BBC Environment –
GM crops are no more harmful to the environment than conventional plant
varieties, a major UK study has found. The Bright project looked at
varieties of sugar beet and winter oil-seed rape which had been
engineered to make them tolerant of specific herbicides. The novel
crops were compared with non-GM cereals grown in rotation. The project
concluded that the GM varieties, used in this way, did not deplete the
soil of weed seeds needed by many birds and other wildlife. The
findings of the Botanical and Rotational Implications of Genetically
Modified Herbicide Tolerance (Bright) Link project were released on
Monday.  Bright was designed to mimic normal agricultural
practice, and measure how these GM crops would perform when used in a
typical crop rotation pattern over four years. Not only did the project
find no evidence of seed depletion, it also pointed to potential
benefits for farmers of growing the GM crops.  “What we have shown
is that in the case of these two crops, there are ways of managing them
which are quite practical, and farmers can deal with them quite
readily,” the study’s scientific co-ordinator Dr Jeremy Sweet told BBC
News. “There appear to be some management advantages in the flexibility
of the herbicide usage; there could well be cost-benefit advantages,
depending on the price of the herbicides and seeds when the crops are
commercialised. “So there do appear to be a number of reasons why
farmers might be quite interested in growing these crops.” (11/29/04)

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Common Dreams — President
George W. Bush’s quick stop in Colombia on his return from the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Chile on Monday brought
this forgotten front in Washington’s war on terrorism briefly into the
headlines. Bush promised Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe - his
closest South American ally - to boost aid for his military campaign
against leftist guerillas. Just two weeks earlier, 100 unarmed peasants
were killed in a massacre reportedly by rightist paramilitary troops in
Colombia’s southern jungle province of Putumayo. Unlike the Bush visit,
this failed to make headlines here. Colombia has received $3.3 billion
in U.S. aid since 2000 - making it the top recipient after the Middle
East. In October, Congress approved doubling the Pentagon’s troop
presence in Colombia to 800 - although they are officially barred from
combat. The Iraq war may have knocked Colombia off the front page, but
Mideast chaos has made South America’s energy resources more strategic
to the United States. Colombia itself is among the top 15 global
suppliers to the United States, and Uribe hopes to privatize the
country’s oil industry as part of his push to join President Bush’s
Free Trade Area of the Americas. Venezuela, bordering Colombia, is the
fourth-largest U.S. supplier after Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Canada.
Venezuela’s populist leader Hugo Chavez is himself a White House target
for Western hemisphere “regime change” - as seen by the current push
for sanctions. Meanwhile, the oil industry has charted a new thrust
into the Amazon regions of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia - countries all
now receiving U.S. military aid under the Andean Regional Initiative,
the Bush administration’s expansion of President Bill Clinton’s “Plan
Colombia.” …  One beneficiary of the increasing troop presence
in Colombia is Occidental Petroleum, known colloquially as “Oxy.” The
United States is training and equipping a Colombian army brigade to
protect Oxy’s 480-mile pipeline linking the oil fields of Arauca
province with the Caribbean. Arauca, the heart of Oxy’s operations,
hosts the greatest concentration of U.S. military advisers and has
Colombia’s worst human rights situation. Oxy is also building a new
pipeline over the Andes to get oil from Ecuador’s Amazon to Pacific
ports, while in Peru, Hunt Oil and Halliburton have launched a massive
natural gas project in the Amazon, with a new pipeline to the Pacific.
And in Bolivia, a consortium including Shell hopes to build a pipeline
linking natural gas fields to a terminal on the Chilean coast.  (11/29/04)
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Common Dreams — Climate
change is ‘a myth’, sea levels are not rising and Britain’s chief
scientist is ‘an embarrassment’ for believing catastrophe is
inevitable. These are the controversial views of a new London-based
think-tank that will publish a report tomorrow attacking the
apocalyptic view that man-made greenhouse gases will destroy the
planet. The International Policy Network will publish its long-awaited
study, claiming that the science warning of an environmental disaster
caused by climate change is ‘fatally flawed’. It will state that
previous predictions of changes in sea level of a metre over the next
100 years were overestimates. Instead, the report will say that sea
level rises will reach a maximum of just 20cms during the next century,
adding that global warming could, in fact, benefit mankind by
increasing fish stocks. The report’s views closely mirror those held by
many of President George Bush’s senior advisers, who have been accused
of derailing attempts to reach international agreement over how to
prevent climate change. The report is set to cause controversy. The
network, which has links with some of the President’s advisers, has
received cash donations from the US oil giant ExxonMobil, which has
long lobbied against the climate change agenda. Exxon lists the
donation as part of its ‘climate change outreach’ programme.
Environmentalists yesterday said the network report was an attempt by
American neo-conservatives to sabotage the Prime Minister’s attempts to
lead the world in tackling climate change. (11/29/04)
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WARNING! – Reading this linked update can be hazardous to your happiness. … Richard Duncan Ph.D. is an Earth scientist studying the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. He believes that the future of Industrialized Civilization is even shorter than he predicted in 2000. … I remember how startled and frightened I was when I first read Duncan’s papers. I spent many weeks of research trying to prove his theory wrong. I didn’t want it to be true. When I finally accepted the truth of his conclusions, I realized as a synergic scientist, there must be a synergic solution to this crisis. I started CommUnity of Minds with the hope of helping to focus on possible solutions for the fossil fuel depletion crisis. … There are three types of humans to be found in our present world. Which type you are depends on what you believe about how the world works. Adversaries believe there is not enough for everyone and only the physically strong will survive. They believe humans are coercively dependent on others, and they best understand the language of force. In this crisis, they will kill as many as they can to insure their survival. Neutralists believe there is enough for everyone, if only you work hard enough and take care of yourself. They believe humans are financial independent and should be self-sufficient unless they are too lazy or defective. They best understand the language of money. In this crisis, they will try to buy their way out. … And, finally a new type of human is emerging. Synergists believe there is enough for everyone, but only if we work together and act responsibly. They believe humans are interdependent and can only obtain sufficiency by working together as community. Synergists best understand the language of love. In this crisis, they will work together to insure mutual survival. Neutralists and Adversaries can learn to be synergists. We humans can change our minds. … Our survival will require that we wake up, and work together. The choice is ours, and we are free to choose. … If you want to work together, just let me know. –Timothy Wilken (11/27/04)
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Roy Madron & John Jopling write: In the midst of the prosperity and affluence of Western ‘democracies’ there is a pervasive sadness and sense of impotence about the future of our societies, of humanity and of the natural world. Many well-informed people have focused those negative feelings on the idea of‘globalisation’. For them the very term carries with it a sense of global despoliation, greed, oppression, injustice and irreparable loss. At the same time, many of us in the West are uncomfortably aware that the unprecedented material abundance we enjoy is being bought at the expense of the rest of the world’s peoples, natural resources and wildlife. Within the societies forced to pay the costs of today’s form of globalisation, tens of millions of citizens are seething with anger, envy and frustration. Yet today’s globalisation is but the latest—and hopefully temporary —phase of a globalising process that has been going on for thousands of years. In effect, we humans are a global species: we have evolved the capacity to inhabit virtually every corner of the planet. Thus some form of ‘globalisation’ is part of our destiny. What is in question is the form that human globalisation will take in its next manifestation. Like millions of people, we have come to the conclusion that today’s globalisation is fundamentally unjust and unsustainable. Like them we want to make a useful contribution to changing this unjust and unsustainable system of globalisation into a just and sustainable one. But we believe that to bring about such a fundamental change in an enormous and complex system we first have to understand its main characteristics as a system. … Gaia’ is the name of the Greek goddess of Earth. James Lovelock adopted it for the scientific theory he first put forward in 1972, in the journal Atmospheric Environment. The Gaia theory sees the planet’s physical, chemical and biological systems as a single evolving, self-regulating ecosystem. It explores how these systems interact to maintain the overall temperature and the chemical composition of the land, the atmosphere and the sea, within limits that make the Earth habitable by countless billions of living creatures. This way of thinking about the planet—thinking within the framework of Gaia theory—has led to many important new perceptions in the sciences of the Earth, and has contributed to the foundation of a new, multidisciplinary effort known as Earth System Science. Gaia’s systems are all self-organising and interactive. We have called the form of government we are proposing Gaian Democracy, because our proposal is shaped by principles similar to those of the Gaian system itself. (11/27/04)
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BBC Nature — New
evidence shows tropical honeybees survived the post-impact winter 65
million years ago that is thought to have helped kill off the
dinosaurs. An asteroid is thought to have hit our planet at the end of
the Cretaceous Period, throwing up dust that blocked sunlight and
dragged down temperatures. Honeybees trapped in amber before the
asteroid strike are nearly identical to their modern relatives, data
shows. Details were given at the Geological Society of America’s 2004
meeting.   The asteroid or comet that created the Chicxulub
impact structure in Mexico occurs at the boundary between two
geological periods: the Cretaceous and the Tertiary. This geological
boundary marks a mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and many
other groups of organisms. The finding throws up all sorts of
questions, researchers say, because current models of the post-impact
winter suggest global temperatures fell far enough to have killed off
honeybees and many of the flowering plants they lived off. Modern
tropical honeybees have an optimal temperature range of 31-34C (88-93F)
in order to maintain vital metabolic activities. This is also the range
that is best for their food source: nectar-rich flowering plants. 
Based on what is known about the Cretaceous climate and modern tropical
honeybees, Jacqueline Kozisek of the University of New Orleans, US,
estimated that any post-impact winter event could not have dropped
temperatures by more than 2-7C (4-13F) without wiping out the bees.
Current theories about the Chicxulub impact winter estimate drops of
7-12C (13-22F) - too cold for tropical honeybees. (11/26/04)
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BBC Humanity – 
More of us are eating more and better than ever before. World cereal
consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has
tripled since 1961. The global fish catch grew more than six times from
1950 to 1997. None of this happened by magic, though, but only by
giving Nature a massive helping hand. The World Resources Institute
said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertilizer ever produced
had been applied since 1984. So one question is whether the world can
go on increasing its harvests at this rate - or even faster, to cater
as well for the extra 75 million people born annually. Our recent
achievements are impressive - while global population doubled to 6
billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more
than kept up.  The proportion of malnourished people fell in the
three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able
to go on at this rate. For a start, much of the world’s best cropland
is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly
marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering - soil
degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13%
in the last half-century. Many of the pesticides on which the crop
increases have depended are losing their effectiveness, as the pests
acquire more resistance. A key constraint is water. The 17% of cropland
that is irrigated produces an estimated 30-40% of all crops, but in
many countries there will be progressively less water available for
agriculture. Many of these are poor countries, where irrigation can
boost crop yields by up to 400%. There are ways to improve irrigation
and to use water more effectively, but it’s not clear these can bridge
the gap. (11/26/04)
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BBC Nature –
Remarkable new film of wild pandas shows how the rare bears engage in
some gymnastics to mark their territory. Pandas can adopt four distinct
postures to deposit scent, with probably the strangest being the
handstand. The bear goes upside down on its front paws with the aim of
pushing its urine as high up a tree trunk as possible. The amazing
pictures were taken in the Quingling mountain range of north-west
China, and will be shown on BBC One’s Bears - Spy In The Woods
programme. It is said to be the first time wild pandas have been filmed
in this activity. The TV programme has been made for the corporation by
independent wildlife filmaker John Downer. He pioneered a remote device
called “boulder-cam” - a camera hidden inside a dummy rock.  The
great advantage with remote cameras is that they are non-invasive. They
are simple in design, often consisting of a stills camera in a
protective housing. The trigger device is based on a pulse infra-red
system, similar to the motion-sensing device that opens supermarket
doors when you walk towards them. The sensitivity can be adjusted to
target animals of different sizes, ranging from pygmy shrews to bull
elephants. When the camera is triggered, the animal produces its own
self-portrait. The equipment now comes in various guises - including
the “bamboo-cam” used to film the pandas. (11/26/04)

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Roy Madron & John Jopling
write: Over the past 50 years, systems thinkers have become
increasingly influential in every field of human endeavour - from
astronomy to agriculture, from economics to health, from crime
prevention to traffic circulation. The practical benefits of systems
thinking in these fields have been immense, yet little use has been
made of it in tackling the social and political problems that we
face. If systems are separated into their component parts they
cannot perform
the functions of which they are capable when put together in the right
combination: a pile of bicycle parts cannot be ridden until assembled
in the correct way; an amputated arm cannot throw a ball. A tree here,
some ants over there and a pile of leaves do not provide an environment
in which an ecosystem can be sustained. A rideable bike, ecosystems and
ball throwing are ‘emergent properties’ of different kinds of systems.
This is the single most important concept in systems sciences because
it requires us to think in terms of whole systems and their
relationships, not just their parts. Living organisms and ecosystems
are ’self-organizing’. This means that their behaviour is not
controlled by some external agency but is established by the system
itself. … 
Failure to use systems thinking when developing solutions to the
problems caused by, for example, the current model of economic
globalization - that is, focusing on the system’s emergent properties
rather than its underlying structural causes - can only lead to
ineffective, and sometimes gravely damaging, actions.  It is this
failure to understand the need for soft-systems approaches
to what systems thinkers call ‘wicked’ problems that leads to the
incompetence of governments in dealing with almost all of the issues on
their agenda. … 
The idea that government could become a learning experience for all
concerned is wholly foreign to command-and-control leaders. But the
application of these concepts to the political field could transform
the way democracy and government work. Diversity, flexibility and
subsidiarity will be the inevitable result
of addressing ‘wicked’ problems with a soft-systems approach. Network
government will encourage creativity and freedom in the design of all
economic systems, in industry and agriculture as well as finance. What
we are predicting here is the gradual emergence of a very different
world. But it is not one that can be specified or ‘imagineered’. In
systems terms, imagineering is inevitably a linear process and as such
cannot take account of the complex adaptive nature of human societies. (11/24/04)
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Richard Duncan Ph.D. writes:
The Olduvai theory has been called unthinkable, preposterous, absurd,
dangerous, self-fulfilling, and self-defeating. I offer it, however, as
an inductive theory based on world energy and population data and on
what I’ve seen during the past 30 years in some 50 nations on all
continents except Antarctica. It is also based on my experience in
electrical engineering and energy management systems, my hobbies of
anthropology and archaeology, and a lifetime of reading in various
fields. The theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production
(use) and world population. The details are worked out. The theory is
easy. It states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is
less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030. World energy production per
capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at a breakneck speed of 3.45 %/year. Next
from 1973 to the all-time peak in 1979, it slowed to a sluggish 0.64
%/year. Then suddenly —and for the first time in history — energy
production per capita took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979
to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent
decline. More to the point, it says that energy production per capita
will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial
Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years. Should this
occur, any number of factors could be cited as the ’causes’ of
collapse. I believe, however, that the collapse will be strongly
correlated with an ‘epidemic’ of permanent blackouts of high-voltage
electric power networks — worldwide. Briefly explained: “When the
electricity goes out, you are back in the Dark Age. And the Stone Age
is just around the corner.” The Olduvai theory, of course, may be
proved wrong. But, as of now, it cannot be rejected by the historic
world energy production and population data. (11/24/04)
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