve for many marine species. Just as Axis and Allied submarines and mines made the transportation of war matériel a highly perilous endeavor, they similarly interfered with fishing. The ability to catch staple seafoods, like cod, declined markedly. Freed from human pursuit, overexploited species multiplied in abundance.
But World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans. Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous, but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s catch for months at a time.
Even human resources developed during the war were later redirected toward fishing: Japanese fighter pilots adept at spotting subsurface Allied submarines were later retrained to look for whales. Likewise, more than a few former Allied pilots found postwar employment hunting bluefin tuna and Atlantic menhaden.
In some ways, the “war machine” wasn’t a metaphor. Across South Asia, leftover explosives were “recycled” for “bomb fishing,” an obscenely destructive way of killing coastal fish, which turned many coral reefs into rubble fields. And the technological overkill continued into the Cold War era: Satellite imagery and GPS technology originally intended to track the movements of the Soviet nuclear arsenal eventually allowed well-populated fish habitats to be clearly identified from space.
Because the war incentivized the creation of ships with much longer oceangoing ranges, it also meant that fishing was transformed from a local endeavor into a global one. “Industrial fishing,” maybe the first globalized economic enterprise, meant the wholesale, permanent occupation of marine ecosystems, instead of the local raids practiced by previous generations.
In addition, emerging economies of scale meant that it wasn’t just the target fish that suffered. With the invention of postwar super trawlers that scooped up everything in their path, a sort of scorched-earth approach to fishing became commonplace.
Taken collectively, the rise of postwar fishing technology meant that the global reported catch rose from some 15 million metric tons at war’s end to 85 million metric tons today — the equivalent, in weight, of the entire human population at the turn of the 20th century, removed from the sea each and every year.
Only the turn of the third millennium saw a new kind of reprieve, this time not caused by human adversity, but by the insight that we need to make peace with other species as well. Growing signs of exhaustion and failure in global fisheries made humans reconsider the totality of their assault.
Marine protected areas, an environmental version of a demilitarized zone, started to spring up, and now cover some 3.5 percent of the ocean. Countries formerly at war began to work together to hammer out new deals for fish, exemplified by both the recent revision of the Common Fisheries Policy in Europe and new efforts underway at the United Nations to better regulate fishing on the high seas, the 60 percent of the oceans outside national control.
Collateral damage to sharks, turtles, whales and sea birds is increasingly becoming unacceptable. And some of those same technologies once used to kill fish with precision are now being used to save them: War-inspired satellite technology is being deployed to identify and pursue rogue vessels fishing illegally.
But in remembering the end of World War II and the deliberate steps that led to a lasting peace, we might contemplate a broader Marshall Plan, which would further restrain our destructive tendencies and technological powers elsewhere, not just in fishing the oceans, but in mining, drilling and otherwise exploiting them.
To be sure, the postwar assault on fish mostly sprang from an honorable intention to feed a growing human population that boomed in a prosperous postwar world. But as in war, everybody loses when there is nothing left to fight for. Only when we fully embrace that simple fact, and act accordingly, will our celebrations resonate among what the author Henry Beston called those “other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opini ... pe=article
Chemo for the Planet
What’s the best way to reduce the chances of climate change wreaking havoc on Earth?
The most obvious answer — one we’ve known for years now — is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere. This can be done, for instance, by putting a price on carbon and thus create powerful market incentives for industries to lower their carbon footprint. Or by moving to renewable energy sources. Or by changing people’s behavior so that our collective actions radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel the world needs to power itself.
Despite this knowledge, however, few policies have been put in place to spur any of that. In the United States, the effective price of carbon, as Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman point out in their new book, “Climate Shock” is “about zero” (aside from California). Fossil fuels remain the world’s default energy source, and — despite the impressive growth of global solar capacity over the last decade — that’s likely to be the case for decades to come. A carbon tax on the worst emitters has gotten nowhere.
So maybe we need to start thinking about coming at the climate-change problem from a different direction. Instead of hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use, maybe it’s time to at least consider using technology to keep climate change at bay.
The deliberate use of technology to manipulate the environment — usually in the context of fighting climate change — is called geoengineering. One method is carbon capture, traditionally conceived as a process that sucks up carbon from the air and buries it in the ground. A second is called solar radiation management, which uses techniques like shooting sulfate particles into the stratosphere in order to reflect or divert solar radiation back into space. This very effect was illustrated after the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the air, the volcano caused global temperatures to fall, temporarily, by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to Wagner and Weitzman.
Somewhat to my surprise, a good portion of Wagner’s and Weitzman’s book is devoted to the subject of geoengineering, especially solar radiation management, which they describe as relatively inexpensive and technologically feasible, with a serious bang for the buck. The reason I was surprised is that the authors have solid environmental credentials — Weitzman is an environmental economist at Harvard, and Wagner is a senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund — and many environmental groups object to the very idea of geoengineering. They even object to research into the subject, viewing the desire to manipulate nature as immoral. Ben Schreiber of Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, recently described discussions about geoengineering as a “dangerous distraction.”
“Geoengineering presumes that we can apply a dramatic technological fix to climate disruption,” he said, “instead of facing the reality that we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions.”
Schreiber was reacting to two reports by a National Academy of Sciences panel that came out just a week before “Climate Shock.” The reports concluded that, while “climate intervention is no substitute for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions,” the politics around carbon reduction have been so fractious that the day could well come when geoengineering was needed as part of a “portfolio” of responses to global warming. It urged further study for both methods, and, in particular, called for the establishment of a research program to examine the possible risks of solar radiation management.
Wagner and Weitzman do not deny the potential risks; indeed, they write quite cautiously about geoengineering. Wagner told me that it should be thought of as a last resort — something the world could turn to if it had to. He described it as a kind of “chemotherapy for the planet” — something you hope you don’t have to use, but you are ready to use if the need arises. And that requires doing research now to prepare for the future.
David Keith, a scientist who is perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering, told me that he believes that solar radiation management should be used even if decent carbon policies became law. “It has substantial benefits,” he said. “That would be true whether we were cutting emissions or not.”
But he also acknowledged that more research is needed. “If you put sulfur into the atmosphere, will there be a risk of ozone loss?” he said, as an example of the kind of risk that needed to be studied.
There is another kind of risk, of course: the risk that if people thought a technological solution were available to “solve” climate change, it would make it even less likely that they would collectively agree to do what is needed to be done to reduce carbon emissions. It is yet another reason that many environmentalists object to geoengineering.
Still, if disaster is truly approaching, wouldn’t you rather be safe than sorry?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... 05309&_r=0
What’s the best way to reduce the chances of climate change wreaking havoc on Earth?
The most obvious answer — one we’ve known for years now — is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere. This can be done, for instance, by putting a price on carbon and thus create powerful market incentives for industries to lower their carbon footprint. Or by moving to renewable energy sources. Or by changing people’s behavior so that our collective actions radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel the world needs to power itself.
Despite this knowledge, however, few policies have been put in place to spur any of that. In the United States, the effective price of carbon, as Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman point out in their new book, “Climate Shock” is “about zero” (aside from California). Fossil fuels remain the world’s default energy source, and — despite the impressive growth of global solar capacity over the last decade — that’s likely to be the case for decades to come. A carbon tax on the worst emitters has gotten nowhere.
So maybe we need to start thinking about coming at the climate-change problem from a different direction. Instead of hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use, maybe it’s time to at least consider using technology to keep climate change at bay.
The deliberate use of technology to manipulate the environment — usually in the context of fighting climate change — is called geoengineering. One method is carbon capture, traditionally conceived as a process that sucks up carbon from the air and buries it in the ground. A second is called solar radiation management, which uses techniques like shooting sulfate particles into the stratosphere in order to reflect or divert solar radiation back into space. This very effect was illustrated after the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the air, the volcano caused global temperatures to fall, temporarily, by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to Wagner and Weitzman.
Somewhat to my surprise, a good portion of Wagner’s and Weitzman’s book is devoted to the subject of geoengineering, especially solar radiation management, which they describe as relatively inexpensive and technologically feasible, with a serious bang for the buck. The reason I was surprised is that the authors have solid environmental credentials — Weitzman is an environmental economist at Harvard, and Wagner is a senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund — and many environmental groups object to the very idea of geoengineering. They even object to research into the subject, viewing the desire to manipulate nature as immoral. Ben Schreiber of Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, recently described discussions about geoengineering as a “dangerous distraction.”
“Geoengineering presumes that we can apply a dramatic technological fix to climate disruption,” he said, “instead of facing the reality that we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions.”
Schreiber was reacting to two reports by a National Academy of Sciences panel that came out just a week before “Climate Shock.” The reports concluded that, while “climate intervention is no substitute for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions,” the politics around carbon reduction have been so fractious that the day could well come when geoengineering was needed as part of a “portfolio” of responses to global warming. It urged further study for both methods, and, in particular, called for the establishment of a research program to examine the possible risks of solar radiation management.
Wagner and Weitzman do not deny the potential risks; indeed, they write quite cautiously about geoengineering. Wagner told me that it should be thought of as a last resort — something the world could turn to if it had to. He described it as a kind of “chemotherapy for the planet” — something you hope you don’t have to use, but you are ready to use if the need arises. And that requires doing research now to prepare for the future.
David Keith, a scientist who is perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering, told me that he believes that solar radiation management should be used even if decent carbon policies became law. “It has substantial benefits,” he said. “That would be true whether we were cutting emissions or not.”
But he also acknowledged that more research is needed. “If you put sulfur into the atmosphere, will there be a risk of ozone loss?” he said, as an example of the kind of risk that needed to be studied.
There is another kind of risk, of course: the risk that if people thought a technological solution were available to “solve” climate change, it would make it even less likely that they would collectively agree to do what is needed to be done to reduce carbon emissions. It is yet another reason that many environmentalists object to geoengineering.
Still, if disaster is truly approaching, wouldn’t you rather be safe than sorry?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Speakers stress need for sustainable mass transit system
KARACHI: The world’s single-largest environmental health risk is air pollution, said Dr Zafar Fatimi, the head of environmental health sciences at the Aga Khan University Hospital.
He was speaking at a seminar organised by the Pakistan Sustainable Transport (Pakstran) at the Pearl Continental hotel on Thursday. The seminar aimed to raise awareness about the significance of sustainable transport systems, the adverse impacts of carbon emissions and the issues faced by mass transit systems in the country.
Dr Fatimi said that air pollution not only had an adverse impact on human health, but also affected agriculture and climate and contributed significantly to global warming. He suggested that public transport regulation and control could contribute to containing the congestion and emission issues.
Dr Mir Shabbar Ali, chairperson of the urban and infrastructure department at the NED University, said that public transport was the safest, cheapest and most efficient mode of commuting.
“The transport sector in Pakistan is directly linked to economic, social development and environmental issues and all possible measures must be taken to improve the urban transport infrastructure,” said Mahmood Akhtar Cheema, the country representative of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Pakistan. He appreciated the involvement of the media in maintaining a positive approach towards the issue of public transport in the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th, 2015.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/893938/spea ... it-system/
KARACHI: The world’s single-largest environmental health risk is air pollution, said Dr Zafar Fatimi, the head of environmental health sciences at the Aga Khan University Hospital.
He was speaking at a seminar organised by the Pakistan Sustainable Transport (Pakstran) at the Pearl Continental hotel on Thursday. The seminar aimed to raise awareness about the significance of sustainable transport systems, the adverse impacts of carbon emissions and the issues faced by mass transit systems in the country.
Dr Fatimi said that air pollution not only had an adverse impact on human health, but also affected agriculture and climate and contributed significantly to global warming. He suggested that public transport regulation and control could contribute to containing the congestion and emission issues.
Dr Mir Shabbar Ali, chairperson of the urban and infrastructure department at the NED University, said that public transport was the safest, cheapest and most efficient mode of commuting.
“The transport sector in Pakistan is directly linked to economic, social development and environmental issues and all possible measures must be taken to improve the urban transport infrastructure,” said Mahmood Akhtar Cheema, the country representative of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Pakistan. He appreciated the involvement of the media in maintaining a positive approach towards the issue of public transport in the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th, 2015.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/893938/spea ... it-system/
Unnatural Beings
Are machines becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
Artificial intelligence is big on the big screen this year, from the sexy female robots of Ex Machina to the superheroes in the Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hollywood often reflects real-world technological advances, such as those in the field of robotics: last year, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman became the first computer to pass the Turing test—based on Alan Turing’s famous poser: “Can machines think?”—in which a computer must convince a human more than 30 percent of the time that it too is human. Eugene Goostman managed this for 33 percent of the time, although there is disagreement over how valid the test was. Some believe that computers will take over the human world—they are already replacing humans in the workplace, from factory floors to complex monitoring of hospital patients, and our dependence on smartphones and data systems suggests they already have taken over.
But as machines become more humanlike, aren’t we humans meeting them halfway? Are computers not simply an extension of our brains? Our inventions may better resemble humans, but we are becoming more machine-like in the process. Are we no longer a natural species, or are we simply a part of nature that has evolved to become less “natural”?
We have shifted our evolutionary pathway with medical advances to save those who would naturally die in infancy. We have surmounted the limitations that restrict other species by creating artificial environments and external sources of energy. A 72-year-old man now has the same chance of dying as a 30-year-old caveman. We are supernatural: we can fly without wings and dive without gills, we can grow new body parts from cells or build mechanical replacements, we can survive killer diseases and be resuscitated after death, we can communicate with people thousands of miles away, control the biodiversity of life, the direction a river flows, even the temperature of the atmosphere—and all this after being conceived in glass.
Rather than fearing a sci-fi scenario where robots take over the world, we should perhaps be looking more closely at the way our newly powerful species is taking over nature. And asking: Can unnatural humans think intelligently?
https://theamericanscholar.org/unnatura ... urce=email
Are machines becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
Artificial intelligence is big on the big screen this year, from the sexy female robots of Ex Machina to the superheroes in the Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hollywood often reflects real-world technological advances, such as those in the field of robotics: last year, a chatbot called Eugene Goostman became the first computer to pass the Turing test—based on Alan Turing’s famous poser: “Can machines think?”—in which a computer must convince a human more than 30 percent of the time that it too is human. Eugene Goostman managed this for 33 percent of the time, although there is disagreement over how valid the test was. Some believe that computers will take over the human world—they are already replacing humans in the workplace, from factory floors to complex monitoring of hospital patients, and our dependence on smartphones and data systems suggests they already have taken over.
But as machines become more humanlike, aren’t we humans meeting them halfway? Are computers not simply an extension of our brains? Our inventions may better resemble humans, but we are becoming more machine-like in the process. Are we no longer a natural species, or are we simply a part of nature that has evolved to become less “natural”?
We have shifted our evolutionary pathway with medical advances to save those who would naturally die in infancy. We have surmounted the limitations that restrict other species by creating artificial environments and external sources of energy. A 72-year-old man now has the same chance of dying as a 30-year-old caveman. We are supernatural: we can fly without wings and dive without gills, we can grow new body parts from cells or build mechanical replacements, we can survive killer diseases and be resuscitated after death, we can communicate with people thousands of miles away, control the biodiversity of life, the direction a river flows, even the temperature of the atmosphere—and all this after being conceived in glass.
Rather than fearing a sci-fi scenario where robots take over the world, we should perhaps be looking more closely at the way our newly powerful species is taking over nature. And asking: Can unnatural humans think intelligently?
https://theamericanscholar.org/unnatura ... urce=email
Skyrocketing Extinctions Put Humans at Risk
“We can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way—the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history.”
So write Gerardo Ceballos, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Ecology, and his co-authors in a blunt and frightening paper published on Friday in the journal Science Advances. They compared contemporary rates of extinction to the baseline rate before human activity began affecting the environment, and found that species today are disappearing at rates far above the baseline.
Under their most conservative estimates, mammal species have gone extinct at 28 times the baseline rate since 1900, and amphibian species have gone extinct at 22 times the baseline. A less conservative estimate puts those numbers at 55 and 100. If baseline rates had held, the number of species lost in the last century alone would have taken 800 to 10,000 years to go extinct.
Previous studies have also found big increases in extinction rates, but they’ve used less conservative measures and attracted some skepticism. Dr. Ceballos and his team wanted to use extremely conservative estimates of the current extinction rate — if they found a large increase even using those numbers, they’d have especially convincing evidence that we are indeed in a period of mass extinction.
That mass extinction, said Dr. Ceballos, is caused by habitat destruction, pollution, trade in products made from endangered species and climate change.
And unless we make big changes, we face an immeasurable loss. “Imagine a world without lions, without rhinos, without elephants, without birds,” said Dr. Ceballos. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
The forces that are causing animal extinctions threaten us too. In the next few decades, habitat destruction and climate change could cause ecosystems around the world to collapse, Dr. Ceballos said, taking with them the benefits they provide, like maintaining the balance of gases in the atmosphere. “Every time we lose a species,” he said, we draw closer to “a complete collapse of civilization as we understand it.”
He and his team tried to make their paper extremely straightforward to drive the risk home to a general audience. For those disturbed by their conclusions, he offered a few recommendations for stemming the tide of extinctions: Drive an electric car or a hybrid if you can afford to, eat less meat (again, if you can afford to) and avoid products that contribute to habitat destruction (some containing palm oil, for example). And, he added, we need to put pressure on governments to enforce endangered species protections. “What is at stake,” he said, “is the survival of mankind.”
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
“We can confidently conclude that modern extinction rates are exceptionally high, that they are increasing, and that they suggest a mass extinction under way—the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history.”
So write Gerardo Ceballos, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Ecology, and his co-authors in a blunt and frightening paper published on Friday in the journal Science Advances. They compared contemporary rates of extinction to the baseline rate before human activity began affecting the environment, and found that species today are disappearing at rates far above the baseline.
Under their most conservative estimates, mammal species have gone extinct at 28 times the baseline rate since 1900, and amphibian species have gone extinct at 22 times the baseline. A less conservative estimate puts those numbers at 55 and 100. If baseline rates had held, the number of species lost in the last century alone would have taken 800 to 10,000 years to go extinct.
Previous studies have also found big increases in extinction rates, but they’ve used less conservative measures and attracted some skepticism. Dr. Ceballos and his team wanted to use extremely conservative estimates of the current extinction rate — if they found a large increase even using those numbers, they’d have especially convincing evidence that we are indeed in a period of mass extinction.
That mass extinction, said Dr. Ceballos, is caused by habitat destruction, pollution, trade in products made from endangered species and climate change.
And unless we make big changes, we face an immeasurable loss. “Imagine a world without lions, without rhinos, without elephants, without birds,” said Dr. Ceballos. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
The forces that are causing animal extinctions threaten us too. In the next few decades, habitat destruction and climate change could cause ecosystems around the world to collapse, Dr. Ceballos said, taking with them the benefits they provide, like maintaining the balance of gases in the atmosphere. “Every time we lose a species,” he said, we draw closer to “a complete collapse of civilization as we understand it.”
He and his team tried to make their paper extremely straightforward to drive the risk home to a general audience. For those disturbed by their conclusions, he offered a few recommendations for stemming the tide of extinctions: Drive an electric car or a hybrid if you can afford to, eat less meat (again, if you can afford to) and avoid products that contribute to habitat destruction (some containing palm oil, for example). And, he added, we need to put pressure on governments to enforce endangered species protections. “What is at stake,” he said, “is the survival of mankind.”
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... d=45305309
The true meaning of life is to plant trees,
under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
- Nelson Henderson
This land, this water, this air, this planet -
this is our legacy to our young.
- Paul Tsongas
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,
we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology.
We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created,
not just as it looked when we got through with it.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
Consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
- Wilma Mankiller
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet.
We all breathe the same air.
We all cherish our children's future.
And we are all mortal.
- John F. Kennedy
under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
- Nelson Henderson
This land, this water, this air, this planet -
this is our legacy to our young.
- Paul Tsongas
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,
we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology.
We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created,
not just as it looked when we got through with it.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
Consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
- Wilma Mankiller
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet.
We all breathe the same air.
We all cherish our children's future.
And we are all mortal.
- John F. Kennedy
Are We Too Many?
What to do about global population growth
A journalist called me the other day to ask if I would “speak about the unspeakable”: isn’t it true, she said, that if our human population weren’t so large, we wouldn’t have so many environmental problems?
More than seven billion people already inhabit the planet, and by 2050, there may be as many as 10 billion. It took us 50,000 years to reach the first billion, but barely more than a decade to add the most recent billion. The negative effects of so many people competing for Earth’s limited resources are everywhere to be seen.
So what do you propose, I teased, slaughtering half the world’s population? Of course not. She described a charity trying to create sustainable villages in Madagascar that is promoting family planning to reduce the villagers’ environmental footprint—shouldn’t that be practiced everywhere?
It already is. Population growth is slowing, with many countries now in negative growth. The rate peaked around 1968 (the year when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published, and since then has declined by about 50 percent. The average woman in a developing country (outside of China) now has three kids rather than six. Globally, that number stands at 2.36, roughly equal to the “replacement rate” (2.33), which, accounting for child and maternal deaths, is the number of children a woman needs to have, on average, to maintain the current population.
Some countries have actively promoted contraceptive use, later motherhood, and female education to reduce family size. China, the most populous nation, introduced a controversial one-child policy in 1978, which has prevented hundreds of millions of potential births. However, social engineering has turned out to be less effective than economic growth in reducing family size: over the same period, Taiwan, in moving from “developing” to “developed” status, has seen a slightly larger reduction in fertility than China.
As people get richer, better educated, and urban, and as resources such as family land become scarcer, women will continue to have fewer children. It may be that as fertility declines, the global population will fall. Such a shift is already happening in parts of the rich world, such as Japan. The social consequences of this are enormous. Wealthy societies will increasingly have to rely on immigration to support the generational population disparity.
Women still have large families in some places, and there, as elsewhere, they should have access to family planning as a fundamental human right. Smaller families may well bring environmental benefits, but promoting family planning programs on that basis alone makes me very uncomfortable.
Rather than focusing on population growth as the preeminent environmental problem, we need to accept our growing numbers and look to what we can acceptably change. And it’s no secret that it comes down to our use of resources. If product engineers were made to consider the 10-billion global population during the design phase, for example, they could create products that are more durable, longer-lasting, and more easily dismantled for efficient recycling of their materials. Energy could be generated from nonpolluting sources. Instead of wasting 40 percent of our food, as we do now, we could farm, store, transport, and eat it more efficiently.
Until the next population-decimating pandemic sweeps the globe, we need to make our large number part of the environmental solution rather than the problem.
Gaia Vince is a journalist whose 2.5-year trek around 40 countries to witness the effects of humanity’s planetary changes is the subject of her book, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.
https://theamericanscholar.org/are-we-t ... urce=email
What to do about global population growth
A journalist called me the other day to ask if I would “speak about the unspeakable”: isn’t it true, she said, that if our human population weren’t so large, we wouldn’t have so many environmental problems?
More than seven billion people already inhabit the planet, and by 2050, there may be as many as 10 billion. It took us 50,000 years to reach the first billion, but barely more than a decade to add the most recent billion. The negative effects of so many people competing for Earth’s limited resources are everywhere to be seen.
So what do you propose, I teased, slaughtering half the world’s population? Of course not. She described a charity trying to create sustainable villages in Madagascar that is promoting family planning to reduce the villagers’ environmental footprint—shouldn’t that be practiced everywhere?
It already is. Population growth is slowing, with many countries now in negative growth. The rate peaked around 1968 (the year when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published, and since then has declined by about 50 percent. The average woman in a developing country (outside of China) now has three kids rather than six. Globally, that number stands at 2.36, roughly equal to the “replacement rate” (2.33), which, accounting for child and maternal deaths, is the number of children a woman needs to have, on average, to maintain the current population.
Some countries have actively promoted contraceptive use, later motherhood, and female education to reduce family size. China, the most populous nation, introduced a controversial one-child policy in 1978, which has prevented hundreds of millions of potential births. However, social engineering has turned out to be less effective than economic growth in reducing family size: over the same period, Taiwan, in moving from “developing” to “developed” status, has seen a slightly larger reduction in fertility than China.
As people get richer, better educated, and urban, and as resources such as family land become scarcer, women will continue to have fewer children. It may be that as fertility declines, the global population will fall. Such a shift is already happening in parts of the rich world, such as Japan. The social consequences of this are enormous. Wealthy societies will increasingly have to rely on immigration to support the generational population disparity.
Women still have large families in some places, and there, as elsewhere, they should have access to family planning as a fundamental human right. Smaller families may well bring environmental benefits, but promoting family planning programs on that basis alone makes me very uncomfortable.
Rather than focusing on population growth as the preeminent environmental problem, we need to accept our growing numbers and look to what we can acceptably change. And it’s no secret that it comes down to our use of resources. If product engineers were made to consider the 10-billion global population during the design phase, for example, they could create products that are more durable, longer-lasting, and more easily dismantled for efficient recycling of their materials. Energy could be generated from nonpolluting sources. Instead of wasting 40 percent of our food, as we do now, we could farm, store, transport, and eat it more efficiently.
Until the next population-decimating pandemic sweeps the globe, we need to make our large number part of the environmental solution rather than the problem.
Gaia Vince is a journalist whose 2.5-year trek around 40 countries to witness the effects of humanity’s planetary changes is the subject of her book, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.
https://theamericanscholar.org/are-we-t ... urce=email
The Risks of Assisting Evolution
THERE are four locked doors guarding a specialized lab at the Harvard School of Public Health. The doors are meant to prevent insects inside the lab from venturing out — which is essential, because researchers behind those doors are re-engineering mosquitoes by cutting and pasting bits of DNA with tools unimaginable a decade ago.
If researchers can figure out the right combination of genes, they’ll manufacture a mosquito resistant to malaria, which could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But geneticists, bioethicists and others who understand the implications of this new technology are apprehensive. To an astonishing degree, these new tools, which include a technique called Crispr-Cas9, allow us to bend evolution to our will. But will we harness these new technologies to help our planet? Or spark an ecological catastrophe?
In university labs, corporate R&D centers and even inside amateur D.I.Y. laboratories, researchers are creating genetically modified organisms at an unprecedented pace. This biotechnological revolution is so fast-moving that it hasn’t yet fully filtered into the public’s awareness or policy makers’ oversight. The implications of Crispr are now intensely debated by medical researchers, especially since Chinese scientists used the method earlier this year to modify human embryos. But there are few similar conversations about the implications of these technologies for ecosystems, even though those impacts will most likely be more transformative for our planet’s future.
These new tools are much more precise and easy to use than past versions. Researchers can cut and paste DNA into just about any animal, plant or fungus. Whereas modified genes were once likely to be stamped out if by chance they made it into the wild, today’s technologies can supercharge a genetic chain reaction: A technique called “gene drive” ensures a modified gene will be inherited with nearly 100 percent success. This is valuable in making sure that a desirable new gene, like one resistant to the malaria parasite, spreads once introduced into a mosquito population. It also means a mistake can’t easily be taken back.
As scientists, policy makers and citizens, we need to start debating how much genetic tinkering we should allow in the wild and what regulations need to be in place. On the one hand, these new tools could help us cope with many risks to humans and animals, including climate change. Coral could be buffered against warming ocean water through the introduction of heat-tolerant genes. Genes from successful species could be used to help rescue imperiled ones. The method could be used as a form of molecular CPR, helping species adjust to our changed planet more quickly than they could on their own.
But the ecological risks of these manipulations are real and poorly understood. We can’t fully predict the consequences of releasing self-propagating genes into the wild. Encoding a self-destruct gene, for example by altering sex-determining genes so the population eventually ends up entirely male, could be a way to battle invasive species like zebra mussels or coral-destroying sea stars. But such genes could potentially leak to places where these species actually play important ecological roles — and could even jump to other species through interbreeding. Re-engineered genes that escape from crop weeds and spread as a result of gene drive could devastate other ecosystems. Moreover, our understanding of how genomes function is still far from the point where we can change genes and be certain we aren’t creating bigger unintended consequences.
Just about everyone agrees that regulation is urgently needed, but no one has much of an idea what it should look like. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the nonhuman impact of gene drive is expected next spring. In the meantime, two actions could vastly improve prospects for successful and balanced regulation.
First, we need to clarify who has jurisdiction over gene-editing projects. Our current system is inadequate and confusing. A transgenic mosquito release in Florida by the company Oxitec is being evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; a similar proposal for a moth release in New York is being overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Agencies vary widely in their review processes, and the current uncertainty about who’s in charge means that some ventures can fall through the cracks. The White House needs to issue clear guidelines.
Second, we need to pay for studies that explore the potential impacts of these technologies on the environment. Right now, there’s little incentive to explore the risks. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and other groups evaluating those risks have virtually no data to work with. A recent report by the Wilson Center notes that from 2008 to 14, less than 1 percent of synthetic biology funding went toward risk research in the United States, lower than in other emerging technologies. Foundations that are investing mightily in gene-editing technologies should commit to footing some of the bill for research on the environmental risks.
And finally, we need to encourage a public conversation about these technologies. At the end of the day, the escape of a few Harvard mosquitoes will not be the most pressing problem our ecosystems will face. But to confront the big challenges, we’ll need an informed and educated public, sophisticated oversight and a broad conversation about what kinds of advances and risks we want to embrace. We need protections that are stronger than multiple doors.
Elizabeth Alter is an assistant professor of biology at City University of New York, York College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/opini ... pe=article
THERE are four locked doors guarding a specialized lab at the Harvard School of Public Health. The doors are meant to prevent insects inside the lab from venturing out — which is essential, because researchers behind those doors are re-engineering mosquitoes by cutting and pasting bits of DNA with tools unimaginable a decade ago.
If researchers can figure out the right combination of genes, they’ll manufacture a mosquito resistant to malaria, which could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But geneticists, bioethicists and others who understand the implications of this new technology are apprehensive. To an astonishing degree, these new tools, which include a technique called Crispr-Cas9, allow us to bend evolution to our will. But will we harness these new technologies to help our planet? Or spark an ecological catastrophe?
In university labs, corporate R&D centers and even inside amateur D.I.Y. laboratories, researchers are creating genetically modified organisms at an unprecedented pace. This biotechnological revolution is so fast-moving that it hasn’t yet fully filtered into the public’s awareness or policy makers’ oversight. The implications of Crispr are now intensely debated by medical researchers, especially since Chinese scientists used the method earlier this year to modify human embryos. But there are few similar conversations about the implications of these technologies for ecosystems, even though those impacts will most likely be more transformative for our planet’s future.
These new tools are much more precise and easy to use than past versions. Researchers can cut and paste DNA into just about any animal, plant or fungus. Whereas modified genes were once likely to be stamped out if by chance they made it into the wild, today’s technologies can supercharge a genetic chain reaction: A technique called “gene drive” ensures a modified gene will be inherited with nearly 100 percent success. This is valuable in making sure that a desirable new gene, like one resistant to the malaria parasite, spreads once introduced into a mosquito population. It also means a mistake can’t easily be taken back.
As scientists, policy makers and citizens, we need to start debating how much genetic tinkering we should allow in the wild and what regulations need to be in place. On the one hand, these new tools could help us cope with many risks to humans and animals, including climate change. Coral could be buffered against warming ocean water through the introduction of heat-tolerant genes. Genes from successful species could be used to help rescue imperiled ones. The method could be used as a form of molecular CPR, helping species adjust to our changed planet more quickly than they could on their own.
But the ecological risks of these manipulations are real and poorly understood. We can’t fully predict the consequences of releasing self-propagating genes into the wild. Encoding a self-destruct gene, for example by altering sex-determining genes so the population eventually ends up entirely male, could be a way to battle invasive species like zebra mussels or coral-destroying sea stars. But such genes could potentially leak to places where these species actually play important ecological roles — and could even jump to other species through interbreeding. Re-engineered genes that escape from crop weeds and spread as a result of gene drive could devastate other ecosystems. Moreover, our understanding of how genomes function is still far from the point where we can change genes and be certain we aren’t creating bigger unintended consequences.
Just about everyone agrees that regulation is urgently needed, but no one has much of an idea what it should look like. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the nonhuman impact of gene drive is expected next spring. In the meantime, two actions could vastly improve prospects for successful and balanced regulation.
First, we need to clarify who has jurisdiction over gene-editing projects. Our current system is inadequate and confusing. A transgenic mosquito release in Florida by the company Oxitec is being evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; a similar proposal for a moth release in New York is being overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Agencies vary widely in their review processes, and the current uncertainty about who’s in charge means that some ventures can fall through the cracks. The White House needs to issue clear guidelines.
Second, we need to pay for studies that explore the potential impacts of these technologies on the environment. Right now, there’s little incentive to explore the risks. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and other groups evaluating those risks have virtually no data to work with. A recent report by the Wilson Center notes that from 2008 to 14, less than 1 percent of synthetic biology funding went toward risk research in the United States, lower than in other emerging technologies. Foundations that are investing mightily in gene-editing technologies should commit to footing some of the bill for research on the environmental risks.
And finally, we need to encourage a public conversation about these technologies. At the end of the day, the escape of a few Harvard mosquitoes will not be the most pressing problem our ecosystems will face. But to confront the big challenges, we’ll need an informed and educated public, sophisticated oversight and a broad conversation about what kinds of advances and risks we want to embrace. We need protections that are stronger than multiple doors.
Elizabeth Alter is an assistant professor of biology at City University of New York, York College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/opini ... pe=article