News Forum Archives: April 2003
Cheap coffee ‘threatens wildlife’
Demand for coffee in the West is threatening to destroy already endangered wildlife, according to new research.
BBC News
Conservation experts say overproduction of cheap robusta coffee beans - commonly used in instant coffee - may be contributing to the loss of tigers, elephants, orangutans and rhinos in Sumatra.
A study by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society says that large areas of Indonesian lowland forest are being cut down to make way for coffee plantations.
Land cleared for coffee production increased by 28% in Lampung province in Sumatra, the heart of Indonesia’s robusta growing region, between 1996 and 2001.
Some 70% of Lampung’s coffee production occurs inside and adjacent to Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park - one of the few remaining strongholds of Sumatran tigers, elephants and rhinoceros.
Populations of these animals are now declining due to the loss of their forest home.
Dr Tim O’Brien, who headed the research published in the journal Science, said: “If we do not act soon, our next cup of Java may have the bitter taste of extinction.”
International deals
He said deforestation rates within the Bukit Barisan Selatan park were directly related to the price of coffee paid to farmers.
This was in turn influenced by coffee supply and demand worldwide.
Between 1962 and 1989 coffee production was regulated by the International Coffee Organisation (ICO) with strong support from the United States.
But in 1989, the US left the ICO and the international agreements expired.
Throughout the 1990s coffee production accelerated - especially in Indonesia and Vietnam - while prices plummeted, creating a coffee crisis.
Meanwhile Western consumption and demand for coffee continued.
Coffee was the second leading export product from developing countries after oil, and the US the biggest importer.
Per capita coffee consumption in the US averaged 4.2kg in 2001.
In the same year, Britain imported 10,000 tons of coffee from Indonesia - mainly the cheap robusta variety.
Despite recent low prices, Indonesia has announced plans to expand robusta coffee production in Lampung as part of its rural development programme.
But Dr O’Brien and his wife and co-researcher Dr Margaret Kinnaird warned: “Plans to expand Lampung’s coffee production will almost certainly target forest inside the national park and result in increased threats to large mammals.”
They are calling for a return to regulation, with the US re-joining the ICO, adding that higher yields of quality coffee would allow a reduction in acreage while boosting prices.
The quality arabica coffee is best grown in the shade and can be grown among indigenous shrubs and trees.
Eco-friendly
The beans fall to the ground making harvest more difficult than that of robusta beans, which ripen and remain on the branch.
But robusta is usually grown in full sunshine and areas are cleared to make room for the coffee plants.
Dr Kinnaird said large mammals, such as the Sumatran tiger, rhinoceros and elephant avoided forest boundaries.
“This means they are disproportionately affected by deforestation because their available safe habitat… is dwindling faster than the rate of forest clearance.”
Pablo Dubois, head of operations at the ICO, which is based in London, said: “I think this is a fair assessment in respect of conditions in Indonesia in that area, but should not be generalised internationally, because conditions vary very much from place to place.
“If you compare coffee cultivation with other economic activities, such as mining or even rearing livestock, coffee is pretty eco-friendly.
“In many habitats coffee will co-exist with a quite considerable degree of original biodiversity.”
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)Massive swing to clean power vital
by Katie Mantell
March 28 2003
At least three quarters of the world’s power must come from clean sources by the end of this century to sufficiently limit global warming, according to estimates released in this week’s Science.
The study shows that even the most conservative estimates of future warming point to a need for tremendous amounts of clean power development.
“To reduce carbon dioxide emissions and avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, we must switch to alternative, carbon-free energy sources,” says a co-author Atul Jain of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States.
The researchers analysed how uncertainties about the way in which climate responds to greenhouse gas concentrations affects the amount of non-polluting power that is needed to keep global warming below 2C.
They say that a massive shift towards clean energy is required, estimating that the equivalent of a zero-emissions power plant would need to be created somewhere in the world every day for the next 50 years in order to keep global warming in check.
“Given the long lead times needed for market penetration of new energy technologies, we need to develop appropriate energy technologies now,” they conclude.
SciDev.Net 2003Link to research paper in Science
Photo credit: Minnkota Power Cooperative, Inc./NREL
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Original Article
Continue Reading Massive swing to clean power vital
The Heartland Wrestles With Biotechnology
By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
MANNING, N.D. — In a bar in this hamlet on the great American prairie, some wheat farmers gathered one night not long ago. They drove for miles through blowing snow, and more than 50 of them packed the Little Knife Saloon, doubling the regular population of Manning. They came to ask questions about a new kind of wheat, and the more they heard from a panel skeptical of the crop, the more their brows knitted in worry.
The wheat was created in a St. Louis biology laboratory, through genetic engineering. It is meant to benefit farmers, but a lot of people in the room fretted that it would put them out of business.
“Nobody has really found out if this stuff is safe,” declared Steven Pollestad, who drove 30 miles from his family farm near Halliday and stood at the back, thumbs hitched in his jeans. “The foreign buyers have flat out said they won’t buy it. And I believe they won’t.”
In the states that grow the fabled amber waves of grain that symbolize America’s heritage of plenty, the most plentiful commodity these days is trouble.
For the first time in its decade-long push to win acceptance of genetically altered crops, Monsanto Co. of St. Louis faces significant opposition from farmers. Across the northern Great Plains and neighboring Canada, skepticism toward a forthcoming Monsanto product, called Roundup Ready wheat, has solidified into a political movement. Some farmers are so worried they want their state governments to wrest authority from federal regulators and adopt formal moratoriums on the crop.
The opposition, based largely on fear that foreign buyers will reject gene-altered wheat, potentially costing American and Canadian farmers vital markets, has only a few symbolic victories and several substantive defeats to show in statehouses and provincial legislatures so far. The critical decisions on whether to approve it still rest with regulators in Washington and Ottawa. But already, candidates have won elections by emphasizing their opposition to biotech wheat. And, facing a revolt not only from farmers but from a wary American food industry, Monsanto has been forced into a tactical retreat, stretching its timetable and issuing a long list of promises about how it would commercialize the product.
“We’re pursuing a very diligent path of dialogue,” said Michael Doane, Monsanto’s director of industry affairs. “Over time, it has affected our strategic approach.”
By no means does the opposition movement command unanimous allegiance in farm country — the issue has split farmers, farm organizations and legislatures in at least four states and two Canadian provinces, with the pro-biotech side plausibly claiming majority support among farmers in most of those places.
But the strength of the opposition has provoked a rollicking debate. Roundup Ready wheat is emerging as a key test of whether the biotechnology industry can take charge of the destiny of a major crop used primarily as food, something it has yet to accomplish despite successes in other crops.
And the fight is becoming a prime symbol in another way, too. As genetic science creates opportunities to manipulate the plants and animals people eat, associated battles are migrating out of Washington. In the next few years, state and even local governments will confront new kinds of crops, as well as gene-altered animals and even a genetically engineered salmon. Some of these products require state permits before they can be commercialized, and many state and local governments will hear demands to keep them out. The new biology, in other words, is coming soon to state legislatures and county commissions across the land.
The change is already evident in North Dakota and neighboring states, where legislators and some ordinary citizens now speak knowledgeably about such matters as genetic drift and pollen flow. The movement has fed on the deep suspicion of corporate ethics sparked by recent scandals. Pollestad, that Halliday farmer, captured the mood in a letter to the editor of the Grand Forks Herald. He noted that Monsanto was continuing to press for quick federal approval of its wheat despite its go-slow promises, and he called on North Dakota lawmakers to give citizens a voice in the decision.
“Or, we could let Monsanto decide,” he wrote. “And maybe we also could get Enron to run our utilities and Arthur Andersen to keep the books.”
Recouping an Investment
The crop technology that many companies, led by Monsanto, are pushing to develop these days is an outgrowth of the vast genetic knowledge pouring from the world’s research laboratories. Scientists are becoming increasingly adept at manipulating plants and animals in a way nature does not, moving genes across species to confer new traits.
Most research suggests such organisms are safe to eat, but a host of theoretical questions remain about the environmental risks, such as the possibility of creating new types of weeds or pests. That concern, plus lingering uncertainty about health effects, has led to a broad opposition movement, particularly in Europe and Japan.
In the long run, the technology offers potential benefits consumers may want, such as foods to cut the risk of heart disease or cancer. But the crops that have come to market first are primarily designed to benefit farmers by giving them greater control over weeds and insects.
Monsanto has been in the vanguard, developing varieties of corn, soybeans and cotton that resist worms and other insects. The company’s biggest success, though, has been with crops designed to exploit another of its products, an herbicide called Roundup. This popular chemical kills weeds efficiently, does no harm to people or animals and readily breaks down in the environment.
But Roundup kills conventional crops as well as weeds, so farmers mostly used it to prepare their fields for planting. Monsanto scientists set out in the 1980s, using genetic engineering, to develop crops resistant to Roundup. “Roundup Ready” crops have proven wildly popular, saving farmers labor. Monsanto competitors brought similar products to market.
Not long after the crops were commercialized in the United States, in the late 1990s, a European backlash began, featuring “Frankenfood” headlines and warnings about manipulating nature. American farmers lost corn sales to Europe, but growing demand in other markets took up the slack. Neither corn nor soybeans is primarily a human food crop — corn is largely fed to farm animals, and after the oil is squeezed out, so is most soybean meal. Cotton, of course, is used to make cloth.
Despite these successes, Monsanto has yet to recoup its huge investment in biotechnology, so the company needs new products. It is trying to conquer the fundamental cereal of Western diets — wheat.
On past experience, the company counted on ready farmer acceptance. But wheat farmers are highly dependent on foreign markets, particularly Japan, and follow them assiduously. And wheat, as it happens, is grown in a part of North America with a long tradition of political activism among farmers, who battled banks and grain monopolies early in the 20th century, a populist tradition that persists.
Moreover, the people who run Monsanto had never met Tom and Gail Wiley.
Money-Minded Opposition
The Wileys are wheat, soybean and cattle farmers who live on a wind-swept farmstead at the end of a long gravel road in southeastern North Dakota. They met in Berkeley, Calif., many years ago, and Tom Wiley confesses to some counterculture dabbling in his youth.
But the Wileys are conventional, not organic, farmers, and have been more or less comfortable using pesticides and other aspects of modern farm technology since they began working Tom Wiley’s family homestead in the 1970s.
In the late 1990s, events unrelated to the biotechnology industry politicized the Wileys. The federal government promulgated a crop-insurance program and then changed the payout rules after farmers had already bought their policies, a bait-and-switch that infuriated the Wileys. They led a farmer coalition that sued the government, won, and eventually got an act of Congress passed to correct the problem.
As that battle was winding down, the Wileys began hearing about Roundup Ready wheat. They’d already had one bad experience with biotech crops — some high-grade soybeans they grew to make tofu somehow got adulterated with a small amount of Roundup Ready soybeans, probably from a neighbor’s field, and buyers overseas balked.
What would happen, the Wileys wondered, if Monsanto commercialized Roundup Ready wheat and foreign buyers suddenly grew skittish about the American crop amid fears of adulteration? They talked to other farmers. Even if falling prices led growers to abandon the Monsanto product, the reputation and marketability of U.S. wheat might be permanently damaged, the farmers reasoned.
A political movement was born. At lightning speed, it won a huge victory when the lower house of North Dakota’s Legislative Assembly passed a moratorium in 2001 on Roundup Ready wheat. Shocked, Monsanto and pro-biotech farm groups descended with lobbyists, and the state Senate turned the moratorium into a mere study. But when the company and farm groups began surveying major buyers of wheat, they found strong resistance to the biotech crop, especially overseas.
Sitting in their farm kitchen not long ago, the Wileys recalled their surprise as they built alliances with environmental outfits like Greenpeace that have traditionally taken a dim view of conventional farming. “I think all my life I’ve been an environmentalist,” Gail Wiley said, her voice dropping as she added, “even though you don’t say that too loudly around here.”
If environmental factors influenced the Wileys’ thinking, other people in North Dakota looked at the issue in strictly dollars-and-cents terms, and came out equally opposed to Roundup Ready wheat on the grounds the marketplace just was not ready for it.
As the rebellion grew, Monsanto bowed to political reality, pledging a slew of steps that the company contends will protect existing markets. Meeting all the milestones will effectively delay Roundup Ready wheat to 2005, if not later. Assuming Monsanto keeps its word, the farmers have gained a two-year moratorium without having to pass one into law.
Doane, the Monsanto industry-affairs officer, has plied North Dakota on the company’s behalf. At his suggestion, a group of skeptical farmers, not including the Wileys, boarded a Monsanto plane in December and flew to St. Louis to talk to company leaders. The discussion was mostly calm, but Louis Kuster, a grower from Stanley, N.D., and a member of a state commission that promotes wheat sales, said he took offense when a company executive, Robb Fraley, seemed to imply that farmers opposing Monsanto might be advancing the agenda of radical environmental groups.
“At that point I countered, and I did raise my voice a little bit and I was a little bit angry, and I looked right straight at him and he was only about five feet away from me, and I said, ‘You’re not talking to the Greens here today,’ ” Kuster recalled. ” ‘We’re money people. We need to make money, too.’ ”
‘Who Can You Trust?’
Gripping the wheel of his pickup truck on a chilly North Dakota morning, an affable man named Terry Wanzek pointed with pride to the several thousand acres of fields that make up his family farm. Wanzek, squarely in the pro-biotech camp, acknowledged that the market risks cited by opponents are real. But as he showed off his farm’s spotless grain-handling system, he declared the problems manageable.
Besides, Wanzek said, what kind of message would it send to a biotech industry investing billions in new technology if the very customers the companies are trying to benefit, farmers, respond by kicking them in the teeth?
People on Wanzek’s side of the issue generally take the view that Monsanto’s go-slow promises can be believed, and they also take seriously a decade of rulings from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture declaring biotech crops safe.
“If you can’t trust EPA and you can’t trust FDA and you can’t trust USDA,” Wanzek said as his truck crunched its way down gravel roads, “who can you trust?”
This is Monsanto’s position, too — that federal regulators will make the right decisions. But the company has been forced to acknowledge that, whatever Washington and Ottawa decide, the risk of overseas rejection is real. Monsanto has lately papered the Great Plains states with brochures outlining how it will proceed.
For starters, the company said it will wait until the United States, Canada (the nation’s largest competitor in selling wheat) and Japan (its largest customer, most years) all approve the crop. And the company said it would help institute “appropriate grain handling protocols” to keep biotech wheat separate from regular wheat. The company acknowledges that total separation of the crops in fields, combines and grain bins is impossible argues that adequate separation can be achieved.
Doane, the industry-affairs director, said Monsanto will honor those commitments. “We’ve put it in black and white,” he said. But distrust of Monsanto runs deep enough in the Great Plains that politicians who support the company can pay a price.
Wanzek isn’t just any farmer — he was, until recently, the Republican chairman of the Senate agriculture committee in North Dakota’s citizen-legislature. His committee was largely responsible for killing the biotech-wheat moratorium in the last legislative session. He was defeated by a Democrat last November in a campaign in which his support for biotech crops became a major issue. “The wheat deal, I think, did cost me some votes,” he said.
Wanzek’s opponent, April Fairfield, was one of at least three legislative candidates to use opposition to Roundup Ready wheat as a signature campaign issue. All won.
Fairfield has failed so far to win a moratorium. Lawmakers also turned down a related measure to shift legal liability to companies like Monsanto if their crops taint nearby farms. Similar legislation has stalled in Montana, South Dakota and other states where wheat revolts are underway. Republicans, many of whom initially supported the North Dakota moratorium, have closed ranks to defend the technology, largely because of Monsanto’s promises.
Passions remain high. As Fairfield described her winning campaign and her losing attempts at lawmaking, in an interview in the basement cafeteria of the North Dakota Legislative Assembly in Bismarck, a fellow named Lance Hagen, executive director of the North Dakota Grain Growers Association, ambled by.
“Biotech or bust, baby!” he declared. “That’s our motto.”
Unlikely Allies
Past midnight on a summer’s evening three years ago, Larry Bohlen walked out of a Safeway supermarket in Silver Spring toting $66.32 worth of taco shells and other corn products. By the time Bohlen, director of health and environment programs at Friends of the Earth, and his allies in the environmental movement were done having the corn products tested for adulteration, they had forced American food and biotech companies into a recall costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
A biotech corn called StarLink, meant only for animal consumption, had made its way into the human food supply through sloppy grain handling. The incident foreshadowed another mishap last year, in which corn genetically engineered to grow a pig vaccine nearly made its way into food.
The problems have made large American food companies exceedingly nervous about biotechnology. More than half their products in the United States contain biotech ingredients, particularly lecithin or protein made from Roundup Ready soybeans, and they live in fear that some contamination incident will provoke a U.S. consumer backlash.
“Right now, public acceptance of biotechnology in America is relatively high,” Betsy D. Holden, co-chief executive of Kraft Foods Inc., said in a recent speech in Arlington. “But how many more times can we test the public’s trust before we begin to lose it?”
The food industry has been publicly skeptical of Roundup Ready wheat. Behind closed doors, according to three people privy to the discussions, the industry has been far blunter with Monsanto and its biotech allies. “Don’t want it. Don’t need it,” one person said the message has been.
The food companies have been killing smaller biotech crops like potatoes and sugar beets for several years. Knowledgeable people say the food companies have essentially told Monsanto they will try to kill Roundup Ready wheat if the company moves forward, asking suppliers to accept only conventional wheat.
At the same time, the food companies are under political pressure from biotech supporters on Capitol Hill not to come out publicly against gene-altered crops. That makes for a volatile situation where it is hard to predict exactly what the food companies will do until the wheat is approved.
Out on the Great Plains, farmers skeptical of the crop are hoping the food companies come down as allies, but they are not counting on it. Their efforts stalled in state legislatures, the farmers recently petitioned the Agriculture Department for a full environmental and economic assessment of Roundup Ready wheat before the government grants approval.
Some farmers acknowledge that Monsanto will probably win approval eventually but say they’re looking for any stalling tactic they can find.
“I feel that we have accomplished something, in that it’s slowing up the process so that more thought can go into it,” said Kuster, the farmer from Stanley, N.D. “The slower it goes, the more chance it has of getting done right.”
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Bird Rides In Bumper From Florida To Pennsylvania
Egret Sucked In When Hit By Minivan
HARRISBURG, Pa.—A 20-inch egret has a new name and a new home after it survived six days and an 850-mile road trip from Orlando, Fl., in the hollow of a minivan bumper.
The white Florida cattle egret was sucked behind the bumper when a minivan hit the flying bird.
It eventually made enough noise that vehicle owner Doug Marsico, of Mechanicsburg, this week took his minivan into a Harrisburg body shop.
There, employee Butch Lockey removed the hungry, irritable bird, which promptly rewarded Lockey with a bite on his gloved hand.
The egret has a four-inch yellow beak and a buff orange crest, breast, and shoulders and is named Butch after his rescuer.
Beth Carricato, the director of the Dauphin County Wildlife Rescue, said the egret has a compound fracture of his femur, but otherwise is “in remarkably good condition.”
She said she is not sure whether they would return the bird to its natural habitat because it may wear down its good leg while the broken one heals.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Continue Reading Bird Rides In Bumper From Florida To Pennsylvania
Consumer Culture No Accident
April 2, 2003
by David Suzuki
David Suzuki Foundation
Most people I talk to today understand that humanity is inflicting harsh damage on the planet’s life support systems of clean air, water, soil and biodiversity. But they feel so insignificant among 6.2 billion people that whatever they do to lighten our impact on nature seems trivial. I am often asked “What can I do?” Well, how about examining our consumption habits. Not long ago, frugality was a virtue but today two thirds of our economy is built on consumption. This didn’t happen by accident.
The stock market collapse in 1929 triggered the Great Depression that engulfed the world in terrible suffering. World War II was the catalyst for economic recovery. America’s enormous resource base, productivity, energy and technology were thrown into the war effort and soon its economy blazed white hot. With victory imminent, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors was challenged to find a way to convert a war economy to peace.
Shortly after the end of the war, retailing analyst Victor Lebow expressed the solution: “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption … we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors Chairman stated: “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods.” Not better health care, education, housing, transportation or recreation or less poverty and hunger, but providing more stuff to consumers.
When goods are well-made and durable, eventually markets are saturated. An endless market is created by introducing rapid obsolescence (think clothing, cars, laptop computers). And with disposability, where an article is used once and thrown away, the market will never be saturated.
Consumer goods aren’t created by the economy out of nothing, they come from the earth and when they are used up, they will be returned to the earth as garbage and toxic waste. It takes energy to extract, process, manufacture and transport products, while air, water and soil are often polluted at many points in the life cycle of the product. In other words, what we consume has direct effects on nature.
And then there are social and spiritual costs. Allen Kanner and Mary Gomes state in The All-Consuming Self: “The purchase of a new product, especially a ‘big ticket’ item such as a car or computer, typically produces an immediate surge of pleasure and achievement, and often confers status and recognition upon the owner. Yet as the novelty wears off, the emptiness threatens to return. The standard consumer solution is to focus on the next promising purchase.”
Ultimately, it goes beyond pleasure or status; acquiring stuff becomes an unquenchable demand. Paul Wachtel says in The Poverty of Affluence: “Having more and newer things each year has become not just something we want but something we need. The idea of more, ever-increasing wealth, has become the center of our identity and our security, and we are caught up by it as the addict is by his drugs.”
Much of what we purchase is not essential for our survival or even basic human comfort, but is based on impulse, novelty, a momentary desire. And there is a hidden price that we, nature and future generations will pay for it too.
When consumption becomes the very reason economies exist, we never ask “how much is enough,” “why do we need all this stuff,” and “are we any happier?” Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Texans Call In a Monster Fish to Tame a Monster Weed
April 8, 2003
By Carol Kaesuk Yoon
New York Times
Perhaps it is only fitting that in Texas, where everything is famously big, people battling an invasive aquatic plant should seek out an appropriately enormous solution: the grass carp, a plant-devouring fish that can reach 400 pounds.
Said to be able to eat their weight in greenery every day, grass carp have been known to denude entire lakes of vegetation of every kind. Though they are strictly vegetarian, and do not eat other fish, they can destroy underwater flora that other fish species need.
So what? say many people who have had to live with the foreign plant, known as hydrilla, that is plaguing Texas.
A fast-growing tangle, hydrilla is clogging lakes and rivers, putting an end to days of boating and swimming, jamming water intakes and shutting down hydroelectric operations. In some places it has formed tangles so thick that it has been blamed in drownings.
When 1,600 grass carp were released into Lake Austin in February, homeowners and many water resource managers hailed the fish as the best hope for subduing hydrilla. But others fear the fish could become an even bigger environmental problem than the one that it was brought in to solve ? a situation that has become all too familiar to those releasing one foreign species to eradicate another.
If the fish destroy all the lake’s vegetation, critics say bass fishing and water quality will decline in this drinking-water reservoir and recreational lake formed by the damming of Texas’ Colorado River.
And if the fish escape from the lake, as many predict they will, they could make their way downriver to destroy sea grass beds in estuaries that are home to productive fisheries.
“The carp don’t just go away and die after they are done with the hydrilla,” said Dwayne Anderson, the Texas program director for Clean Water Action, an environmental group. “It’s another nonnative species with no predator, and it will be an eating machine, and it will be destructive.”
Ed Parten, president of a fishermen’s association created to fight the grass carp, described the fish as a scourge on the state’s tradition of bass fishing. “Wherever the carp has been used, the bass fishing has declined from fabulous to extremely poor,” he said, adding that fishing should be of wide interest because it brings the state billions of dollars each year.
But the fishermen have yet to sway homeowners around Lake Austin who miss the lakeside life they once enjoyed and who fear property values may fall as the plant clogs the waters. Also, many dismiss the economic importance of bass fishing.
“Maybe they bought a six pack of beer before they put the boat in,” said Shirley Coleman, who lives on the lake where the average home costs more than a million dollars. She is a member of Friends of Lake Austin, a group of lake users organized to eradicate the weed. “Hydrilla is wicked stuff,” she said. “While we’re sitting here arguing about it, hydrilla is taking over more and more of the lake.”
Hydrilla, originally native to Asia and Australia, is believed to have been introduced accidentally in Florida in the 1950’s, possibly when someone emptied a fish tank and set the aquarium plant free. Because hydrilla can resprout from the tiniest piece of a broken stem, the plant has traveled easily on motorboat propellers and boat trailers across the country to Arizona and California, costing many millions of dollars in eradication, control and water-system repairs. Hydrilla has shown up as far north as Washington State, and last year it turned up in Maine.
Hydrilla covered 23 acres of Lake Austin in 1999, but by last May it covered 300. Growing in long strands upward from its roots in the sediment and branching out profusely at the surface, the plant creates dense curtains and mats of vines, tangling boat propellers, tripping up wake boarders, snagging water-skiers and frightening off swimmers.
So far no method of control has satisfied everyone. There were vehement objections to the use of herbicides in this reservoir. Boats can mow and harvest hydrilla, a method preferred by fishermen and environmentalists, but many say the process is too expensive and inefficient.
Dams have been used to lower the level of water in the lake, exposing the hydrilla to killing cold in the winter. But the plants surge back in the spring. Managers have even explored using tiny enemies, like the hydrilla fly and a hydrilla beetle, though neither has proved terribly effective.
For many, the only answer is to buy grass carp that have been rendered safely sterile, and then release the hungry swimmers by the thousands, as is under way at Lake Austin.
“I work with foreign species problems so I have some qualms, but I’ve looked at this issue from all kinds of different angles,” said Dr. Tom Arsuffi, an aquatic ecologist at Southwest Texas State University, who recently completed a tracking study showing that even in a flood, small numbers of radio-tagged fish did not escape the dammed Lake Austin and swim downriver. “This is a long-term solution. With the right amount of fish, the grass carp can keep the hydrilla trimmed for 20 years.”
So far, the 1,600 grass carp released into Lake Austin have had no obvious effect. Texas Parks and Wildlife gave the city a permit to release as many as 6,400. Mary Gilroy, an environmental scientist with the city, said it would release the fish in increments as necessary.
But far from achieving a neat solution, scientists say Lake Austin’s ecological experiment has just begun.
For years, researchers have tried without success to find a method for determining how many grass carp are required for a given situation. Still shooting in the dark, managers can never be sure if they will get no effect, perfectly proportioned elimination or if the fish will eradicate every bit of greenery.
Critics also fear there is a danger that fertile fish could end up in the water. Companies that sell grass carp typically subject fertilized eggs to intense pressure, causing the egg to retain an extra set of chromosomes and rendering it sterile.
Dr. Earl Chilton, aquatic habitat enhancement program director at Texas Parks and Wildlife, said that every fish was tested once. Any fertile fish, that is, any fish carrying the normal number of chromosomes, are removed. A second small sample is tested later and if any fish are fertile, the entire batch is tossed out, Dr. Chilton said.
But despite safeguards, critics say it is still possible for a fertile fish to be released and establish a permanent population of these crafty creatures that are so difficult to catch, even in a net.
So far, all the heat around grass carp seems to center around Lake Austin. Yet it is in the Rio Grande, where another major release of grass carp was approved by the state last month, that hydrilla has arguably done its most awesome damage.
With the river already low because of a drought, hydrilla has clogged its channel, slowing water flow and encouraging quicker evaporation. As a result, the mighty Rio Grande, an international waterway and an international border, has turned into a drying dribble, just yards short of the ocean.
In fact, because the United States-Mexico border is in the river, the control of hydrilla is considerably more complex than in Lake Austin. Cutter boats must avoid crossing the border. Herbicides have been out of the question because scientists were unable to find an appropriate chemical approved for use in both countries.
Yet despite the fact that 23,000 grass carp will soon be released in the Rio Grande, Dr. Chilton said only two people showed up for a public meeting on the situation. He noted that the Mexican government was in favor of using the fish and that the Fish and Wildlife Service had sent written notice that it expected no bad effects from the carp.
Twenty years ago though, nearly 300,000 fertile grass carp were released in Lake Conroe, Tex.
“Lake Conroe went from being a world-class bass fishery to a big mudhole,” said Mr. Anderson, describing the lake as an unmitigated disaster, stripped of vegetation, foreign and native.
But not everyone agrees.
“It’s so strange,” said Ms. Coleman, who found the negative reaction quizzical. “The Lake Conroe people successfully conquered it. They say it’s beautiful.”
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Continue Reading Texans Call In a Monster Fish to Tame a Monster Weed
Deserts Advancing, Civilization Retreating
Janet Larsen
Earth Policy Institute
The coalition forces advancing northward from Kuwait to Baghdad are traversing the site of the world’s first civilization?ancient Sumer. More than 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians inhabited the rich land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, part of the legendary Fertile Crescent. There they developed a sophisticated irrigation system, built the first cities, devised a written language, and invented the wheel.
Yet the Fertile Crescent as now seen in press coverage of the war in Iraq appears to be anything but fertile. Strong winds ripping across the dusty floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates and the surrounding area catch fine dust and sand, creating choking storms that impede movement, impair visibility, and threaten human health. Once-fertile land is now desert.
Unfortunately, this situation is not unique. The pressure of the world’s 6.2 billion people is slowly turning productive land into desert on every continent. Cultivation of marginal land has eroded soils, while some 3 billion cattle, sheep, and goats have pushed pastures beyond their sustainable limits. All told, desertification plagues up to one third of the earth’s land area, affecting more than 1 billion people in 110 countries.
Although deserts regularly expand and contract, the acceleration of human-induced desertification is fast undermining rural economies. Each year, deserts claim millions of hectares of cropland and rangeland. Africa?with almost half its land area at risk?is most vulnerable, but satellite images and on-the-ground reports confirm that desertification is widespread throughout the world’s drylands.
In the Sistan basin shared by Afghanistan and Iran, windblown dust and sand have buried more than 100 villages. A former oasis that only five years ago supported at least a million cattle, sheep, and goats is now nearly barren. As overgrazed pastures turn to sand, hundreds of thousands of livestock have perished, and villagers have abandoned the area.
To the north, along Afghanistan’s Amu Darya River, destruction of protective vegetation has exacerbated the effects of drought and allowed the formation of a sand dune belt that is some 300 kilometers (186 miles) long and 30 kilometers wide. These dunes, moving up to 1 meter per day, are blocking roads and swallowing villages no longer shielded by local forests.
In Kazakhstan, overtaxed farmland is being abandoned as productivity falls. Overplowing of marginal land during a Soviet attempt to boost grain harvests in the 1950s led to widespread wind erosion of soil. Since 1985, Kazakhstan has abandoned half of its 25 million hectares of grainland.
In China, desertification threatens the livelihoods of millions and racks up direct annual economic losses of roughly $6.5 billion, including the cost of reduced farm productivity. A report from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing entitled “Desert Mergers and Acquisitions” reveals that in northwest China, prolonged dry weather, overgrazing of pastures, and rampant harvesting of wild plants have loosened sand on the edges of the country’s third and fourth largest deserts. Strong winds are pushing destabilized dunes southward from the 5-million-hectare (12-million-acre) Bardanjilin Desert toward the 3-million-hectare Tengry Desert, literally laying ground for a merger.
A similar situation exists in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Excessive upstream dam building and water withdrawals for agriculture have dried up the Tarim River. As a result, large poplar groves and other vegetation that once served as a barrier between the Taklamakan and Kumtag deserts have died off. Now the two deserts are moving steadily toward each other, and they too may merge.
These problems are not isolated, nor are they purely local in scope. Massive dust storms originating in China and Mongolia have traveled as far east as the continental United States. Two countries directly in the path of the suffocating dust, Japan and South Korea, have teamed up with China to promote rehabilitation of the degraded lands that feed these ocean-traversing storms.
The secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification has projected that without concerted efforts to arrest and reverse desertification, Asia could lose one third of its arable land. In South America, arable land area could shrink by one fifth. In Africa, two thirds of the arable land could be lost, reinforcing poverty and food insecurity and quickly adding to the ranks of environmental refugees.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, loses some 350,000 hectares of land?about half the size of the U.S. state of Delaware?to the encroaching Sahara Desert each year. Desertification from a combination of excessive population pressure, poor land management, overgrazing, and drought affects over half the land in 10 of Nigeria’s northern states, which have a combined population of 29 million. As deserts expand, the competition between farmers and pastoralists for the remaining productive land intensifies.
In Kenya, over 80 percent of the land is vulnerable to desertification-land that supports nearly a third of the country’s 32 million people and half of its 28 million cattle, sheep, and goats. Unprecedented population growth has led to inappropriate land use and accelerated deforestation. People and their livestock have been forced onto marginal lands, and farmers have reduced fallow periods, furthering soil degradation.
The means of combating desertification varies among countries, depending on local climatic and social conditions. Efforts to turn back the deserts and break the cycle of poor land management and poverty hinge on raising the incomes of the 1 billion people worldwide who live on less than $1 per day. Reduced family size and education also play key roles in lowering pressure on the land and fostering stewardship.
Though desert margins are particularly at risk, any land that is completely cleared of vegetation is vulnerable to desertification. Restoring vegetation in vulnerable areas can stabilize soils so that they do not blow away. Realizing this, the Chinese government has launched the world’s largest tree planting project in an attempt to stop the encroaching desert.
To prevent wind and water erosion, farmers can practice conservation agriculture. No-till or low-till farming can replace intensive plowing, maintaining soil organic matter and moisture. Conservation agriculture is practiced on some 60 million hectares worldwide, primarily in the United States and South America, but it has great potential to reduce soil erosion and raise crop yields in dry regions in Africa and the Middle East.
Careful management of livestock is necessary to protect the integrity of grasslands. In China, where grasslands are grazed and trampled by 161 million goats, 137 million sheep, and 128 million cattle and buffalo, some local governments have banned goats from feeding on open land. Villagers may receive subsidies to keep their flocks in the farmyard, feeding them with cut forage.
Alternative energy also has a role to play in preventing land degradation. In developing countries, where some 2 billion people rely on wood and crop residues for cooking, simple devices like solar cookers can relieve pressure on the land. And wind turbines can provide clean energy while serving as windbreaks.
The United Nations Environment Programme conservatively estimates that between 1978 and 1991, some $300-600 billion in income was lost worldwide because of the failure to combat desertification. Other analyses have estimated that the benefits from slowing desertification and rehabilitating degraded lands are at least 2.5 times higher than the costs of letting sands take over. A world where productive land area is shrinking while human demands grow is not a recipe for ecological stability or economic progress.
Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
New Study Links Eating Organic to Lowered Pesticide Levels in Children’s Bodies
Group Asks USDA to Officially Recognize Organic’s Safety Benefit
By Environmental Working Group
November 22, 2002
WASHINGTON — Just days after USDA launched its national organic certification program, a scientific study finds that children who eat organic foods have lower levels of one class of agricultural pesticides (organophosphorus pesticides) in their bodies. University of Washington researchers conducted the study, which tested 18 children fed primarily organic diets and 21 children who eat mostly conventional diets.
The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, concludes that parents could greatly reduce their children’s exposure to pesticides by taking the simple step of buying organic foods. Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) research supports this latest study’s findings with its recently updated website database FoodNews (found at http://www.ewg.org/). The database includes the latest government testing data 150,000 samples from USDA on pesticide residues found on produce.
This is the first interactive tool that allows consumers to select specific produce, or fill up a virtual shopping cart, to see how many pesticides are found on those items. FoodNews then compares these items with their organic counterparts. EWG calls on U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to formally recognize the safety advantage of reduced pesticide exposure offered by organic food. “USDA has always insisted that organic is no safer, but it is safer with respect to pesticide exposure, as this study shows for the same kind of bug killers that EPA has prioritized for regulatory action,” said EWG Senior Vice President Richard Wiles.
As USDA’s website asserts: “USDA makes no claims that organically produced food is safer or more nutritious than conventionally produced food. Organic food differs from conventionally produced food in the way it is grown, handled, and processed.” Since Congress unanimously amended the nation’s pesticide law in 1996, the EPA has been removing dangerous pesticides from the food supply specifically because they present unacceptable risks to children. “In the past five years, the EPA has removed several dangerous pesticides from conventional food that organic food never had.
Yet, even as EPA slowly bans pesticides that fail federal safety standards for children, industry lobbyists and their allies at USDA continue to claim that all pesticides in food are completely safe and that food without chemical pesticides is no safer,” said EWG Senior Vice President Richard Wiles. “How does that square?”