3 replies to this topic

[Lazarus Long]

Here is an article from the Time Webzine page:
http://www.time.com/...y/enopener.html

But before I post it in it's entirety I believe that it is a follow up on at least two of the topics that are threads in the old forum, "Is the West responsible for the Poor?" and the "Socialists versus Capitalists" debate. I think that this is the area for discussion of the politics of Eco-Economy but I think that there is also the need to create a science section for these issues as there is a tendancy to include a lot of socio political baggage in the biological side of the arguments. It might be helpful to distinguish the two. B)
LL


YANN ARTHUS-BERTRAND/IMPACT PHOTOS
LOVE THE LAND: Heart shape in foliage

In Johannesburg, leaders will debate what to do about threats to our health, food, water, climate and biodiversity


By JEFFREY KLUGER AND ANDREA DORFMAN


Posted Sunday, August 18, 2002; 7:31 a.m. EST

For starters, let's be clear about what we mean by "saving the earth." The globe doesn't need to be saved by us, and we couldn't kill it if we tried. What we do need to save—and what we have done a fair job of bollixing up so far—is the earth as we like it, with its climate, air, water and biomass all in that destructible balance that best supports life as we have come to know it. Muck that up, and the planet will simply shake us off, as it's shaken off countless species before us. In the end, then, it's us we're trying to save—and while the job is doable, it won't be easy.

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was the last time world leaders assembled to look at how to heal the ailing environment. Now, 10 years later, Presidents and Prime Ministers are convening at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg next week to reassess the planet's condition and talk about where to go from here. In many ways, things haven't changed: the air is just as grimy in many places, the oceans just as stressed, and most treaties designed to do something about it lie in incomplete states of ratification or implementation. Yet we're oddly smarter than we were in Rio. If years of environmental false starts have taught us anything, it's that it's time to quit seeing the job of cleaning up the world as a zero-sum game between industrial progress on the one hand and a healthy planet on the other. The fact is, it's development—well-planned, well-executed sustainable development—that may be what saves our bacon before it's too late.

As the summiteers gather in Johannesburg, TIME is looking ahead to what the unfolding century—a green century—could be like. In this special report, we will examine several avenues to a healthier future, including green industry, green architecture, green energy, green transportation and even a greener approach to wilderness preservation. All of them have been explored before, but never so urgently as now. What gives such endeavors their new credibility is the hope and notion of sustainable development, a concept that can be hard to implement but wonderfully simple to understand.


Though it's not easy to see it from the well-fed West, a third of the world goes hungry

With 6.1 billion people relying on the resources of the same small planet, we're coming to realize that we're drawing from a finite account. The amount of crops, animals and other biomatter we extract from the earth each year exceeds what the planet can replace by an estimated 20%, meaning it takes 14.4 months to replenish what we use in 12—deficit spending of the worst kind. Sustainable development works to reverse that, to expand the resource base and adjust how we use it so we're living off biological interest without ever touching principal. "The old environmental movement had a reputation of élitism," says Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). "The key now is to put people first and the environment second, but also to remember that when you exhaust resources, you destroy people." With that in mind, the summiteers will wrestle with a host of difficult issues that affect both people and the environment. Among them...

POPULATION AND HEALTH
The tide of people may not ebb until the head count hits the 11 billion mark

While the number of people on earth is still rising rapidly, especially in the developing countries of Asia, the good news is that the growth rate is slowing. World population increased 48% from 1975 to 2000, compared with 64% from 1950 to 1975. As this gradual deceleration continues, the population is expected to level off eventually, perhaps at 11 billion sometime in the last half of this century.

Economic-development and family-planning programs have helped slow the tide of people, but in some places, population growth is moderating for all the wrong reasons. In the poorest parts of the world, most notably Africa, infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, cholera and tuberculosis are having a Malthusian effect. Rural-land degradation is pushing people into cities, where crowded, polluted living conditions create the perfect breeding grounds for sickness. Worldwide, at least 68 million are expected to die of AIDS by 2020, including 55 million in sub-Saharan Africa. While any factor that eases population pressures may help the environment, the situation would be far less tragic if rich nations did more to help the developing world reduce birth rates and slow the spread of disease.

Efforts to provide greater access to family planning and health care have proved effective. Though women in the poorest countries still have the most children, their collective fertility rate is 50% lower than it was in 1969 and is expected to decline more by 2050. Other programs targeted at women include basic education and job training. Educated mothers not only have a stepladder out of poverty, but they also choose to have fewer babies.

Rapid development will require good health care for the young since there are more than 1 billion people ages 15 to 24. Getting programs in place to keep this youth bubble healthy could make it the most productive generation ever conceived. Says Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund: "It's a window of opportunity to build the economy and prepare for the future."

FOOD
As we try to nourish 6 billion people, both bioengineering and organic farming will help

Though it's not always easy to see it from the well-fed West, up to a third of the world is in danger of starving. Two billion people lack reliable access to safe, nutritious food, and 800 million of them—including 300 million children—are chronically malnourished.

Agricultural policies now in place define the very idea of unsustainable development. Just 15 cash crops such as corn, wheat and rice provide 90% of the world's food, but planting and replanting the same crops strips fields of nutrients and makes them more vulnerable to pests. Slash-and-burn planting techniques and overreliance on pesticides further degrade the soil.

Solving the problem is difficult, mostly because of the ferocious debate over how to do it. Biotech partisans say the answer lies in genetically modified crops—foods engineered for vitamins, yield and robust growth. Environmentalists worry that fooling about with genes is a recipe for Frankensteinian disaster. There is no reason, however, that both camps can't make a contribution.

Better crop rotation and irrigation can help protect fields from exhaustion and erosion. Old-fashioned cross-breeding can yield plant strains that are heartier and more pest-resistant. But in a world that needs action fast, genetic engineering must still have a role—provided it produces suitable crops.

Increasingly, those crops are being created not just by giant biotech firms but also by home-grown groups that know best what local consumers need.

The National Agricultural Research Organization of Uganda has developed corn varieties that are more resistant to disease and thrive in soil that is poor in nitrogen. Agronomists in Kenya are developing a sweet potato that wards off viruses. Also in the works are drought-tolerant, disease-defeating and vitamin-fortified forms of such crops as sorghum and cassava—hardly staples in the West, but essentials elsewhere in the world. The key, explains economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is not to dictate food policy from the West but to help the developing world build its own biotech infrastructure so it can produce the things it needs the most. "We can't presume that our technologies will bail out poor people in Malawi," he says. "They need their own improved varieties of sorghum and millet, not our genetically improved varieties of wheat and soybeans."

WATER
In 25 years two-thirds of humanity may live in nations running short of life's elixir

For a world that is 70% water, things are drying up fast. Only 2.5% of water is fresh, and only a fraction of that is accessible. Meanwhile, each of us requires about 50 quarts per day for drinking, bathing, cooking and other basic needs. At present, 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and more than 2.4 billion lack adequate sanitation. "Unless we take swift and decisive action," says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, "by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may be living in countries that face serious water shortages."

The answer is to get smart about how we use water. Agriculture accounts for about two-thirds of the fresh water consumed. A report prepared for the summit thus endorses the "more crop per drop" approach, which calls for more efficient irrigation techniques, planting of drought- and salt-tolerant crop varieties that require less water and better monitoring of growing conditions, such as soil humidity levels. Improving water-delivery systems would also help, reducing the amount that is lost en route to the people who use it.

One program winning quick support is dubbed WASH—for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for All—a global effort that aims to provide water services and hygiene training to everyone who lacks them by 2015. Already, the U.N., 28 governments and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have signed on.

ENERGY AND CLIMATE
Car exhaust is a major source of the heat-trapping gases that produce global warming

In the U.S., people think of rural electrification as a long-ago legacy of the New Deal. In many parts of the world, it hasn't even happened yet. About 2.5 billion people have no access to modern energy services, and the power demands of developing economies are expected to grow 2.5% per year. But if those demands are met by burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, more and more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will hit the atmosphere. That, scientists tell us, will promote global warming, which could lead to rising seas, fiercer storms, severe droughts and other climatic disruptions.

Of more immediate concern is the heavy air pollution caused in many places by combustion of wood and fossil fuels. A new U.N. Environment Program report warns of the effects of a haze across all southern Asia. Dubbed the "Asian brown cloud" and estimated to be 2 miles thick, it may be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from respiratory diseases.

The better way to meet the world's energy needs is to develop cheaper, cleaner sources. Pre-Johannesburg proposals call for eliminating taxation and pricing systems that encourage oil use and replacing them with policies that provide incentives for alternative energy. In India there has been a boom in wind power because the government has made it easier for entrepreneurs to get their hands on the necessary technology and has then required the national power grid to purchase the juice that wind systems produce.

Other technologies can work their own little miracles. Micro-hydroelectric plants are already operating in numerous nations, including Kenya, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The systems divert water from streams and rivers and use it to run turbines without complex dams or catchment areas. Each plant can produce as much as 200 kilowatts—enough to electrify 200 to 500 homes and businesses—and lasts 20 years. One plant in Kenya was built by 200 villagers, all of whom own shares in the cooperative that sells the power.

The Global Village Energy Partnership, which involves the World Bank, the UNDP and various donors, wants to provide energy to 300 million people, as well as schools, hospitals and clinics in 50,000 communities worldwide over 10 years. The key will be to match the right energy source to the right users. For example, solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity might be cost-effective in remote areas, while extending the power grid might be better in Third World cities.

BIODIVERSITY
Unless we guard wilderness, as many as half of all species could vanish in this century

More than 11,000 species of animals and plants are known to be threatened with extinction, about a third of all coral reefs are expected to vanish in the next 30 years and about 36 million acres of forest are being razed annually. In his new book, The Future of Life, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson writes of his worry that unless we change our ways half of all species could disappear by the end of this century.

The damage being done is more than aesthetic. Many vanishing species provide humans with both food and medicine. What's more, once you start tearing out swaths of ecosystem, you upset the existing balance in ways that harm even areas you didn't intend to touch. Environmentalists have said this for decades, and now that many of them have tempered ecological absolutism with developmental realism, more people are listening.

The Equator Initiative, a public-private group, is publicizing examples of sustainable development in the equatorial belt. Among the projects already cited are one to help restore marine fisheries in Fiji and another that promotes beekeeping as a source of supplementary income in rural Kenya. The Global Conservation Trust hopes to raise $260 million to help conserve genetic material from plants for use by local agricultural programs. "When you approach sustainable development from an environmental view, the problems are global," says the U.N.'s Malloch Brown. "But from a development view, the front line is local, local, local."

If that's the message environmental groups and industry want to get out, they appear to be doing a good job of it. Increasingly, local folks act whether world political bodies do or not. California Governor Gray Davis signed a law last month requiring automakers to cut their cars' carbon emissions by 2009. Many countries are similarly proactive. Chile is encouraging sustainable use of water and electricity; Japan is dangling financial incentives before consumers who buy environmentally sound cars; and tiny Mauritius is promoting solar cells and discouraging use of plastics and other disposables.

Business is getting right with the environment too. The Center for Environmental Leadership in Business, based in Washington, is working with auto and oil giants including Ford, Chevron, Texaco and Shell to draft guidelines for incorporating biodiversity conservation into oil and gas exploration. And the center has helped Starbucks develop purchasing guidelines that reward coffee growers whose methods have the least impact on the environment. Says Nitin Desai, secretary-general of the Johannesburg summit: "We're hoping that partnerships—involving governments, corporations, philanthropies and NGOs—will increase the credibility of the commitment to sustainable development."

Will that happen? In 1992 the big, global measures of the Rio summit seemed like the answer to what ails the world. In 2002 that illness is—in many respects—worse. But if Rio's goal was to stamp out the disease of environmental degradation, Johannesburg's appears to be subtler—and perhaps better: treating the patient a bit at a time, until the planet as a whole at last gets well.


RELATED GRAPHIC: State of the Planet
http://www.time.com/.../enopener.html#

MAP: Trouble Spots
http://www.time.com/.../enopener.html#

[Lazarus Long]

Another one goes, and another one goes, and another one bites the dust... [angry]
LL

Amazon Forest Still Burning Despite the Good Intentions

http://www.nytimes.c...cas/23BRAZ.html

By LARRY ROHTER


TRAIRÃO, Brazil, Aug. 19 — By decree, the official burning season here in the Amazon is supposed to be severely limited in scope and not to start until Sept. 15. Yet the skies south of here are already thick with smoke as big landowners set the jungle ablaze to clear the way for cattle pasture and lucrative crops like soybeans.

The Amazon basin, which is larger than all of Europe and extends over nine countries, accounts for more than half of what remains of the world's tropical forests. But in spite of heightened efforts in recent years to limit deforestation and encourage "sustainable development," the assault on its resources continues, with Brazil in the lead.

On Monday, the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development is to begin in Johannesburg. That conference comes 10 years after an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was attended by more than 100 nations, who signed a series of ambitious agreements aimed at protecting forests, oceans, the atmosphere and wildlife.

As the host country, Brazil was one of the sponsors of those accords. Within three years, however, the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of Brazil's territory, had doubled, to nearly 12,000 square miles, an area the size of Maryland.

Since then, the rate of destruction has slowed and the government has begun numerous initiatives aimed at further curbing the cutting and burning of the forest. Just this week, the government announced the creation of the world's largest tropical national park, in the northern state of Amapá near the border with French Guyana.

But the Brazilian jungle is still disappearing at a rate of more than 6,000 square miles a year, an area the size of Connecticut. What is more, the deforestation is likely to accelerate, environmentalists warn, as the government moves ahead with an ambitious $43 billion eight-year infrastructure program known as Brazil Advances, aimed at improving the livelihoods of the 17 million people in the Amazon.

Over the last 30 years, most destruction in the Amazon has been in a 2,000-mile-long "arc of deforestation" along the southern and eastern fringe of the jungle. But now the government is moving to turn the Cuiabá-Santarém road, which slices through the heart of the forest, into a paved, all-weather highway so that farmers to the south can more easily transport soybeans and other products to the Amazon River and then to Europe.

Soybean production has begun to play a big role in the destruction of the jungle. Both the deforestation here and the growing pressure to finish paving the highway are to a large extent driven by economic developments half a world away, in China. Rising incomes there have created a huge and expanding middle class whose appetite for soybeans is growing rapidly.

As recently as 1993, the year after the Rio conference, China was still a soybean exporter. Now it is the world's biggest importer of soy oil, meal and beans. Brazil, the largest exporter of soy products after the United States, is rushing to meet that demand.

The potential environmental impact of asphalting the 1,100-mile-long road is enormous. About 80 percent of deforestation in the Amazon occurs in a 31-mile corridor on either side of highways and roads, and when these are paved "deforestation goes up tremendously," said Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus, known as INPA.

A paved section of the highway ends barely 12 miles from here, putting this remote and dusty town of 14,000 on the front line of the agricultural frontier. Dozens of sawmills now operate along the road where just a handful existed five years ago, and at night, after government inspectors have gone home, trucks carrying illegal loads of valuable hardwoods rattle down side roads that lead deep into the jungle.

"The sensation is that of being on a battlefield and not having the weapons to defend ourselves," said the Rev. Anselmo Ferreira Melo, the parish priest here.

Trairão, founded in 1993, is named for a game fish that has traditionally been plentiful throughout the Amazon. But the new lumber yards here are dumping so much sawdust into local streams that the fish population has dropped sharply.

No one knows exactly the quantity of greenhouse gases Brazil is already pumping into the atmosphere as a result of such efforts to tame its vast jungle. Though a national inventory of carbon emissions was supposed to have been announced three years ago, it still has not been made public.

But scientists at INPA estimate that Brazil's carbon emissions may have risen as much as 50 percent since 1990. They calculate that "land use changes," most of which occur in the Amazon, now pour about 400 million tons of greenhouse gases into the air each year, dwarfing the 90 million tons annually from fossil fuel use in Brazil and making it one of the 10 top polluters in the world.

Part of the recent decline in deforestation rates is attributable to the Brazilian economy, whose rapid growth was responsible for the spike of the mid-1990's but has since cooled, or simply to weather patterns. But scientists also credit specific Brazilian government steps for the improved performance.

One symbolically important step with practical consequences has been the demarcation of indigenous lands. According to government statistics, more than 385,000 square miles, or 12 percent of Brazil's territory, an area larger than England and France combined, has been formally transferred to Indian control.

As a result, tribes with a warrior tradition, like the Kayapó, Wamiri-Atroari and Mundurucú, have rushed to defend the reserves set aside for them and become aggressive defenders of the forest.

"If you put together satellite images of all the fires burning in the Amazon, you can see the outline of the indigenous areas just from that," said Stephan Schwartzman, senior scientist at Environmental Defense in Washington. "Where Indian land starts is where the fires stop."

In some areas of the Amazon, the Brazilian government's environmental protection agency, known as Ibama, has also played a leading role in deterring deforestation. An environmental crimes law passed in 1998 gave the agency, founded in 1989, new enforcement powers, which it has used, albeit selectively, in raids aimed at arresting and fining the most blatant violators of the law.

"Ibama is full of problems and underfunded, but they are still making progress, thanks especially to these blitzes," said Daniel Nepstad of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Belém. "The cost of doing business as a logger has increased and the profit margins have gone down, and the sense of impunity that existed just a few years ago has diminished."

But the initiative that the Brazilian government sees as most promising is in the southern Amazon state of Mato Grosso, where deforestation is licensed and monitored by satellite. Though the state's name means "thick jungle" in Portuguese, huge deforestation began in the 1970's and accelerated with the soybean boom of the 1990's.

Since the program went into effect late in 1999, deforestation in Mato Grosso, which has had the fastest growing economy of any Brazilian state, has declined by more than half, to about 4,600 square miles over the two-year period that ended on Jan 1.

Large ranchers and farmers can clear no more than 20 percent of their land, and those who exceed that limit are punished with fines and prison sentences.

"The truth is that nobody ever controlled this, and that you can't control properties one by one even if you have an entire army of men," said Federico Muller, director of the state's environmental protection agency. "But now the satellite does it for us. It's like Big Brother, an all-seeing eye in the jungle."

But the neighboring states of Pará and Rondônia, where deforestation has been equally intense, have yet to adopt the initiative. As a result, loggers, sawmill operators, cattle ranchers, land speculators and other adventurers have simply moved northward up the Cuiabá-Santarém highway, deeper into the heart of the jungle, to areas like this one.

Armed with guns and global positioning satellite locators, loggers are also pushing into the Tapajós National Park west of Trairão and other nature reserves. Peasant settlers here say that they have complaimed to the police and to the environmental protection agency but that nothing has been done.

"Everything functions on the basis of bribes or threats, and so Ibama does not act," said José Rodrigues do Nascimento, who farms 250 acres. "These loggers tell us they have the authorization to go in there, but they never show any papers, and because they have gunman, you don't dare to contradict them."

José Carlos Carvalho, the environment minister, acknowledged problems but promised improvements by next year's dry season, saying that the states of Pará and Rondônia were now installing the same monitoring system as Mato Grosso. In addition, he said, the environmental protection agency is to double the number of its agents, to 2,000.

"We recognize that the predatory occupation of the jungle doesn't work and has to give way to a system of sustainable development, and we are moving in that direction," he said.

©New York Times

[Lazarus Long]

And here is why it is hard to separate the scienc e from the politics.

Antarctic Ozone Hole to Expand in Coming Weeks
http://story.news.ya...ence_ozone_dc_3

Fri Aug 23, 6:32 AM ET

GENEVA (Reuters) - The annual depletion of the earth's protective ozone layer has begun over Antarctica and the hole is set to expand in coming weeks, the World Meteorological Organization ( news - web sites) said on Friday.

In its latest bulletin, the WMO said the size of the ozone hole over the Antarctic was "normal for this time of year."

The depletion began as delegates prepared to discuss environmental issues in Johannesburg next week at the Earth Summit, officially the United Nations ( news - web sites)' World Summit on Sustainable Development.

The ozone layer protects people from harmful radiation and many scientists blame its depletion on chemicals such as chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) and some crop fumigants.

The Geneva-based United Nations agency said a second region of very low ozone levels had appeared near the southern tip of South America and spread north over much of Argentina.

"As expected, the annually occurring ozone hole is again forming over Antarctica. The ozone hole is still small, but will expand and deepen during the next four to six weeks," WMO said.

"The low ozone observed over Argentina may not be entirely due to the ozone hole but have a meteorological component, although the progression of the low ozone region from the Antarctic perimeter northward suggests ozone loss has contributed," it added.

WMO said earlier this month that as the sun rises over Antarctica, chemical ozone loss could be expected to occur with an intensity linked to weather conditions in the stratosphere, particularly in September and October. Weather conditions would strongly influence the extent and persistence of the ozone hole.

On Friday, WMO said measurements of ozone over the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires were up to 20 per cent lower than the "pre-ozone hole norms" based on readings from 1964 to 1976.

Satellite measurements indicated that ozone values over the British island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean were 35 per cent below the readings from that period, it added.

Related Article
Glaciers Melting Worldwide, Study Finds
Contra Costa Times (Aug 21, 2002)
http://story.news.ya...ence_ozone_dc_3

[Lazarus Long]

I would like this thread to be treated as more formal exchange of informational articles and discussion on relevant aspects of the comparative ethics for defining Habitat Competition for Species. I will start it with a significant article from today's news.

This is a complex area that clearly overlaps my thesis on Human versus Natural Selection but here is a specific example of biodiversity destruction that will effect survival and all the claims about how we have solved all the problems of population with regard to resources from food to general aspects of energy resource distribution for the human population that is alive today and all who survive into the future whether possessing of longevity or not.

But there are the larger questions of values and what kind of world those of us who intend to survive will cohabit, how we will do so, and with what type of biodiversity (cultures and species) we will cohabit?

I think these are vital aspects of our debate about immortalist memetics and also a question relating to our species survival.

Scientists: Only 10 Percent of Big Ocean Fish Left
Wed May 14, 3:14 PM ET
http://story.news.ya...science_fish_dc

By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - Large predatory fish -- marlin, tuna and swordfish -- are disappearing from the world's oceans, with their numbers down by 90 percent in the past 50 years, Canadian scientists said on Wednesday.

"From giant blue marlin to mighty blue fin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean," said Ransom Myers, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada.

"There is no blue frontier left."

Myers and his colleague Boris Worm estimate that compared with when industrial fishing began in the 1950s, less than 10 percent of large predatory fish species, the old men of the sea, have survived.

"This means that the larger, more sensitive species like the sharks will go extinct unless we reduce fishing in a very large-scale manner," Myers said in an interview.

The great fish, like the one immortalized in Ernest Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea" are not only dwindling in numbers, they are also getting smaller. Top predator fish are about one fifth to one half the size they used to be. Many fish never get the chance to reproduce, according to the researchers.

People had presumed there were untapped reservoirs of large fish, but Myers said that is not true. He warned that the sustainability of fisheries worldwide is being compromised.

"This calls for a reduction in fishing worldwide so we can allow the natural diversity and fish species to persist in the world's oceans," he said.

"A minimum reduction of 50 percent of fish mortality (the percentage of fish killed each year) may be necessary to avoid further declines of particularly sensitive species."

As well as the big predators, there are also fewer large ground fish such as cod, halibut, skate and flounder.

In a 10-year study, Myers and Worm examined data from fisheries and scientific research institutes to estimate the number of fish remaining in the world's oceans.

"It is a worldwide analysis...to find out what is happening in the world's oceans," said Myers, whose research is published in the science journal Nature.

If stocks are restored, he added, fishermen could get more fish out of the oceans with a fraction of the effort. If they aren't, the great fish will suffer the fate of the dinosaurs.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 15 May 2003 - 11:07 PM.