There Is Little or Nothing Manufactured Today That Nature Loves

We will no longer be impressed by an organic T-shirt if its cotton was grown by hogging water in an arid and impoverished land, or if its dye puts workers at heightened risk for leukemia.

The Age of Eco-Angst
By Daniel Goleman / September 27, 2009

My grandson’s third birthday is at hand, and I’m looking at a toy racing car I won’t be giving him. Painted a bright yellow, this nifty little toy seemed just right for him when I paid a buck for it at a big box store. But before I could give it to him, I learned that cheap toys made in China, like this one, can have lead in their paint — particularly reds and yellows — to make them more shiny.

My pleasure at picturing his delight at the toy car melted into something between disgust and outrage. That nifty toy sits on my desk months after I bought it.

Call it eco-angst, the moment a new bit of unpleasant ecological information about some product or other plunges us into a moment (or more) of despair at the planet’s condition and the fragility of our place on it.

Eco-angst, it turns out, is but one version of a widely studied psychological phenomenon, one well-known in the world of retailing. Take a bargain bin cabernet, tell people it’s an expensive, estate-bottled varietal, and they’ll tell you they like it. They’ll even linger longer over their dinner, enjoying not just the wine but the rest of their food more. Now describe the same wine as a low-end variety from North Dakota, and they’ll tell you it’s not so good — and finish their meal faster, enjoying it less.

The difference lies, of course, in the perception, not the reality. The emotional power of this perceptual skew has been documented in experiments not just with wines, but even pain relievers — the more expensive ones always seem better. Mindset drives our experience of a product, a fact known intuitively by advertisers long before the era of “Mad Men.” Back in the 1920s, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, became an influential pioneer of public relations by capitalizing on the power of psychological manipulation of the public to sell products. Advertising and psychology has been intertwined ever since.

What’s more, brain imaging now reveals that tasting what we think is a high-end wine produces heightened activity in a key strip of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, which lights up during moments of keen interest — a pattern some neuroeconomists see as the brain signature for brand preference. The “low-end” wine, on the other hand elicits not a budge in orbitofrontal chatter, a pattern indicating disinterest or disgust. (Study data can be found here.)

The neural signature for disgust may soon become more prevalent in the aisles of stores with the advent of heightened transparency about the ecological impacts of retail products like deodorants, foods and toys. A new generation of information systems has begun to offer detailed evaluations of once-hidden ecological impacts for tens of thousands of items, and the picture is not always pretty.

Eco-angst dawns with the discovery that some children’s sunblock contains a chemical that becomes a carcinogen when exposed to the sun, or that the company that makes a popular organic yogurt operates in ways that result in significantly more greenhouse gases than their competitors. The moral here, or course, is not to stop using sunblock nor to give up yogurt, but to choose the brands without these downsides.

Such distasteful information has predictable consequences for marketing, particularly if the eye-opening data comes at the moment we’re comparing two brands. Psychologists call it the “contrast effect”: as Item A suddenly looks bad, we get an even stronger preference for Item B. It is also a marketing boon for products that do no harm.

Eco-angst among consumers may soon spread as information about products is increasing easy to get. GoodGuide.com, is a Web site (with its own iPhone application) that instantly compares any of 75,000 consumer products on their environmental, health, and social impacts. Another Web site, SkinDeep.com, analyzes every ingredient in personal care products to match them with findings from medical databases; it ranks, for example, more than a thousand shampoos on their likely levels of toxicity.

The blockbuster for ecological transparency was the announcement in July by Wal-Mart that they are developing a similar sustainability index with the help of an academic consortium. One day shoppers, it seems, will get ecological ratings of products along with price in Wal-Mart (and likely other major retailers as well) as they stroll the aisles.

These rating systems herald the death of “greenwashing,” the advertising sleight-of-hand that plucks a single virtue from a multitude of a product’s ecological impacts and touts its environmental goodness. We will no longer be impressed by an organic T-shirt if its cotton was grown by hogging water in an arid and impoverished land, or if its dye puts workers at heightened risk for leukemia, or if it was stitched together in a sweatshop where young women suffer from needless injuries.

Industrial ecology, the fledgling discipline that renders precise analyzes of the multitude of ecological impacts any man-made item has over its life cycle, tells us that there is little or nothing manufactured today that nature loves. Ours is an age of eco-angst because virtually all our industrial platforms, processes and chemicals were developed in a day when people were oblivious to their ecological impacts.

It’s not that no one cared — no one really knew. Industrial ecology has only come of age in the last decade or two, and has yet to make its findings widely known. But as ecological transparency comes to the aisles of stores near you and me, it opens an opportunity for us to vote with our dollars with unprecedented precision for better ecological impacts.

Rather than taking the ascetic route of “No Impact Man,” we can together become high impact shoppers, tipping market share to products with gentler ecological imprints. But to do so we need to face the often unattractive truths behind the making of our favorite stuff, and so risk a stiff dose of disgust.

Source / New York Times

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We Can Build a Society of Good Ancestors

Ecosocialism - For a Society of Good Ancestors!
By Ian Angus / April 30, 2009

[Ian Angus was a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century conference , in Sydney Australia, April 10-12, 2009. The event, which drew 440 participants from more than 15 countries, was organized by Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and Green Left Weekly. The following is Ian's talk to the plenary session on "Confronting the climate change crisis: an ecosocialist perspective." He has lightly edited the text for publication.]

The world is getting hotter, and the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. Enormous damage has already been done, and we will have to live with the consequences of past emissions for decades, perhaps even centuries. Unless we rapidly and drastically cut emissions, the existing damage will turn to catastrophe.

Anyone who denies that is either lying or somehow unaware of the huge mass of compelling scientific evidence.

Many publications regularly publish articles summarizing the scientific evidence and outlining the devastation that we face if action isn't taken quickly. I highly recommend Green Left Weekly as a continuing source. I'm not going to repeat what you've undoubtedly read there.

But I do want to draw your attention to an important recent development. Last month, more than 2500 climate scientists met in Copenhagen to discuss the state of scientific knowledge on this subject. And the one message that came through loud and clear was this: it's much worse than we thought.

What were called "worst case scenarios" two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually understated the problem. The final statement issued by the Copenhagen conference declared: "The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized ."

Nicholas Stern, author of the landmark 2006 study, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change now says, "We underestimated the risks . we underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases . and we underestimated the probability of temperature increases."

Seventeen years of failure - with one exception

Later this year, the world's governments will meet, again in Copenhagen, to try to reach a new post-Kyoto climate treaty. Will they meet the challenge of climate change that is much worse than expected?

The politicians' record does not inspire hope.

Seventeen years ago, in June 1992, 172 governments, including 108 heads of state, met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

That meeting produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first international agreement that aimed "to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a low enough level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." In particular, the industrialized countries promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels.

Like the Kyoto Accord that followed it, that agreement was a failure. The world's top politicians demonstrated their gross hypocrisy and their indifference to the future of humanity and nature by giving fine speeches and making promises - and then continuing with business as usual.

But there was one exception. In Rio one head of state spoke out strongly, and called for immediate emergency action - and then returned home to support the implementation of practical policies for sustainable, low-emission development.

That head of state was Fidel Castro.

Fidel began his brief remarks to the plenary session of the 1992 Earth Summit with a blunt description of the crisis: "An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. We have become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it."

He placed the blame for the crisis squarely on the imperialist countries, and he finished with a warning that emergency action was needed: "Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago."

After the 1992 Earth Summit, only the Cubans acted on their promises and commitments.

In 1992 Cuba amended its constitution to recognize the importance of "sustainable economic and social development to make human life more rational and to ensure the survival, well-being and security of present and future generations." The amended constitution obligates the provincial and municipal assemblies of People's Power to implement and enforce environmental protections. And it says that "it is the duty of citizens to contribute to the protection of the waters, atmosphere, the conservation of the soil, flora, fauna and nature's entire rich potential."

The Cubans have adopted low-fertilizer agriculture, and encouraged urban farming to reduce the distances food has to travel. They have replaced all of their incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents, and distributed energy efficient rice cookers. They have stepped up reforestation, nearly doubling the island's forested area, to 25% in 2006.

As a result of these and many other projects, in 2006 the World Wildlife Federation concluded that Cuba is the only country in the world that meets the criteria for sustainable development.

By contrast, the countries responsible for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions followed one of two paths. Some gave lip service to cleaning up their acts, but in practice did little or nothing. Others denied that action was needed and so did little or nothing.

As a result we are now very close to the tomorrow that Fidel spoke of, the tomorrow when it is too late.

Why Cuba?

The World Wildlife Federation deserves credit for its honesty in reporting Cuba's achievements. But the WWF failed to address the next logical question. Why was Cuba the exception? Why could a tiny island republic in the Caribbean do what no other country could do?

And the next question after that is, why have the richest countries in the world not cut their emissions, not developed sustainable economies? Why, despite their enormous physical and scientific resources, has their performance actually gotten worse?

The first question, why Cuba could do it, was answered not long ago by Armando Choy, a leader of the Cuban revolution who has recently headed the drive to clean up Havana Bay. His explanation was very clear and compelling:

"This is possible because our system is socialist in character and commitment, and because the revolution's top leadership acts in the interests of the majority of humanity inhabiting planet earth - not on behalf of narrow individual interests, or even simply Cuba's national interests."

General Choy's comments reminded me of a passage in Capital, a paragraph that all by itself refutes the claim that is sometimes made, that Marxism has nothing in common with ecology. Karl Marx wrote:

"Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations."

I've never known any socialist organization to make this point explicitly, but Marx's words imply that one of the key objectives of socialism must be to build a society in which human beings work consciously to be Good Ancestors.

And that is what the Cubans are doing in practice.

The idea that we must act in the present to build a better world for the future, has been a theme of the Cuban revolutionary movement since Fidel's great 1953 speech, History Will Absolve Me. That commitment to future generations is central to what has justly been called the greening of the Cuban revolution.

The Cubans are committed, not just in words but in practice, to being Good Ancestors, not only to future Cubans, but to future generations around the globe.

Why not capitalism?

But what about the other side of the question? Why do we not see a similar commitment in the ruling classes of Australia, or Canada, or the United States?

If you ask any of them individually, our rulers would undoubtedly say that they want their children and grandchildren to live in a stable and sustainable world. So why do their actions contradict their words? Why do they seem determined, in practice, to leave their children and grandchildren a world of poisoned air and water, a world of floods and droughts and escalating climate disasters? Why have they repeatedly sabotaged international efforts to adopt even half-hearted measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions?

When they do consider or implement responses to the climate crisis, why do they always support solutions that do not work, that cannot possibly work?

Karl Marx had a wonderful phrase for the bosses and their agents - the big shareholders and executives and top managers and the politicians they own - a phrase that explains why they invariably act against the present and future interests of humanity. These people, he said, are "personifications of capital." Regardless of how they behave at home, or with their children, their social role is that of capital in human form.

They don't act to stop climate change because the changes needed by the people of this world are directly contrary to the needs of capital.

Capital has no conscience. Capital can't be anyone's ancestor because capital has no children. Capital has only one imperative: it has to grow.

The only reason for using money to buy stock, launch a corporation, build a factory or drill an oil well is to get more money back than you invested. That doesn't always happen, of course - some investments fail to produce profits, and, as we are seeing today, periodically the entire system goes into freefall, wiping out jobs and livelihoods and destroying capital. But that doesn't contradict the fact that the potential for profit, to make capital grow, is a defining feature of capitalism. Without it, the system would rapidly collapse.

As Joel Kovel says, "Capitalism can no more survive limits on growth than a person can live without breathing."

A system of growth and waste

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much is sold every day, every week, every year. It doesn't matter that the sales include vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.

It all contributes to profits, and thus to the growth of capital - and that's what counts.

In Capital, Marx wrote that from a capitalist's perspective, raw materials such as metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. are "furnished by Nature gratis." The wealth of nature doesn't have to be paid for or replaced when it is used - it is there for the taking. If the capitalists had to pay the real cost of that replacing or restoring that wealth, their profits would fall drastically.

That's true not only of raw materials, but also of what are sometimes called "environmental services" - the water and air that have been absorbing capitalism's waste products for centuries. They have been treated as free sewers and free garbage dumps, "furnished by Nature gratis."

That's what the pioneering environmental economist William Kapp meant nearly sixty years ago, when he wrote, "Capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs."

Kapp wrote that capitalism's claims of efficiency and productivity are: "nothing more than an institutionalized cover under which it is possible for private enterprise to shift part of the costs to the shoulders of others and to practice a form of large-scale spoliation which transcends everything the early socialists had in mind when they spoke of the exploitation of man by man."

In short, pollution is not an accident, and it is not a "market failure." It is the way the system works.

How large is the problem? In 1998 the World Resources Institute conducted a major international study of the resource inputs used by corporations in major industrial countries - water, raw materials, fuel, and so on. Then they determined what happened to those inputs. They found that "One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year."

Similar numbers are reported by others. As you know, about a billion people live in hunger. And yet, as the head of the United Nations Environmental Program said recently, "Over half of the food produced today is either lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain."

"Inefficiency" in this case means that it is no profit to be made by preventing food waste - so waste continues. In addition to exacerbating world hunger, capitalism's gross inefficiency poisons the land and water with food that is harvested but not used.

Capitalism's destructive DNA

Capitalism combines an irresistible drive to grow, with an irresistible drive to create waste and pollution. If nothing stops it, capitalism will expand both those processes infinitely.

But the earth is not infinite. The atmosphere and oceans and the forests are very large, but ultimately they are finite, limited resources - and capitalism is now pressing against those limits. The 2006 WWF Living Planet Report concludes, "The Earth's regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand - people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources."

My only disagreement with that statement is that it places the blame on "people" as an abstract category. In fact the devastation is caused by the global capitalist system, and by the tiny class of exploiters that profits from capitalism's continued growth. The great majority of people are victims, not perpetrators.

In particular, capitalist pollution has passed the physical limit of the ability of nature to absorb carbon dioxide and other gases while keeping the earth's temperature steady. As a result, the world is warmer today than it has been for 100,000 years, and the temperature continues to rise.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions are not unusual or exceptional. Pouring crap into the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and it isn't going to stop so long as capitalism survives. That's why "solutions" like carbon trading have failed so badly and will continue to fail: waste and pollution and ecological destruction are built into the system's DNA.

No matter how carefully the scheme is developed, no matter how many loopholes are identified and plugged, and no matter how sincere the implementers and administrators may be, capitalism's fundamental nature will always prevail.

We've seen that happen with Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism, under which polluters in rich countries can avoid cutting their own emissions if they invest in equivalent emission-reducing projects in the Third World. A Stanford University study shows that two-thirds or more of the CDM emission reduction credits have not produced any reductions in pollution.

The entire system is based on what one observer says are "enough lies to make a sub-prime mortgage pusher blush."

CDM continues not because it is reducing emissions, but because there are profits to be made buying and selling credits. CDM is an attempt to trick the market into doing good in spite of itself, but capitalism's drive for profits wins every time.

Green eco-capitalists

One of the greatest weaknesses of the mainstream environmental movement has been its failure or refusal to identify capitalism as the root problem. Indeed, many of the world's Green Parties, including the one in Canada where I live, openly describe themselves as eco-capitalist, committed to maintaining the profit system.

Of course this puts them in a contradictory position when they face the reality of capitalist ecocide.

In Canada, as you may know, oil companies are engaged in what the British newspaper, The Independent, accurately called, "The Biggest Environmental Crime in History," mining the Alberta Tar Sands. If it continues, it will ultimately destroy an area that is nearly twice as big as New South Wales, in order to produce oil by a process that generates three times as much greenhouse gas as normal oil production.

It is also destroying ecosystems, killing animals, fish and birds, and poisoning the drinking water used by Indigenous peoples in that area.

It's obvious that anyone who is serious about protecting the environment and stopping emissions should demand that the Tar Sands be shut down. But when I raised that in a talk not long ago in Vancouver, a Green Party candidate in the audience objected that would be irresponsible, because it would violate the oil companies' contract rights.

Evidently, for these eco-capitalists, "capitalism" takes precedence over "eco."

But as capitalist destruction accelerates, and as capitalist politicians continue to stall, or to introduce measures that only benefit the fossil fuel companies, we can expect that many of the most sincere and dedicated greens will begin to question the system itself, not just its worst results.

Greens moving left: Gus Speth

An important case in point, and, I hope, a harbinger of what's to come in green circles - is James Gustave Speth, who is now dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Gus Speth has spent most of his life trying to save the environment by working inside the system. He was a senior environmental advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, and later to Bill Clinton. In the 1990s, he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and Chair of the United Nations Development Group. Time magazine called him "the ultimate insider."

Last year, after 40 years working inside the system, Speth published a book called, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Stability”.

…He argues that working inside the system has failed - because the system itself is the cause of environmental destruction.

"My conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today .

"Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates."

That's exactly correct - no Marxist could have said it better. Nor could we improve on Speth's summary of the factors that combine to make contemporary capitalism the enemy of ecology.

"An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at almost any cost; enormous investment in technologies designed with little regard for the environment; powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they create; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by a worshipping of novelty and by sophisticated advertising; economic activity so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet; all combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the planet's ability to sustain life."

Speth is not a Marxist. He still hopes that governments can reform and control capitalism, eliminating pollution. He's wrong about that, but his analysis of the problem is dead-on, and the fact that it comes from someone who has worked for so long inside the system makes his argument against capitalism credible and powerful.

The socialist movement should welcome and publicize this development, even though Speth and others like him don't yet take their ideas to the necessary socialist conclusions.

Greens moving left: James Hansen

Similarly, we should be very encouraged that NASA's James Hansen, one of the world's most respected climate scientists, joined in the March 20 demonstration against a planned coal-fired electricity plant in Coventry, England. Hansen is another environmentalist who has worked inside the system for years.

He told the UK “Guardian” that people should first use the "democratic process" by which he means elections. He went on:

"What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

"The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I'm not surprised that people are getting frustrated.

"I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we're running out of time."

In the same interview, Hansen expressed concern about the approach of the Obama administration:

"It's not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately I think that will be another case of greenwash. It's going to take stronger action than that."

Like Speth, Hansen is not a socialist. But he condemns the most widely-promoted market-based "solution," and he calls for demonstrations and protests, so eco-socialists can and must view him as an ally.

Why ECO-socialism?

Which brings me to a question I've been asked many times, including during this visit to Australia. "Why eco-socialism?"

Why not just say 'socialism'? Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about humanity's relationship to nature, and what we today would call ecological ideas, are deeply embedded in their writings. In the 1920s, there was a very influential ecology movement in the Soviet Union. So why do we need a new word?

All that is true. But it is also true that during the 20th century socialists forgot or ignored that tradition, supporting (and in some cases implementing) approaches to economic growth and development that were grossly harmful to the environment.

Socialist Voice recently published an interview in which Oswaldo Martinez, the president of the Economic Affairs Commission of Cuba's National Assembly addressed just that question. He said:

"The socialism practiced by the countries of the Socialist Camp replicated the development model of capitalism, in the sense that socialism was conceived as a quantitative result of growth in productive forces. It thus established a purely quantitative competition with capitalism, and development consisted in achieving this without taking into account that the capitalist model of development is the structuring of a consumer society that is inconceivable for humanity as a whole.

"The planet would not survive. It is impossible to replicate the model of one car for each family, the model of the idyllic North American society, Hollywood etc. - absolutely impossible, and this cannot be the reality for the 250 million inhabitants of the United States, with a huge rearguard of poverty in the rest of the world.

"It is therefore necessary to come up with another model of development that is compatible with the environment and has a much more collective way of functioning." [Full interview: www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=375]

In my view, one good reason for using the word `eco-socialism' is to signal a clear break with the practices that Martinez describes: practices that were called socialist for seventy years. It is a way of saying that we aim not to create a society based on having more things, but on living better - not quantitative growth, but qualitative change.

Another reason, just as important, is to signal loud and clear that we view ecology and climate change not as just as another stick to bash capitalism with, but as one of the principal problems facing humanity in this century.

Evo Morales: Save the planet from capitalism

Although he has never used the word, so far as I know, one of the strongest defenders of eco-socialist ideas in the world today is Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state in Latin America.

In a short essay published last November, Evo brilliantly defined the problem, named the villain, and posed the alternative.

"Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism, Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world.

"In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold under capitalism. And even "climate change" itself has become a business.

"Climate change" has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life."

You know, last year I spent months working with other members of the Eco-socialist International Network, composing a statement to be distributed at the World Social Forum. It was finally published as the Belem Eco-socialist Declaration. [See climateandcapitalism.com/?p=597]

Now I wonder why we didn't just publish this statement by comrade Evo Morales. He set out the case for eco-socialism, including a program of 20 demands, more concisely, more clearly, and vastly more eloquently than we did. I urge you to read it and to distribute it as widely as possible. [Full text - climateandcapitalism.com/?p=591]

Slamming on the brakes

Writing in the 1930s, when Nazi barbarism was in the rise, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin said:

"Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake."

That's a powerful and profound metaphor. Capitalism has been so destructive, and taken us so far down the road to catastrophe, that one of the first tasks facing a socialist government will be to slam on the brakes.

The only choice, the only way forward, is eco-socialism, which I suggest can be defined simply as a socialism that will give top priority to the restoration of ecosystems that capitalism has destroyed, to the reestablishment of agriculture and industry on ecologically sound principles, and to mending what Marx called the metabolic rift, the destructive divide that capitalism has created between humanity and nature.

The fate of the ecological struggle is closely tied to the fortunes of the class struggle as a whole. The long neo-liberal drive to weaken the movements of working people also undermine ecological resistance, isolating it, pushing its leaders and organizations to the right.

But today neo-liberalism is discredited. Its financial and economic structures are in shambles. There is growing recognition that profound economic change is needed.

This is an historic opportunity for ecological activists to join hands with workers, with indigenous activists, with anti-imperialist movements here and around the world, to make ecological transformation a central feature of the economic change that is so clearly needed.

Together we can build a society of Good Ancestors, and cooperatively create a better world for future generations.

It won't be easy, and it won't be quick, but together we can make it happen.

Thank you.

[Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism, associate editor Socialist Voice, and a founding member of the Eco-socialist International Network. He lives near Ottawa, Canada.]

Source / Socialist Voice

Thanks to Ron Ridenour / The Rag Blog

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Honeybees Are Remarkable for Lots of Reasons

Honey bee nectaring on button willow.Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey, UC Davis Department of Entomology.
Let’s Hear It for the Bees
By Leon Kreitzman / April 28, 2009

Gardeners know that plants open and close their flowers at set times during the day. For example, the flowers of catmint open between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m.; orange hawkweed follows between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.; field marigolds open at 9:00 a.m.

In “Philosophia Botanica” (1751), the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus proposed that it should be possible to plant a floral clock. He noted that two species of daisy, the hawk’s-beard and the hawkbit, opened and closed at their respective times within about a half-hour each day. He suggested planting these daisies along with St. John’s Wort, marigolds, water-lilies and other species in a circle. The rhythmic opening and closing of the plants would be the effective hands of this clock.

Plants have carefully timed routines determined by internally generated rhythms. In 1729, Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan, a French astronomer, put a Mimosa plant in a cupboard to see what happened when it was kept in the dark. He peeked in at various times, and although the plant was permanently in the dark its leaves still opened and closed rhythmically – it was as though it had its own representation of day and night. The plant’s leaves still drooped during its subjective night and stiffened up during its subjective day. Furthermore, all the leaves moved at the same time. It took another 230 years or so to come up with the term circadian – about a day – to describe these rhythms.

In a similar vein, tobacco plants, stocks and evening primroses release their scent as the sun starts to go down at dusk. These plants attract pollinating moths and night-flying insects. The plants tend to be white or pale. Color vision is difficult under low light, and white best reflects the mainly bluish tinge of evening light.

But plants cannot release their scent in a timely manner simply in response to an environmental cue, like the lowering of the light levels. They need time to produce the oils. To coincide with the appearance of the nocturnal insects, the plant has to anticipate the sunset and produce the scent on a circadian schedule.

Flowers of a given species all produce nectar at about the same time each day, as this increases the chances of cross-pollination. The trick works because pollinators, which in most cases means the honeybee, concentrate foraging on a particular species into a narrow time-window. In effect the honeybee has a daily diary that can include as many as nine appointments — say, 10:00 a.m., lilac; 11:30 a.m., peonies; and so on. The bees’ time-keeping is accurate to about 20 minutes.

The bee can do this because, like the plants and just about every living creature, it has a circadian clock that is reset daily to run in time with the solar cycle. The bee can effectively consult this clock and “check” off the given time and associate this with a particular event.

Honeybees really are nature’s little treasures. They are a centimeter or so long, their brains are tiny, and a small set of simple rules can explain the sophisticated social behavior that produces the coordinated activity of a hive. They live by sets of instructions that are familiar to computer programmers as subroutines – do this until the stop code, then into the next subroutine, and so on.

These humble little bees have an innate ability to work out the location of a food source from its position in relation to the sun. They do this even on cloudy days by reading the pattern of the polarization of the light, and pass this information to other bees. In the dark of the hive, they transpose the location of a food source in the horizontal plane through the famous “waggle” dance into communication in the vertical plane of the hive.

Honeybees can tell their sisters how far away the food is up to a distance of about 15 kilometers. For good measure, they can also allow for the fact that the sun moves relative to the hive by about 15 degrees an hour and correct for this when they pass on the information. In other words, they have their own built-in global positioning system and a language that enables them to refer to objects and events that are distant in space or time.

German scientists in the early part of the last century called this ability of bees to learn the time of day when flowers start secreting nectar and visit the flowers at appropriate times Zeitgedächtnis, or time-sense. But the species of flowers in bloom, say, this week, is likely to be replaced by a different species at a different location next week or the week after. The bee needs a flexible, dynamic appointments system that it continually updates, and it has evolved an impressive ability to learn colors, odors, shapes and routes, within a time frame, quickly and accurately.

While the initial dance by a returning scout bee informs her sisters of the location and distance of food plants and the quality of their nectar, bees that visit the food source learn to synchronize their behavior with daily floral rhythms, foraging only when nectar and pollen are at their highest levels. At other times, they remain in the hive, conserving energy that otherwise would be exhausted on non-productive foraging flights.

Although most animals, including humans, cannot sustain long-lasting periods of activity without circadian rhythms, honeybees have developed a marked flexibility in their circadian rhythm that depends on the job they are doing. Whereas a particular circadian determined behavior is usually fixed to a certain phase of the cycle, in honeybees the circadian rhythm is dependent on the job the bee is doing.

Adult worker bees perform a number of tasks in the hive when they are young, like caring for eggs and larvae, and then shift to foraging for nectar and pollen as they age. However, if the hive has a shortage of foragers, some of the young nurse bees will switch jobs and become foragers. The job transition, whether triggered by age or social cues, involves changes in genes in the honeybee brain; some genes turn on, while others turn off.

Young worker bees less than two weeks of age who typically nurse the brood around-the-clock display no circadian rhythms. Older workers (more than three weeks) typically perform foraging activities and have strong circadian rhythms that are needed for the time-compensated sun-compass navigation and timing visits to flowers.

Recent research in Israel has shown that when young worker bees are removed from caring for the brood and placed in individual cages, they rapidly show circadian rhythms in their behavior. Newly emerged bees isolated in individual cages typically show circadian rhythms in locomotor activity when at 3 days to 14 days old, ages at which most bees in the hive perform around-the-clock nursing activities as mentioned above. Older foragers who revert to nursing duties switch back to around-the-clock brood care activity similar to that of young nurses in typical colonies.

The molecular clockwork mechanism that produces the circadian rhythm works by a series of feedback loops in which the proteins produced by several genes feedback to repress their own production. It is a complicated system, but the end result is a near-24-hour cycling in the levels of various proteins that in turn result in the cycling of the secretion of hormones and other substances.

It seems that there is a plasticity, or flexibility, in the organization of this molecular clockwork mechanism in honeybees, and that the social factors that influence division of labor in honeybee colonies are important also for the regulation of this circadian mechanism. As there is mounting evidence for increased pathologies and deterioration in performance when around-the-clock activity is imposed on most animals, including humans, detailed study of the plasticity of the circadian organization in honeybees may provide pointers for ways for us to have our 24/7 cake and eat it.

Honeybees are remarkable not just for the organization of their circadian clockwork. James Gould of Princeton first studied bees as an undergraduate. It was his pioneering study that showed conclusively that Karl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize for elucidating the waggle dance, had been right in concluding that the dance was a means of conveying information.

Ironically, an allergy meant that Gould had to stop working directly with the creatures, but his respect for them is enormous. As he has pointed out:

When a human decides whether to recommend a restaurant, taking into account its menus, the tastes of the friend being advised, the cost of the food, the distance to the establishment, the ambience of the dining room, the ease of parking and all the other factors that enter into such a decision, we have little hesitation in attributing conscious decision-making to the calculation. When a small frenetic creature enclosed in an exoskeleton and sprouting supernumerary legs and a sting performs an analogous integration of factors, however, our biases spur us to look for another explanation, different in kind.

We have been exploiting honeybees for thousands of years by systematically robbing them of their honey. The least we can do is take proper care of these wondrous creatures. Instead we are killing them off in their billions through our befouling of their environment. The honeybee brain has only a million or so neurons, several orders of magnitude less than ours. It is a moot point as to whether humans or honeybees make the best use of their neuronal resource.

**********
NOTES:

For a discussion about how bees know what to do, and when, see the appropriately titled paper by Pahl M., Zhu H, Pix W., Tautz J., Zhang S. “Circadian timed episodic-like memory – a bee knows what to do when, and also where ” J Exp Biol. 2007 Oct, 210(Pt 20):3559-67.

For circadian plasticity see Shemesh Y., Cohen M., Bloch G. “Natural plasticity in circadian rhythms is mediated by reorganization in the molecular clockwork in honeybees” FASEB J. 2007 Aug;21(10):2304-11.

James Gould quote from Gould, J. L. & Gould, C. G. (1999) “The Animal Mind.” W. H. Freeman, New York.

Source / New York Times

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Greening Up the Co-operative Movement

The River Arts co-op development is considering solar panels. The building’s energy committee includes Julie Ruben, top, and from left, Jack Fogle, Frank Gary and Paul Kittas. Photo: Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times.
It’s Not Easy Turning Co-op Boards Green
By Mireya Navarro / March 22, 2009

Seated at an oval table with spreadsheets and calculators at the ready, the six-member board of River Arts, a 244-unit co-op development in Washington Heights, mulled over the pros and cons of investing in solar power.

Ed Lloyd, the board president, was not convinced that the co-op would get its initial investment back.

“I don’t want us to be all caught up in green and end up in the red,” he said. “I’m as environmentally conscious as the next person but we can’t base it all on that.”

Jack Fogle, a resident who had worked for more than a year with the co-op’s energy committee to sell the idea, pressed on.

“If we take the risk, that money will pay us back for the next 30 years,” said Mr. Fogle, who is also the building’s manager.

The politics at residential buildings, which are notoriously contentious, have become even more so as environmental issues have entered the fray. At many co-ops and condominiums, the members of energy and green committees lobby and cajole their neighbors to embrace projects that sometimes require upfront money, like solar panels, but more often just demand interest and effort on the part of residents, like recycling correctly.

It can be a thankless job that sometimes is met with indifference, skepticism and even outright hostility. But environmentally motivated residents say they operate on the theory of, “If I don’t do it, who will?” as it was put by Sharon Lee Ritchie, who started a green committee in her co-op in Harlem.

While more fervent advocates can gravitate toward weighty projects — a green roof or solar panels, for example — mundane measures can make more of an impact, experts say. But no matter what the investment, environmental consciousness can be a tough sell in a bad economy, especially when it can takes years to recoup the initial cost for some projects.

At River Arts, one argument that was used to sell the board on the idea of solar energy was the savings achieved by Cabrini Terrace, another co-op in Washington Heights, which went solar in 2007 and shared its figures with the River Arts board.

Frank Rathbun, a spokesman for Community Associations Institute, a national group that represents homeowner associations, said that if co-op boards “can show savings, the homeowners are going to be a lot more receptive.”

That has been the case at River Arts, which overlooks the Hudson River on Riverside Drive. In 2007, members of an energy committee had pushed to install solar panels to produce part of the building’s electricity, but the board balked because it would take 10 years to recover the investment through energy savings, Mr. Fogle said.

Since then, new federal, state and city tax credits have become available, reducing River Arts’ net cost of a $400,000 system to $10,000 — meaning it would take about one year for the co-op to recover the investment, Mr. Fogle said. The co-op expects its solar power to eventually reduce energy costs by $7,000 a year. At a committee meeting in January to plan the presentation for board members and shareholders, tensions rose as discussions stalled on details like how much information shareholders needed to hear about the timeline for the project.

“People! People!” Mr. Fogle shouted. “You don’t need to give people more than is necessary.” He walked out of the room, returning a few minutes later in a calmer state.

Finally, at a meeting in February, the hard work seemed to be paying off.

“Financially, it sounds like the numbers are reasonable,” conceded Mr. Lloyd, the board president.

There is little question that the green movement has gained significant traction in recent years.

In New York, city officials say residential buildings produce more carbon dioxide emissions — 30 percent — than any other large sources of emissions, such as commercial buildings or transportation. Nearly two-thirds of those emissions come from the use of electricity and natural gas.

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, said he knew interest in greening buildings was high when he called a conference on the topic in late 2007 and a standing-room-only crowd of 500 people came.

“The green-building movement is now commonplace,” he said. “It’s a combination of economics, saving the environment and this whole notion that the measures we take enhance the quality of life,” he said.

Yet there are still battles to be fought, and not all of them related to money. At River Arts, part of the challenge is to win over apathetic residents.

One member of the energy committee, Julie Ruben, said that an informational meeting on the idea for solar in December drew barely a dozen people. The co-op residents will ultimately have to vote to approve the plan.

And at another co-op building in Washington Heights, the residents’ input was nearly avoided altogether at first. Yonah Zur, 31, a musician who lives with his wife and young son, got a compost pile going in his co-op’s backyard with the knowledge of only the few members of the building’s garden committee. He said that compost bins are often mistakenly assumed to smell and attract rodents, and he worried about the reaction from the rest of the owners.

“I wanted to make it work and then show the neighbors,” Mr. Zur said.

After eight months of composting food scraps and leaves by himself in a spot not visible from most of the building’s 120 units, Mr. Zur put up signs in the elevator last May, announcing a garden clean-up and a compost lesson. Now as many as 10 apartments use four compost bins. But one neighbor did not like the aesthetics of a tall bin that held a pile of leaves outside her window.

“She was complaining about the look of it,” Mr. Zur said. The problem was solved by moving the bin eight feet away from the neighbor’s apartment.

Many of those pushing for greening buildings argue that any step, no matter how small, helps create a commitment that can lead to more ambitious undertakings.

Ms. Ritchie, the co-op owner in Harlem, said that she did not feel it was realistic to go for big energy projects when her 241-unit co-op in Harlem already has a list of must-do capital projects. So she turned her attention to “doable” things like a clothing and fabric recycling program, partnering with Wearable Collections, a local business that does curbside pickups.

At her 241-unit co-op in Harlem, Sharon Lee Ritchie pushed smaller environmental projects, like using eco-friendly cleaning products. Photo: Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times.

Experts from the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group that certifies buildings for energy efficiency and other environmental features, say that it is the unglamorous measures that are beneficial but often overlooked. Those include insulating steam pipes, sealing leaks around windows, weather-stripping doors, investing in a gas-fired boiler or co-generation, sub-metering electricity so owners pay for their own consumption, or even making sure lights are not left on all the time.

Ms. Ritchie, who owns an event planning and design business, said she convinced a skeptical building superintendent — “just humor me for a week,” she told him — to try out eco-friendly cleaning products, which come in such highly concentrated formulas, she said, that they now save the building $500 a month in cleaning supplies.

Still, for almost two years, her building’s green committee had only one member: Ms. Ritchie. “I just think people are busy and they’re happy to participate without spending any of their time,” she said of her rewarding but lonely greening experience.

She was overjoyed this month when seven new volunteers agreed to join her committee.

Source / New York Times

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Slow Food Nation : You Are What You Eat

The Slow Food Nation gathering promises to be a Woodstock for food lovers and enviros concerned with our food system.
By Kerry Trueman / August 25

SAN FRANCISCO -- A swarm of 40,000 to 50,000 locavores will descend on San Francisco this Labor Day weekend to attend Slow Food Nation, a four-day extravaganza of teach-ins and tastings that's being billed as a kind of "Woodstock for gastronomes."

I'd rather go to a Woodstock for garden gnomes, myself -- at least those Lilliputian lawn ornaments share my fondness for front yard farming. Gastro gnomes, on the other hand, sound like elitist elves who are overly fond of artisanal cheeses and grass-fed beef. Do we really need a celebration of such highfalutin culinary novelties at a time when high fuel and food costs are making it harder for people to keep their pantries stocked with even the most basic staples?

Well, yes, we do, because we need to remember that the fresh, unadulterated, minimally processed, locally produced foods that Slow Food Nation is showcasing were our pantry staples, before the military-industrial complex annexed our food chain a half a century or so ago in the name of progress.

Our great-grandparents would be flabbergasted to learn that grass-fed milk in glass bottles bearing the local dairy farm's logo is now a rare luxury item available to only the affluent few who are willing to pay $4 for a half-gallon of milk.

Back in the day, our breads were fresh-baked and free of high fructose corn syrup, and our eggs and bacon came from chickens and hogs that rolled around in the dirt and saw the light of day. The word "farm" still evokes nostalgic pastoral images for most Americans, but there's nothing even remotely benign or bucolic about the fetid, brutal factory farms that supply us with most of our meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products today. And unmasking this unsavory reality is as much a part of Slow Food Nation's agrarian agenda as dishing out local delicacies.

So don't be distracted by the aroma of wood-fired focaccia wafting from the Fort Mason Center "Taste Pavilions"; Slow Food Nation has the potential to spark a crucial dialogue about where our food comes from, how it's grown, and why all that matters. With forums featuring the good food movement's marquee names, including Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser, this Alice Waters-sponsored shindig could be the watershed event that puts America's foodsheds on the map.

Don't know what a "foodshed" is? Don't worry, nobody else does, either -- the word is still so obscure it hasn't earned an entry on Wikipedia. It means, essentially, the area through which food travels to get from the farm to your plate. That would have been a pretty short trip a few generations ago, but in this era of globalization, our foodshed now encompasses the whole world, more or less.

This far-flung food chain has enslaved us with a false sense of abundance, turning the produce aisles of our supermarkets into a seasonless place where you can find berries and bell peppers all year round. But this apparent bounty diverts us from the fact that industrial agriculture has actually drastically reduced the diversity of the foods that our farmers grow.

As small and mid-size farms got swallowed up by the massive monoculture operations we now call "conventional," the varieties of fruits and vegetables grown on those farms got whittled down to just those few that shipped the best and had the longest shelf life. Breeders chose to focus on species of livestock and poultry that fatten up the fastest, such as big-breasted but bland Butterball turkeys so top-heavy they can't reproduce naturally and have to be artificially inseminated. For this we give thanks each November?

This focus on economies of scale, and the illusory "efficiency" of a food system dependent on cheap fossil fuels and perpetual subsidies, gave us, the richest nation in the world, the cheapest food. And we are all the poorer for it.

Along the way, we lost hundreds of different kinds of plants and animals; currently, "at least 1,060 food varieties unique to North America are threatened, endangered or functionally extinct in the marketplaces of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico," Gary Paul Nabhan writes in Renewing America's Food Traditions, a new book that celebrates the distinctive culinary regions of our country that Agribiz almost obliterated in recent decades.

But Renewing America's Food Traditions is not just a book; it's an alliance: Called RAFT for short, it's a collaborative effort from Slow Food USA and six other sustainably minded organizations. RAFT's mission is to inspire what the folks at Slow Foods USA call "eater-based conservation" by preserving and promoting the culinary heritage and extraordinary biodiversity that blessed this country for centuries before we shifted gears and became a fast food nation.

Nabhan is participating in a Slow Food Nation forum, "Re-Localizing Food," along with Pollan, Dan Barber and Winona LaDuke, but this powerhouse panel is, alas, already sold out, along with most of the other forums featuring the rock stars of the real food movement.

Thankfully, the Slow Food Nation folks are offering some free events and exhibits, too, including the Marketplace, which promises "to transform San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza into an urban garden, farmers market, outdoor food bazaar and soapbox," and the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in front of City Hall, whose impressive array of organic heirloom vegetables is being donated to local food banks.

In keeping with its goal to promote all things sustainable, Slow Food Nation aspires to be a "zero waste event:" In addition to recycling and composting food waste, plates, flatware and packaging, Slow Food Nation is joining forces with Food and Water Watch to banish bottled water from the four-day festival. Echoing Food and Water Watch's Take Back the Tap campaign, the event will instead offer five tap water stations where folks can refill their water bottles -- or, if you didn't bring your own, you can buy a reusable, eco-friendly stainless steel canteen.

Not content to just spare us the spectacle of 50,000 good food fanatics washing down all those sustainable snacks with bottled water, Food and Water Watch has posted a much-needed guide on its Web site for the rest of us on how to "Free Your Event From Bottled Water." Pair this with Slow Food Nation's Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, to be unveiled on Aug. 28 at San Francisco's City Hall, and you've got a virtual road map to a real revolution, even if you're not going to San Francisco.

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Suffocating Dead Zones Spread Across World's Oceans

With more than 400 oxygen-starved dead zones in global coastal waters, scientists are calling for such dead zones to be recognised as one of the world's great environmental problems.
Critically low oxygen levels now pose as great a threat to life in the world's oceans as overfishing and habitat loss, say experts
By David Adam / August 15, 2008

Man-made pollution is spreading a growing number of suffocating dead zones across the world's seas with disastrous consequences for marine life, scientists have warned.

The experts say the hundreds of regions of critically low oxygen now affect a combined area the size of New Zealand, and that they pose as great a threat to life in the world's oceans as overfishing and habitat loss

The number of such seabed zones – caused when massive algal blooms feeding off pollutants such as fertiliser die and decay – has boomed in the last decade. There were some 405 recorded in coastal waters worldwide in 2007, up from 305 in 1995 and 162 in the 1980s.

Robert Diaz, an oceans expert at the US Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, at Gloucester Point, said: "Dead zones were once rare. Now they're commonplace. There are more of them in more places."

Marine bacteria feed on the algae in the blooms after it has died and sunk to the bottom, and in doing so they use up all of the oxygen dissolved in the water. The resulting 'hypoxic' seabed zones can asphyxiate swathes of bottom dwelling organisms such as clams and worms, and disrupt fish populations.

Diaz and his colleague, Rutger Rosenberg of the department of marine ecology at the University of Gothenburg, call for more careful use of fertilisers to address the problem.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say the dead zones must be viewed as one of the "major global environmental problems". They say: "There is no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time."

The key solution, they say, is to "keep fertilisers on the land and out of the sea". Changes in the way fertilisers and other pollutants are managed on land have already "virtually eliminated" dead zones from the Mersey and Thames estuaries, they say.

Diaz says his concern is shared by farmers who are worried about the high cost of fertilisers. "They certainly don't want to see their dollars flowing off their fields. Scientists and farmers need to continue working together to minimise the transfer of nutrients from land to sea."

The number of dead zones reported has doubled each decade since the 1960s, but the scientists say they are often ignored until they provoke problems among populations of larger creatures such as fish or lobsters. By killing or stunting the growth of bottom-dwelling organisms, the lack of oxygen denies food to creatures higher up the food chain.

The Baltic Sea, site of the world's largest dead zone, has lost about 30% of its available food energy, which has led to a significant decline in its fisheries.

The lack of oxygen can also force fish into warmer waters closer to the surface, perhaps making them more susceptible to disease.

The size of marine dead zones often fluctuates with the seasons. A massive dead zone, some 8,000 square miles across, forms each summer in the Gulf of Mexico as floodwater flushes nitrogen-rich fertiliser into the Mississippi River.

Experts said it was slightly smaller than expected this year because Hurricane Dolly stirred up the water. Dead zones require the water to be separated into layers, with little or no mixing between.

As well as fertilisers rich in nitrates and phosphates, sewage discharges also contribute to the problem because they help the algal blooms to flourish.

Diaz and Rosenberg say: "We believe it would be unrealistic to return to pre-industrial levels of nutrient input [to oceans], but an appropriate management goal would be to reduce nutrient inputs to levels that occurred in the middle of the past century," before the rise in added nutrients began to spread dead zones globally.

Climate change could be adding to the problem. Many regions are expected to experience more severe periods of heavy rain, which could wash more nutrients from farmland into rivers.

In May, scientists reported that oxygen-depleted zones in tropical oceans are expanding. They analysed oxygen levels in samples of seawater and found the effect was largest in the central and eastern tropical Atlantic and the equatorial Pacific. The increase could push oxygen-starved zones closer to the surface and give marine life such as fish less room to live and look for food.

The scientists, led by Lothar Stramma from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, say the change could be linked to warming seas. At 0C, a litre of seawater can hold about 10ml of dissolved oxygen; at 25C this falls to 4ml. Stramma said: "Whether or not these observed changes in oxygen can be attributed to global warming alone is still unresolved." The reduction could also be down to natural processes working on shorter timescales, he said.

Source / Guardian, UK.

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Berkeley Scientists : World In 'Mass Extinction Spasm'

Amphibians are dying even in remote Sierra Nevada.
Scientists: Humans To Blame

'Behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens'
By John Boitnott / August 12, 2008

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now," said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. "Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn't. The fact that they're cutting out now should be a lesson for us."

New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species, scientists said.

Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events. There have been only five in our planet's history, until now, scientists said.

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now."

David Wake, UC Berkeley

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events.

"My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens," Wake said.

The study was co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University.

There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started, Wake said.

It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction.

It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

No matter what the start date, data show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline, he said. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on in decline.

Amphibians dying even in remote Sierra Nevada

The Bay Area's back yard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is grim there, as well.

"We have these great national parks here that are about as close as you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really startling drops in amphibian populations there, too," Wake said.

Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened.

Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park.

This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size.

Originally, frogs living atop the highest, most remote peaks seemed to thrive, but recently, they also declined.

There are several frog killers in the Sierra Nevada, Wake said.

The first hint of frog decline in this area came in the 1990s, and researchers originally thought that rainbow trout introduced to this area were the culprits - they like to snack on tadpoles and frog eggs.

The UC Berkeley team did experiments in which it physically removed trout from some areas, and the result was that frog populations started to recover.

"But then they disappeared again, and this time there were carcasses," Wake said.

The culprit is a nasty pathogenic fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis.

Researchers discovered the fungus in Sierra Nevada frogs in 2001.

Scientists have documented over the last five years mass die-offs and population collapses due to the fungus in the mountain range.

But the fungus is not unique to California. It has been wiping out amphibians around the world, including in the tropics, where amphibian biodiversity is particularly high, Wake said.

"It's been called the most devastating wildlife disease ever recorded," Wake said.

Global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of frogs around the world, Wake said. The Sierra Nevada amphibians are also susceptible to poisonous winds carrying pesticides from Central Valley croplands.

"The frogs have really been hit by a one-two punch," Wake said, "Although it's more like a one-two-three-four punch."

The frogs are not the only victims in this mass extinction, Wake said.

Scientists studying other organisms have seen similarly dramatic effects.

"Our work needs to be seen in the context of all this other work, and the news is very, very grim," Wake said.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health helped support the study.

Source / NBC11.com

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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ENVIRONMENT : Russian Oil Development Threatens Belugas

A Beluga whale swims underwater in the Arctic region. What happens to the Beluga population reflects the effects global warming on the Arctic ecosystem, says Vsevolod Belkovich, a professor at the Russian Academy of Science who is leading a study on the whales. Photo from Getty Images.
Whale Playground Sheds Light on Melting Arctic
By Conor Humphries / July 24, 2008

A young whale pokes its melon-shaped head into the cool morning air near this remote island, a sign its herd is thriving despite mounting threats in Russia's melting Arctic.

Cameras and microphones capture the whale's every move as scientists use the species' only shore-side breeding ground to see how they are coping as fleets of oil tankers replace melting ice in their traditional feeding grounds.

"Belugas are a bellwether species...what happens to them reflects the effects of pollution and global warming on the whole ecosystem," said Vsevolod Belkovich, a professor at the Russian Academy of Science who is leading the study.

Scientists have recorded a small drop in the whale population that they attribute in part to human activity in Arctic regions. "As global warming continues, the threats are going to grow dramatically," Belkovich said.

Since monitoring began scores of whales have traveled hundreds of miles each year to this White Sea sandbank to mate, frolic and train their young.

Distinctive markings on the whales' backs allow the researchers to track the population from year to year, monitoring their health, longevity and interactions with rival herds.

"It's the only place in the world they come so close to the shore," said Vladimir Baranov, a senior researcher with Moscow's Institute of Oceanology, who films the Belugas close up underwater in their natural setting.

"They can play here because there is no danger," said Olga Kirilova, a fellow researcher. "But in the winter they go north and face intensive shipping, the tankers and their pollution."

With the melting of ice sheets in the Arctic, the Russian government has set the development of rich oil and gas reserves in the region as a priority, including fields in the Barents Sea where many of the Belugas spend the winter.

The volume of oil transported through the Barents Sea -- part of the Arctic Ocean -- has soared in less than decade from almost zero to 10 million tons, according to a study by the Norwegian funded Barents Secretariat.

Within a decade it could hit 150 million tons, the study said.

While the noise of the tankers is recognized as a major problem for the whales, who use sound to navigate, the biggest danger is the threat of a spill that could take years to clear.

It took the White Sea ecosystem over five years to overcome the effects of a small spill in 2003, Belkovich said.

A five percent fall in the White Sea Beluga population registered in recent years suggests the development is beginning to have an effect. But researchers fear much worse is to come.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), which is financing the research, cites the example of the Harp seal, which like the Beluga migrates between the White Sea and the Barents Sea.

Global warming and increased ship traffic in the White Sea have together robbed the Harp seal of the ice sheets where pups are born, causing a collapse in its population from 300,000 in 2003 to just over 100,000 in 2008, IFAW said.

While the Belugas are less dependent on ice, they are very sensitive to any pollution that the oil industry brings, said researcher Vera Krasnova.

"In the Saint Lawrence River in Canada, pollution has been catastrophic for the Belugas," she said. "The same could happen here."

Source / AFP / Discovery News

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Complex Underwater Eco-Systems at Peril

A fish swims among coral reefs off the Obhor coast, north of the Red Sea city of Jeddah. A third of reef-building corals worldwide are threatened with extinction due to climate change and water pollution, according to the first global assessment on the marine creature. Photo by Hassan Ammar / AFP/Getty Images.
Climate Change Threatens World's Coral Reefs
July 10, 2008

A third of reef-building corals worldwide are threatened with extinction due to climate change and water pollution, according to the first global assessment on the marine creature by 39 scientists.

Destructive fishing and the degradation of coastal habitats also posed threats, said the study published Thursday involving the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Conservation International.

"The results of this study are very disconcerting," said Kent Carpenter, lead author of the study which examined 845 coral reef species.

"When corals die off, so do the other plants and animals that depend on coral reefs for food and shelter, and this can lead to the collapse of entire ecosystems," he added.

Roger McManus from Conservation International said that reef-building corals in particular were "most vulnerable to the effects of climate change".

Sea temperature rises bleach and weaken the algae that give the underwater sea life its vibrant color, and make it more susceptible to diseases.

As they are home to over 25 percent of marine species -- including fish stocks -- loss of reefs could also impact coastal fishing communities.

"The loss of the corals will have profound implications for millions of people who depend on coral reefs for their livelihoods," said McManus.

According to the study, the Caribbean region has the highest number of highly threatened corals.

Due to huge human populations in the region, the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago also has the highest proportions of vulnerable and almost threatened species in the Indo-Pacific.

"We either reduce our CO2 emission now or many corals will be lost forever," warned Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN Director General.

Source. / AFP / Discovery News

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