CommUnity of Minds — David and Marcia Pimentel write: About forty years ago, the world population was only 3.5 billion, or about half of the present population of 6.7 billion people. Most of us seem to ignore or be unaware of the magnitude of this rapid expansion and the vast changes that it is causing throughout the world. Indeed, the daily and even the annual impacts of this growth go unnoticed. Yet the impacts of the growing world population on land, water, energy, and biota resources are real and indeed overwhelming.

What resources are required to secure a quality life for future generations worldwide? Will there be sufficient cropland, water, energy, and biological resources to provide adequate food and other essential human needs? Balanced against the future availability of these basic resources are the escalating needs of an ever-growing population.

Clear scientific evidence suggests worldwide problems of food availability already have emerged. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 60 percent of the world population now is malnourished—the largest number and proportion of malnourished people ever reported in history. Further, many serious diseases, like malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis are increasing, not only because of worldwide malnutrition but also because the increasing density and movement of human populations facilitate the spread of diseases.

More humans than ever before cover the earth with their urbanization, highways, and other activities. This imperils the availability of land resources. Cropland is a vital resource, with more than 99.7 percent of human food calories coming from the land and less than 0.3 percent from oceans and other aquatic ecosystems. Globally, an average of only 0.22 hectares of cropland per capita is now available for crop production. In contrast, 0.5 hectares per capita is available to support the diverse food systems of the United States and Europe. At present, cropland in the United States now occupies 17 percent of the total land area, but relatively little additional cropland is available to support the future expansion of U.S. agriculture. As a result, valuable forest areas are being permanently destroyed and replaced with cropland. This is causing many long-range global problems, including contributing to global warming.

Each year more than 10 million hectares of valuable cropland are degraded and lost because of soil erosion. In addition, an added 10 million hectares are being destroyed by salinization resulting from improper irrigation. Combined, world soil erosion and salinization account for the major losses in productive cropland.

Along with the loss of cropland and irrigated land, per-capita fertilizer use worldwide is declining, and all these changes are suppressing food-crop production, especially in developing countries. Adding to the 22 percent decline in per-capita use of fertilizers is the rapid increase in fertilizer prices. This decline is a concern because fertilizer nutrients are critical for crop production. The recent doubling of fertilizer prices had major impacts on farmers, especially struggling farmers in developing countries. …

The present world population of 6.7 billion is projected by the United Nations to increase to 9 billion and may rise to as many as 11 billion by 2050. Even if a worldwide policy of two children per couple (instead of the current 2.8 children) were agreed on tomorrow, the world population will continue to expand for about seventy years before stabilizing at about 13 billion people. China, with a present policy of one child per couple, will add about 8 million to its population this year because of its young-age structure. Population momentum depends on the young-age structure of the current world population and propels the speed of growth. Note that 40 percent of the world population is under the age of twenty.

To be able to ensure a reasonable standard of living, Americans will have to reduce their population and their consumption of goods and energy by one-half. When the United States runs out of oil, natural gas, and coal, it will have to rely only on renewable energy. Such renewable energy sources will be able to provide only about half of the oil equivalents now used per capita each year—slightly more than 5,000 liters of oil equivalents instead of the current 9,500 liters per capita. But as the population continues to grow and resources decline, several problems will increase.

Clearly, the current energy-population imbalance will impose drastic changes in energy, land, and water use and result in major changes in the American lifestyle. Achieving energy conservation and efficiency of all energy sources is paramount. Other major changes should include: smaller automobile size with double the gasoline efficiency; significant reductions in living space; reduction in heating, cooling, and light-energy usage; improvement in the movement of goods by energy-efficient methods; and heightened consumption of locally produced goods.

To halt the escalating imbalance between expanding population numbers and the earth’s essential natural resources, humans must control their numbers. At the same time, they must make efforts to conserve cropland, freshwater, energy, biodiversity, and the other life-supporting environmental resources. People in developed countries could contribute by reducing their high consumption of all natural resources, especially fossil fuels.

Continued rapid population growth damages the lives of all individuals and their offspring. Personal well-being, based on health as well as personal freedoms, is directly related to population numbers. If humans do not control their numbers, nature will. (07/30/09)

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BBC Medical Science — Children who eat plenty of dairy foods such as milk and cheese can expect to live longer, a study suggests. Some 4,374 UK children from a 1930s study were traced 65 years later by researchers in Bristol and Queensland.

They found those who had had high dairy and calcium intakes as children had been protected against stroke and other causes of death, journal Heart reports. Despite dairy containing artery furring fat and cholesterol, high consumption did not raise the heart disease risk. The findings appear to back the practice of giving extra milk to schoolchildren.

The study looked at family diets and found higher intakes of both calcium and dairy, predominantly from milk, cut mortality by a quarter. A higher daily intake of calcium, of at least 400mg as found in just over half a pint of milk, cut the chance of dying from stroke by as much as 60%. These beneficial effects were seen at estimated intake levels similar to those currently recommended by experts. Three servings of dairy foods - for example, a 200ml glass of milk, a pot of yogurt and a small piece of cheese - will provide all the calcium most people need each day.

Other factors may play a part - though researchers say they took into account that children with the highest dairy intakes came from wealthier families and ate better diets overall - but there is evidence that high calcium intake is good for blood pressure. Prolonged high blood pressure increases the risk of stroke.

Dairy consumption may also influence heart and circulation health through a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), say the study authors from the UK’s University of Bristol and Australia’s Queensland Institute of Medical Research. In adults, high circulating levels of IGF-1 are linked with reduced cases of heart failure and heart disease deaths. (07/28/09)

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BBC Nature — British woodlands are less biologically distinctive than they were 70 years ago, says a team of UK researchers. The use of fertilisers in farming had increased soil fertility, while tree canopies had grown thicker and cut light levels, they explained. As a result, the woodlands were becoming home to the same species, resulting in the unique characteristics of individual sites being lost.

The findings appear online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research was carried out by scientists from Bournemouth University, Natural England and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).

“This study shows that increased pollution and poor countryside management have led to increasing homogenisation of biodiversity in British woodlands,” said co-author Professor James Bullock, an ecologist from CEH. “These two issues must be addressed in future if we wish to restore the diverse woodland communities of the past.”

The researchers initially looked at a dataset of plant records from more than 7,000 sites in Dorset collected in the 1930s. They then revisited 86 of the woodlands that were used in the original survey, and recorded the plants that were found at the locations.

Comparing the two sets of data, the team found that while the average number of plant species found in the woodlands had remained the same, there was a “significant” reduction in the diversity of species.

“Biotic homogenisation has major implications for biodiversity conservation,” the team observed. “It is related to the loss of unique species combinations, leaving an impoverished version of the past variety of nature.” (07/28/09)

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BBC Medical Science —A dye similar to that used in sweets may potentially minimise the severity of spinal cord injuries. A cascade of molecular changes triggered in the hours following an initial injury can cause further severe damage to the spinal cord. But US researchers found this can be halted by using a dye known as Brilliant Blue G (BBG).

However, rats given the treatment in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study turned blue.

The researchers, from the University of Rochester, hope their work might eventually provide a way to minimise the risk of paralysis following a traumatic injury to the spine. But they stress that much work will be required to come up with a practical treatment. And the treatment would only work if it was administered in the hours immediately after an injury.

However, researcher Professor Steven Goldman said: “We have no effective treatment now for patients who have an acute spinal cord injury. Our hope is that this work will lead to a practical, safe agent that can be given to patients shortly after injury, for the purpose of decreasing the secondary damage that we have to otherwise expect.” …

Dr Mark Bacon, head of research at the charity Spinal Research, said: “There may be little we can do to stop the initial traumatic injury but we can certainly look to stop the insidious secondary damage that occurs in the spinal cord in the hours and days immediately afterwards.

“What we appear to have here is a promising lead in this quest for so-called neuroprotective treatments. The fact that it is a known, approved food colourant would, on the face of it, appear to make this a compelling starting point. However, the levels ingested in food stuffs don’t make us go blue, as is the case in the group’s experimental studies on rats, suggesting the therapeutic dose needed to protect the spinal cord from ATP toxicity is far, far higher than that experienced in daily life.” (07/28/09)

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CommUnity of Minds — Ellen Brown writes: California expects to need to issue only about $13 billion in IOUs through September, and all its Governor has asked for in the way of a loan from the federal government is a guarantee for $6 billion. Total loans, commitments and guarantees to rescue the financial sector and stem the credit crisis have been estimated at $12.8 trillion.

But California has not been invited to the banquet. The total sum California needs to balance its budget is $26.3 billion. That is about the same sum given to Citigroup, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan in bailout money; and it is only about one-tenth the sum given to AIG, a mere insurance company.

Corporations evidently trump States and their citizens in the eyes of the powers controlling the purse strings. California has a gross domestic product of $1.7 trillion annually and has been rated the world’s eighth largest economy. Its 38.3 million people are one-eighth of the nation’s population and a key catalyst for U.S. retail sales. When the California consumer base falters, businesses are shaken nationwide. If AIG and the other Wall Street welfare recipients are too big to fail, California is way too big to fail.

Fitch Rating Agency has downgraded California’s municipal bonds to junk bond status,triple B. Why? AIG and Lehman Brothers had A ratings right up until they declared bankruptcy. California has never defaulted on its bonds, and it cannot arbitrarily decide to default; the State Constitution mandates that debt principal and interest must be paid as promised. California bonds lost their triple A rating only when the municipal bond insurers (Ambac and MBIA) lost theirs. It was these insurers, not the State of California, that got into hot water gambling in derivatives. The State Attorney General has opined that California’s IOUs are valid and binding obligations of the State. In rejecting them, however, Wall Street may have ulterior motives. A lower credit rating can justify investors in demanding higher interest rates. The interest offered on the IOUs is substantially lower than the interest banks can get on triple B rated municipal bonds.

There may be deeper motives than that. Considering the enormous importance of the California economy to the country, and the relatively small sum it needs in loans, the refusal to support the State financially seems highly suspicious, especially when much more has been given to less creditworthy private institutions. The banks say they want to keep the pressure on California legislators to work it out among themselves, but what does that mean? (07/22/09)

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The Nation — William Greider wrote: Phil Angelides, the former state treasurer of California, is a tough-minded liberal with hands-on knowledge of high finance and the social contradictions in modern capitalism. So it is remarkable that Angelides has been chosen to chair the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission newly created by Congress. The commission has enormous potential to generate deeper reforms than anything President Obama has yet proposed, simply by digging out the hard facts of what caused the financial collapse. …

The best evidence of Angelides’s authentic values is that, as state treasurer, he was endlessly attacked and ridiculed by the Wall Street Journal. Angelides was a pioneer among state treasurers in mobilizing the financial-market power of CalPERS and CalSTRS, California’s mammoth pension funds for public employees and teachers. Those funds repeatedly used their weight to challenge Wall Street firms and corporate managements on the soundness of investment strategies and the financial system’s disregard for larger social consequences, including ecological destruction. He ran for governor and lost in 2006, then returned to his private life as a real estate developer (a joint venture with Magic Johnson to build affordable rental housing in Los Angeles) while also serving actively as chairman of the Apollo Alliance for a green economy.

During the Bush years, when Angelides articulated his views on capitalism, he sounded downright quaint. In a Nation article I did four years ago on pension-fund power, Angelides explained his perspective: “I would make the case–this comes from my experience in real estate–that the best, most highly regarded companies are the ones that are profitable and also produce products that are of utility to society, that increase our productivity and enrich our lives. When people step back and ask what they most want to see in the private sector, it is both profitability and good results for society. There is no reason capital shouldn’t be held to the same standard.”

If Phil Angelides applies that standard to his commission’s inquiry, we will see one bombshell after another. (07/22/09)
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BBC Medical Science — Stressed parents may play a role in childhood asthma, researchers believe. They found the children of tense parents who lived in polluted areas were far more likely to have asthma than friends in the same neighbourhood. The University of California team believe parental anxieties combine with other known risk factors to increase a child’s asthma risk.

They told Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences there might be an underlying biological explanation. Experts have already shown that women who are stressed in pregnancy may raise the risk of their child developing asthma or other allergies. And stress is known to trigger asthma attacks.

In the latest study the researchers followed 2,497 healthy primary school children living in Southern California and recorded how many of these developed asthma over a three-year period - 120 in total. They also gathered information on other known asthma risk factors like exposure to traffic-related air pollution and maternal smoking, as well as parental education, income and stress levels.

As expected, children exposed to more air pollution had a higher risk of asthma, but this risk was further increased if their parents were stressed and described their lives as “unpredictable”, “uncontrollable” or “overwhelming”. …

Professor Rob McConnell and his team speculate that stress increases the inflammatory effects of pollutants in tobacco smoke and traffic fumes on the airways.

Writing in PNAS they said: “These results suggest that children from stressful households are more susceptible to the effects of traffic-related pollution and in utero tobacco smoke on the development of asthma.” (07/21/09)

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Cluster F%#k Nation — John Howard Kunstler writes: As president, Barack Obama is faced with the essential fraudulence and unreality of the US economy.  Notice that, as ominous as they are, the wars in iraq and Afghanistan have generated only minimal protest so far in the early Obama period, despite the fact that they are not operationally different from their conduct under Bush. There is no protest because, for now, a consensus exists that our troops are in these places for perceived reasons — to keep Mideast oil supply lines open… to keep Islamic maniacs busy in their own backyard instead of on US territory… to keep Iran in a vise… to maintain the American “empire” (take your pick). There’s something there to appeal to a broad majority of US voters. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq and Afstan are not perceived as out-and-out frauds.

But the economy is.  Since September of 2008, when Hank Paulson began shoveling bail-outs to the very banks who screwed the world on fraudulent and unreal securities, and left American society comprehensively bankrupt, the consensus has only deepened on the perception of an historic swindle. And so far, President Obama has positioned himself as chief enabler to further swindling. One need look no further than the rulings this past spring of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) as authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, an official government agency, created 1934), which have allowed the biggest banks to pretend that the fraudulent paper in their vaults does not have to be recorded as a loss on their books.

The US economy is now dying a slow and painful death because it had become based on activities that had nothing to do with producing real wealth. Instead, it became dependent on rackets, that is, behavior geared to getting something for nothing.  These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from the wish commonly labeled “the American Dream” — itself largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda.  The end product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel scarcity. The unraveling of debt at every level now is directly related to the mis-investments made in that way of life.

By now, it’s self-evident that the “change” voted for in November’s election was too horrifying to articulate.  It still is.  The suburban sprawl economy was all we had left.  Now it’s gone and we’re stuck with all its deleveraging after-effects — the worst case of “buyer’s remorse” since the fall of Nazi Germany. Thus, the only “change” that President Obama can really work for is the health care system, which is a life-and-death matter. The sordid rackets so ostentatiously infecting the system boil down vividly to lives ruined and bankrupted, and a system more frightful to deal with than disease itself. Probably the baseline truth is that health care will end up being rationed one way or another. It’s another prime symptom of population overshoot, and a reminder that life is tragic.

As another blogger put it so nicely last week on the web (sorry, but I forget who or where), this isn’t a “recession,” it’s a collapse. The excellent Dmitry Orlov has outlined the process very nicely in his book “Reinventing Collapse” about the parallels between the demise of the Soviet Union and the prospects for demise of the US as currently constituted.  Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the Soviet collapse. He must have been a leader of very subtle abilities.  Not only did he survive to enjoy a busy second act of life with a Nobel Prize in his pocket, but he accomplished a nearly bloodless transition in a society long-conditioned to bloodletting as the primary political act.

Here in the USA, where we have had over two hundred years experience with peaceful power transitions — even during the convulsions of 1860-65 — the outcome this time might not be so appetizing. It would be one of the supreme ironies of history if it turned out that the US was incapable of ending its most self-destructive rackets peacefully and bloodlessly, while the Russians shucked off its Soviet racket like an old sweater.  The way I see it, Mr. Obama just doesn’t have much time before his authority and legitimacy slough off and he is left with only his genial smile. The “hope” vested in him will end up in a Museum of Lost Hopes, along with the integrity of TV news and the rectitude of the medical profession. And funding for that museum will be cut by President Sarah Palin, representing Nazism US style — i.e. Nazism without the brains. (07/20/09)

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BBC Technology History — US President Barack Obama has praised the “heroism” of the men who made the first landing on the Moon. Marking the 40th anniversary of the event, he said Americans continued to draw inspiration from Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. “I think that all of us recall the moment in which mankind finally was untethered from this planet,” he added.

Earlier, Mr Aldrin and Mr Collins called for renewed efforts to send a manned mission to Mars. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, said the race to get to the Moon had been the ultimate peaceful contest. He said it was an “exceptional national investment” for the US and the former USSR. He spoke at an event at Washington DC’s National Air and Space Museum.

Shortly afterwards, the three astronauts met Mr Obama at the White House. Mr Obama, who was seven years old when Mr Armstrong and Mr Aldrin took mankind’s first steps on the lunar surface, said it was “wonderful” to be in the company of the three history-makers. “The moment in which we had one of our own step on the Moon and leave that imprint… is there to this day,” Mr Obama said. He praised the astronauts for the “heroism, the calm under pressure, the grace” with which they operated. Their achievement, Mr Obama said “was somehow able to lift our sights, not just here in the United States but around the world”.

The American space industry wants the Obama administration to agree to send Nasa crews back into space, first to the Moon and then to Mars, reports the BBC’s Kevin Connolly, in Washington. …

Other Nasa astronauts gave a news conference at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC on Monday.

Eugene Cernan, who was the last astronaut to step off the Moon, in 1972, concurred with the Apollo 11 astronauts and called for a new focus on Mars.

“We need to go back to the Moon, we need to learn a little bit more about what we think we know already, we need to establish bases, put new telescopes there, get prepared to go to Mars. The ultimate goal, truly, is to go to Mars,” he told journalists.

“I think the next major goal is not to spend three days, or three weeks or three months on the Moon, but to have you folks, or your kids, or your grand-kids sit here and talk to a group of guys who can tell you what it was like to go to Mars.”  A decision could be due later this year, although there is no guarantee. Mr Obama will make funds available, our correspondent says. (07/20/09)

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Future Positive — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: In America this weekend, we are again celebrating our Independence. Of course this so called “independence” is a complete falsehood. We Americans depend on the entire planet to provide us our wants and needs. We have lived beyond our means at every imaginable level, and now it is time it is time to pay the piper. Unfortunately, we will make the entire human species pay for our excesses.

Many of the articles and essays offered at SynEARTH in the past ten years have documented and explained our growing human crisis. And, in the past 18 months, this crisis has deepened so rapidly that the DANGER of it has colored everything being written and reported in our human journalism including the articles and essays posted here.

Today, I have some good news. There is also OPPORTUNITY within this crisis. But if we humans are to have any chance to seize this opportunity, we will have to face the truth.

We are NOT an independent class of life.

Our Neutral-Adversary Political-Economic system cannot continue to function with 6.7 billion humans. It is failing now. Our recession will not end. There will be no recovery. We cannot fight our way out of this crisis. We cannot buy our way out of this crisis. It is time to put away weapons. It is time to put away money.

Only if we re-Organize ourselves — all 6.7 billion of us using a Synergic Political-Economic system do we have a chance to survive. 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.

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