One thing that’s different for people from when I was growing up is that there is much less expectation that you can learn a profession or skill and then depend on doing that thing for the rest of your life. That tendency looks to become even more prevalent in the future, to the point where if you want to be a step ahead it won’t be just a matter of anticipating what will be the hot profession when you graduate from school, but instead planning ahead for jobs that may not even exist yet.
The one I have in mind fits that last category. If it hasn’t happened yet, there’s going to be a large future demand for people who understand how to manage, maintain, and restore a working ecology. We’re in the process right now of demonstrating how to take a functioning global climate system and the ecology based on it, and wreck it. We’ve been at it now for a couple hundred years or so and the effects are becoming apparent. Figuring out how to make it right is going to require people with knowledge across a wide range of subjects, from the biological sciences to physics and chemistry, geology, geography, history and much more.
Craig Hebert (National Wildlife Research Center in Ottawa, Canada) and his team analyzed 25 years of data on the gulls and found that throughout the Great Lakes region, the birds were in poor health in many areas. Tests of their fatty acids showed an increase in the type of transfat that mostly comes from food produced by humans.
“It seems that the birds are being forced to make a dietary shift from fish to terrestrial food, including garbage,” says Hebert.
Although no one is certain why the birds are eating more garbage, evidence points to fish stocking. When exotic salmon and trout have been added to the waters, the birds seem to be out competed for their favorite prey of smaller fish, such as alewifes.
We need to get to the point where we can recognize the possibility of something like gulls being forced to move to land and eat garbage before something like fish stocking is actually done. Maybe we’ll think trade-off is worth it, but we should still should be making our decisions with a better understanding of the possible consequences. Not understanding consequences has a lot to do with how we got where we are now.
For a while, because we’re still early in the process of learning how the complex relationships between species in an environment really works, this is an job that’s going to be as much or more an art than it is science or engineering. But if you know someone who’s wondering what to be when they grow up, tell him or her that the future is wide-open for anyone who can learn how to take a broken environment and put it back together again. Whatever they end up calling it.
There was a time when the mere threat of a veto by President Bush could keep a piece of legislation from even being voted on. Those days are no more.
The House passed a $290 billion farm bill Wednesday with a strong veto-proof majority, offering more subsidies for farmers, food stamps for the poor and special projects that lawmakers can bring home to voters this election year.
The 318-106 vote for the five-year bill came despite President Bush’s promised veto. He says the measure is too expensive and gives too much money to wealthy farmers.
The thing is, Bush probably has a point when it comes to subsidies to already wealthy farmers. But the farm bill also contains key pieces if environmental legislation, including the beginning of a shift away from corn as a source for ethanol.
No legislation gets through Congress in an election year without some provisions designed to help a few legislators keep their jobs. And besides, since when was George Bush opposed to tax breaks for rich people?
Whatever you think about the merits or drawbacks of the current legislation, the real issue at this time is power and who has it. And after nearly eight years of a term in which the President all too often got everything his own way, it’s nice to see that power is beginning to shift out of the White House.
A sneaky spider has been named in honor of rock musician Neil Young.
Jason Bond, a biologist at East Carolina University, named a newly discovered arachnid, Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi. It is also known as a trapdoor spider.
“There are rather strict rules about how you name new species,” Bond said. “As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please.”
He added, “With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice.”
Having a whole species named after you is an honor not many are granted. Among rock musicians, the only other such naming is the whirligig beetle, Orectochilus orbosinorum, named after Roy Orbison and his wife Barbara.
“The mantis shrimp is a delightfully weird beastie,” said Professor White, of the University of Queensland. “They’re multi-coloured, their genus and species names mean ‘mouth-feet’ and ‘genital-fingers’; they can move each eye independently, they see the world in 11 or 12 primary colours as opposed to our humble three, and now we find that this species can see a world invisible to the rest of us.”
It has to do with an ability to see the direction and amount of polarization of light. Polarization in its simple form is the cause of the dark patches that show up when you look at a blue sky through polarized sunglasses. The shrimp are able to do more than that.
The two scientists have shown that shrimp of the species Gonodactylus smithii have eyes that simultaneously measure four linear and two circular polarisations, enabling them to determine both the direction of the oscillation, as well as how polarised the light is.
”This is very useful because natural light can vary from strongly polarised, like the glare off snow or water, to unpolarised, like the sun,” Professor White said.
”Any changes to the amount of polarisation instantly tells the animal that something is going on.”
Another scientist speculated that the shrimp’s ability plays a role in mating behavior, an observation that may tell us as much about marine biologists as it does mantis shrimp.
Mary Dade’s claim that she was forced to resign from her position as Midwest regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency after pressure was put on by DOW chemical company is being investigated by members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Senators Barbara Boxer and Sheldon Whitehouse are asking some questions.
“As you know, Congress and the American people expect EPA to enforce vigorously our public health protections - and to preserve the integrity of the enforcement program by excluding politics from such activities,” the senators wrote in a letter today to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
“Against the backdrop of allegations of political intervention in EPA decision-making that have been aired at recent hearings before this Committee, as well as similar allegations that we have heard from EPA staff and seen widely reported in the media, it is important for there to be a full explanation of the circumstances surrounding Ms. Gade’s allegedly forced resignation.”
Gade had been directing an effort to make DOW clean up dioxin contamination in lake Huron and Saginaw Bay. She was a career EPA official, appointed to her last position by President Bush. The circumstances around her resignation are yet another look into who’s really running things at the EPA.
Here’s another reason to think there’s a better way to produce ethanol than by converting corn.
Sweet sorghum, used in the United States mostly as animal feed, offers a 10-foot (3 meter) stalk that can be turned into ethanol without damaging the food grain that grows at its top, Mark Winslow said in an interview.
Unlike corn-based ethanol, which uses one and a half times as much energy in its production as it offers as an end product, sweet sorghum produces eight units of fuel for every unit of fuel used to make it in developing countries, Winslow said.
The days when corn is actively grown in order to be used as a fuel are going to end up as a blip in history. Blink twice and it will be as if it never happened.
There’s some good news in a recent report about thte cleanliness of water along the U.S. coastlines, but there are also indications that there’s still lots of work to do.
U.S. environmental laws enacted in the 1970s are reducing overall contaminant levels in coastal waters of the United States, finds a 20 year study released today by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. But the study shows continuing elevated levels of toxic metals and oils near urban and industrial areas of the coast.
Oil related compounds from motor vehicles and shipping activities continue to flow into coastal waters daily, NOAA reports. These compounds, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, have been monitored by NOAA scientists for decades so baseline data exist to help define the extent of environmental degradation.
The chemicals whose presence has been reduced, like DDT and PCB’s, received a good amount of publicity over the years as to their harmful effects. Note also that the laws and regulations passed to control their use have actually worked. That suggests we can deal with the rise of oil related pollution and rise of trace metals, too.
In remarks he prepared to give at a wind technology firm in Portland, Oregon, on Monday, the Arizona senator said he would seek international accords to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and would offer an incentive system to make businesses in the United States cleaner.
“The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington,” McCain said in remarks he planned to give at the Vestas Wind Technology plant.
“Good stewardship, prudence, and simple common sense demand that we act to meet the challenge, and act quickly,” he added.
That’s certainly different talk than we’ve heard out of anyone in the White House the last eight years, and if acted on would guarantee that some changes, at least, will be made in U.S. environmental policy.
But when it comes to issues like governmental regulation and a “hands-off” approach to the marketplace, McCain is a confirmed right-winger. It’s hard to see how much would improve, for instance, at an agency like the EPA. You can talk all you want about lowering greenhouse gas emissions, but if no one has the power or desire to enforce the rules, it ain’t going to matter much.
My dad and brother are the avid fishermen in the family, and this year it sounds like my brother Brian had a pretty good day.From outdoor writer Ron Schara’sannual column on the Minnesota fishing opener in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Brian Johnson of Plymouth skillfully hauled in his limit of six walleyes, including a 19 1/2-incher.
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