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« Reply #180 on Nov 1, 2009, 7:27pm » | |
India to investigate rising elephant death toll
'Elephant-range' states will meet in Delhi next week to discuss the threat to the animals posed by poachers and habitat loss
* Randeep Ramesh in Delhi
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 October 2009 16.38 GMT
![[image]](http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/6697/elephantarticle1496894.jpg)
A young Indian elephant feeds on bamboo. Photograph: Wayne Lawler/Ecoscene/Corbis
An alarming rise in elephant deaths in India because of habitat loss and poachers' bolder forays into government-protected zones has led officials to arrange a meeting to address the problem.
This year has seen jumbos poisoned and electrocuted by villagers in Assam and the animals killed for their tusks in Orissa. Herds of wild elephants have killed at least 30 people in Chhattisgarh so far this year.
A N Prasad, director of the Indian government's Project Elephant, said: "Almost all states are grappling with increasing jumbo-human conflicts due to habitat degradation, resulting in disappearance of [wildlife] corridors." The official said that the conflict was now a serious issue and that a meeting of "elephant-range" states would be held in Delhi next week to work out how the animals could be saved from retaliatory killings.
One proposal from the WWF is to use domesticated female elephants, known as kunkis, to drive off foraging wild animals.
India claims to have one of the world's largest wild elephant populations – numbering more than 27,000 – but environmentalists fear the pachyderm is headed the same way as the tiger, which has disappeared from large swaths of the country.
"Elephant numbers are about a third less than the government thinks and dropping like a stone in a lake," said Bittu Sahgal, environmentalist and editor of Sanctuary Asia magazine.
Sahgal said concerns in Delhi are not reflected by local decisions – which often make matters worse. "There's a dam being built now in north-eastern India, which will cut off food supplies for four months for the local elephants. Where will they go? They will go to the villagers' fields and be killed."
Even the traditional respect for elephants in India does not save them from the wrath of locals. Last week, a full-grown female elephant was found dead – suspected to have been poisoned – at a tea estate in on the Indo-Bhutan border.
The other major problem is illegal hunting of the animals. While trophy hunting of elephants has been relegated to history, today poachers are after the ivory in the tusks – a hot commodity across Asia where it is prized as an ornament and used in traditional medicine.
Although the sale of tusks and other elephant parts is a violation of international law, poaching is bigger business than ever, with prices for ivory rising more than 16-fold in recent years. One study released this month predicted the extinction of the African elephant within 15 years unless the problem is tackled.
"I am afraid this [problem of conflicts between humans and Indian elephants] is entirely predictable. India has good policies [to save the elephant] but does not implement them. Until it does, the elephant is condemned," said Sahgal.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/30/india-elephant-death-toll
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #181 on Nov 1, 2009, 7:29pm » | |
In Japan's managed landscape, a struggle to save the bears
Although it is a heavily urbanised nation, two-thirds of Japan remains woodlands. Yet many of the forests are timber plantations inhospitable to wildlife, especially black bears, which are struggling to survive in one of the most densely populated countries on Earth.
* From Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 October 2009 11.08 GMT
![[image]](http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/8879/ajapaneseblackbear00115.jpg)
A Japanese black bear. Photograph: JTB Photo Communications, Inc. //Alamy
In 1990 Kazuhiko Maita set out to capture some bears. Maita, who now directs the Institute for Asian Black Bear Research and Preservation in Hiroshima Prefecture, had first been drawn to the powerful animals as a college student in the 1960s. At that time he had little interest in conservation, and, simply wanting to study their behavior, spent two decades after graduation tracking bears for a regional government office in northern Japan. By the 1980s, however, it was clear that Japanese black bears (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) were in a state of crisis that persists to this day.
"I set out a lot of traps in remote mountain areas, but I only caught two bears – and I'm a very good bear-catcher," says Maita, who had hoped to attach radio tracking devices to the bears' necks and then release them. "I was able to capture more around small villages. That's when I first realized there were almost no bears in the deep mountains of Hiroshima."
Maita had come face to face with an odd reality of contemporary Japan. Although the country is among the most heavily forested nations in the world — despite its urban image, a surprising 67 percent of Japan remains woodlands — much of those forests have become uninhabitable for bears and other wildlife. As the demand for timber in the construction and industrial sectors skyrocketed, the government subsidized large-scale planting of Japanese cedar and Japanese cypress plantations. Today, such plantations make up 41 percent of Japan's forests, and in some prefectures the figure is higher than 60 percent.
The outcome, say critics like Mariko Moriyama of the 20,000-member Japan Bear and Forest Association (JBFA), has been the creation of forests where few animals can survive. Vast single-species stands of timber lack the plant diversity found in natural forests, and plant diversity forms the foundation for animal diversity. Black bears, for example, are omnivorous but prefer to eat young leaves, insects, berries, and acorns — few of which can be found in timber plantations.
And what natural forest remains has been fragmented by roads and other development, leaving less and less room for Japan's bears and putting them in conflict with humans — a clash that is rapidly driving down bear populations.
"The results of the experiment are in," says Moriyama, who founded JBFA after a career as a middle school science teacher. "Japan's traditional culture preserved amazing forests up until World War II. Our post-war approach has failed."
Sixty years of development and urbanization have not only radically changed the composition of Japan's forests, but have also reshuffled ancient patterns of land use. With wild forests disappearing, habitat for ordinarily shy mountain wildlife has shifted closer to villages, causing interaction with humans to increase. Bears have done serious damage to crops and timber plantations throughout their range on Honshu, Japan's main island, and Shikoku, the smaller island that sits to the west of Osaka. While cases of injury and death have been rare, black bears are increasingly being shot as "nuisance kills" and by sport hunters, and some isolated populations are nearing extirpation.
Even the supposedly healthy populations may not be safe for long: In 2006, a stunning 4,340 of Japan's black bears were reportedly killed. No one knows how many black bears live in Japan, but Maita fears the 2006 kills may have represented up to 60 percent of the entire population.
These extraordinary numbers evidence not so much a national hatred for bears as a failure to plan for the inevitable consequences of development on a small and crowded island. Despite high rates of urbanization and a proclivity to manicure nature, the Japanese are as fond of wildlife as any other people, and numerous efforts to protect bears are underway around the country. Nevertheless, Japan lacks a comprehensive strategy for managing the bears, boars, and other creatures that development pushes out of the wild. In this vacuum of knowledge and planning, black bears in Japan lumber ever-closer to extinction.
This crisis in the coexistence of humans and wild animals is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the history of civilization in Japan, the boundary between bear habitat and human habitat was clearly defined. Bears lived in what was called okuyama, the deep mountains where humans rarely ventured except to hunt and cut wood. While overharvesting of timber was a problem as early as the eighth century, by the 17th century a system of regulations had developed which averted the wholesale destruction of Japan's forests. The result was that the okuyama was covered almost entirely in natural forest and was regarded with fearful respect as the abode of the gods. Rural populations were concentrated in small farming villages. Between the two was a buffer zone of managed woodland called satoyama, where villagers collected firewood and cut weeds and grass to enrich their rice fields, and large mammals rarely strayed.
Since World War II, rural depopulation has turned the satoyama wild in many places while the okuyama has become increasingly domesticated.
That black bears survived at all into the 21st century is due largely to Japan's mountainous geography. Although Honshu and Shikoku don't have large national parks, some inaccessible mountain areas have remained wild. Japan's black bears have as a result fared better than many of their species in other Asian countries like Bangladesh, where bears cling to survival in small remnants of forest, and China, where demand for bear bile used in traditional Chinese medicine fuels dangerous levels of poaching. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) categorizes bears as vulnerable throughout Asia.
The exact mechanism of the bears' decline in Japan has varied with location. In Mie Prefecture, on the Kii Peninsula, artificial plantations make up nearly two-thirds of all forests and, as is the case nationwide, depressed lumber prices and rural depopulation have led to widespread neglect of these plantations. Tree seedlings in Japan are planted close together to shade out fast-growing weeds. Later, foresters must repeatedly thin the stands. Insufficient thinning not only produces spindly trees, but leaves the forests dark and bare of undergrowth that could provide leaves, berries, and acorns for bears to eat. Still the bears enter these barren woods in search of sustenance.
"If you go into the remote plantations around May, the forest actually looks bright from where bears have stripped the bark off the trees and the white and red underside is showing," says Hideyuki Yoshizawa, a 42-year-old forestry worker in Mie Prefecture. He says bears probably strip the bark to get at a sweet underlayer that develops in the spring; where the bark is peeled away, the trunk rots and the timber becomes unusable.
In Hiroshima, says Maita, the depopulation of rural villages has played a greater role.
"Before the 1980s, there was a zone between the villages and the mountains where people cut grass and harvested firewood," Maita explains. "When people stopped managing those areas, the trees grew larger and bears and wild boars were able to live closer to the villages." Unharvested orchards of chestnuts and persimmons also drew bears close to houses, where frightened villagers usually shot or trapped them.
Capture-and-release is gaining ground, but in a small country like Japan the bears are often released so close to their native territories that they return home.
Moriyama, Maita, and other conservationists argue that such half-measures don't get to the root of the problem.
"We need to recreate a place that wild animals can return to," says Moriyama, who advocates returning all remote mountain areas to natural forest and limiting plantations to 30 percent of lowland areas. JBFA actively cuts down conifer plantations and re-plants them with the broadleaf species that bears favor, and has also preserved 3,128 acres of threatened old growth-like forest in trusts at nine locations. (True old growth forest in Japan is extremely rare).
That may help restore Japan's natural forests, but the country's ravenous appetite for timber remains.
"If we replaced our current plantation forests with acorn-bearing broadleaf trees that can barely be used for building houses, we'd have to import an even larger amount of wood from abroad," says Tohru Hayami, who owns 2,009 acres of Forest Stewardship Council-certified Japanese cedar and cypress forest in Mie Prefecture.
Japan already imports over 80 percent of the 100 million cubic meters of timber it consumes each year, and an estimated 20 percent of that comes from illegally logged forests, mostly in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Russia. Rather than abandon its ailing timber industry, Hayami says Japan should manage its plantations so that wildlife can thrive in them.
"I think it's possible to preserve biodiversity while producing timber, and as a result provide habitat for many animals, including bears," he says. Thinning is key to that goal. Hayami leaves about a fifth of the forest canopy open on his land and avoids cutting undergrowth. He's catalogued over 240 plant species and many animals, including bears. Nevertheless, he admits that providing habitat for bears while running a productive timber operation is far from easy: His remote properties suffer heavy damage from bark-stripping each year. And sustainably-operated forests like his remain rare in Japan.
On the governmental level, Japan is slowly putting more emphasis on biodiversity conservation and has started to give bears more protection. WWF Japan's Hisashi Okura says that, in response to studies that showed bears were straying outside current preserves on Shikoku, one prefecture is expected to approve new protected areas in the near future.
Unfortunately, much of the damage from development and loss of natural forest has already been done, so creating large, unbroken nature preserves will likely be impossible. Japan must instead invent ways to protect wildlife even where wilderness is closely intertwined with developed areas. To do that, improved research and education are needed, says Yamazaki of the Japan Bear Network.
In short, Japan will once again need to redraw its relationship to the natural world. That won't be easy in a nation that is now overwhelmingly urban and out of touch with nature, but it may be the only way to ensure a future for Japan's black bears.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/30/japan-black-bears
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #182 on Nov 4, 2009, 12:07am » | |
CO2 from forest destruction overestimated – study
* David Adam, environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 November 2009 19.49 GMT
The carbon dioxide emissions caused by the destruction of tropical forests have been significantly overestimated, according to a new study. The work could undermine attempts to pay poor countries to protect forests as a cost-effective way to tackle global warming.
The loss of forests in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia is widely assumed to account for about 20% of all carbon dioxide produced by human activity – more than the world's transport system. The 20% figure was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 and was widely quoted after being highlighted by the Stern review on the economics of the problem. It is repeatedly used by Prince Charles and others as an incentive to push efforts to include forests in carbon trading.
Curbing emissions from deforestation is one of the main issues being discussed at a UN climate meeting in Barcelona this week, before crucial talks in Copenhagen next month.
But researchers led by Guido van der Werf, an earth scientist at VU University in Amsterdam, say that figure is an overestimate and that the true figure is closer to 12%. Publishing their analysis in the journal Nature Geoscience, they say the 20% figure was based on inaccurate and out-of-date information. "It's a tough message because everybody would like to see forests better protected and it is difficult to tell them that carbon dioxide emissions are less important than assumed. Still, the good news of lower emissions is no bad news for the forests," said Van der Werf.
The lower figure could make it harder to agree ways to reward forest protection, he said. "If you want to put a price on carbon [in forests] then you would get less carbon for your money now."
The study showed previous assessments exaggerated the rate of tropical deforestation. It also took into account soaring emissions from fossil fuel burning since 2000, which reduces the relative role of deforestation. The scientists say 12% is an estimate, and the figure could be between 6% and 17%, but that the original 20% figure was equally uncertain.
Van der Werf said an important finding of the research was the previously unquantified emissions from tropical peatlands, which they say could be as high as 3% of global CO2 – more than the aviation industry. "The total contribution of deforestation and peatlands is about 15% and is still a substantial contribution to global CO2 emissions, and therefore remains a significant opportunity for global CO2 reduction," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20....2-overestimated
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
|
Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #183 on Nov 4, 2009, 1:36am » | |
The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change
Janis L. Dickinson 1
ABSTRACT
In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist cross-trained in philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry, invoked consciousness of self and the inevitability of death as the primary sources of human anxiety and repression. He proposed that the psychological basis of cooperation, competition, and emotional and mental health is a tendency to hold tightly to anxiety-buffering cultural world views or "immortality projects" that serve as the basis for self-esteem and meaning. Although he focused mainly on social and political outcomes like war, torture, and genocide, he was increasingly aware that materialism, denial of nature, and immortality-striving efforts to control, rather than sanctify, the natural world were problems whose severity was increasing. In this paper I review Becker's ideas and suggest ways in which they illuminate human response to global climate change. Because immortality projects range from belief in technology and materialism to reverence for nature or belief in a celestial god, they act both as barriers to and facilitators of sustainable practices. I propose that Becker’s cross-disciplinary "science of man," and the predictions it generates for proximate-level determinants of social behavior, add significantly to our understanding of and potential for managing the people paradox, i.e., that the very things that bring us symbolic immortality often conflict with our prospects for survival. Analysis of immortality projects as one of the proximate barriers to addressing climate change is both cautionary and hopeful, providing insights that should be included in the cross-disciplinary quest to uncover new pathways toward rational, social change.
INTRODUCTION
Reversing the trajectory of global climate change requires widespread support for policies and incentives that will reduce carbon emissions. Although it is certainly in the world's best interest to promote carbon neutrality, it is not in the material interests of nations or individuals to hinder economic growth (Dyson 2006, Woodward 2008). Given that the link between the use of fossil fuel and economic development is a significant political-economic barrier to restraint, the greatest hope for transformative change may be mobilization of ideological communities toward a ground swell of support for carbon neutrality.
The popularity of environmental education initiatives, including Al Gore's The Climate Project, attests to a belief that increasing awareness helps change individual behavior and promotes advocacy, but there is little real evidence that this is so (Blumstein and Saylan 2008). Although short-term behaviors often shift as a consequence of educational experiences (Kaiser and Fuhrer 2003), the resulting behavioral changes are typically short lived (Dwyer et al. 1993). We must question the assumption that increased knowledge of the dangers will generate a sustained rational response (Janssen and de Vries 1998, Dessai et al. 2004), because even the behavior of conservation biologists, who frequently drive large pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, suggests that this is not the case. Behavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes (Dyson 2006).
Despite ample evidence of an inevitable rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide during this century, Dyson (2006:120) argues that "humanity's experience of another difficult 'long' threat—HIV/AIDS—reveals a broadly analogous sequence of human reactions. In short, (i) scientific understanding advances rapidly, but (ii) avoidance, denial, and recrimination characterize the overall societal response, therefore (iii) there is relatively little behavioral change, until (iv) evidence of damage becomes plain." The implication is that only direct experience with adverse outcomes leads to behavioral change, leaving us with the question of why the connection is so flimsy between what we know, what we value, and how we behave.
This question is rooted in the ideas of Ernest Becker, whose work culminated in two companion syntheses: The Denial of Death (1973) and Escape from Evil (1975). Here I expand Becker's cultural and proximate psychological understanding of human behavior to provide new insights into the challenge of implementing a rational response to global climate change. First, I summarize Becker's ideas on psychological repression of death anxiety through symbolic perpetuation of the self, and clarify the empirical framing of these ideas within the branch of social psychology known as "terror management theory" (TMT). I then use TMT research paradigms, which examine how thinking about death influences human behavior (Pyszczynski et al. 2006), to make predictions about how individuals and groups respond to mortal environmental problems like global climate change. The purpose of this synthesis is to explore one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner. I focus on Becker's mechanistic (proximate) understanding of self-esteem striving, transference idealization, world view defense, and outgroup antagonism, illuminating several ways in which death-denying defenses and perpetuation of the symbolic self are psychological barriers to the development of modern, rational, sustainable belief systems, advocacy, and action.
ERNEST BECKER'S IDEAS ON DENIAL OF DEATH AND THE SYMBOLIC SELF
Becker's ideas have their historical roots in psychoanalysis (Rank 1941, Freud 1957, Brown 1985), his own disciplinary training in cultural anthropology (Hocart 1933, 1952, 1954, Becker 1971b) and sociology (Berger and Luckmann 1966, Becker 1971b), as well as in the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey (Dewey and Bentley 1949). In The Denial of Death (1973), he proposed that human beings are predisposed to suppress thoughts of death to manage anxiety about the inevitability of mortality. Along with an enlarged brain and prefrontal cortex, human beings gained the capacity to use symbolic language and simulate experience, imagining the future before it happens (Rakic 1995, Leifer 1997). One component of consciousness is awareness of a "self" (Dennett 2004), and with this awareness comes awareness of the inevitability of mortality. Becker invoked Rank's (1941) assertion that fear of annihilation is the primary source of human anxiety. The flip side of fear of annihilation is anxiety about the self, which is the basis of neurosis.
Becker suggested that thinking about death is so costly that denial of death is ubiquitous and explains the majority of human mythologies and world views. He proposed that we repress thoughts of death and dying by pushing them out of consciousness and creating a mythical, culturally and socially informed reality that provides a context for self-esteem or even heroism. We use our unique self-awareness and imagination to create a fictional self through shared meaning, myths, cultural world views, and projects for building self-esteem (causa sui or Oedipal projects). Cultural world views include all ways of viewing the world, from belief in the supernatural to the creation of meaning within cultures of honor, materialism, myths, nationalism, religion, and reverence for youthfulness, beauty, or artistry. Ancestral cultures were more integrated and provided a consistent context for self-esteem with well-defined roles that governed interactions within ritual units or social groups, but, in the modern world, in which people no longer operate within a single culture, we have a larger variety of contexts or world views within which to strive for self-esteem as doctors and scientists, soldiers and nationals, parishioners and priests, consumers and aesthetes, artists and athletes, cult or gang members, and world leaders (Becker 1973, Lifton 1993).
Another way to reduce anxiety about mortality is to project power and importance onto some idealized other, often a celestial god. In Becker's (1973) words, we are "meaning seeking creatures." We have the capacity to see ourselves in relation to larger systems, including the cosmos, and to comprehend the idea that we are small and insignificant relative to what we see in the sky: the stars, the planets, the universe (Leifer 1997). Because this is terrifying (Rank 1932), we repress thoughts of death and project a power and importance onto something larger that will save us. This psychological phenomenon, known as transference, was proposed by Freud (1957) to describe patients' projection of aspects of the parent-child power and love relationship onto the analyst. Recently, controlled behavioral experiments provide empirical support for transference idealization with anxiety-reducing effects that can be understood using neural network approaches (Gabbard 2006) and visualized with neural imaging techniques (Gerber and Peterson 2006). Charismatic leaders and deities are common soteriological transference objects, but so are movie stars, political leaders, lovers, and teachers. The exact nature of transference varies, but what is critical is that transference objects appear larger than life and more enduring than the mortal self.
The proximate psychological mechanisms that form the basis of the ideas presented here neither conflict with nor support hypotheses at the ultimate, evolutionary level of analysis, at which the experience of and defenses against existential terror can be viewed either as costly byproducts of the evolution of consciousness (Landau et al. 2006) or, more plausibly, as products of selection resulting from the advantages of ideologically based within-group cooperation and extra-group competition (Hardin 1968, Hauert et al. 2002, 2006, Wilson 2006). This treatment focuses only on the proximate level of analysis while recognizing that hypotheses at the two levels are not mutually exclusive and thus do not compete (Reeve and Sherman 1993).
Becker connected the denial of death to a broad suite of behaviors enacted in defense of a cultural world view, placing his ideas within the context of Western society's increasingly distant relationship to nature and rejection of death as an integral part of life (Becker 1975, Lifton 1979). His goal was to revitalize the enlightenment tradition (Anchor 1979) and develop a "science of man" that would discover the psychological reasons why people gravitate toward finding meaning within some context of cosmic significance, why group ideologies so often involve literal or symbolic immortality, why cultural ideologies are so often the grounds upon which battle lines are drawn, and why so much of human motivation is subconscious and thus outside awareness.
Applying these ideas to the environment, I propose that unconscious defenses identified by TMT can both block and promote rational responses to global climate change. Given the paradox that most modern immortality-striving hero systems hinder our chances of survival, what might we learn by investigating the psychological mechanisms governing our choices? Understanding proximate behavioral mechanisms, particularly unconscious motivations that govern decision making, may reveal methods for generating a sustained response to global climate change in the short term and provide insights that individuals and institutions can use to foster rational responses to escalating environmental crises over the long term.
TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR DENIAL OF DEATH AS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Terror management theory (TMT) is the formalization of Becker's ideas within the field of social psychology. Although not universally accepted (Navarrete and Fessler 2005), TMT is supported by evidence from more than 300 empirical studies testing a wide range of predictions with Western and indigenous societies in various parts of the globe (Pyszczynski et al. 2006). For this reason alone, it is worth taking seriously and integrating with environmental thinking, particularly with regard to human responses to climate change.
Pyszczynski et al. (1999) proposed a dual-process model in which both proximal and distal terror management defenses comprise the anxiety-buffering system required to keep death thoughts at bay. Proximal defenses are launched when death thoughts rise to consciousness, whereas distal defenses are responsible for keeping death thoughts unconscious. The experiments ask whether TMT is a good predictor of how people will behave in response to "death primes," which are stimuli that increase mortality salience, rendering unconscious thoughts of death conscious or, if they remain unconscious, making death thoughts more accessible.
PROXIMAL DEFENSES AND PREDICTED RESPONSES TO INFORMATION ABOUT GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
Proximal defenses use rational thinking and deploy immediately after conscious thoughts of death are triggered; they involve both active suppression and cognitive distortions that relegate the problem of death to the distant future (Pyszczynski et al. 1999). Distraction, planning, and biased cognition, such as denial of risk and rationalization, all serve to suppress thoughts of death, reducing abstract awareness of mortality. Individuals filter information in ways that appear rational, biasing cognition away from the inevitability of death. To this end, people are prone to deny the validity of research and tests indicating that their lives could be in danger (Kunda 1987) and elect to endure pain and suffering so long as it is accompanied by a promise of long life (Quattrone and Tversky 1984).
Where global climate change is concerned, proximal defenses to thinking about mortality are likely to manifest in three ways: (1) denial of climate change, i.e., climate skeptics; (2) denial that humans are the cause of climate change; and (3) a tendency to minimize or project the impacts of climate change far into the future, where they no longer represent a personal danger (Table 1). For example, after viewing the apocalyptic film "The Day After Tomorrow," subjects' beliefs in the likelihood of extreme events declined (Lowe et al. 2006). Although this result was neither studied nor interpreted within the context of TMT, it is consistent with proximal defenses. Proximal defenses cause people to minimize the severity of mortal problems. If thinking about climate change triggers proximal defenses, people who say that they believe climate change is occurring will still tend to underestimate the need for an immediate response. As conditions worsen and it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the effects of global climate change, more people will probably switch over to distal defenses.
HOW DISTAL DEFENCES INFLUENCE HUMAN CAPACITY TO RESPOND TO GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
Distal terror management defenses comprise the most interesting predictions of Becker's work. They are thought to be activated when the accessibility of death thoughts increases, although these thoughts still remain unconscious (Pyszczynski et al. 1999). Distal defenses are symbolic and occur in the absence of negative affect, physiological arousal, or distress; they are deployed in response to verbal or written death primes and subliminal death stimuli, which strongly supports the idea that they are unconsciously motivated. Experiments indicate that bolstering self-esteem helps to keep death thoughts at bay (Greenberg et al. 1992b). Consequently, threats to self-esteem can elicit terror management defenses, whereas factors such as a history of secure attachment or thinking about one's own secure relationship have buffering effects (Florian and Mikulincer 1998, Mikulincer and Florian 2000, Mikulincer et al. 2003). Experiments designed to explore distal defenses are intriguing because they tap into unconscious motivation in compelling ways, asking whether interventions (primes) that increase mortality salience also increase the individual's striving for self-esteem, defense of his or her own world view, antagonism toward outgroups, and idealization of lovers and leaders.
Distal defenses are also counterintuitive. If primes related to global climate change increase the accessibility of death thoughts, exposure should lead to (1) transference idealization in the form of blind following and a reduction in the rational criticism of public figures, particularly charismatic leaders; (2) increased striving for self-esteem, which in Western society could mean counterintuitive increases in status-driven consumerism, materialism, and other behaviors that increase carbon emissions; (3) increased outgroup antagonism, not just between environmentalists and anti-environmentalists, but among religious groups, gangs, and other ideological groups; and (4) a tendency to bolster the existing world view even if it is not sustainable. A startling example of this is the "Drill, baby, drill" chant that erupted at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, in 2008. No rational approach could ever produce this gleeful negation of drilling's profound aesthetic and environmental costs.
In past studies, death primes have included questions that cause subjects to imagine their own deaths, graphic footage of the deaths of others, indirect triggers including proximity to a funeral home, and subliminal messages like flashing the word "death" imperceptibly across a computer screen (Solomon et al. 2004). Controls involve anxiety-producing stimuli like physical pain, e.g., dental pain; psychologically stressful situations unrelated to death, e.g., having to give a speech or take an exam; and subliminal presentations of a neutral word that has the same length and number of vowels as the word "death" (Arndt et al. 1997, Solomon et al. 2004). I know of no study that investigated whether delivering information on global climate change increases death thought accessibility. However, if it does, then experiments that manipulate the way in which information on global climate change is presented, including the extent to which graphic details or the potential for human mortality are revealed, could prove useful not only for testing the idea that mortality salience influences human response to global climate change but also for determining the most effective ways to structure climate change education.
A critical but frequently misunderstood component of TMT is that distal defenses are designed to reinforce a "symbolic self." This means that TMT does not predict that individuals will choose the strategy most likely to avoid death or harm. If it were that simple, making death thoughts more accessible would cause people to drive more carefully. However, when driving and self-esteem are linked, Becker's hypothesis makes the opposite prediction, and this was borne out in an experiment in which subjects who linked driving with self-esteem drove faster and became more reckless in response to stimuli that made them think about death, sacrificing true safety for false safety in the form of defense of the ego (Ben-Ari et al. 1999).
This result parallels the prediction that increased confrontation with the problem of global climate change will lead to increased consumerism and status-seeking through material wealth (Kasser and Sheldon 2000). This is the crux of Becker's argument: The behaviors people exhibit are not necessarily those that reduce the risk of death, and in fact they may sometimes increase it as long as they also bolster the individual's symbolic self and the complex, immortality-striving hero system that defines it. Such counterintuitive responses can be seen in some of the studies integrated into the discussion of climate change below, and are but a small sample of a large inventory of experimental studies supporting the use of distal defenses in the management of existential terror.
WHEN CLIMATE CHANGE PRIMES ELICIT TERROR MANAGEMENT DEFENSES
What happens when discussion of climate change makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death? We have seen that death-denying defenses are often counterintuitive, causing individuals to incur greater rather than less danger and leading to irrational outcomes and behavior. If confronting global climate change increases mortality salience, which remains to be tested, the precise behavioral manifestations will likely be as varied as the many extant cultural world views. For example, people who find self-esteem via materialism and an ideology of entitlement will probably buy more SUVs and become more antagonistic toward environmental causes and points of view, favoring suppression of the environmental movement and harsher penalties for the more radical protestors. In contrast, people who find self-esteem through humanist ideologies or environmentalism should become increasingly militant and vocal about their causes. This clash between two major Western ideologies is likely to produce even deeper ideological rifts within and outside the United States than we currently see.
Thinking about climate change may also result in ideological conflict within individuals. Environmental awareness and a tendency to promote conservation behavior will be undermined when the environmentalist ideology threatens an individual's self-esteem within some other ideological context. Because people adhere to more than one ideology (Lifton 1993), there is such a thing as a "materialistic environmentalist." This leads to the question of what is required for people to hold two conflicting ideologies at the same time; this question is understudied, and the outcome probably varies with personality type. Lifton (1993) discovered that "doubling," i.e., the creation of separate selves, occurred among doctors who became killers at Auschwitz; this is an extreme response that allows people to retain deeply discordant ideologies, which is difficult because internal conflict undermines self-esteem with guilt and shame.
How does TMT inform efforts to increase environmental awareness and behavior? First, it illustrates why Wilson's (2006) approach to the clergy, which explains how people can integrate concern for biodiversity within their existing world views, might be more productive than Dawkins's (2006) more direct approach, which contradicts and dismisses or even attacks the world view of much of humanity, arguing for an entirely new one. Second, it provides a mechanistic explanation for why the responses necessary to reduce carbon emissions may be difficult to come by even among conservationists. Finally, it identifies additional barriers to and possibilities for assembling ecological communities whose priorities match the real dangers we are facing, with the unifying characteristic being that the context for self-esteem and, most importantly, the doctrines of leaders are aligned with the mission of stopping climate change.
The integration of TMT with social theory may also prove useful in understanding the psychological impacts of the "risk society," which is less "progress-centric" and focuses instead on adaptation to the manufactured risks associated with human activity (Giddens 1990, Beck 1995). If the perception of risk, including the risks associated with climate change, increases death thought accessibility, and this becomes increasingly likely as the impacts of climate change reveal themselves, then efforts to move people toward environmentally responsible behaviors may have the opposite effect, causing them to purchase large gas-guzzling vehicles, listen to Rush Limbaugh, join fundamentalist cults, or, in the case of university faculty, hunker down and write more scientific papers.
We currently lack the basic understanding required to design educational structures to support leadership, resilience, and courageous responses to the problem of global climate change. Investigation of the psychological underpinnings of response to climate change is important in designing educational strategies, particularly those that involve teaching young people. I propose that inspiring young people to bring their talent, creativity, and energy to the table is insufficient without also providing a climate change ideology for the collective good. Social support and a reconfiguring of identity are critically important in overcoming addictions to nicotine and alcohol (Barber and Crisp 1995, Christakis and Fowler 2008), and the inability of environmental education projects to promote behavioral change may rest with their failure to provide a social context for self-esteem.
NEW HISTORICAL SOURCES OF IMMORTALITY AND POWER AS PROXIMATE CAUSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL HARM
Lifton (1993) proposed that, beginning in the 20th century, people were forced to adopt a many-sided ideology because of unprecedented change ranging from social and political dislocation to the expanding geography of employment opportunities. This dislocation, combined with the mass media revolution and the threat of human extinction, has required people to continuously recreate their symbols and become "fluid and many-sided." In ancestral societies, ideologies commonly focused on rebirth and renewal as forms of symbolic self-perpetuation. Becker (1975) wrote about the "new historical forms of immortality and power," the most universal and primary of which is money. Modern Western society has lost the alignment of community with the "ritual unit" or cultural world view (Becker 1973). Whereas the ritual unit was once the community or clan, today the ritual unit is often mismatched to the cultural grouping within which it resides. Although the family and the church or state continue to exist, the intermediate communities are either missing or transient, and not everyone has a defined role within which he or she can feel successful.
Because there are few cultures remaining that have not been superseded by larger entities, with tribes becoming townships, cities, states, and nations, we no longer have an "integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust" (Becker 1975). Although this might open up the possibility of a utopian, egalitarian, and secular society in which the combined gifts of individuals prevail, what we have in the West is a secular inequality devoid of a shared sense of the sacred and a heroism that triumphs over nature, perpetuating itself through new immortality ideologies that value material acquisitions and money. Lacking in heroism, these immortality ideologies come up empty or even inspire guilt. The irony of Western materialism is that wealth beyond the point of basic material comfort does not make people happy (Gilbert 2005).
Support for materialism as a functional immortality ideology comes from experimental evidence that thinking about death increases consumptive behavior (Kasser and Sheldon 2000). When subjects were asked to write essays about death and then project their circumstances 15 years down the line, they imagined themselves wealthier and with more possessions than did controls. More directly relevant to natural resource management, this pattern was upheld in a second experiment in which subjects in the "mortality salience" condition consumed resources more greedily in a forest management game than did control subjects. This suggests that mortality salience accelerates the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). The impact of mortality salience on consumptive behavior can also be seen in response to television advertisements: With the increase in death-related news reports, it was possible to ask whether subjects exposed to news about death increased their valuations of high-status items for sale during television commercials. Subtle reminders of death caused viewers to place a higher value on high-status items and to devalue low-status items (Mandel and Heine 1999). This effect was absent in control subjects who were not reminded of death. Given these results, increased mortality, e.g., from terrorism (Pyszczynski et al. 2002), war, and extreme weather, is likely to increase consumerism and carbon emissions.
Technocracy itself is an immortality ideology that, although it is coupled with materialism, has as part of its makeup an element of the magical and a belief that new tools and innovations provide solutions to both the small day-to-day problems of life and the larger problems of human happiness and mortality. Technology is entrancing, and, functionally, technologists become creators of magic and the wizards of today, claiming the same authority over technology that doctors claim over human health or shamans over the cursed. This has always been so, going back to ancestral peoples who learned to use fire, tools, wind, and wheels. Even in subsistence societies, technology has a greater impact on a variety of sociological variables than do supernatural or religious beliefs (Nolan and Lenski 1996).
Traditionally, technology consolidates power within a society and exacerbates inequity. What is interesting about the new information technologies is that they do both: They consolidate power with patents, exclusive intellectual capital, and expensive tools, and they distribute power through open source technologies and open communication networks. As such, they promote material segregation while at the same time providing a relatively open network within which ideological communities can function. Photo galleries, forums, listserves, Google groups, and new social networking tools like MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life present mechanisms for growing online communities. In this new virtual world, frequent interaction is easy to achieve, and the topics around which free choice interaction occurs can be very focused and specific, suggesting that large social networks function like smaller ideological communities once did in the real world. It is also true that, although the Internet can unite and assemble large communities of action, e.g., Moveon.org, it can also be used to manipulate. The complexity of its impact on culture, relationships, and environmental behavior is worthy of scrutiny and study.
Like materialism, technology offers opportunities for reducing the impacts of ideology and life-style on the environment, including the invention of tools that allow individuals to save energy (Midden et al. 2007) and social networks that encourage sustainable behaviors. The flip side of this is that technology and materialism both lead to the increased use of natural resources (Vlek and Steg 2007), and so both materialism and the belief in technological salvation in their present manifestations will ultimately have negative impacts on the conservation of natural resources and on our ability to reduce carbon emissions.
CONSERVATION AS AN IMMORTALITY PROJECT: RECRUITING CONSERVATIONISTS FROM CULTURES OF HONOR
Although cultures of honor likely have their evolutionary basis in mate competition (Shackelford 2005), when viewed through the psychological lens of Becker's ideas they provide a context for self-esteem. For example, urban gangs allow members to strive for self-esteem more successfully than within the broader cultural context of their urban schools or the monetary ideology of contemporary Western society (Lopez 1991). Cultures of honor form in response to marginalization, and their codes and ideologies are highly variable, although they all have self-esteem as a common ingredient. This is why disrespect or "dissing" figures so importantly as a context for conflict.
What is it about youth conservation corps projects that make them such a good fit for youth emerging from urban cultures of honor? The answer may be a simple one. Local, redemptive conservation projects focused on environmental justice communities have all of the trappings of an immortality project and provide a meaningful context within which imperiled youth can strive for self-esteem and happiness. Currently, youth conservation corps programs across the United States have more poor, inner city youth applying to join their ranks than they can accommodate. In many cases, the young men leave gangs and lucrative, but illegal, drug-dealing operations to dedicate themselves to the conservation corps, working for low pay and minimal scholarships. This trend may have direct parallels with the Civilian Conservation Corps enacted by Roosevelt as part of the New Deal in 1933. Members express the desire to better themselves and develop a sense of justice about issues of pollution and environmental degradation.
The link between self-esteem, the creation of communities of action, and justice issues is a powerful one that can be applied to climate change as well, because global climate change is predicted to have the greatest and earliest impacts on the poor. Becker's ideas translate into a hypothesis that has social value: What is lacking in many challenged communities is not merely resources, but the resilience that comes from having a supportive context for meaning. This thinking suggests that eco-groups can seed challenged coastal communities with the raw materials for participatory action research (Minkler 2000) toward improved resilience (Faber et al. 2001, Kuo 2001, Tidball and Krasny 2007); mental health (Faber et al. 2001); science, technology, engineering, and math learning; the management or remediation of environmental problems; and climate change activism.
Gangs are typically high in bonding social capital, with deep, close within-group connections, but low on bridging social capital, which involves connections among groups of different socioeconomic status and power (Bolin et al. 2004). If youth conservation projects provide a shared context for self-esteem and promote bonding social capital without providing opportunities for bridging social capital, they may simply create new "gangs." Providing opportunities for youth conservation corps to address issues with politicians and the broader community could create the bridging social capital required to avoid increases in outgroup antagonism.
LEADERS, ARCHTYPES, AND TOTEMS: A PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORY OF SUSTAINABLE CULTURE
In ancestral societies, nature was an integral part of immortality-striving rituals and symbolism, providing a context for the vital lies or "character armor" that people require to survive as conscious beings in a social world (Becker 1975). This integration is seen today in new religious environmental movements (Goodenough 1998, Ostrow and Rockefeller 2007), with both theistic and nontheistic emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of conservation (Goodenough 1998, Orr 2002). Although these movements may exacerbate ideological antagonism, they also hold promise for creating an ideological groundswell to reduce carbon emissions, particularly with the support of charismatic conservation leaders (see, for example, http://renewalproject.net ).
Nontheistic conservation communities often arise around ideological symbols or charismatic archtypes. The practice of bird watching in the United States has grown dramatically, increasing by 155% in the years from 1982 to 1995 (Fitzpatrick and Gill 2002). This rapid exponential growth, similar to the growth that sometimes accompanies new religious movements, suggests that bird conservation communities function as ideological entities. Concern for and ideal love of archetypal charismatic organisms such as birds can be interpreted within the context of transference idealization.
Like fantasy and belief in the supernatural, the idealization of birds may have anxiety-buffering effects (Solomon et al., in press). Belief in a supernatural higher power increases in response to reminders of death, regardless of whether that particular higher power is embodied by the subject's own belief system or that of an outgroup (Norenzayan and Hansen 2006). To the extent that birds elicit a religious fervor, ritual bird watching may serve an anxiety-buffering function that goes beyond the benefits of spending time outdoors; if this is so, then asking bird watchers to think about bird watching should reduce death thought accessibility and anxiety.
When it comes to climate change, birds may be superior archetypes to other charismatic organisms. Not quite celestial, they have the unusual capacity to take to the sky with a beauty, mystery, and charisma that renders them elusive, godlike, and apart from us. These characteristics make them ideal symbolic "transference objects" on which to project a striving for immortality. The connection between vitality and flight can be seen in ornithological literature of the early 20th century, when flowery, anthropomorphic language was not uncommon. Thomas Mason Earl wrote of a common nighthawk he observed over a 5-yr period, "But if she really ever noticed me giving her more than ordinary attention, she had never indicated that there was any reciprocal feeling of interest. No doubt she regarded all earth-walkers as worms of the dust, far inferior to her own kind that could mount like spirits to the vault of heaven" (Earl 1924). Studies indicate that people project more power onto objects that appear higher than lower in the visual field (Schubert 2005; Solomon et al., in press). In addition to altitude, flight itself appears to have special qualities; flight fantasies are universal across the spans of culture and time (Ogilvie 2004; Solomon et al., in press).
In a study of flight fantasy, participants primed with thoughts of death were more likely than controls to express the desire to fly. In another study by the same group of researchers, participants were asked to visualize a detailed flight fantasy, while "grounded participants" were asked only to visualize the rising sun. A previous study demonstrated that people asked to think about death gave George W. Bush elevated approval ratings (Landau et al. 2004). In the flight experiment, subjects who visualized themselves in flight were less likely than grounded participants to give Bush the high ratings typically associated with experimentally induced mortality salience; this indicates that flight visualization ameliorates terror management defenses (Landau et al. 2004; Solomon et al., in press). If birding has similar effects to thinking about flight, it may foster resilience to direct confrontation with the problem of climate change.
Among birds, iconic species may be particularly effective totems of immortality, providing support for understanding and addressing the problem of climate change. Just as the bald eagle is a symbol of national independence, strength, and freedom, it has become, for one inner city neighborhood, a symbol of community resilience. In the Earth Conservation Corps' experience of bringing back the bald eagle to Washington D.C. after a 50-yr absence, the eagles have become symbols of environmental justice and restoration for both the river and the community; each eaglet is an immortality symbol named after a young corps member murdered in the difficult neighborhood of Anacostia (Renard 2006). The eaglets are a symbolic perpetuation of these young lives and, as a consequence, solidify the ideology that holds the corps together.
The concept of birds as transference objects suggests several other ways in which birds have unexpected links with conservation behavior. First, the desire to save birds may be a pro-conservation terror management defense that elicits striving for self-esteem within the cultural world view of conservation activism. The idealization of birds as archetypal organisms may allow individuals to experience mortality threats associated with global climate change in a nonthreatening, non-self-referent context and to practice with these threats much in the way that children are thought to practice with frightening thoughts through fantasy (Jones 2002). Becker (1967:126) described human beings as "the animal in nature who, par excellence, imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience."
Birds provide important connections with nature, even if the only contact is with non-native birds common in cities. Such contact may be the primary hope for mobilizing urban populations to care about environmental issues (Dunn et al. 2006). Currently, more than half the world's population lives in cities, and this constitutes a large segment of humanity that is disconnected from the natural world (Louv 2005). This realization is the underlying basis of programs like Celebrate Urban Birds at The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Council for Environmental Education's Flying Wild, which propose that teaching about birds close to home will re-establish these missing connections, reduce fear of nature, and get people to spend more unstructured time outdoors.
By merging two ideas, i.e., the personal connection to nature through birds (Dunn 2006) and the denial of death (Becker 1973), the growing attachment to and projection-idealization of birds and other charismatic species may provide an important route to helping the public to recognize, care about, and act upon climate change in a sustained way. It may be more effective than forecasting the impacts of climate change on human populations, because birds are external to self, and this appears to be an important characteristic of an immortality project. Birders may also prove more resilient to the stress associated with conservation work than their less bird-o-philic counterparts. These are testable ideas that may enhance the strategies of conservation organizations and improve the way in which we convey difficult and important information about global climate change.
Bird watching is not just a hobby, a labor of love, and a spiritual experience; it is also a culture of honor and a competitive sport with regional and national events like Big Day and Big Year. Birding conservation communities are stratified with status and leadership equivalent to birding prowess. They serve a social function worthy of study, and, as with any sport, bird watching provides a context for self-esteem. Interestingly, serious birding may have parallels with hunting, as opposed to gathering, because there appears to be a gender bias in which most of the top competitive bird watchers in the United States are male. Regardless, it is reasonable to hypothesize that bird watching communities provide the cultural context for the heroic enactments of competitive birders and the conservation efforts they support.
SCIENCE AS A PANACAEA: FETISHIZING THE PROBLEM OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
Academic science is both a world view and a context for self-esteem according to Becker (1975). This can lead scientists to imbue the scientific process with a power that it does not actually possess. Environmental biologists surely grasp the complexity of living systems and the requirement for data and accurate forecast modeling of the effects of global climate change. We also recognize how unpredictable the changes are given that global warming is likely to affect not just populations but community and ecosystem interactions. Studying global climate change is a way for scientists to feel that we are both conducting important research and contributing to the greater good, which bolsters self-esteem within two ideologies at once, namely, the ideology of science and the liberal political ideology that most environmental scientists ascribe to. Although research may provide major insights that help to mitigate change that is inevitable, terror management theory predicts that we will focus our attention and resources on discovery and mitigation for global climate change at the expense of actions that will stop the process from occurring in the first place. The frequency with which scientists currently discuss "adaptation to" and "mitigation for" climate change is disturbing, and may speak of a reluctance to confront the problem with a realistic attitude (Dyson 2006). Awareness of this possibility can help redirect scientists to circumvent distal defenses in this somewhat ironic context.
Continued ...
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
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THE BINARY NATURE OF PRESERVATION AS A CULTURAL WORLD VIEW: IS THERE POTENTIAL FOR A HEROIC SOCIETY?
In his final book, Becker (1975) explored the potential for a heroic society. His analysis provided a new perspective on the psychodynamic basis of the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). Now, 35 yr after his death, how might we move forward toward understanding and addressing the problem of global climate change? Becker recognized that human beings are universal seekers of meaning who require opportunities for heroism and derive significance through their identification with the world views provided by relationships, religions, society, politics, and the arts (Becker 1971a). If true change requires both heroic leadership and a cultural context for the heroism of many, a cultural world view that incorporates both innovation and idealization of the natural world is the logical immortality project and the best opportunity for heroism in these times. Love of nature is a deep ethical and spiritual issue that is consistent with most belief systems. Preservation of land, species conservation, and the creation of innovative technologies to combat the problem of climate change provide profound opportunities for symbolic immortality.
When confronted authentically, without TMT defenses, the conservation ideology is mortality salient, beginning with the recognition that as individuals we will not go on and that continuation of the world with its rich complex of biodiversity is something we can no longer take for granted. What does it mean to preserve the wilderness and to be in the world with wildlife? What does it mean to be without it and to lose even one species? With consciousness comes a will to touch the world with our own special brand of humanness, i.e., our identity, and with this perhaps there is a vicarious sense of loss when another living species disappears. Whether it is the loss of the Hawaiian Po'o-uli (Melamprosops phaeosoma) or the apparent loss and resurrection of the Ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), we are elevated by the will of other creatures and diminished by their absence. This ideology, although psychospiritual in nature, promotes courage and encompasses a shared responsibility for other organisms and for tackling the problem of carbon emissions.
On the other hand, although transference idealization, an emphasis on charismatic species, and the promotion of conservation ideologies can foster sustainable behaviors by making use of what we know about distal terror management defenses, it is likely that mortality-salient philosophies and theologies hold the most promise for avoiding distal defenses and addressing the challenges of global climate change. Because increased mortality salience and outgroup antagonism are predicted outcomes of rapid climate change, understanding how TMT defenses are influenced by rational analytic thinking becomes critically important.
Rational analytic thinking has a modulating effect on world view defense, reducing the impacts of mortality salience on behavior (Greenberg et al. 1992a). For example, priming with an argument for tolerance reduced the effects of mortality salience on outgroup antagonism in U.S. subjects confronted with individuals critical of the United States and its policies (Greenberg et al. 1994). If it is adopted with rational awareness, a cultural world view that values the natural world is authentic. However, because rational awareness is unstable, the practice of awareness requires repetition. In one experiment, individuals did not engage in symbolic world-view defense when they practiced a deep contemplation of death similar to Buddhist meditation (Greenberg et al. 1994). In general, deep contemplation and experiencing fear with conscious awareness helps individuals to avoid distal defenses, whereas feeling little or no fear is associated with an amplified, unconsciously motivated, world view defense, even in response to mild death stimuli (Greenberg et al. 1994). This body of research suggests that a combination of rational thinking and anxiety-reduction techniques, such as meditation practice, will reduce reliance on distal defenses, leading to the direct confrontation with climate change required for authentic leadership.
Evidence of a universal moral grammar that places nonharming and fairness above community, authority, and purity (Haidt 2007) suggests a need to explore the ways in which moral axes interact with striving for self-esteem, world view defense, and social capital to shape cooperative and competitive behaviors and their impacts on responses to global climate change. Understanding individual variability in neurosis is also important, as suggested by the finding that physical sensitivity to sudden noise or reminders of danger is associated with a tendency to move toward a more conservative political stance (Oxley et al. 2008). The predictions of TMT, if integrated with resilience theory, might increase our understanding of the potential for social learning, visioning, scenario building, and leadership to support ideological and physical communities (Folke 2006).
TMT may prove useful in understanding the risk society (Beck 1991). Climate change has the quality of seeming both real and unreal, but, along with other current nuclear, chemical, and ecological risks, it demands that we move away from seeing the present in the light of progress relative to the past and instead view the present in the light of risks whose effects will be felt in the future (Beck 1991). This is a large and perhaps unprecedented shift for humankind, and our capacity to make this shift demands increased confrontation with mortality.
This means that understanding how risk interacts with our immortality-striving hero systems is fundamental to addressing the problems faced by a risk society. Contexts for self-esteem based upon progress are under threat; TMT predicts that this threat will create resistance and interfere with rational change. As Lifton (1993) suggested, undermining the symbol systems of "the immortalizing animal" can lead toward transformation and a sense of self that is based significantly on one's connection to mankind, or it can increase rigidity and bolster the desire to control circumstances. TMT predicts which experiences will tend to tip the balance away from rigid control in favor of connection.
Ulrich Beck (1991) suggested that a revival of the enlightenment, removed "from its professional incrustations," will have to consider how people can change themselves, not only in trivial areas such as life conduct or peculiarities of personality, but also in such major things as their relationships to themselves, to the world, and to reality. It is not yet clear how many people have the capacity to engage in sustained restraint to avoid consequences, not for themselves, but for the future of their children and grandchildren. We are beginning to see the academic disciplines mobilize around the climate change issue. Recently, mainstream sociologists were called upon to overcome their disciplinary inhibitions against listening seriously to what scientists have to say about nature and the more recent inhibition against thinking about the future, and asked to engage fully with the issue of climate change (Leahy 2008, Lever-Tracy 2008). The climate change problem requires the attention of teams of natural and social scientists, including social psychologists, sociologists, ecologists, and other biogeochemical scientists, economists, anthropologists, and sociobiologists, all seeking to understand the people paradox and what it means for our potential for cooperation and our prospects for survival and quality of life in the future (Homer-Dixon 1991, Janssen and de Vries 1998, Killingback et al. 2006, Oxley et al. 2008). This attempt to bring into the discussion the work of Becker and the relevance of terror management theory is designed to begin one such dialog.
Making the unconscious conscious is both a cause of and a cure for distal defenses. Becker was aware of this conundrum and did not see his ideas as providing a panacea for the human condition, but as a starting point for understanding the key issues facing humanity. He saw people's relation to nature as one of six common human problems and lamented the shallowness of the modern connection to the natural world, contrasting it with the sacred view of natural objects common among indigenous people (Becker 1971a). Described as dark, his final work offered no solutions beyond a belief in the value and vitality of the spirit (Becker 1975). Nevertheless, Becker's ideas, along with the experimental work of others he influenced, bears the mark of a journey at the end of which is the recognition that answers to the large questions of life cannot be divorced from morality, ethics, responsibility, and even spirituality (Goodenough 1998, Orr 2002). In this he kept company with leading scientific and philosophical seekers of his time (Einstein 1950, White 1967).
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. (Carson 1962)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the late Ernest Becker for the enduring gifts of wisdom and insight that were his legacy and the TMT researchers for bringing his ideas into the empirical realm, where they can be “heard” by positivist scientists. This synthesis is no substitute for reading Becker’s original work, which I highly recommend. I have conversed in person and via e-mail with scholars from a diversity of fields at Cornell and beyond, including Marie Becker-Pos, Barbara Bedford, Chuck Geisler, Neil Elgee at the Ernest Becker Foundation, Steve and Natalia Emlen, Karim Aly-Kassam, Walt Koenig, Ron Leifer, David Orr, Sheldon Solomon, Rich Steadman, and David Sloan Wilson. Each person I spoke with changed my thinking in meaningful ways. I am indebted to Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg, and Mark Landau for sharing unpublished manuscripts and to Sheldon, two anonymous reviewers, the associate editor, and the editor, Carl Folke, for reading earlier versions of this manuscript. Finally, Ron Leifer, a good friend and close colleague of Ernest Becker in the 1960s, provided critical insights and encouragement throughout my foray into this new area of scholarship, literally helping me to refine my thinking every step of the way. To the extent that I have interpreted Becker correctly, it is in large part due to discussions, both challenging and supportive, with him.
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http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art34/
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #185 on Nov 7, 2009, 12:29am » | |
GPS used to preserve ants' nests
Conservationists in Northumberland have used satellite technology to pinpoint 69 rare ants' nests before work to fell thousands of trees begins.
The nests, made of conifer needles, are home to the hairy northern wood ant.
The Forestry Commission is removing 10,000 tonnes of conifer planted in the 20th Century to restore the area to its ancient roots as an oak wood.
Foresters will be provided with the nests' GPS co-ordinates to ensure they do not damage them.
Some conifers will be left in place to provide the ants with building materials.
The nests can be found on the Forestry Commission estate in 375-acre (150-hectare) Holystone Wood, near Rothbury, Northumberland.
Spokesman Jonathan Farries said: "Holystone is one of the most important ancient woods in Northumberland and also a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
"This long-term project will see many of the conifers planted in the 20th Century removed to allow native species like oak and birch to regenerate.
"But we are tweaking our plans to ensure that the wood ant nests continue to thrive."
The hairy northern wood ant, which is red and black, is Britain's largest ant.
Nick Brodin, Natural England's regional biodiversity officer, said: "Hairy wood ants are a very uncommon species in the north-east of England and it's great news that these amazing ant nest stacks in Holystone Wood will be safeguarded thanks to satellite technology.
"Use of GPS technology has revolutionised nature conservation research and habitat management and this project will make it easier to find the nest stack of the wood ants."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/8342215.stm
Published: 2009/11/04 13:03:08 GMT
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #186 on Nov 7, 2009, 2:08am » | |
Gone with the wind: rare flora and fauna force change of plan
DEBRA JOPSON REGIONAL AFFAIRS
November 7, 2009
![[image]](http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/8049/johnbenson420x07269182.jpg)
Unique...Dr John Benson photographs the spinifex and porcupine grass on Mundi Mundi mountain near Broken Hill. Photo: Sahlan Hayes
A COLLECTION of humble plants clinging to 600 million-year-old rocks on a distant mountain range and a small dragon given to promiscuous sex under a hot sun have forced planners to redraw the map for the southern hemisphere's biggest wind farm.
The discovery that spinifex - normally an inhabitant of the red dirt plains below - is living on sediment probably deposited in the last Ice Age and has red mallee and gum coolibah trees for neighbours is so strange and rare that the Silverton wind farm designers have moved 153 turbines from some of the windiest ridges.
Sightings of hundreds of endangered tawny rock dragons, whose males fiercely compete for female attention by waving their front legs ''as if to say: 'Hi I'm over here,''' according to herpetologist Steve Sass, have also convinced designers to go back to their drawing boards.
These life forms have had an impact across the world. The $2.5 billion wind farm, on a 30 by 15 kilometre slice of near-desert about 25 kilometres north-west of Broken Hill, is being developed by Germany's Epuron Pty Ltd with Macquarie Capital Group, which has a joint venture with a Portuguese company Martifer Renewables. The NSW Government has approved 282 turbines, with a possible future total of 598 providing power to 440,000 homes, according to the project manager, Donna Bolton, who always knew skirting around sensitive habitats would mean dollars.
''It will cost money, in that you always go for the optimal placement. With the turbine, you are taking it from its optimal placement to a not quite so good placement, so its yield will come down marginally, but it's not a major issue for us and it's better to deal with it at the planning stage than at the construction stage,'' she said.
Mr Sass found the spinifex while working on the environmental impact assessment for the site last year. He rang John Benson, a senior plant ecologist with Sydney's Botanic Gardens Trust, who has devoted a decade to creating a database which classifies vegetation statewide and allows environmental assessors to check whether habitats need protection.
In this case, the database information persuaded the joint venture partners to protect the 300 hectares where the plants live. The wind farm's designers re-routed more than 15 kilometres of roads which will be used to carry the giant turbines and their 42-metre blades to the spine of the Barrier Range.
The trees clustering around the spinifex, nominated a year ago as endangered, are at the edge of their viability in this drought-stricken country and further global warming could wipe them out, Dr Benson said. ''If temperatures go up substantially, plants can't just pick up their legs and run,'' he said.
The wind farm will help the environment by reducing carbon emissions, he said.
Ms Bolton says the energy from the wind farm will be equal to 4.5 per cent of the electricity NSW now uses if the entire project goes ahead.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/gone-w....91106-i24r.html
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #187 on Nov 8, 2009, 12:08pm » | |
Study suggests peat CO2 credits more valuable
By Sunanda Creagh
Posted 2009/11/06 at 2:03 pm EST
JAKARTA, Nov. 6, 2009 (Reuters) — An Indonesia-based study shows carbon-rich tropical peat lands trap more greenhouse gases than first thought, driving up their potential value on the carbon market and strengthening a case for their protection.
Green groups on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks in Barcelona said tropical deforestation accounted for a smaller portion of global carbon emissions than thought, reaching 15 percent including draining peat soils where rainforests grow.
Huge amounts of greenhouse gases are released when peat lands are logged or drained for agriculture, and even more when the dried bogs catch fire and release toxic haze into the air.
While scientists agree preserving peat is key to slowing global warming, a team of 11 of the world's best peat scientists have found it might be more important than first thought.
"We are finding that the emissions from peat are very, very large, much larger than people expected," said John Raison, chair of the 11-member Peat and Greenhouse Gases Group, a joint project between the Indonesian and Australian governments formed late last year to develop a method to measure peat emissions.
"We are also finding that all of the assumptions to date have been too rough, far too rough for something that is to be sold on the (carbon) market."
Peat is created when layers of organic material break down over thousands of years and is particularly abundant in the Sumatra and Kalimantan, the Indonesian half of Borneo island, where huge tracts have been cleared for palm oil plantations.
Accurate calculations on carbon lost through deforestation or locked away by saving and replanting forests and peatlands is crucial to a fledgling U.N. forest carbon offset scheme called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).
REDD aims to reward developing nations for preserving and protecting forests via the use of an expanded carbon market, under a wider climate pact from 2013 that might be agreed next month in Copenhagen or some time next year.
ESTIMATES
But Raison said there was still great uncertainty about how much carbon was stored in the peat lands, which would influence how much peat carbon credits should be worth.
Governments and companies in rich nations could buy the credits to help them meet mandatory emissions reduction targets.
"There have only ever been very gross estimates about that -- just guesses, really -- but the price is dictated by the certainty of the estimates. The more precise the estimate, the more valuable the product," he told Reuters in an interview.
To settle the debate, the team of peat experts will develop a method of estimating greenhouse gas emissions from tropical peat lands and create a way of forecasting more accurately how much greenhouse gases could be saved through REDD projects.
Environmental groups including the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International said on Friday that tropical deforestation plus degradation of associated peat accounted for about 15 percent of global carbon emissions.
Previously most references were to 20 percent emissions from deforestation. A study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Geoscience found that global deforestation accounted for 12 percent of the world's total carbon emissions, and peat degradation in South East Asia 3 percent.
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5a50ov-us-climate-indonesia-peat/
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #188 on Nov 14, 2009, 9:23pm » | |
Nuclear disposal put in doubt by recovered Swedish galleon
The plan to use copper for sealing nuclear waste underground has being thrown into disarray by corrosion in artefacts from the Vasa
* Terry Macalister
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 14 November 2009 23.33 GMT
Plans for nuclear waste disposal could be thrown into confusion tomorrow at a summit because of new evidence of corrosion in materials traditionally used for burial procedures.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) says it will keep careful watch on a meeting organised by the Swedish National Council for Nuclear Waste, which will look at potential problems with copper, designated for an important role in sealing radioactive waste underground.
Concerns have risen from a most unexpected quarter. Examination of copper artefacts from the Vasa, a fifteenth-century galleon raised from Stockholm harbour, has shown a level of decay that challenges the scientific wisdom that copper corrodes only when exposed to oxygen.
David Lowry, a consultant on the nuclear industry, said the latest evidence had profound implications. "As the British nuclear industry gears up to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, so the pressure builds to demonstrate there is a solution to the long-term management of nuclear waste. But plans to adopt the Swedish system of nuclear waste disposal look as if they might have hit the rocks."
The NDA said that no decision had been taken on what materials would be used for containment. "It's not a showstopper. There are other options," a spokesman said.Researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have prepared a report for tomorrow's meeting which says its findings "cast additional doubt on copper for nuclear waste containment and other important applications."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20....ent-vasa-sweden
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #189 on Nov 14, 2009, 9:50pm » | |
Climate Change, Nitrogen Loss Threaten Plant Life in Arid Desert Soils
Mojave Desert research shows that nitrogen is second only to water in importance
![[image]](http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7294/mojavedesertclimatecha0.jpg)
Sunset over the Mojave desert. National Science Foundation research shows that as the world warms up, arid soils lose more nitrogen, which could lead to deserts with even less plant life than they sustain today
Photograph: Jed Sparks/NSF
November 5, 2009
In the Mojave Desert winds howl across this hottest place in North America, blowing sands across Death Valley and through empty ghost towns, swirling across treeless land for hundreds of miles. But even in the otherworldly Mojave, life thrives. The Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia), an indicator species for this desert, defines the Mojave's boundaries. In spring when the rains come, brightly colored flowers bloom in profusion--nature's paintbrush on an otherwise monotone landscape.
Now the Mojave's plant life, sparse as it has always been, is facing new challenges. As Earth's climate warms, arid soils lose more nitrogen, which could lead to deserts with even less plant life than they sustain today.
Available nitrogen is second only to water as the biggest constraint to biological activity in arid ecosystems, but ecologists have struggled to understand the balance of the input and output of nitrogen in deserts. For the first time, however, researchers have discovered a mechanism that balances the nitrogen budget in deserts: Higher temperatures cause nitrogen to escape as gas from desert soils.
The researchers' results, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, suggest that most climate change models need to be altered to consider these findings.
"This discovery is completely reorganizing how we think about nitrogen in desert ecosystems," said Robert Sanford, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s division of environmental biology, which funded the research.
In the past, researchers focused on biological mechanisms in which soil microbes near the surface produce nitrogen gas that dissipates into the air, but ecologists Jed Sparks and Carmody ("Carrie") McCalley, both at Cornell University and co-authors of the paper, found that non-biological processes are playing a bigger role in nitrogen losses from soil to air.
![[image]](http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/9553/mojave2f3014786.jpg)
Nitrogen loss in a non-desert system happens primarily through biological processes and water leaching. In a desert, in the summer, however, the soil layer heats up so much that microorganisms are not active enough to release nitrogen; neither is there enough water to cause significant leaching. Researchers have found that the heat itself causes large reactive nitrogen species evaporation.
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
"This is a way that nitrogen is lost from an ecosystem that people have never accounted for before," said Sparks. "It allows us to finally understand the dynamics of nitrogen in arid systems."
He and McCalley used instruments sensitive enough to measure levels of nitrogen gases in parts per trillion. These instruments had never before been applied to soil measurements.
The researchers covered small patches of soil in the Mojave Desert with sealed containers to measure a group of more than 25 different compounds containing oxidized nitrogen, as well as ammonia gases, that escaped from desert soils.
To rule out the role of light in this process, McCalley kept light constant but varied the temperatures in lab experiments.
"At 40 to 50 degrees Celsius (about 100 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit), we found rapid increases in gases coming out of the soil regardless of the light," McCalley said.
Midday ground temperatures in the Mojave average about 65 C (150 F) and may exceed 90 C (close to 200 F).
"Any place that gets hot and dry, in all parts of the world, will likely exhibit this pattern," said Sparks.
The Mojave Desert covers a large part of southeastern California and smaller parts of central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona. The Mojave receives less than ten inches of rain a year, and in Death Valley, the air temperature may surpass 49 C (120 F) in late July and early August. After temperature, wind is the most significant phenomenon in the Mojave. Both temperature and precipitation range widely, in all seasons, across the desert.
Further temperature increases and shifting precipitation patterns due to climate change may lead to more nitrogen losses in arid ecosystems, making their soils even more infertile and unable to support most plant life, according to McCalley. Although some climate models predict more summer rainfall for desert areas, the water, when combined with heat, would greatly increase nitrogen losses, she said.
"We're on a trajectory where plant life in arid ecosystems could cease to do well," said McCalley.
More nitrogen oxides in the lower atmosphere creates ozone near the ground, which contributes to air pollution and increases the greenhouse effect that warms the planet. With deserts accounting for 35 to 40 percent of Earth's surface, and arid and semi-arid lands the most likely areas for new human settlements, air quality issues, loss of soil fertility, and further desertification need to be considered as the climate warms, the researchers said.
They also pointed out that most climate modelers now use algorithms that only consider biological factors to predict nitrogen gases coming from soils.
"The code in climate models would have to change to account for abiotic impacts on this part of the nitrogen budget," McCalley said.
The research was also funded by Cornell's Andrew Mellon Student Research Grants.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115871
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #190 on Nov 14, 2009, 10:08pm » | |
Britain's problem with pets: they're bad for the planet
The authors of a provocative new book have bad news for animal-lovers: pets are bad for the planet. They consume vast amounts of precious resources, produce mountains of noxious waste – and they can be a disaster for wildlife
o Leo Hickman
o The Guardian, Friday 13 November 2009
Henrietta Morrison confidently plunges her spoon into a tin of slow-cooked lamb hotpot and lifts out a mouthful for inspection. She passes her nostrils over the meat chunks and accompanying sauce, smiles, then places the whole lot into her mouth. "Delicious," she remarks, as a small crowd of onlookers gathers round to watch the spectacle.
Someone eating their lunch doesn't usually elicit such attention, but, then again, most people aren't prepared to tuck into a tin of dog food for sustenance. Morrison has a point to prove, though: she is at Europe's largest pet trade show, PetIndex, at the Birmingham NEC, and her company, Lily's Kitchen, sells the most expensive pet food on the market. Her dog food, for example, retails in places such as Harrods for more than £2 a tin, with the promise that the contents are "proper food".
A quick inspection of the ingredients ("organic and certified holistic") shows why Morrison is prepared to put her pet food where her mouth is. Lamb ("60%"), rice, pearl barley, broccoli, spinach, blueberries, flaxseed, marigold petals, burdock root and alfalfa are just some of the ingredients contained within a tin of slow-cooked lamb hotpot. It really does look and sound good enough to eat – that's the whole point.
"I eat my pet food regularly to test batches," says Morrison. "My personal favourite is goose and duck feast with fruits, but chicken and turkey casserole is our bestseller."
Lily's Kitchen and its range of anthropomorphised pet "recipes" represent the somewhat rarefied summit of the UK's pet food industry, which is now said to be worth close to £2bn a year. Just like us humans, the nation's 8 million dogs and 8 million cats – as well as our collective menagerie of rabbits, horses, lizards, tropical fish et al – consume a wide variety of foodstuffs. In recent years, and despite the economic downturn, the pet food industry has witnessed a move towards "premium products", but the market is still dominated by products made with ingredients that, frankly, can send a shudder down any owner's spine. "Hydrolysed feather meal", "derivatives of vegetable origin", "ash" and "animal derivatives" are just some of the delights routinely found in pet food.
The industry has been the recipient of both jibes and brickbats about the true origin of its ingredients for decades. Horse meat, whale, kangaroo – before strict legislation tightened up the rules following the BSE scandal, we were used to hearing all sorts of hypotheses and rumours. But now it faces a new source of criticism: just what is the environmental impact of feeding the huge quantity of "companion" animals around the world? A new book with the somewhat provocative title of Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living has triggered a highly charged debate about the environmental efficacy of our pet-owning habits. If we are to examine the environmental impacts of all our lifestyle choices, the book argues, then we must also include pets in the discussion, no matter how unsettling the answers. The various environmental impacts attributed to the human food chain are well documented, so isn't it right, for example, that we should now be questioning whether it is sensible to be feeding slow-cooked lamb hotpot to our dogs, too?
The New Scientist, in a recent editorial entitled "Cute, fluffy and horribly greedy", largely agreed with the book's findings that some pets, due to the food they eat, have a surprisingly high "ecological footprint" (a way of quantifying human demand on the planet's ecosystems using a measure called "global hectares"). "According to the authors . . . it takes 0.84 hectares [2.07 acres] of land to keep a medium-sized dog fed. In contrast, running a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser, including the energy required to construct the thing and drive it 10,000km a year, requires 0.41 hectares. Dogs are not the only environmental sinners. The eco-footprint of a cat equates to that of a Volkswagen Golf. If that's troubling, there is an even more shocking comparison. In 2004, the average citizen of Vietnam had an ecological footprint of 0.76 hectares. For an Ethiopian, it was just 0.67 hectares. In a world where scarce resources are already hogged by the rich, can we really justify keeping pets that take more than some people?"
Speaking from his university office in Christchurch, New Zealand, Robert Vale, who co-wrote the book with his partner Brenda Vale, admits that he has received a "few unpleasant emails" from irate pet owners since the New Scientist article was published, but insists that he still stands by his central point. "We need to know what we're doing when it comes to the environment," he says. "We can't go blind into this debate. Nothing should be off limits no matter how uncomfortable it is to discuss it. Human population growth is a huge issue, too. We have to recognise that we live in a world of finite resources."
Vale says he was "genuinely surprised" when calculating quite how large the environmental impact was of some of our most popular pet species. "Of all the areas we researched for the book, the subject of pets was by far the biggest surprise for us. But all we are arguing in the book is that we should be making sensible, informed choices. For example, it's not really going to be that much of a problem if you have a big dog but also take the bus everywhere, never fly and live in a small home. It's when everyone starts to have a big car, big house, big family and a big dog that the problems start."
Vale does not – as some of his critics seem to assume – advocate a mass cull of the world's pets. But some of his proposed solutions are still likely to shock some pet owners. For example, the book suggests catching vermin such as rats and processing them into a "natural" cat food. Equally, the book proposes a return to the days when families would – hence the book's title – have edible pets. For example, a pair of rabbits would be kept as pets and their offspring would be eaten. It's hard to see that one gaining much traction.
When feeding a pet, however, the advice is to "think feathers and long ears, not horns and fins". In other words, favour pet foods made from chicken and rabbit meat and avoid those containing red meat and fish which, by comparison, have a much higher environmental impact. Last and, perhaps, most obvious: the smaller the pet, the better.
Back among the avenues of stalls at the PetIndex show, vendors jostle for attention with their impressive and sometimes baffling range of pet foods and accessories. One woman proudly tells me why her pet food containing yucca extract makes "her dog's poo stink less".
Another tells me why, when you use her hair-grooming tool, you must aim to "never expose a dog's testicles". Two saleswomen from Shanghai try to explain to me the fashion vagaries of doggie handbags (let's be clear: that's handbags to carry around your dog, rather than handbags made from dogs). I also spot car seats for dogs, a "pet fountain" that allows your cat to drink from a constantly flowing source of water, and a "memory foam" mattress for "senior" pooches with bad backs. I even come across a treadmill for obese dogs – the "Fit Fur Life" with its attendant price tag of £1,865.
Amid this paradise of pet paraphernalia, I meet Ben Helm, the sales and marketing director of Golden Acres, the UK's largest manufacturer of own-brand pet foods. The company owns Lancashire's largest arable farm and its on-site factory produces 70,000 tonnes of pet food a year, exporting to 37 countries around the world. By most measures, it's a huge operation, but it's a doggie biscuit in scale compared with the four leading pet-food manufacturers – P&G, Nestlé, Mars and Colgate-Palmolive – which, between them, are thought to account for more than 80% of the world's pet-food market.
"Some people now spend more on feeding their pets than they do feeding their children," says Helm, with a hint of awe. "It's a huge industry. Our bestselling 'kibble' [dried composite biscuit] is lamb and rice. Until about a year ago, we were importing three shipping containers of lamb meal [the labelling term for dry rendered lamb derivative] from New Zealand every week to make our kibbles, but now we try to source more of it locally as people are worried about food miles." As for the rice, he says: "The pet-food industry is now probably the biggest single importer of rice in the country." (I later check this factoid with the Pet Food Manufacturers' Association. It says: "So far as we can tell, our industry uses 50,000-150,000 tonnes of mostly 'broken rice' [a byproduct of the milling process] a year. This compares with rice imports for human consumption of around 450,000 tonnes in the UK.")
Helm picks up a handful of salmon kibbles for cats and rolls one around in his fingers. "Cat food actually requires more processing than dog food because it makes it easier to digest. We also add high-quality fats to the surface of cat kibbles to aid palatability. They say that you can't fool a cat as they will detect bad fats. We source our chicken fat from the UK."
Helm says that pet-food trends follow human food trends by about a year. He says that "no carb" pet food is currently the "big thing" largely because pet obesity – it is now estimated that between a quarter and half of the cats and dogs in the UK are obese – has become such a big talking point for the industry. Hypo-allergenic ranges are also popular, with many pet owners reporting that their pets are displaying signs of intolerance to the wheat found in many pet foods. It is one of the reasons why many owners are scaling up to the premium ranges offered by the likes of Lily's Kitchen.
When viewing the sheer scale of the pet-food industry from on high, it can be tempting to agree with Vale's conclusion that we must urgently consider the associated environmental impacts of owning a pet. But the industry, as you might expect, puts up a spirited defence, arguing instead that the pet-food industry is actually a highly efficient processor of what would otherwise largely be waste material from the human food chain.
"Far from being unsustainable, pet-food manufacturing uses material from animals which are inspected by vets as fit for human consumption but which are surplus to the requirements of the human food industry," says Michael Bellingham, the chief executive of the Pet Food Manufacturers' Association. "These byproducts must meet the very high safety and quality criteria laid down in European legislation. Without us adding value annually to around 630,000 tonnes of animal byproducts in the UK, it might otherwise have to be disposed of via landfill or incineration. Not very green. Furthermore, a recent report by the Waste and Resources Action Programme [more commonly known as Wrap] is rightly damning of the enormous amounts of food – around 30% – that goes to waste each year. Compare that with the 1% of pet food they found went to disposal."
Bellingham says that the "vast majority" of meat used in pet foods is byproduct from the human food chain, as opposed to "human-grade ingredients" or meat specifically reared for the purpose. The situation with fish, he says, is similar: "The vast majority of the fish ingredients used by industry are the surplus from fish filleting plants, or fishmeal produced from such surpluses. Some 'super premium' products may use human-grade ingredients but, for the very small amount of fish used and the tiny market share, this will have a negligible impact on fish stocks."
But Bellingham also argues that the benefits of pets need to be viewed more holistically, rather than just through the prism of their "carbon pawprint". "Our environment, far from being threatened by pets, is greatly enriched by the part they play in our lives," he says. "Pets in the home instil responsibility, encourage social as well as environmental awareness and have positive health benefits on children. Furthermore, children from households with pets are found to have stronger immune systems and take fewer days off school. People with pets make fewer visits to the doctor – 21% less for elderly people. What large polluting car improves your health and gets you out for a walk every day?"
Archaeology has shown that we have been living with companion animals for at least 12,000 years. For example, in what is now northern Israel, a dig at the remains of the Natufian settlement called Ain Mallaha revealed the grave of an elderly man who is tenderly cradling a puppy in his arms.
That we greatly benefit from the presence of pets isn't really disputed. But in order to reduce their impact on the environment, should there possibly be a limit to the number of pets we have? Because, of course, it's not just the food they eat that's the problem. Some conservationists, for example, have long been saying that the population of domesticated cats is having a detrimental impact on native fauna. As obligate carnivores, cats are, by instinct, opportunistic predators. A 2005 study in Bristol, for example, showed that 131 cats returned home 358 animals – birds, small mammals and amphibians – over the course of a year. It didn't record the prey the cats failed to return home.
Professor Stephen Harris, based at the school of biological sciences at the University of Bristol, was one of the study's authors and he believes that the impact of some pets on local ecology needs to be debated much more widely.
"Compulsory neutering of cats is not really practical," he says. "But people really should weigh up the environmental cost of owning a pet. We each need to ask ourselves if we really need a pet? In the US, animal welfare groups strongly recommend that cats are kept indoors. And in Australia, some states are now discussing making it compulsory to neuter cats, as well as introducing 'feline-free' zones where, if found, cats can be trapped and humanely destroyed by the local authority. But here the British attitude to cats is that they should be left to roam as this is natural." (In an earlier study that Harris co-authored, it was calculated that the UK's 7.7 million cats kill around 188 million wild animals a year.)
But Harris says dogs aren't exactly guilt-free, given that an estimated 250,000 tonnes of dog faeces are deposited on our streets and in our parks each year: "It is calculated that 100 tonnes of dog sh_t is left on Richmond Park in London each year alone. This has a huge impact on the local ecology. If you see aerial photographs of the area, you can see how yellow the grass is around the car park where all the dogs rush out of the owners' cars to urinate. Pets such as dogs and cats can have lots of these little impacts, which really do add up. Ecologically, pets are very demanding and this is a lifestyle choice that is difficult to justify for most people." (In their book, the Vales make the observation that, in San Francisco, city officials say that dog faeces now account for 4% of the municipal waste sent to landfill each year – the same level as used nappies.)
Marina Pacheco, chief executive of the Mammal Society – who owns a cat herself – says education, rather than legislation, is the answer: "We are aware of the huge impact cats have on small mammals. Yes, we probably have too many cats in the UK, but it's too hard to work out the optimum carrying capacity. We have to be pragmatic about the fact that millions of people do own cats. There are things cat owners can do, though. Keeping cats in during dusk and dawn, which is their natural hunting time, is a good idea, as are collar bells. Not owning too many cats is also sensible. One or two is enough and get them neutered, too. It must become socially unacceptable to be an irresponsible pet owner."
Anyone who owns a pet will keenly testify how much joy and companionship they can bring. But they will also acknowledge just how much time, effort and money they can require, too: a tortoise needs its heat and lighting; a horse needs shoeing and a regular supply of straw; an iguana needs its supply of insects; a chicken needs grit and corn; a dog needs its delousing powder; a cat needs a scratch tower. And then there's the insurance, the vet's fees and the annual cost of food and bedding. It's little wonder that some pets are described as being as big a commitment as having a child in the home. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that some are now viewing pets as having a similar environmental impact to that of a small person. After all, in many owners' eyes, their pets are very much part of the family.
Back at PetIndex, Morrison is handing out samples of her luxury pet food to passersby. "No, we don't use any animal meal in our pet foods," she says proudly to one interested woman. "It's the devil's work. They strip everything that's good off a chicken, even the fat, then they grind it into a powder for pet food. People are fixated on price – most pet food is cheaper than a tin of baked beans. But more and more people are coming round to the view, just as they are doing with their own diet, that quality counts. We've only been going since last November and we've already turned over half a million pounds. We have to start asking more questions about the food we feed our pets."
For altogether different reasons, Morrison is right.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20....arbon-emissions
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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« Reply #191 on Nov 26, 2009, 10:43am » | |
Cutting Greenhouse Pollutants Could Directly Save Millions of Lives Worldwide
ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — Tackling climate change by reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions will have major direct health benefits in addition to reducing the risk of climate change, especially in low-income countries, according to a series of six papers appearing on, Nov. 25 in the British journal The Lancet.
The studies, three of them coauthored by Kirk R. Smith, professor of global environmental health and one coauthored by Michael Jerrett, associate professor of environmental health sciences, both at University of California, Berkeley, use case studies to demonstrate the co-benefits of tackling climate change in four sectors: electricity generation, household energy use, transportation, and food and agriculture.
"Policymakers need to know that if they exert their efforts in certain directions, they can obtain important public health benefits as well as climate benefits," said Smith, who was the principal investigator in the United States for the overall research effort. "Climate change threatens us all, but its impact will likely be greatest on the poorest communities in every country. Thus, it has been called the most regressive tax in human history. Carefully choosing how we reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have the added benefit of reducing global health inequities."
Each study in the series examines the health implications in both high- and low-income countries of actions designed to reduce the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. Climate change due to emission of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel energy sources causes air pollution by increasing ground-level ozone and concentrations of fine particulate matter.
The studies were commissioned by the NIEHS, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in part to help inform discussions next month at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The NIEHS is one of the key sponsors of the international event.
"These papers demonstrate there are clear and substantive improvements for health if we choose the right mitigation strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions," said Birnbaum. "We now have real life examples of how we can save the environment, reduce air pollution and decrease related health effects; it's really a win-win situation for everyone."
A case study led by Smith on the health and climate benefits from a potential 150-million-stove program in India from 2010-2020 gives the largest co-benefit of any examined in the six papers. Smith has shown that providing low-emission stove technologies in poor countries that currently rely on solid fuel household stoves to cook and heat their homes is a very cost-effective climate change linkage. The 10-year program could prevent 2 million premature deaths in India, he said, in addition to reducing greenhouse pollution by hundreds of millions of tons.
The paper coauthored by Jerrett contains analysis of 18 years of data on the long-term health effects of black carbon -- the first study of its kind ever conducted. The study followed 352,000 people in 66 U.S. cities and was conducted by a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers led by Jerrett and Smith. Black carbon is a short-lived greenhouse pollutant which, along with ozone, is responsible for a significant proportion of global warming. Unlike CO2, these short-lived greenhouse pollutants exert significant direct impacts on health. Also, because they are short-lived, emission controls are almost immediately reflected in changes in warming.
"Combustion-related air pollution is estimated to be responsible for nearly 2.5 million premature deaths annually around the world and also for a significant portion of greenhouse warming," said Smith. "These studies provide the kind of concrete information needed to choose actions that efficiently reduce this health burden as well as reduce the threat of climate change."
Funding for The Lancet Health and Climate Change series was provided by the NIEHS and U.K. partners including The Academy of Medical Sciences, U.K. Department of Health, Economic and Social Research Council, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, National Institute for Health Research, Royal College of Physicians, and Wellcome Trust. The air pollution study also had funding from the Health Effects Institute, California Air Resources Board and Clean Air Task Force.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091125081622.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #192 on Nov 27, 2009, 9:45pm » | |
Protected zones will help to save Britain's marine wildlife
Harmful fishing practices will be banned from UK coastal waters under new legislation to protect endangered species
* Lisa Bachelor
* The Observer, Sunday 8 November 2009
An exotic underwater world of seahorses, sharks and corals that surrounds the coast of Britain is to be given greater protection under new legislation coming into force this week.
The long-awaited Marine Act will allow conservation groups to map sites of nature preservation for the first time. Future legislation to be enforced in these marine conservation zones will see an end to damaging practices such as scallop dredging and trawler fishing.
Currently there is only one small piece of coastline in Britain that is heavily protected – the sea around Lundy Island, off Devon. As a result, species such as spiny sea-horses, found in Studland Bay in Dorset, and basking sharks, seen in Britain's coastal waters in the summer, have been under serious threat.
"This is a truly momentous event for our marine wildlife," said Joan Edwards, head of living seas for the Wildlife Trusts. "We have campaigned for many years for new laws to provide better protection of marine habitats and wildlife, as well as improved management of activities at sea. Numbers of basking sharks have dropped by more than 95% and corals, seahorses, whales, dolphins and seals have all been affected. The Marine and Coastal Access Bill, if effectively implemented, will provide the chance to conserve the thousands of species which inhabit UK waters."
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds hopes the act will also offer greater protection to Britain's seabirds, which are vulnerable to destructive fishing methods and marine pollution. "In recent years we have seen frightening declines in kittiwakes and other seabirds," said Dr Mark Avery, the RSPB's director of conservation. "Climate change has been warming our seas and the food chain on which they rely is in danger of collapse. While this act can't stop climate change, it can help reduce other pressures on these vulnerable populations."
Part of the act's purpose is to safeguard Britain's vast network of brightly coloured, delicate corals. These include rarities such as the sunset cup coral, only found at a small number of isolated sites in the south-west of England and Wales. It is a slow-growing, long-lived species, making it particularly vulnerable. "Bottom trawling is like taking a plough along the sea bed," said Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at York University. "That is not conducive to sustaining healthy populations of fish."
The wildlife charity WWF has identified six "flagship species" that are under threat or in decline, which it believes will benefit from the act. These are the Atlantic salmon, whose numbers have been falling for 30 years; the pink sea fan, an exotic-looking horny coral; the harbour porpoise, usually seen in summer along the Welsh and Scottish coasts; sea-grass beds, a vital sea-horse habitat; deep-water coral reefs and horse mussel beds.
The establishment of the marine conservation zones will take place over the next two years, and the rules that govern each zone will be different, depending upon the needs of the species that are identified within them.
"If the Marine Act produces another feel-good exercise, it will have failed. My feeling is that it won't and that it will offer real protection to marine species," said Roberts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20....marine-wildlife
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #193 on Nov 27, 2009, 9:49pm » | |
Common sense and the city: Jaime Lerner, Brazil's green revolutionary
The ex-mayor of Curitiba used massive creativity and tiny budgets to create the world's greenest city
![[image]](http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/5341/viewofthebotanicalgar00.jpg)
View of the botanical gardens in Curitiba, Brazil. The city is a model for modern urbanisation. Photograph: Carlos Cazalis/Corbis
There are times in life – admittedly very few indeed – when you really wish Boris Johnson was in the same room as you. Last night was one of them as the revolutionary Brazilian ex-mayor, Jaime Lerner, spoke at London's British Film Institute as part of its Of Dreams and Cities season.
"You have to keep things simple, and just start working ... You have a lot of complexity-sellers in this life. We should beat them, beat them with a slipper," said the 70-year-old former mayor of Curitiba, the world's most environmentally friendly city. He has the look of an ex-boxer and a military bearing, softened by a ready and guttural laugh. Lerner was there to see A Convenient Truth, an inspiring film by Giovanni Baz del Bello showing how Lerner and successive mayors have over the past 40 years made Curitiba, a city of 3 million in southern Brazil, one of the world's most livable urban spaces – using only massive creativity and tiny budgets.
"You get creative when you take a zero from your budget," says Lerner. "But sustainability starts when you take two zeros from your budget. Many other mayors tell me their budget is small. For many things, we had no budget."
His first major coup was pedestrianising the main central shopping street in 1972 – in a weekend.
"We started one Friday night, and finished on Monday morning. If we'd had to stop and do things regularly, I wouldn't have made it, and I could have been fired. So we took the risk. By the Monday night, business was so good, the head of the local businessmen came to me and he gave me a petition and said: 'We want the whole street pedestrianised.'"
Lerner heard about a possible protest by drivers who planned to drive through the newly pedestrianised thoroughfare. So, he enlisted hundreds of children, armed them with paintbrushes and paper, and set them to play in the street. The protest never materialised.
Using three-section bendy buses in dedicated bus lanes, the city's transport system carries passenger numbers comparable to an underground – 2 million a day – but at a cost of $1m per kilometre rather than $100m. Fares are flat, and the city was encouraged to grow along the bus routes, so any Curitiba resident is never more than 400m from a bus stop. Only the cars get stuck in traffic jams.
Soon, Lerner hopes to launch the Dock-Dock, a 60cm-wide and 130cm-long car – the smallest in the world. "I can fit inside it," he says. "It will run at less than 25kmh with a range of 50km. But you won't own it." It will act as publicly owned feeder vehicles for public transport. Lernert says he'll test drive it in Rio next week.
Recycling in Curitiba is perhaps the most radical reform of all. In 1989, residents in a nearby favela were dumping their trash in surrounding rivers and fields, as there were no collections from their narrow streets. Lerner arranged for a truck to visit the favela at fixed times each week, and residents' rubbish was exchanged for bus tickets, football tickets and shows. Soon, the locals were cleaning the rivers and fields of old rubbish to sell. Schoolchildren were given new plastic toys for old bottles and bags in a scheme called "Garbage that's not garbage".
Separation of organic and non-organic waste improved efficiencies further. Local homeless people and alcoholics were employed at the recycling plant, where they also retrained on computers they rescued from the city's bins. Curitiba's fishermen were paid to fish for rubbish.
Floodplains surrounding the city were bought up and converted to parks with boating lakes acting as overspill areas. This solution, far cheaper and more effective than culvetting rivers with concrete, increased the green space available for residents from 0.5 square metres each in the 1960s to over 50 square metres per resident today.
Housing was tackled in a similarly simple, revolutionary way. Land next to the electricity company's lot was converted into housing estates, and residents were encouraged to redesign their interiors, so they felt more pride and ownership over their properties.
Lerners' reforms have been widely popular and they appear to have improved the peoples' lot. GDP per capita in Curitiba is 60% higher than the average in Brazil. "Those that were most against us transformed into our greatest supporters – they just needed to see the results. Now they are proud of their city."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/nov/05/jaime-lerner-brazil-green
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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Big Bunny
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| | Re: Mitigating The Collapse of Gaia II
« Reply #194 on Dec 8, 2009, 10:18am » | |
The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?
ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2009) — A new article in the December 4 issue of Science addresses how the combined efforts of government commitments and market transition could save forest and reduce carbon emissions in Brazil.
The Policy Forum brief was authored by contributors from the Woods Hole Research Center, Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM), Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Aliança da Terra, Environmental Defense Fund, University of Florida, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and the Universidade Federal do Pará.
According to Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center and the study's lead author, "market forces and Brazil's political will are converging in an unprecedented opportunity to end deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon with 80 percent of the forest still standing."
Brazil has lowered deforestation rates 64 percent since 2005. This remarkable achievement was possible through a government crack-down on illegal activities in the region. It was helped by a retraction of the cattle and soybean industries, and a growing effort to exclude deforesters from the beef and soy markets. The article describes how Brazil could build upon this progress to end forest clearing by the year 2020, and the additional funding that will be required to reach this goal.
The study estimates that $6.5 to $18 billion will be needed from 2010 to 2020 to achieve the end of deforestation, resulting in a 2 to 5 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions. The steps include the support of low-deforestation livelihoods for forest peoples and smallholders; identifying and rewarding responsible cattle ranchers and farmers; improved enforcement of environmental laws; and investments in protected area management. This estimate utilizes a sophisticated economic model of the Amazon region that estimates and maps the value of forgone profits from ranching and soy farming that are associated with forest conservation.
Britaldo Soares-Filho of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, the article's second author, describes, "Our economic models integrate the best available information on soils, roads, and the costs of production to capture the economic logic of the Amazon's drivers of deforestation."
Brazil has emerged as one of the most progressive nations in the world in assuming commitments to lower greenhouse gas emissions within the United Nations climate negotiations. In December of 2008, this nation declared that it would cut deforestation to 20% of its historic level by 2020. Brazil's position going into Copenhagen next week, when climate negotiations should culminate in a new climate agreement, could be even more progressive.
Paulo Moutinho, leader of IPAM's climate change program, in Brazil, and a scientist at the WHRC, states, "Brazil was, for many years, the country that said that rich nations must lead in developing a solution to climate change. Now, Brazil is showing that leadership."
These lessons are key, especially in light of the UN climate conference beginning on December 7, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Journal Reference:
1. Daniel Nepstad et al. The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Science, December 4, 2009
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091203163148.htm
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788-1860
"In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children’s future."
John F. Kennedy |
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