42 replies to this topic

[Lazarus Long]

I am opening this topic up here but I think it deserves its own category discussion. Consider it where we can discuss evolutionary theory as well as the practical realities of futurism and our environment. It is a broad area of related life sciences from medical ecology to Gaia habitat study.

I will try and set an example with the following article from todays BBC but it is here where we should post and discuss E.O. Wilson and John Fukuyama's well prepared study on evolution and death, and the larger schema of what is understood by the related aspects of cross species genetics.

I would argue a growing study of Human versus Natural Selection as the operative paradigm is what is required to address the rising level of threat to life on Earth.

Please contribute folks and Kevin apologies. This topic has gotten confused by consecutive mergers of related posts and threads but I am working to arrange it coherently.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 06 June 2004 - 05:05 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

Nature's Web

Monday, 30 September, 2002, 21:02 GMT 22:02 UK
Life's not so complicated web

By Arran Frood



It is easy to claim that everything is connected to everything else, but a hard proposition to test scientifically.

Now research by ecologists studying food webs has shown this may after all be the case.

They found species are much more closely linked to each other than previously thought.

This may have implications for conservation and biodiversity, as the consequences of species extinction are likely to be more widely felt than was realised.

Food theory

Two studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) combine network analysis with real-world ecological data to search for patterns in food webs: the chain of who eats whom in a complex biological system.

Close relationships like that between predator and prey clearly link species, but there appear also to be similar links between species which are not obviously connected.

Dr Neo Martinez and colleagues from San Francisco State University (SFSU), and Alberto Barabasi from the University of Notre Dame, both US, examined the number of links between species in food webs of different sizes.

They found over 95% of species from a variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats were within three links of each other, with the average number of links being just two.

Ecologists used to think that within large communities species would be four or more links away from each other, and therefore unlikely to affect others in the event of extinction, for example.

Sensitive parts

This research shows few, if any, species in the same community are four links apart.

This means that invasions, extinctions and biodiversity loss may affect many more species than previously thought, because so few species will be far enough apart not to be affected.

Dr Martinez says: "This means that every species is indeed ecologically connected to every other species within a community.

"Food webs may largely conform to simple equations. Finding them would greatly help us focus on the parts of the system most sensitive to biodiversity loss.

"People should not be so confident that they can predict the consequences of species extinctions or invasions, like in biocontrol.

"The law of unintended consequences appears particularly applicable to large complex ecological systems."

World of cliques

Some scientists are coming round to this new way of thinking. "They are probably right on this," says Dr Jane Memmott, an ecologist specialising in food webs and biocontrol from the University of Bristol, UK.

"If it makes people more careful of damaging the environment, then it is of good practical use." She adds that more good quality field data is needed to confirm and complement the theory.

The US researchers also investigated whether food webs conformed to what is called the "small world" phenomenon, the "six degrees of separation" found in a number of biological, social and technological networks, from the neural cells of worms to the pages of the worldwide web.

"Small worlds" typically have numbers of clique-like clusters of nodes a short distance apart.

Useful tools

As in social groups, cliques tend to form in which every member knows all or most of the other members. The researchers used a measure called the clustering coefficient that describes how clique-like a network is.

In some small worlds, they found, most nodes had relatively few links, but a few were the super-connected hubs of the system. Such networks are obviously very vulnerable if the lose the rare highly-connected nodes.

But analysis of 16 complex food webs with between 25 and 172 nodes from various habitats showed most were not small worlds and did not resemble the technological networks such as the web and the US power grid.

"Physicists want to see one universal type," says Dr Martinez. "Ecologists want to say every habitat and system is different.

"We're treading the middle ground, which some see as a no-man's land. Others like us see it as a much more persuasive and scientifically useful claim than either of the extremes."

See also:

24 Aug 01 | Science/Nature
Dying species 'endangering' Earth
http://news.bbc.co.u...ure/1507866.stm

28 Sep 00 | Science/Nature
Growing threat to rare species
http://news.bbc.co.u...ture/938038.stm

Internet links:

PNAS http://www.pnas.org/

Neo Martinez http://online.sfsu.edu/~webhead/

Reagan lobbies for stem cell research
http://news.bbc.co.u...cas/2288255.stm

Boost for life on Jupiter moon
http://news.bbc.co.u...ure/2284852.stm

Plans to decode dogs
http://news.bbc.co.u...ure/2283397.stm

Links to more Science/Nature stories are on the main page.

[advancedatheist]

(AdvAth: I placed the content from the ban fishing article in the post... the content replaced was from the article on dropping food production..-- kp)
http://news.independ...sp?story=438723

Ban fishing in third of all seas, scientists say
By Severin Carrell
31 August 2003


All fishing should be banned in a third of the world's oceans to reverse a catastrophic decline in fish stocks such as cod and tuna, British scientists have warned.

In a new study, they recommend that large areas of ocean, including the North Sea, around the Falklands, and the Gulf of California, should be made into legally protected marine reserves, policed by naval patrols and satellites.

The dramatic proposal - expected to be endorsed by an international conference on wildlife reserves next month - follows mounting alarm about the worldwide collapse of fish, dolphin, whale and turtle populations, and the destruction of ancient coral reefs.

Edited by kevin, 31 August 2003 - 09:05 PM.

[patrick]

Naturally, it would never occur to these people that fish farms have proven that commercialization can save fish species.

I say, if you want to save a species, put them on the dinner table. We're never going to run out of cattle. Tiger burgers, manatee milkshakes, whale fries, why not?

I won't even mention that some studies have found that there are *too many* whales in the oceans. Nope. Won't even go near it.


Patrick

[advancedatheist]

Naturally, it would never occur to these people that fish farms have proven that commercialization can save fish species.

Unfortunately farmed fish appear to be nutritionally inferior to the wild varieties, in addition to accumulating the kinds of toxins our farming practices put into our food supply:

Farmed & Dangerous

[outlawpoet]

Farming would definitely reduce the impact on fish species by replacing them as a resource, but commercial cattle or even plants in no way recapitulate the original ecosystems or animals that these farms replace and replicate. So I think it's a mistake to think of farming as 'preserving' species.

Banning fishing in particular parts of the sea will reduce stress to populations and may help. But most marine populations are so fluid as to depend on multiple areas of sea for their life-cycle. the main benefit this proposal could bring is by reducing the areas commercial fishing can take place, thus reducing the total amount of commercial fishing. Which is a risky proposition because they may simple go on more fishing expeditions in smaller areas, and turn to factory fishing methods, increasingly.

The danger here is that marine ecologies may begin to collapse, and we'll start losing oxygen producing biomass. Phytoplankton is responsible for a far greater percentage of our breathable air than any land-based species of plant. Threats to ecology are threats to us, which is why we should pay attention.

Patrick, I'm unaware of any studies showing that too many whales exist. It's difficult to see how. If there are too many whales relative to food supply, they'd just die off. If there are too many whales per area, they'd stop mating, or drive each other away from mating grounds. Not to mention that it's hard to imagine how there could be philosophically too many whales. It's a similar topic when people suggest that human population should be curtailed. I have an instinctually high regard for people and whales may qualify. Most species have language, names, memories, and society. Unfortunately for whale-human relations, they've not particularly manipulative creatures, have no tools, and simple culture. Certainly not complex enough of a culture to start accumulating complexity the way our cultures have.

The fish farm concept is a good one, with terrible implementations that result in the toxicity and decreased health noted in the article above. I have yet to see free-range farming, which is an excellent and doable idea, or see very large closed range farming, such as bubble-inclosure, or semipermeable plastic enclosures. As it is, you're far safer eating fresh ocean caught fish, as harmful a concept as that is. Something to keep in mind is that the vast majority of commercial fishing is not for human consumption. But rather on small unappetizing fish like menhaden, to grind for protein meals, animal feed, and industry. These are business to business transactions, sadly, and will only be affected by legality and total costs.

[chubtoad]

http://www.scienceda...31010075307.htm
Source: American Heart Association
Date: 2003-10-10

Air Pollution May Increase Stroke Risk
DALLAS, Oct. 10 – High pollution levels may make people more susceptible to stroke, according to a report in today's rapid access issue of Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers collected data on 23,179 hospital stroke admissions from 1997 to 2000 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan – the island's second largest city and heavy industrial area. They compared air pollution levels on the dates of admissions with air pollution levels one week before and one week after admissions, said Chun-Yuh Yang, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor, director and dean at the Institute of Public Health, College of Health Sciences at the Kaohsiung Medical University.

The researchers found an association between exposure to increasing levels of two common pollutants and hospital admissions for stroke, particularly on warm days, i.e., 20 degrees Celsius or warmer (68 degrees or warmer Fahrenheit).
"Particulate matter (PM10) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) seem to be the most important pollutants and the effects appear to be stronger on warm days," Yang said.

For each interquartile change – 66.33 microgram per cubic meter change for PM10 and 7.08 parts per billion change for NO2– the risk of hospital admission for primary intracerebral hemorrhage (bursting of a defective brain vessel) increased by 54 percent.

The risk of hospital admission from ischemic stroke (resulting from a blood clot blocking blood flow to the brain) increased by 46 percent for PM10 per interquartile change and 55 percent for NO2 per interquartile change.

Studies have shown associations between air pollution and daily death rates for respiratory and heart disease. But findings related to pollution's effect on stroke have conflicted.
"This study provides new evidence that higher levels of ambient pollutants increase the risk of hospital admissions for stroke, especially on warm days," he said.

On cool days, researchers noted a link between carbon dioxide levels and ischemic stroke admissions, but believe this may have been a finding by chance.

Many experts suspect that air pollution may affect blood volume and resistance of the blood vessels and heart structures, known collectively as the hemodynamic system. High temperatures may also affect blood viscosity.

"Doctors should know that hemodynamic disturbances that may lead to the risk of cardiovascular events may also lead to an increased risk of other types of circulatory events, such as stroke," Yang said.

Substantiating these findings with further studies could lead to developing drug interventions that might protect the public from transient exposure to ambient pollutants, such as those experienced during rush-hour traffic. "In hot weather, we recommend that people avoid pollution, stay inside and use an air conditioner if needed," he said.

As stroke is associated with air pollution, lowering the level of exposure could considerably reduce the associated health burden independent of behavior change, he said.

[chubtoad]

http://www.scienceda...31016063501.htm
Source: North Central Research Station / USDA Forest Service
Date:
2003-10-16

Down And Dirty: Airborne Ozone Can Alter Forest Soil
HOUGHTON, Mich. -- The industrial pollutant ozone, long known to be harmful to many kinds of plants, can also affect the very earth in which they grow.

Researchers at Michigan Technological University and the North Central Research Station of the USDA Forest Service have discovered that ozone can reduce soil carbon formation--a measure of the amount of organic matter being added to the soil. Their findings are published in the Oct. 16 issue of the journal Nature.

The scientists exposed forest stands to increased levels of two atmospheric pollutants, ozone and carbon dioxide. Soil carbon formation dropped off dramatically in the plots fumigated with a mix of ozone and carbon dioxide compared to carbon dioxide alone.

"This research shows that changes in atmospheric chemistry can cascade through the forest and affect soils," says Dr. Kurt Pregitzer, a coauthor of the Nature paper and a professor in Michigan Tech's School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science. "Reductions we have observed in plant growth under elevated ozone appear to result in similar reductions in soil carbon formation."

The findings could have implications for the health of forests in areas with high levels of ozone, says Dr. Wendy Loya, the lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral research scientist at Michigan Tech. "Under normal conditions, forest litter, which is made up of fallen leaves, twigs and dead roots, decomposes and releases carbon that is then stored in the soil," she says. "Under conditions of elevated ozone, the amount of soil carbon formed is reduced."

Because increased carbon dioxide tends to cause plants to grow more quickly and take in more carbon from the atmosphere, some scientists and policymakers have speculated that forests could become "carbon sinks," absorbing carbon dioxide and mitigating its greenhouse effects.

However, the soil in the plots exposed to an ozone/carbon dioxide mixture gained only half the carbon as plots fumigated with carbon dioxide alone. Thus, plants and soils may be less able to clean the air of excess carbon dioxide when ozone levels are high.

Ozone pollution occurs at levels known to be toxic to both plants and people in many parts of the United States and throughout the world. It is formed when chemicals produced by burning fossil fuels and from industrial processes react in the presence of sunlight and warm temperatures.


In addition to Loya and Pregitzer, other coauthors of the Nature article, "Reduction of Soil Carbon Formation by Tropospheric Ozone Under Elevated Carbon Dioxide," are Dr. John King, an assistant professor of ecosystems at Michigan Tech; and research ecologist Dr. Christian Giardina and ecologist Noah Karberg of the USDA Forest Service.

[chubtoad]

http://www.scienceda...31016064211.htm
Source: American Chemical Society
Date: 2003-10-16

New Global Treaty Proposed To Control Climate Change And Improve Health
A global treaty focusing on intercontinental air pollution could be a better approach to controlling climate change than the Kyoto Protocol, according to a new scientific study. By cooperating to reduce pollutants like ozone and aerosols, countries could address their own regional health concerns, keep their downwind neighbors happy and reduce the threat of global warming in the process, claim the researchers.

The report appears in the Oct. 13 edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

The Kyoto Protocol, drafted in 1997, was designed to provide binding commitments for reducing national emissions of greenhouse gases, with a special emphasis on carbon dioxide. Some countries, however, like the United States and China, have been reluctant to fully adopt the standards because of their potential economic burden.

In the new study, researchers from Columbia (N.Y.), Harvard and Princeton acknowledge the need to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, but they propose that a treaty dealing with air pollutants like ozone and aerosols, which can cause health problems, could be a better first step, uniting the interests of all countries involved.

"We suggest that it may be time to consider an international treaty to control air pollution on a hemispheric scale," says lead researcher Tracey Holloway, Ph.D. "The Kyoto Protocol addresses carbon dioxide emissions, which have no direct health impact, so they are not regulated currently as air pollutants." Holloway was at Columbia University when the study was done and is now with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An air pollution treaty that targets health-related pollutants "would tie in to regulations that most countries are already pursuing on a domestic basis," according to Holloway. One obvious example of this in the United States is the Clean Air Act, which regulates various pollutants, such as those that contribute to acid rain, smog and ozone depletion.

Holloway and her colleagues focused their research on ozone and aerosols. Both have lifetimes of about one week - long enough to be transported from Asia to the United States, as well as shorter distances across the Atlantic - and both pose health risks associated with respiratory disease, which Holloway says makes them more immediate concerns to countries than carbon dioxide.

But ozone and aerosols also contribute to large-scale climate problems, Holloway says, so the implications of controlling them go beyond air pollution into the realm of climate change.

The case for controlling greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide was first presented three years ago by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, according to Holloway.

Holloway believes an international air pollution treaty would not encounter the roadblocks that the Kyoto Protocol has faced. "It would be serving the self-interest of participating countries to address short-term health risks," she says. "Regulation could take shape without immediate reform of the domestic or international energy economy, and energy savings implemented to achieve air quality goals could have the win-win effect of reducing carbon dioxide emissions as well."

Holloway suggests a treaty based loosely on the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), which initially addressed acid rain deposition in Europe through voluntary participation. The convention has since been amended to cover a broad range of pollutants, and participants include countries from Western and Eastern Europe as well as the United States and Canada.

Expanding such a treaty to include Asia would give the United States even more incentive to participate, Holloway says, since westerly winds spread pollution from that part of the world to North America. "Asian countries are already concerned about air pollution," she adds, "and are making significant strides toward domestic control."

[chubtoad]

http://www.scienceda...31022061155.htm
Source: Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
Date: 2003-10-22

MIT's Plasmatron Cuts Diesel Bus Emissions, Promises Better Gas Engine Efficiency
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A bus in Indiana is the latest laboratory for MIT's plasmatron reformer, a small device its developers believe could significantly cut the nation's oil consumption as well as noxious emissions from a variety of vehicles.

The work will be the subject of an invited talk next Thursday, October 30, at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Plasma Physics in Albuquerque, NM.

The researchers and colleagues from industry also reported plasmatron advances at a U.S. Department of Energy Diesel Engine Emissions Reduction (DEER) meeting in August. There they reported that the device, used with an exhaust treatment catalyst on a diesel engine bus, removed up to 90 percent of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the bus's emissions. Nitrogen oxides are the primary components of smog.

The plasmatron reformer also cut in half the amount of fuel needed for the removal process. "The absorption catalyst approach under consideration for diesel exhaust NOx removal requires additional fuel to work," explained Daniel R. Cohn, one of the leaders of the team and head of the Plasma Technology Division at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). "The plasmatron reformer reduced that amount of fuel by a factor of two compared to a system without the plasmatron."

Cohn noted that the plasmatron reformer also allowed the NOx absorption catalyst to be effective at the low exhaust temperatures characteristic of urban use.

These results indicate that the plasmatron reformer, in conjunction with an NOx absorber catalyst, could be one of the most promising ways to meet stricter emissions limits for all heavy trucks and buses. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to institute the new limits by 2007.

"Diesel-engine vehicles generally do not have exhaust treatment systems," Cohn said, adding that treating diesel exhaust is much more difficult than gasoline exhaust.

Under development for the last six years, the plasmatron is an onboard "oil reformer" that converts a variety of fuels into high-quality, hydrogen-rich gas. Adding a relatively modest amount of such gas to the gasoline powering a car or to a diesel vehicle's exhaust is known to have benefits for cutting the emissions of pollutants. "Prior to the plasmatron reformer development, there was no attractive way to produce that hydrogen on board," said Cohn.

His colleagues are Leslie Bromberg (who will give next week's APS talk) and Alexander Rabinovich of the PSFC; John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab and the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and Rudolf M. Smaling, a graduate student in the Engineering Systems Division. Smaling is an engineering manager from ArvinMeritor, a major automotive and heavy truck components company that has licensed the plasmatron technology from MIT. The bus engine tests were performed at the company's facility in Columbus, Ind., by an ArvinMeritor team.

TOWARD INCREASED GASOLINE ENGINE EFFICIENCY

The team is finding that the device could make vehicles cleaner and more efficient, with a potentially significant impact on oil consumption.

"If widespread use of plasmatron hydrogen-enhanced gasoline engines could eventually increase the average efficiency of cars and other light-duty vehicles by 20 percent, the amount of gasoline that could be saved would be around 25 billion gallons a year," Cohn said. That corresponds to around 70 percent of the oil that is currently imported by the United States from the Middle East."

The Bush administration has made development of a hydrogen-powered vehicle a priority, Heywood noted. "That's an important goal, as it could lead to more efficient, cleaner vehicles, but is it the only way to get there? Engines using plasmatron reformer technology could have a comparable impact, but in a much shorter time frame," he said.

"Our objective is to have the plasmatron in production - and in vehicles - by 2010," Smaling said. ArvinMeritor is working with a vehicle concept specialist company to build a proof-of-concept vehicle that incorporates the plasmatron in an internal combustion engine. "We'd like to have a driving vehicle in one and a half years to demonstrate the benefits," Smaling said.

In the meantime, the team continues to improve the base technology. At the DEER meeting, Bromberg, for example, reported cutting the plasmatron's consumption of electric power "by a factor of two to three."

[chubtoad]

http://www.scienceda...31111065914.htm
Source: University Of California - Los Angeles
Date: 2003-11-11

Air Pollutants Alone May Cause Asthma Attacks
UCLA researchers have shown for the first time that diesel exhaust particles alone may be enough to induce acute asthma attacks. A new testing method used in an animal model helped researchers better isolate the effect of diesel exhaust particles, a component of air pollution, on asthma.

"Previously, we thought that air pollution alone was not enough to incite acute asthma attacks, but [that an attack] also required the presence of allergens such as pollen or house dust mites to establish airway inflammation and allergic responses in the airways," said Dr. Andre Nel, the study's principal investigator and a professor of medicine in the division of clinical immunology and allergy at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. "However, this new experimental study shows that we need to pay closer attention to the intrinsic abilities of the air pollutant particles to induce asthma."

The study, which appears in the November 2003 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, will enhance research methods and lead to a better epidemiological understanding of how sudden surges in air pollution levels induce acute asthma attacks. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ, collaborated with UCLA researchers on the study.

Asthma affects 15 to 20 million people in the United States, with the largest increase in cases seen among school-age children. Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the small airways in the lung and can trigger acute episodes of airway tightening and wheezing. Researchers first gave mice a surrogate allergen, which would be similar to exposing humans to an allergen such as pollen. After several days, researchers administered aerosolized diesel particles to the mice, simulating the inhalation of air-pollution particles. This quickly resulted in an acute asthma-like condition. From a research standpoint, this is the first time that the asthma attack-prompting effects of diesel particles have been separated from the potent effects of allergens.

According to researchers, the test showed that if an initial exposure to an allergen was downscaled into a weakened allergic response, the aerosolized diesel exhaust particles could induce an asthma-like condition. Researchers next tested the aerosolized diesel particles on genetically modified mice that had chronic airway inflammation, even in the absence of an allergen. The diesel particles also caused acute asthma attacks in this setting.

According to Nel, the ability of the diesel particles to cause asthma flares after the initial allergen effect has diminished, and even in the absence an allergen, demonstrated that air pollution may play a larger role than previously thought in acute asthmatic events.

Acute asthma attacks are difficult to reproduce in a research setting. Previous animal models in which diesel exhaust particles were used took weeks to induce an asthma-like condition. In these cases, it was difficult to decipher the extent to which pollutant particles, allergens or other factors contributed to the airway inflammation.

This study introduces new and more rapid screening models that better isolate the biological mechanisms behind an acute asthma attack. This technological advancement may allow researchers to develop an explanation for acute asthma flares that occur within hours after a single pollution event. Nel noted that this would also be helpful in testing the effectiveness of asthma medications in relation to air pollution.

During the next phase of the study, researchers will more closely examine the mechanisms by which air pollution induces airway inflammation and will determine if the responses to pollutants that occurred in mice also occur in humans. Researchers will also employ new particle concentrator technology, developed by Dr. Constantinos Sioutas at the University of Southern California, to collect real-life ambient particles in the Los Angeles basin to reproduce the effects of diesel-exhaust particle inhalation in animals, said Nel.

This study builds on the growing body of research on airborne pollution at the UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and the Southern California Particle Center and Supersite at UCLA. Another recent study by these researchers and their colleagues, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, linked real-life ambient particles, collected by particle concentrators in the Los Angeles basin, to cell damage. That study also highlighted the fact that the smallest particles, known as ultrafine particles, penetrate most deeply into tissue and cause the most damage.

The current study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Other study authors include Dr. Minqi Hao and Dr. Meying Wang of the division of immunology and allergy in the department of medicine at UCLA Medical Center; and Stephania Cormier and James J. Lee of the division of pulmonary medicine in the department of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ.

[outlawpoet]

That's a lot of air pollution. Sadly, I think that air pollution, while awful, ranks pretty low on the totem pole of risks, unless I'm missing something. More people have problems with getting clean water, getting clean and nutritious food, and decent sanitation. However, air pollution is rarely comprehensively tracked, so it may be a shadow risk that we've mis-estimated the impact of. Particularly on total lifespan. I know that second-hand smoke was underestimated for years as a contributing factor to cancer. Who knows what other pollutants could build up and give us eventual health problems?

[Lazarus Long]

Sadly, I think that air pollution, while awful, ranks pretty low on the totem pole of risks, unless I'm missing something. More people have problems with getting clean water, getting clean and nutritious food, and decent sanitation. However, air pollution is rarely comprehensively tracked, so it may be a shadow risk that we've mis-estimated the impact of. Particularly on total lifespan.

Deprive of us water we die quickly, deprive us of air and we die even quicker. We are seeing a global threat to potable water at an accelerated rate to that of the total atmosphere but the issues do overlap.

Air pollution effects global warming (greenhouse gasses) and radiation from solar and ambient cosmic sources (ozone layer decay) on one extreme and it effects the longevity of tissues (cumulative toxins & carcinogens) and construction materials (acid rains) on the other. It even subtly effects ground water mineral and pollutant content (i.e.Chernobyl fallout). The problem is when trying to see all these issues in total isolation from one another. This is the fallacy of reducing a problem too far.

The content of air pollution is changing. For example we clearly burn less coal in some areas than others and are capable of doing it cleaner than in prior years but as oil supplies dwindle we may find more and more coal being burned around the world. And none of this deals with the significant but not human dependent sources like volcanism; though dust and particulate content is effected by the impact of desertification that human demand is contributing to.

Is air pollution a causal factor or an effect?

It actually can be both and it can also be the ignored canary in the mines.

[Lazarus Long]

I have tried to get folks to have a rational debate over the central aspects of what is involved in the distinction of Human and Natural Selection and it appears that for most the anthropocentric paradigm is too strong to challenge. It is ironic because I am establishing it as legitimate for us to impose a Human Standard for selection but I am arguing that we have not done so with any truly rational or legitimate scientific determination.

We have touched briefly on aspects that effect biodiversity and a short list follows:

Climate

Consumption

Human Habitat expansion

Genetic Modification

Land/Marine use strategy

Agricultural demand/deforestation/desertification

pandemic

Environmental toxification

Ecosystem as the Collateral victim of politics


There are a series of articles out there now to support a claim I have been asserting here in our forum for some time about the magnitude of the destruction of species effecting the Earth. Here is one of them. Please use this thread to gather more evidence and argue the importance the extinction of species that seems to be the price of our success and perhaps the dead canary warning of our own doom that we are ignoring.



A steep decline in birds, butterflies and native plants in Britain supports the theory that humans are pushing the natural world into the Earth's sixth big extinction event. (AP Graphic)

Study: Many Species at Risk of Extinction
Thu Mar 18, 6:16 PM ET Science - AP
By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - A steep decline in birds, butterflies and native plants in Britain supports the theory that humans are pushing the natural world into the Earth's sixth big extinction event and the future may see more and more animal species disappearing.

In an effort that sent more than 20,000 volunteers into every corner of England, Scotland and Wales to survey wildlife and plants, researchers found that many native populations are in big trouble and some are gone altogether.

"This is the first time, for instance, that we can answer the question, 'Have butterflies declined as badly as birds?'" said Jeremy A. Thomas, an ecologist with the National Environment Research Council in Dorchester, England, and the first author of a study appearing in the journal Science.

A survey of 58 butterfly species found that some had experienced a 71 percent population swoon since similar surveys taken from 1970 through 1982. Some 201 bird species were tracked between 1968 and 1971, and then again from 1988 to 1991, with a population decline of about 54 percent.

Two surveys of 1,254 native plant species showed a decrease of about 28 percent over 40 years.

Thomas said that other scientists, noting losses of mammals and other animals, have speculated about the loss of insects, but the British butterfly study is the first to actually document over decades such a steep decline.

"Population extinctions were recorded in all the main ecosystems of Britain," Thomas and his co-authors wrote. This supports the theory, they said, that "the biological world is approaching the sixth major extinction event in its history."

Thomas said that some past extinctions have killed off more than 90 percent of all life forms and "nobody is suggesting we are at that point."

But, he said, "if this goes on for the foreseeable future then within a short period in geological time we will be getting toward the level of a major extinction."

Scott Miller, a biologist with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said the British study was impressive in its thoroughness. He said, "They may not be representative of the world as a whole, but they have the best data."

The data support the idea that the rise of humans over tens of thousands of years — along with climate changes — is reshaping the natural world in ways that aren't thoroughly understood.

Scientists have identified five extinction events in Earth's history, with some so severe that more than 90 percent of all life forms died. The last and most famous extinction was the Cretaceous-Tertiary event some 63 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs and allowed the rise of mammals. It is thought to have been caused by an asteroid hitting Earth.

"We are in the middle of a sixth extinction event that began about 50,000 years ago" with the expanding role in the world of human beings, said Paul S. Martin, a zoologist and geochemist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It's happening, but it's slower and it is not clear it will be as severe as some of the others."

Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University, said in Science that the British study results "show that we have likely underestimated the magnitude of the pending extinctions."

Miller and Martin both point to the hundreds of species, mostly large animals and birds, that already are gone, some wiped out directly through human action.

Martin said the fossil records show that the disappearance of many animals in Australia, Madagascar and North America started about the time that humans arrived. Gone from the natural North American environment, for instance, are mammoths, camels, giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers.

The causes of the other extinctions are not well understood. The largest ended the Permian Period some 250 million years ago. All but about 4 percent of all species disappeared then. There were three other lesser-known events in the Ordovician (435 million years ago), the Devonian (357 million years ago) and the Triassic (198 million years ago) periods.

___

On the Net:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org


Fresh Studies Support New Mass Extinction Theory (Reuters)

Fauna, flora diversity declining in Britain (AFP)

[randolfe]

OUTLAW NATURE

I just suffered through one of those “nature” documentaries on the” Discovery Channel”. It really left me feeling a deep revulsion towards “nature” as we view it today.

There was a scene in which a crocodile grabs a baby baboon. The baboons jump on the croc and save the baby but it is dead. Life in the raw is really ugly. I have to admit that I hate the realities of life

Perhaps that is why I am an Immortalist. I just think life as it exists today is terribly ugly and vile. The crocodiles eat the innocent. Even the “good” are doomed to death. No doubt, that is why religionists invented their “answers”.

Human beings have the option of overcoming their biological limitations. We are the first specie to have that option. As Dr. Lee Silver pointed out in his book, “Remaking Eden”, once human beings were able to conceive outside the womb via IVF, they took human evolution into their own hands.

I minimize my eating of meat. The idea of the mass slaughter of animals to feed me is disgusting. If you have read books like ‘Diet for a Small Planet” you know that the corn, etc. used to make a pound of beef could feed a hungry family for many days. Every time we eat a pound of meat on “this” side of the planet, some family on the other “poorer” side of the Earth, starves. Think of that next time you have a piece of meat.

Meat eating, like death, is part of “nature” as we know it. I guess I should thank “nature” for giving me life. However, I am not willing to let “nature” take it away. I think that is what this site is all about.

So, our war is not only against involuntary death” and “nature” as we know it, our war is against “nature” itself. That conflict is joined in the debates about genetic engineering of both plants and animals and in the debate about whether ‘we’ control our own destiny or whether we are “subject to” a predisposed genetic/biological destiny.

Despite the possibility that such a declaration might be met with dismay and disapproval, I think we should ‘declare war’ on Mother Nature herself. What does Mother Nature give us but a limited lifespan and then the oblivion of death? I reject “death” and “Mother Nature” in the same context. It is time to stop ‘worshipping’ at the shrine of ‘Mother Nature’”.

Immortality involves overcoming the limitations Mother Nature would like to put upon us.. It iust a simple choice: Mother Nature or Us. I vote for “Us”.

[Bruce Klein]

As we learn how the system works (evolution) and that we're only a bit player, we indistinctly rebel against the barbaric 'nature' of it all (symbol: human as baby baboon and crock as aging). Fighting for more time, if only to figure out what we're fighting for, is an important step as we lead ourselves away from the jaws of oblivion.

[kevin]

Although there are a great many examples of predator-prey in nature, there are some really incredible examples of symbiotic development where organisms live in harmony and have even come to only be able to exist with the other present.

The process of evolution certainly uses an approach which may offend with the consumed and the consumer... even the sun, if sentient, is likely unhappy about its imminent demise and would try to grab back a few photons from the plants who absorb them.

Evolution has formed us through countless eons and we are now a tool that has been finely honed, on the verge of being able to transform itself altogether. Although it is unlikely that we will be escaping entropy anytime soon, we will at least be able to enjoy the designs of nature without being the dominant scene on the canvas as we learn how to do more with less and our movement through the future takes on the finesse of self-direction.

Rather optimistic.. but naturally so.

[kevin]

Link: http://story.news.ya...ountains_report

---

http://us.news2.yimg...1888a398967860d

Report Shows Smokies 'Beginning to Die'
Thu Apr 15, 7:11 AM ET Add Science - AP to My Yahoo!

GATLINBURG, Tenn. - A new report by the National Parks Conservation Association on the future of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park paints a dire picture.

"This park is beginning to die," said Tom Kiernan, the conservation group's president. "This assessment clearly shows the park is in danger, and its long-term viability is at risk."

High ozone levels, acid rain, continued underfunding and a proposed road on the north shore of Fontana Lake in North Carolina are combining to endanger the park's future, Kiernan said.

Much of the damage could be slowed or prevented if certain steps are taken, he said, including rigorous enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act and increasing the park's budget.

"The question is will our society and Congress step up to implement these recommendations," Kiernan said.

If the Smokies aren't protected, the negative impact on the region's economy and quality of life could be significant, he said.

"This is the first health assessment of the park, and it's not good," Kiernan said. "It's worrisome."

There had been no previous systemic, park-wide scientific study to provide a benchmark for future recommendations for the Smokies before Wednesday's report, Kiernan said. The public was forced to rely on conflicting findings of various groups, scientists and organizations when trying to evaluate the park's ecosystem, he said.

Raw data for the report was combined from the National Park Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) and various state agencies to gather all data that is published or unpublished on parks, Kiernan said.

"This has significant scientific credibility in the United States and is gaining it worldwide," he said.

Several areas of concern were noted in the report on the Smokies. Among them are:

_ Ground level ozone and acid rain "threaten the health of park visitors, staff, vegetation, soils and streams."

_ Air pollution has diminished visibility from an average of 113 miles from prime viewing locations to an average of 25 miles.

_ The park has an annual budget shortfall of more than $11 million, and needs another 108 new full-time positions to adequately protect resources.

_ Nonnative pests and diseases are killing off Fraser firs, hemlocks, dogwoods, butternuts and beech trees.

Much of the air pollution in the Smokies is from the burning of fossil fuels, particularly those used in power plants, factories and automobiles, officials said.

Conservation association program analyst Jill Stephens and Sandy McLaughlin, a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, described the scope of the park's air-pollution problem Wednesday while at the Twin Creeks research station.

At the research station, one of three in the Smokies and Oak Ridge, 35 trees are constantly monitored by devices that check their growth, sap flow and other vital signs every half-hour, they said.

While pollutants affect vegetation throughout the park, trees that grow at higher elevations — such as spruce and firs trees — are hit especially hard, Stephens said. Also, rainfall is up to 10 times as acidic as normal precipitation in the park and fog is often 100 times more acidic, McLaughlin said.

Jim Renfro, a Park Service air-resource specialist, said that some species of plants are showing "visible leaf damage" from the pollution, while others aren't growing as well. He also noted that during the past 15 years the park has had more than 300 "bad-air days," meaning ozone levels were high enough to threaten public health.

"That's way too many," he said. "There shouldn't be any in a national park."

Experts expect the Smokies to be designated a "non-attainment" area Thursday when the EPA releases its list of areas that haven't met federal clean-air standards meant to protect public health.

Officials of the parks conservation group also are opposed to the proposed North Shore Road project, also known as the "Road to Nowhere," in Swain County, N.C. The road was started in the early 1960s, but work ended because of cost and environmental problems.

The issue appeared again in 2000 when North Carolina Rep. Charles Taylor and Sen. Jesse Helms tacked a new $16 million appropriation for the road onto a transportation bill. The conservation group contends completing the road would be costly and also inflict serious environmental damage to the park.

___

On the Net:

Great Smoky Mountains National Park: http://www.nps.gov/grsm/

National Parks Conservation Association: http://www.npca.org/

[kevin]

Link: http://www.wwfus.org...ies/species.cfm

These are the pathetically few species that people hear about on occasion.

Giant Pandas - about 1000
Mountain Gorillas - under 700
Cross River Gorillas - 200
Grauer's Gorillas - about 16000
Black Rhinos - fewer than 2600
(has four subspecies, the rarest of which at last count had a total of 10 left in the wild)
Javan Rhinos - less than 70
Greater One Horned Rhinos - less than 2400
Sumatran Rhinos - estimated at less than 300
Southern White Rhinos - just over 8400
Northern White Rhinos - less than 30
North Atlantic Right Whale - about 350
Blue Whale - about 5000
Vaquita (Gulf Of California Harbor Porpoise) - about 500
Tigers - in total a maximum of 7277
Golden Lion Tamarins - about 1000
Humans - over 6,000,000,000 er, wait, that one shouldn't be there...

[Lazarus Long]

Randolf et al, again and again we return to the essential conundrum of Natural versus Human Selection.

Are we so very confident we can do it better?

Belief is irrelevant; the proof is in the result. Only by then the ramifications of choice can be too late to remedy. I am not voicing this inherent challenge to take the position pro or con but because I see no alternative but that we face the challenge of doing so. It is far too late to return to Eden.

In my research for a paper I have been writing on Human Selection I found that I did not coin the phrase, well at least I wasn't the first. Here is a quaint but articulate paper on the subject written near the end of the 19th Century by a friend of Darwin. Interesting how many themes of the paper, regardless of agreement for the author's conclusions and misunderstanding are still relevant.

It is of no small import that the author is considered one of the founders of modern sociology, was an early socialist, and rejected Lamarckianism but examines what the propositions of Lamarck might entail. This is important to appreciate because what we are introducing into nature through human applied technology is Lamarckianism by selective choice, not as a 'natural occurrence'.

Check out the full text and links as they are very relevant to our debates over Transhumanism and the type of social imperatives that are derived from it. In fact I would argue that much of the debate over "Social Darwinism" probably stems from the discussions that resulted from this and similar author's work.

http://www.wku.edu/~...lace/S427.htm#6

(excerpts)

Human Selection (S427: 1890)

Editor Charles H. Smith's Note: Wallace considered this essay on human social evolution "the most important contribution I have made to the science of sociology and the cause of human progress" (My Life, 1905, Volume 2, on page 209). It was first published in Volume 48 (New Series) of Fortnightly Review in September 1890. Original pagination indicated within double brackets. To link directly to this page, connect with: http://www.wku.edu/~...allace/S427.htm

[[p. 325]] In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes. As a recent American writer well puts it,

We behold the melancholy spectacle of the renewal of the great mass of society from the lowest classes, the highest classes to a great extent either not marrying or not having children. The floating population is always the scum, and yet the stream of life is largely renewed from this source. Such a state of affairs, sufficiently dangerous in any society, is simply suicidal in the democratic civilisation of our day.1

********
Comment by Prof. Martin Fichman, York University, Ontario (pers. commun. 3/00):

Wallace considered this article his most important contribution to the development of sociology. More pointedly, he considered it his major statement on the much-debated question of "human progress." A number of late Victorian thinkers, including Darwin, expressed the opinion that it was primarily the "lower" classes, rather than the middle or upper classes, who were propelling population growth--and, by inference, polluting the gene pool with their (allegedly) inferior heritable traits. Wallace agreed that there were, indeed, checks on progress but argued that these checks were sociopolitical, as well as biological, in nature. Significantly, he dismissed as ineffective any proposals based solely on beneficial environmental influences--such as education and public hygiene--because he rejected the Lamarckian notion that traits acquired by individuals during their lifetimes could be transmitted to their offspring. He was adamant in his belief that "some form of selection" was the only possible means of permanently improving the human condition. But he also rejected the then popular doctrine of eugenics both on scientific and ethical grounds. Instead, Wallace argued that a form of "sexual selection"--within the context of socialist society--offered the best means of effecting permanent human progress. Freed from the constraint of marrying primarily on grounds of financial security (as Wallace believed capitalist society demanded), women could now choose as marriage partners only those men who possessed "noble" traits such as intelligence, compassion, altruism, and physical health. Conversely, women would reject potential mates men who were idle, selfish, violent, weak in intellect or who possessed any overt hereditary disease. In Wallace's socialist utopia, the general outlines of which he borrowed from the American writer Edward Bellamy, educated female choice would become the biologically effective agent of eliminating the worst human traits from society and ensuring the propagation of the best traits. "Human Selection," Wallace's first public declaration of his socialism, displays that interplay of scientific and cultural ideas that was central to his worldview. Though characterized by a certain naiveté as to human motives and actions, it remains a powerful indictment of any society which permits gross social and economic inequities to persist. Indeed, Wallace's particular mixture of evolutionary biology, socialist ideology, and certain feminist concerns remains as provocative and controversial today as it was when first presented in 1890. His views demand renewed attention in our present age of potential genetic manipulation of the human species.

[kevin]

Link: http://www.newscient...p?id=ns99994897

---

World's marine life is getting sicker
16:55 19 April 04

For years, apparent increases in illness among marine creatures, from whales to coral, have left marine scientists with the uneasy suspicion that the seas are increasingly plagued by disease. Now, US researchers have uncovered the first good evidence that they are right.

In 1998, a dozen of the world's top experts on diseases of marine animals warned that sea creatures seemed to be getting sick more often, with more diseases.

New viruses had appeared in whales and seals, while corals were dying of fungal and algal infections. Pilchards succumbed to viruses and an aggressive parasite expanded its range to attack commercial oysters, scallops and clams. In the Caribbean, some unknown bacteria wiped out what had been the dominant sea urchin.

But there was no way to tell if the apparent increase was simply due to more scientists paying more attention to marine disease. There was no baseline, as no one had ever measured disease incidence in any of these species decades ago.

Now, Jessica Ward, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has shed important new light on the problem by looking at how the number of reports of marine diseases in nine different groups of marine creatures has changed in the scientific literature since 1970.

"We wanted to find out if something was actually happening," Ward told New Scientist. "For most groups of organisms, we found that yes, there is something going on out there. Now we hope more people will try and figure out where it is coming from."


True incidence

Ward, with Kevin Lafferty, of the University of California in Santa Barbara, first tested whether changing numbers of scientific reports of rabies in US raccoons matched the true incidence of the disease, which is known independently. They matched, suggesting more scientific reports really do mean more disease.

The pair further tested the relationship by removing the most prolific laboratory from the publications they collected for each group of marine creatures - just in case increased reporting reflected only one scientist's funding success. This did not change any apparent disease trends. Neither did taking out multiple papers on one well-reported disease event, such as the Caribbean urchin die-off.

So using scientific reports as a measure, Ward and Lafferty found that disease has increased in turtles, corals, marine mammals, urchins, and molluscs such as oysters.

Illness seems to have remained steady in the shark and shrimp families, and in seagrasses. Surprisingly, disease reports have diminished for fish.


Easy prey

There are numerous possible reasons for rising disease. One, Ward suggests, is increasing sea surface temperatures due to global warming. This can cause corals to bleach, making them easier prey for infections.

Warming has also led to the northward spread of the oyster parasite Perkinsus. And warming is thought to accelerate the growth of tumours in turtles caused by a herpes virus.

Another possible factor is that human over-fishing has destabilised marine ecosystems. For example, when the urchins in the Caribbean died, corals were overwhelmed by the algae the urchins used to eat. "Normally fish would have eaten the algae instead, but they weren't there," says Ward.

Other suggested causes include:

• new pathogens from domestic animals, such as dog distemper virus and the parasite Toxoplasma

• bioaccumulation of toxins weakening marine mammals' immunity

• new species carried across oceans in ships' ballast tanks introducing new diseases

In the face of all this, the apparent health of fish is intriguing. Ward says this could be because the fish are simply fewer in number. Many pathogens die out among animals that are not packed densely enough to pass the infection on. But it is also possible, she says, that the frequency of disease is just as bad or worse - but fewer fish mean fewer observations, and fewer reports.

Journal reference: PLoS Biology (vol 2, p 542)

[Lazarus Long]

Here is the New York Times on another related report just released.
LL

Federal Study Urges New Strategy for Safeguarding the Sea
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: April 20, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 20 — The first major federal assessment of the oceans in a generation has concluded that coastal waters continue to be severely degraded by escalating man-made insults.

The report, issued today, called on the government, in coordination with the states, to fundamentally restructure its approach to ocean management so that the degradation does not become permanent.

The United States Commission on Ocean Policy, noting that 51 percent of the country's population lives on or near the coast and coastal watersheds, offered moderately tough suggestions for curbing the overfishing that has depleted fish stocks worldwide and the nutrient pollution that threatens to strangle the ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound and has created a huge seasonal "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

"Our oceans and coasts are in serious trouble," the commission's chairman, Adm. James D. Watkins, a former chief of naval operations, said at a news conference here today. The existing management system, which spreads responsibility across what he called "a Byzantine patchwork" of federal and state agencies and local fishing councils, "is simply not up to the task" of preventing degradation, Admiral Watkins said.

The goal of the governmental restructuring that he called for would be to use what he called "ecosystem-based management" and to abandon the current practice of assessing the prospects and perils of each species or habitat individually. The report also recommended doubling the current federal research spending on oceans and establishing an Ocean Policy Trust Fund, financed with up to $4 billion annually drawn from royalties from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas exploration and exploitation.

Going against the conservative grain at both the local and international levels, the report recommended that the powerful local and regional fisheries management councils be forced to follow the guidance of their sister scientific and statistical councils on fishing limits and called on the Congress and the Bush administration to end the country's 22-year refusal to officially join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, James L. Connaughton, said today that "we are effectively implementing 95 percent of the treaty." He added that "President Bush has put the treaty on the top priority list for ratification and we're working hard with the Congress to assuage their concerns" on issues of intelligence gathering and national security. The long-term concerns over deep-sea mining and whether the convention's provisions infringed on American sovereignty have been largely resolved, he added.

The commission report recommended that Congress elevate the issue of ocean management and streamline interagency coordination by creating a White House-based National Oceans Council, composed of the cabinet secretaries heading the relevant executive-branch agencies, and that the president should appoint a new assistant to head the council.

The commission, a largely Republican group of scientists, businessmen and government officials, stopped short of endorsing some of the stringent controls suggested by a private study sponsored by the Pew Commission last spring, including calls for creating a web of "marine protected areas," with similar protections as terrestrial parks and wilderness areas, and zoning portions of the ocean for a variety of uses. It also shied away from recommendations specifically geared to limit industrial bottom trawling practices that can destroy coral reefs.

Both industry and environmental groups gave qualified support to the report's conclusions. "We are generally pleased with most of the recommendations," said Linda Candler, a spokeswoman for the National Fisheries Institute, which represents commercial fishing groups. "We are genuinely pleased that the commission recognizes that fishing is not the only human impact on our oceans."

John Adams, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a major environmental group, welcomed the report and in an interview would not dwell on any differences he had with specific recommendations.

"The overall message," he said, "is that there's a crisis out there and it's a very important crisis because we're losing a food supply and a huge economic base for this country, and unless we get to it quickly this will start to disappear very quickly."

Full Text of Commission Report

[kevin]

Link: http://story.news.ya...13/ap_on_sc/cod

Overfishing is particularly important because of its double whammy... as a food source for humans as well as other creatures in the ocean.

---

Global Cod Stocks May Be Gone by 2020
Thu May 13,11:24 AM ET
GLAND, Switzerland - The world's cod stocks could be wiped out by 2020 because of overfishing, illegal catches and oil exploration, the environment group WWF said Thursday.

WWF — the World Wide Fund for Nature — said the world's largest remaining cod stock, in the Barents Sea, is under particular threat.

In a report, WWF said the world's cod fisheries are disappearing fast, with a global catch that declined from 3.42 million tons in 1970 to 1 million tons in 2000.

"If such a trend continues, the world's cod stocks will disappear in 15 years time," said the group, which is known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States.

In North America, the catch has declined by 90 per cent since the early 1980s, while in European waters, the catch of North Sea cod is now just 25 per cent of what it was two decades ago.

"Overfishing of cod continues because fisheries policies are driven by short-term economic interests," said Simon Cripps, head of WWF's oceans program.

The Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia, is one of the world's richest fishing grounds, accounting for half the global cod catch. But although numbers there appear healthy, this may not last, said WWF.

High fishing quotas for 2004 are unsustainable, the group maintained. Some 110,000 tons of cod are also believed to be caught there illegally every year, further denting stocks, it said.

"The onus is on Russia and Norway to prevent the Barents Sea cod stock suffering a similar fate as the Canadian cod stock, which collapsed in the 1990s and has not yet recovered," Cripps said.

WWF also said it believes Barents Sea cod are threatened by expanded shipping and oil exploration plans.

On Tuesday, Norwegian authorities said the potentially oil-rich sea would be reopened for exploration, after a pause to address environmental concerns about protecting the fragile ecosystem in Arctic waters.

Russia, meanwhile, is planning to boost shipping by developing a new export route via its ice-free deep-water port of Murmansk, which would allow supertankers to economically take oil to the U.S. East Coast.

[bacopa]

A sad testament to humanities overtaking our own environment...troubling to say the least thanks for the links Kevin.

[kevin]

Link: http://www.scienceda...40514065516.htm

What's Related
Researchers Project Future Shrinking Biodiversity Of Mexican Species
Rainforest Wildlife Surprisingly Sensitive To Landscape Changes; Long-Term Study Reveals Dramatic Impact Of Fragmentation
Biodiversity's Response To Ecosystem Productivity Depends On Historical Plant And Animal Relationships

---

Source: University Of Wisconsin-Madison
Date: 2004-05-18

Study Examines Future Of Species Extinction, Conservation
MADISON - Extinction doesn't just affect the species that disappears - it alters entire communities, changing both how the community as a whole and the individual species within it will respond to environmental degradation, according to results published in the May 13 issue of Nature.

With extinction continuously altering the fates of plants and animals, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say, it may be extremely difficult to predict which organisms will be the next to cease existing and that the wisest conservation plan is one that reaches beyond a particular species to protect entire communities.

The pair of researchers, interested in understanding what happens when species go extinct, developed mathematical models that look at changes in a community's tolerance to a particular environmental condition, such as global warming or acid rain.

They found that, as individual species start to disappear, two forces begin to act upon a community, making it either more or less tolerant to the environmental condition. One of these forces occurs when species disappear in the order of their sensitivity to a particular environmental factor, with the least-tolerant ones going extinct first.

"We know that some species are more sensitive to environmental stressors," says Anthony Ives, a UW-Madison zoology professor and co-author of the Nature paper. "And they often go extinct in order of their sensitivity."

With the disappearance of organisms most vulnerable to a certain condition, such as the increase of nutrients in lake water, the species best suited for that condition are left behind. This ordered extinction, notes Ives, makes the community as a whole more resistant to that environmental pressure and, in a sense, protects it from future degradation.

"One important message is that if we're going to understand the consequences of extinction, we need to pay attention to order," says Bradley Cardinale, a UW-Madison postdoctoral fellow and co-author of the recent paper. "If species go extinct in a particular order, it is possible for the surviving community to become more resistant overall."

While this finding may sound like good news, there is a downside: The researchers say that a community's resistance to an environmental condition can shift over time due to yet another force - changes in food-web interactions resulting from the extinction of individual species. All species are part of a food web, whether they are predators, prey or even competition. When a member of the food web goes extinct, it indirectly alters the livelihood of the survivors, note the researchers.

Ives explains, "Now free from the species that fed on it or competed with it for food, a species may increase in abundance." By increasing in abundance, he adds, the species makes the entire community more tolerant to the environmental pressure.

However, according to the models, the continuous extinction of organisms from a community ultimately dampens the ability of surviving species to compensate, or increase in population size, and, consequently, makes the community less resistant to changes in the environment.

"The loss of species tends to deplete a community's ability to withstand environmental degradation," says Ives.

Cardinale says that these changes in the food web and their indirect effects on organisms within a community can "change the order of extinction," basically foreshadowing new fates for species. He explains, "A species that seems insignificant now may become important later on once it's released from predation or competition."

Because of the dynamics of the food web, the researchers say it becomes challenging to determine which species may vanish next due to the forces of extinction. This leads them to suggest a more holistic approach to conservation.

"We can't just go out and conserve one species," explains Cardinale. "Because we have no idea what species may make the community resistant in the future, we would be most prudent to conserve as many as we can right now."

[Lazarus Long]

Environmental impacts come in many forms but the MOST destructive are actually through passive neglect more than intentional destruction. We are a social ape that likes to find the guilty and so fix blame and think we are fixing the problem. The truth is more sinister, we have met the enemy and it is ourselves.

One problem with Kyoto for example is that it is too incremental at best. Another problem is although we might identify specific culprits the real threat emanates from a large percentage of lifestyle choices that we are not generally willing to question until confronted with destructive result let alone irrefutable "evidence'.

It should also be implied from the results of this study that numerous compounds (possibly carcinogenic) are being assimilated into the primary food chain impacting the totality of sea life and ultimately accumulating in ourselves at the top.

There is no one solution to the series of converging problems, no quick and simply fix. There are however numerous questions of "Values" and this is where our debate at the moment should focus as we clearly do not all share the same ones.

LL

****



Courtesy of Richard Charles Thompson
Plastic debris litters many beaches like this one in Europe.

Just One Word for the Ocean: Plastics
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: May 11, 2004

Four decades ago, they were something of a novelty, a one-word tip for the Dustin Hoffman character in the 1967 movie "The Graduate." By now, plastics permeate civilization, from shopping bags to shirts, computers to car bumpers. And as all of that plastic is discarded, it is permeating the environment, too — to a microscopic scale.

The latest evidence comes from a study conducted around the British Isles that shows accumulations of microscopic fibers and bits of synthetic polymers in beach and seabed sediments.

The study also examined an archive of samples of plankton filtered from seawater from the 1960's through the 1990's, and found a big jump in the concentration of plastic particles amid the plankton in the last two decades. The growth was consistent with the sharp increase in manufacturing and sales of plastic goods and packaging in those years, the researchers said. Their study appears in the current issue of the journal Science.

Although the sampling was mainly around Britain, the global spread of plastic flotsam and jetsam probably means that other areas are likely seeing buildups, too, said the lead author, Dr. Richard C. Thompson, a marine ecologist at the University of Plymouth.

Larger plastic items are hazardous to sea life. It is unclear whether tiny fragments of bigger items pose ecological risks, although they were readily ingested by worms, barnacles and other bottom-dwelling life in tank tests, the researchers said.

Robert S. Krebs, a spokesman for the American Plastics Council, a trade group, said the problem was improper disposal. "Debris in the oceans is a problem," he said, noting that the council had worked with manufacturers to limit direct disposal of plastic like the small pellets used as raw material by factories.

Mr. Krebs said the biggest challenge was preventing discarded plastic from blowing or floating away. He noted that water in almost every region of the United States eventually drained into the sea.

"You can't point your finger at one type of material," he said. "We all share the responsibility for keeping stuff from going into the ocean."

[Lazarus Long]

Kevin has started the topic thread on "Our Dying Planet" and it overlaps this topic but I think we should keep them separate and in this thread address the causal aspects more and occasional the effects and in his the other way around. There we might collect the impacts and see them in terms of specific biodiversity concerns.

The difference is subtle but relevant because I see this whole debate coming down to a paradigm shift in economic theory that must alter the structure of "values" and this is the shift of a defined standard of currency based on a scarcity model (the atavistic Gold Standard) versus a progressive model that includes knowledge, sustaining and renewable resources, altruism and ecological and social models of interdependence. This latter model of currency is far more complex but address the idea of a values based on a win/win currency of benevolence as its own reward.

OK that rhetoric aside let me address this in a pragmatic manner with a news story that highlights the idea of habitat as a scarcity and competitive resource between Humans, the species we depend upon and that depend on us (agriculture, aquaculture etc.) and the rest of life on Earth. This is at the heart of defining whether Human selection will be essentially a form of parasitism or symbiosis but either way we are making the shift to a Living Global Standard of Human Selection replacing Natural Selection unless humanity becomes extinct.

I favor not becoming extinct as this is obviously counter productive to all I value and as it probably would also set life as a whole back on Earth, but I also have a very different "Standard" as to what defines the "Highest Qualities of Life" and here I think we have need a sincere and rational discussion with the clear goal of finding common ground and mutually beneficial markers we can work toward while agreeing upon identifiable risks that are currently being grossly overlooked.

Here is another exemplary article describing the "front lines" in the conflict for life.

LL


Ed Kennedy/Palm Beach Post - Silver Image
Friend or foe? An alligator in Florida.

http://www.nytimes.c...iew/23john.html

One Man's Cuddly Critter Is Another Man's Varmint
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: May 23, 2004

DO you love the idea of wild wolves howling in the woods? If you answer yes, the odds are you don't live in the woods, argues Lenore Hardy Barrett, a Republican state representative from Challis, Idaho, who thinks wolves were banished from the West for good reason. Ms. Barrett, and many ranchers in the region, are fighting the federal government's reintroduction of breeding pairs into Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

"After we cleared them out 35 years ago or whenever, why would we want them back?" she said. "They were in conflict then, and there are more people now."

Bob Dylan sang that "Man gave names to all the animals." But what people really did, ecologists say, was apply labels. Some creatures are called pests or predators or both; others are pets. Some evoke national pride, or fuzzy emotion or disgust, and some, like whales, seem to have good p.r. departments.

But the fact is many species that have been brought back from the brink are the same ones people have tried their hardest to kill off. And those messy relationships are growing more tangled all the time on a crowded planet where battles are inevitable over which species are worth fighting to save.

From the mountain lions that are sometimes spotted on the running trails near Denver to the black bears of New Jersey and the alligators of Florida - not to mention the squirrels, raccoons and deer nearly everywhere - many creatures are bumping up against hard questions: Desirable or not? Fit to live among us or not?

The Department of the Interior said last week that the bald eagle might be removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act as early as this year, mostly because the pesticide DDT is no longer around to weaken the bird's eggshells.

Biological viability is one thing. Popularity is another. In most of the country, an eagle is a heartwarming sight. But for some people, notably in Alaska, where until 1953 the state paid a bounty on bald eagle carcasses, and across much of the sheep country of the lower 48 states, where ranchers lose lambs every year to attacks from the sky, eagles are still considered bad actors. And some fishermen have recently complained that the eagle's protected status has upset the ecological balance because the birds are eating too many of certain species of fish, a claim wildlife experts deny.

The battle over wolves continues as well. In Wyoming, the state's Department of Agriculture said last week that it was investigating the deaths of a half-dozen dogs near Jackson that ate pesticide-laced meat apparently left for wolves. The pesticide has been linked to an anti-wolf group that has declared war on the animal despite its protected status, a department official said.

The underlying, mostly unstated, fact about wildlife recovery is that it's only partly about the environment. Biologists say that in a world where 20,000 species - most of them microscopic - can exist on a single acre of land, decisions about species often come down to which ones connect emotionally. People might understand intellectually that wolves and other predators are important to keep deer and elk populations down, and that bats eat lots of insects, but their responses will be based on something deeper.

"If they're big and warm and fuzzy, or if they have nice flowers, we react," said David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University. "We have a distorted perspective of what species we love and yet which ones are truly important to us as far as keeping our environment functioning."

Other wildlife experts say that saving eagles and wolves and other examples of what the ornithologist William T. Everett calls "charismatic megafauna" was easy. "When the Endangered Species Act was first authorized, you had eagles, peregrine falcons and gray wolves," said Dr. Everett, the president and founder of the Endangered Species Recovery Council, a California-based conservation group. "More and more, really small, inconspicuous organisms are going to be afforded the same protection, and in coming decades we're going to see a huge amount of conflict," Dr. Everett said.

Advocates for animal rights say the real test will come when people realize they don't have the right to decide the fates of certain creatures at all.

"There's a growing awareness that we do share this planet and that all species are important," said Steven M. Wise, president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, which in Mr. Wise's words advocates "basic legal rights for some nonhuman animals."

The word "some" requires yet another choice. Mr. Wise, who has taught animal rights law at Harvard, said his own criterion was what he calls practical autonomy, which assesses an animal's ability to intentionally fulfill its desires.

The great apes have it, he believes, as do African elephants, African gray parrots and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins.

Wolves might have some, but Mr. Wise said he hasn't studied their case enough.

Bald eagles are another question mark. He said not enough cognitive research has been done to determine whether they could apply for rights or not.

[Lazarus Long]

Well here is one that should trigger some controversy even here. I happen to agree with Lovelock on many things, even the underlying assumptions here.

BUT A HUGE CAVEAT!

This proposition is only reasonable in conjunction with a massive investment in developing fusion (not a simple H2 economy) and a commensurate nearly draconian effort to control consumptions' excess waste, all while dramatically increasing efficiency through modern designs that conserve as well as simultaneous infrastructural change that emphasizes conservation.

Nuclear under this scenario IMO is at best merely a stop gap measure and the positive effects of investment in this sector will all be lost if these other conditions are not met.

It should NOT be a pretext for business as usual.

http://news.independ...sp?story=524313

'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming'
Leading environmentalist urges radical rethink on climate change
By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor
24 May 2004

Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.

His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.

Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.

He was in a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on climate change to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Cabinet at 10 Downing Street in April 1989.

He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their last report in 2001.

On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable energy, such as wind, wave and solar power - the favoured solution of the Green movement - to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power stations whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere to warm.

He believes only a massive expansion of nuclear power, which produces almost no CO2, can now check a runaway warming which would raise sea levels disastrously around the world, cause climatic turbulence and make agriculture unviable over large areas. He says fears about the safety of nuclear energy are irrational and exaggerated, and urges the Green movement to drop its opposition.

In today's Independent, Professor Lovelock says he is concerned by two climatic events in particular: the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will raise global sea levels significantly, and the episode of extreme heat in western central Europe last August, accepted by many scientists as unprecedented and a direct result of global warming.

These are ominous warning signs, he says, that climate change is speeding, but many people are still in ignorance of this. Important among the reasons is "the denial of climate change in the US, where governments have failed to give their climate scientists the support they needed".

He compares the situation to that in Europe in 1938, with the Second World War looming, and nobody knowing what to do. The attachment of the Greens to renewables is "well-intentioned but misguided", he says, like the Left's 1938 attachment to disarmament when he too was a left-winger.

He writes today: "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."

His appeal, which in effect is asking the Greens to make a bargain with the devil, is likely to fall on deaf ears, at least at present.

"Lovelock is right to demand a drastic response to climate change," Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said last night. "He's right to question previous assumptions.

"But he's wrong to think nuclear power is any part of the answer. Nuclear creates enormous problems, waste we don't know what to do with; radioactive emissions; unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack."

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Climate change and radioactive waste both pose deadly long-term threats, and we have a moral duty to minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them."

[Lazarus Long]

The hits just keep on coming. I have read the WWF report earlier but now more reports are confirming the observation that the great species die-off is accelerating. Why as theis article alludes to is a more elusive set of arguments but the vast number of them are all related to human activity.

Whether it is through consumption, competition, displacement (habitat), indirect interference (as in climate change) or plain neglect (toxic waste) all roads lead to Rome and we are the Global Romans.


Climate Change: Boom or Bust for Biodiversity?
Mon May 24,12:07 PM ET Science - Reuters
By Ed Stoddard

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) - Will climate change trigger mass extinctions or will new life bloom in its wake?

Some of the scientific scenarios are apocalyptic and see a warmer world leading to the most profound changes since the demise of the dinosaurs.

"The biodiversity and nature impacts (of global warming) are well-documented...All the signals are there: birds migrating earlier, flowers blooming earlier, seasons changing," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change program for the conservation group WWF International.

Global warming (news - web sites) could wipe out a quarter of all species of plants and animals by 2050, according to one international study.

Others see a wetter and hence greener world as a result.

Australians scientists said this month that a hotter planet could induce more rainfall, encouraging the growth of plants that soak up greenhouse gases. Many scientists say any benefits to forest growth could not offset threats to biodiversity from human pollution, the spread of roads and cities or rising sea levels tied to global warming.

Few scientists dispute the basic premise of the "greenhouse effect," which holds that human-induced carbon dioxide emissions are trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere. The debate intensifies when scientists attempt to forecast how fast and how far global temperatures will rise as a result.


CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE PAST

One dramatic thesis asserts that humanity has been altering the Earth's climate for the past 8,000 years because of large-scale forest clearance for agriculture, which released huge amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

In a paper published last year in the journal "Climatic Change," William Ruddiman of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville argued that on the eve of Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, people had already raised the global temperature by an average of 0.8 degrees centigrade.

"The first phase is that of negligible human impact which stretches back, say, a million years ago. And then you have this middle phase which begins 8,000 years ago with early agriculture and greenhouse gas levels rise slowly," Ruddiman told Reuters by telephone.

"And since the Industrial Revolution there is a real acceleration (in greenhouse gas emissions) and as a result a stronger effect on climate," he said.

Ruddiman says that pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions warmed the planet sufficiently to stop an ice age in its tracks. And the cause -- widespread forest clearing -- would almost certainly have had an impact on biodiversity, though Ruddiman himself has not speculated on this angle, and declined to be drawn on it as it is not his field of expertise. Habitat destruction is widely regarded by many ecologists as the biggest man-made reason for species loss or extinction.

Forest clearing in Europe 5,000 years ago would not be like the mechanized felling of tropical forests today. It may in fact have initially contributed to diversity as early farmers would probably have left a variety of habitats in their wake, such as fields bordering forests, which could have benefited many species.

There is an intriguing flip side to this story.

ANOTHER THEORY

Ruddiman maintains that this pre-industrial warming trend was at times reversed by reforestation in the northern hemisphere -- a process set in motion by mass human deaths caused by pandemics of bubonic plague and other diseases.

His argument: The plague led to widespread abandonment of farms during the Roman empire and most spectacularly in the mid-14th century, when at least one-third of Europe's inhabitants perished in its wake between 1347 and 1350. Cultivated land also fell into disuse in the Americas because of smallpox, which devastated Native American populations as a result of their initial contacts with Europeans.

The result was that forests grew back and absorbed big enough quantities of greenhouse gases while they were at it to affect global climate patterns.

"Land-use modelers note that abandoned cropland and pasture reverts to full-forest carbon levels in 50 years or less," Ruddiman wrote.

"Historical records indicate that reoccupation of farms occurred in less than a century if the plagues quickly abated, but could be delayed by a century or two if repeated outbreaks kept population levels low."

This, he maintains, may have been a factor behind the "Little Ice Age" between 1300 and 1900. In short, the causes of human-induced climate change -- never mind its effects -- have probably already affected life on Earth in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.

And in today's world of 6 billion people -- compared with 200 million to 400 million 2,000 years ago, according to U.N. estimates -- the causes of climate change may be having a far greater impact than at any other time in human history.

Pollution linked to the burning of greenhouse fossil fuels and the destruction of tropical rain forests is, in the view of most ecologists, taking a serious toll on the environment. The impact of drastic climate change itself on biodiversity may hold surprises which have not yet been imagined.

[kevin]

Link: http://www.eurekaler...u-ewn060204.php

---

Public release date: 2-Jun-2004
Contact: Terry Collins
collins1@sympatico.ca
416-538-8712
United Nations University

Experts weigh need to overhaul environmental governance system as world ecosystems worsen
Environmental conditions worldwide are worsening despite a proliferation of treaties and organizations, calling into question the need to overhaul the way the world manages its environmental affairs, according to research published June 3 by United Nations University Press.

No one body currently administers the different treaties and multi-lateral environmental agreements so mandates overlap, enforcement inconsistent and disjointed. The numerous actors on the international environmental field need coordination by a new Global Environmental Organization (GEO), say authors of "Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance".

Edited by Professors Norichika Kanie and Peter M. Haas, the book says the new global environmental institution would help consolidate and coordinate environmental policy research, technology databases, and information clearing-houses, conduct training, and centralize the secretariats that administer global environmental agreements.

A GEO could serve as well as a legal advocate for environmental protection and regulations to counterbalance the WTO by collecting a roster of international environmental lawyers to participate in WTO panels, the book says, adding it could also organize high-profile annual ministerial meetings to address environmental issues, ensure widespread involvement in environmental policy, and galvanize rapid responses to new alerts. Also called for is the creation of an international High Commissioner for the Environment.

The book says the UN Environment Programme is overstretched, with a large mandate but relatively little funding and personnel, and recommends it focus on science and co-ordination of scientific activities throughout the UN system, overseeing the monitoring of environmental conditions, and providing authoritative information to the international community.

Other recommendations in the book include an NGO watchdog to monitor state and industry compliance with multilateral environmental treaties, akin to Amnesty International.

Enforcement: World Environmental Court, Security Council, among global options

Authors of the second UNU book explore like themes, including the need for improving compliance with and enforcement of international environmental laws.

"Reforming International Environmental Governance: From Institutional Limits to Innovative Solutions," edited by W. Bradnee Chambers and Jessica F. Green, says options include a World Environment Court, a UN Environmental Security Council with binding enforcement powers, and expansion of the UN Security Council mandate to include environmental security. The Security Council can already act in cases of armed conflict which arise because of environmental or resource depletion, but it is unclear whether it does or should have the mandate to act, for example, when there are environmental threats to peace and stability.

According to Mr. Chambers, the book aims at fundamental questions about how institutions can most effectively address global environmental problems.

"Even though governments have complained a lot about the problem, they have offered no solutions except the status quo," he says. "The basic question to ask ourselves is why, after witnessing a proliferation of international organizations, hundreds of treaties, new agencies and new environmental programmes in every relevant UN organization, nevertheless we see the environment getting worse, not better. Is something wrong with the current institutional setup? If so what is it? How can we improve these organizations?"

With reform of international environmental governance an important topic in both the political and the academic arenas, these two volumes offer important information about the current complex dynamics of multilateral agreements, the costs and benefits of different models and approaches to reforming international environmental governance.


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Established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1973, UNU is an international community of scholars engaged in research, advanced training and the dissemination of knowledge related to pressing global problems. Activities focus mainly on peace and conflict resolution, sustainable development and the use of science and technology to advance human welfare. The University operates a worldwide network of research and post-graduate training centres, with headquarters in Tokyo.