Rachel's Democracy & Health News #961

From: The New York Times (pg. A14)
May 28, 2008

U.S. REPORT FORESEES EFFECTS OF CLIMATE SHIFT

[Rachel’s introduction: In the next 25 to 50 years, the western states in the U.S. will face major challenges because of growing demand for water and big drops in supply caused by global warming, says a new federal report. The report also offers new projections of how the poor, elderly and communities with lagging public-health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming.]

By Andrew C. Revkin

The rise in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is influencing climate patterns and vegetation across the United States and will significantly disrupt water supplies, agriculture, forestry and ecosystems for decades, a new federal report (2.8 Mbyte PDF) says.

The changes are unfolding in ways that are likely to produce an uneven national map of harms and benefits, according to the report, released Tuesday and posted online at climatescience.gov.

The authors of the report and some independent experts said the main value of its projections was the level of detail and the high confidence in some conclusions. That confidence comes in part from the report’s emphasis on the next 25 to 50 years, when shifts in emissions are unlikely to make much of a difference in climate trends.

The report also reflects a recent, significant shift by the Bush administration on climate science. During Mr. Bush’s first term, administration officials worked to play down a national assessment of climate effects conducted mainly during the Clinton administration, but released in 2000.

The new report, which includes some findings that are more sobering and definitive than those in the 2000 climate report, holds the signatures of three cabinet secretaries.

According to the report, Western states will face substantial challenges because of growing demand for water and big projected drops in supplies.

From 2040 to 2060, anticipated water flows from rainfall in much of the West are likely to approach a 20 percent decrease in the average from 1901 to 1970, and are likely to be much lower in places like the fast-growing Southwest. In contrast, runoff in much of the Midwest and East is expected to increase that much or more.

Farmers, foresters and ranchers nationwide will face a complicated blend of changes, driven not only by shifting weather patterns but also by the simultaneous spread of nonnative plant and insect pests.

Some invasive grasses, vines and weeds, for example, do better in higher temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations than do crops and preferred livestock forage plants.

Corn and soybean plants are likely to grow and mature faster, but will be more subject to crop failures from spikes in summer temperatures that can prevent pollination, said one of the authors, Jerry L. Hatfield, a plant physiologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, in a conference call with reporters.

David E. Schimel, a lead author and director of a federal system of ecological monitoring stations, said in the call that mitigating emissions in the long run was still important even though not much could be done to change the short-term climate picture.

The 203-page report, “The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources and Biodiversity in the United States,” is a review of existing studies, including last year’s voluminous quartet of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is part of a continuing assessment of lingering questions related to global warming that was initiated in 2003 by Mr. Bush.

The report did not evaluate how the risk faced by farmers, water- supply managers and others might be reduced if they changed practices or crop and livestock varieties to adjust to changing conditions.

But several authors said that over all, the pace and nature of some of the looming changes would present big challenges in many of the country’s fastest-growing regions.

The West will not only face a dearth of water, but also large shifts in when it is available. Water supplies there will be transformed by midcentury, with mountain snows that provided a steady flow of runoff for irrigation and reservoirs dwindling. That flow will be replaced by rainfall that comes at times and in amounts that make it hard to manage, the report and authors said.

The report also emphasized that the country’s capacity to detect climate shifts and related effects was eroding, as budgets and plans for long-term monitoring of air, water and land changes — both on the ground and from satellites — shrank.

Richard Moss, a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund who previously coordinated federal climate reports under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, said the findings “highlight the urgency of the climate change problem” and provided important new support for action both to limit emissions and adapt to inevitable changes.

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From: MSNBC ……………………………………….
May 23, 2008

SEAS OFF WEST COAST VERY ACIDIC, STUDY WARNS

[Rachel’s introduction: The Pacific Ocean is growing more acidic, posing a threat to marine life, because of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. The problem is at least 50 years more advanced than scientists had predicted.]

By the Associated Press

Waters along North America’s Pacific coast are becoming more acidic, posing a threat to marine life, federal scientists reported Friday — adding that while that fits global warming scenarios, no one had expected the acidification to happen so soon.

“We did not expect to see this extent of ocean acidification until the middle to the end of the century,” said study co-author Chris Sabine.

“Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification,” the experts wrote in the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Acidification describes the process, natural or manmade, of ocean water becoming corrosive as a result of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere.

The researchers said anthropogenic, or manmade, emissions of carbon dioxide are likely to blame since the acidified water that is being “upwelled” seasonally from the deeper ocean is from the last 50 years, a period when the burning of fossil fuels raised CO2 levels dramatically.

“Other continental shelf regions may also be impacted where anthropogenic CO2-enriched water is being upwelled onto the shelf,” they concluded.

Threat ‘right now’

“Ocean acidification may be seriously impacting marine life on our continental shelf right now,” study co-author Richard Feely said in a statement released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which co-sponsored the study along with NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Feely, a NOAA oceanographer, noted that while the ability of oceans to absorb carbon dioxide helps mitigate warming, “the change in the ocean chemistry affects marine life, particularly organisms with calcium carbonate shells, such as corals, mussels, mollusks, and small creatures in the early stages of the food chain.”

NOAA echoed the experts’ findings. “Acidification of the Earth’s ocean water could have far-reaching impacts on the health of our near-shore environment, and on the sustainability of ecosystems that support human populations,” said NOAA assistant administrator Richard Spinrad.

“This research is vital to understanding the processes within the ocean, as well as the consequences of a carbon-rich atmosphere,” he added.

The team compiled data from 13 survey lines dropped last summer and stretching from the waters of central Canada to northern Mexico. They measured pH levels in seawater to detect acidification, and found lower levels were much closer to the surface than researchers had predicted.

Previous studies found acidification at deeper depths farther from shore. The researchers said the acidified water appears to well up in spring and summer, when winds bring CO2-rich water up from depths of about 400-600 feet onto the continental shelf.

‘Train has left the station’

“The water that will upwell off the coast in future years already is making its undersea trek toward us, with ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide and acidity,” co-author Burke Hales, an associate professor at Oregon State University, warned in a statement.

“The coastal ocean acidification train has left the station,” Hales added, “and there is not much we can do to derail it.”

Hales also cited a strong correlation between recent low-oxygen events off the Northwest coast and increasing acidification.

“The hypoxia is caused by persistent upwelling that produces an over- abundance of phytoplankton,” Hales said. “When the system works, the upwelling winds subside for a day or two every couple of weeks in what we call a ‘relaxation event’ that allows that buildup of decomposing organic matter to be washed out to the deep ocean.”

“But in recent years, especially in 2002 and 2006, there were few if any of these relaxation breaks in the upwelling and the phytoplankton blooms were enormous,” Hales said. “When the material produced by these blooms decomposes, it puts more CO2 into the system and increases the acidification.”

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From: New Scientist ………………………………..
May 21, 2008

EARTH MAY HIDE A LETHAL CARBON CACHE

[Rachel’s introduction: An entirely new threat from global warming was the subject of a scientific meeting last week: “Global warming could destabilise some deep carbon reserves, which may hold trillions of tonnes of methane.” “If you raise temperatures even slightly, they could be released.”]

By Fred Pearce

Carbon buried in the Earth could ultimately determine the fate of our planet’s atmosphere. So concluded a pioneering meeting last week about the Earth’s long-neglected “deep” carbon cycle.

Carbon is locked away down in the Earth’s crust: in magma and old carbonate rocks buried by plate tectonics, in fossil fuels like coal and oil, and in ice lattices beneath the ocean bed. It has long been assumed that this carbon was largely cut off from the surface, and could safely be ignored when analysing the effect of greenhouse gases on climate.

Now it seems there may be much more “deep carbon” ready to spew out than we thought. This realisation could have profound implications for our climate, argues Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution, who organised the meeting at the institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington DC. “We may be on the verge of a transformational moment… a glimpse of new, unexplored scientific territory,” he says.

Perhaps the greatest threat of an unexpected release of carbon from the deep comes from an indirect effect of human-made CO2. Global warming could destabilise some deep carbon reserves, notably in clathrates — ice lattices which are found beneath the ocean floor and continental permafrost, and even under freshwater lakes like Lake Baikal in Siberia. These ice structures may hold trillions of tonnes of methane.

“Global warming could destabilise some deep carbon reserves, which may hold trillions of tonnes of methane””We are extremely concerned that clathrates are the largest single source of greenhouse gases that could be added to the atmosphere,” says Hazen. “If you raise temperatures even slightly, they could be released.” According to Ronald Cohen, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution, natural warming caused large releases of methane around 55 million years ago.

Though the deep carbon cycle could theoretically absorb human-made emissions, Hazen points out that this would take millions of years. Catastrophic methane emissions could happen over just a few decades.

Natural processes such as volcanism are also known to bring carbon to the surface, but there may be other mechanisms to release buried carbon that have not been considered by mainstream climate science. For example, there is growing evidence that microbes living deep in the crust may be converting carbon into forms that can migrate to the surface — notably methane.

Vladimir Kutcherov of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, speculates that unknown non-biological chemical reactions may also be able to produce methane or hydrocarbons that seep up through the crust. For example, methane or petroleum might be produced when carbonate rocks react with water and iron upon being subducted into the mantle. Kutcherov and colleagues say hydrocarbon deposits from Kidd Creek in Ontario, Canada, have an isotopic signature suggesting they are not organic in origin — though this claim was disputed by others at the meeting.

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From: New Scientist ………………………………..
May 28, 2008

CHILDHOOD LEAD EXPOSURE CAN PREDICT CRIMINALITY

[Rachel’s introduction: By measuring toxic lead in children’s blood, researchers can predict which children will get in trouble with the law later in life. This important prospective study links toxic lead and crime together in a cause-and-effect way for the first time.]

By Alison Motluk

Children exposed to lead early in life are more likely to be in trouble with the law as adults.

Lead contamination most often arises from the dust and soil, but can also come from lead water pipes or environmental pollution. Studies have consistently found associations between lead exposure in childhood and subsequent antisocial behaviour, but there have always been problems in determining causality.

Now Kim Dietrich at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and his colleagues have looked prospectively at how lead levels affect the risk of being arrested in adulthood. They recruited 250 pregnant women from a poor lead-contaminated inner-city district in Cincinnati.

The researchers took blood samples from the women early in pregnancy, then sampled the blood of the children four times a year till age 5, and then twice a year until they were about 7 years old.

Increased arrests

Years later, the researchers checked public records to see if their subjects had been arrested since reaching the age of 18, and if so, how many times and for what. Independent reviewers coded them into categories, such as violent offences, drug offences and fraud.

After controlling for factors including maternal IQ, maternal arrest rates, parenting style and socioeconomic factors, they found that prenatal and childhood lead concentrations in the blood predicted likelihood of adult arrest.

A 5 microgram/decilitre increment in average childhood blood lead level, for instance, increased the rate of arrest for violent crimes by 26%. And high prenatal blood levels predicted the total number of adult arrests.

Dose-dependent effect

Lead can interfere with the brain by impairing synapse formation and disrupting neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin. It also appears to permanently alter brain structure.

In a companion study, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brains of some of these same individuals.

They found that, here too, lead had a dose-dependent effect — the more lead a person had been exposed to as a child, the smaller the brain regions in frontal areas. These are regions involved in judgement, emotional regulation and impulse control, among other things.

“It’s time to blame lead,” says Dietrich.

Preventable risk

“Even if the contribution of lead to arrest risk is small,” points out David Bellinger, at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, US, in a comment on the paper, “it has a special status in that, in contrast to most other known risk factors for criminality, we know full well how to prevent it.”

The Centers for Disease Control says that blood levels above 10 micrograms are unsafe. The good news is that both childhood blood lead levels and crime have declined in the US.

In Ohio, for instance, where this study was conducted, only 2.3% of children under age 6 had blood lead levels exceeding CDC recommendations in 2006, compared with 16.6% of children in 1997.

The mean childhood blood level of these study participants was 13 mcg/dl [micrograms of lead in each 10th of a liter of blood] and ranged from 4 to 37 mcg/dl. Many researchers say even 5 mcg/dl can put a child at risk.

Journal references: PLoS Medicine (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050101 and DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050112)

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From: NorthJersey.com ……………………………….
May 23, 2008

CAN GRILLING MEAT CAN CAUSE CANCER?

[Rachel’s introduction: A new report finds that red meat and all processed meats, such as hot dogs, contribute to human cancers, and that barbecuing any meat (red, white, or fish) on a grill leaves a residue of potent carcinogens in the meat.]

By Lindy Washburn, Staff Writer

Memo to Memorial Day barbecuers: Charred meat is out. Hotdogs and brats? Forget it.

It’s hard to imagine a summer weekend without the aroma of meat on the grill, but the American Institute of Cancer Research is urging everyone to rethink this all-American pastime.

Grilling any meat — red, white or fish — produces potent carcinogens, the institute said after analyzing the results of 7,000 studies.

“Grill fruits and vegetables instead of red meat and hot dogs this year,” the institute advised.

If real men can learn to eat quiche, maybe they’ll also come to love grilled peaches.

The high heat of grilling reacts with proteins in red meat, poultry and fish, creating heterocyclic amines, chemicals that are linked to cancer. Another form of cancer-causing agents, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are found in the smoke created when fat and juices from meats drip and hit the heat source. The smoke rises and can stick to the meat.

“When you hit the amino acids in those meats with very high heat it creates heterocyclic amines — that’s what they consider carcinogenic,” says Debbie Bessen, a registered dietician specializing in cancer nutrition at Holy Name Hospital.

“I do try to steer people away from grilled meats,” says Maureen Huhmann, a clinical dietitian at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick and an assistant professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s School of Health Related Professions.

“Keep them to a once-in-a-while thing,” she says. “And if you are having something grilled, make sure it’s not burnt or blackened.”

Both gas and charcoal grilling has the same effect. Cooking inside on a stove — whether in a frying pan, a grill pan or in the oven — is not known to cause the same reactions, because the meats cook at far lower temperatures. Some experts, however, suggest against charring a steak on high heat in the broiler.

The doctors at the institute, frankly, are advising that Americans need to cut down on many forms of meat however they are cooked.

The institute took particular aim at preserved meats, like hot dogs. All processed meats — hot dogs, sausages, bacon, ham, pastrami, salami and any meat that has been salted, smoked or cured — are bad for you, it said. Chemicals used to preserve meat increase the production of cancer-causing compounds in the body.

The institute’s report (12 Mbyte PDF) said it “could find no amount of processed meat that is safe to eat.”

Red meat is also linked to higher rates of certain cancers, the institute said. It should be eaten in limited quantities — not more than 18 ounces a week, or the equivalent of about three restaurant- sized burgers for the entire week. Substances in red meat can damage the lining of the colon.

“The evidence is now overwhelming that red meat — especially processed red meats like hot dogs — is a cause of colorectal cancer,” said Karen Collins, the institutes’ nutrition advisor.

The evidence is so strong, the institute said it “should prompt a nationwide reduction in red meat consumption.”

Turkey burgers and chicken hot dogs don’t get a pass, either. It’s not clear whether it’s the processing or the grilling that produces the carcinogens, so more research is needed, the institute’s guidelines said.

Other health groups, like the American Cancer Society, also recommend reducing consumption of preserved meats, and using alternatives to the high heat of the grill to cook meats.

The bottom line of most experts: cover two-thirds of your plate with plant foods like salads, beans, and grains. Leave just one-third of the plate for meat.

That’s not something most people want to hear.

“Anything you enjoy, they take away from you,” said Ann Cervia, who, along with her son, Ray Cervia, is holding a barbecue for 10 family members in Bogota on Monday. They just bought a new grill for the event.

The health warnings can’t make her take sausage and peppers off the menu. “If you’re going to go, you’re going to go,” she said.

Hector Maldonado of Bogota will be grilling for 20 on Sunday.

“I don’t eat grilled meat that much — obviously this weekend — maybe three or four barbecues a year,” said Maldonado, a 26-year-old plumber who recently bought a new propane grill.

Marianne Bolduc of Demarest, who underwent treatment for breast cancer last year and is the lunch program coordinator for her town’s public schools, said she takes the guidelines “very seriously.”

“I love hot dogs,” she said. “I have to fight the urge.”

She treats herself once a month — “one hot dog with preservatives is not going to kill you,” she said.

But it’s also true that she could “go to a barbecue and not eat meat,” she says. “In Italian families, meat is not that big a deal. We put out a lot of salads instead, dressed with oil and vinegar.” And when she hosts, she’ll offer veggie burgers as well as grilled vegetables.

As to the nutritionists, Bessen isn’t even going to a barbecue this Memorial Day weekend.

“I’m going to the beach,” she says — where she’ll use sunscreen, of course.

Staff Writer Bob Groves contributed to this report. E-mail: washburn@northjersey.com

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Sidebar: CUTTING THE RISK

To keep the taste and cut the risk, experts offer these recommendations:

** Minimize grill time. Microwave meat or pre-cook in the oven before putting it on the grill. Flip burgers at least once a minute.

** When using marinades, thinner is better. Thicker marinades have a tendency to char, possibly increasing exposure to carcinogenic compounds. Look for marinades that contain vinegar and/or lemon, which can create a protective coating around the meat.

** Create a barrier to prevent juices from spilling and producing harmful smoke. Line the grill with aluminum foil that has holes poked in it or cook on cedar planks.

** Don’t eat blackened or burned meat.

** Choose smaller cuts such as kabobs — they take less time to cook. Lean meats create less dripping, less fat flare-ups and less smoke.

** Trim excess fat and remove skin from poultry.

** Avoid hot dogs and other processed meats.

** Place food at least six inches away from the heat source.

Source: Debbie Bessen of Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

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Copyright 2008 North Jersey Media Group

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From: Christian Science Monitor ………………………
May 21, 2008

WHY A GULF WETLANDS MAY BECOME A CITY

[Rachel’s introduction: The Army Corps of Engineers is about to approve a new condo development on Mississippi’s coastal wetlands — the place where hurricane Katrina rushed ashore. Can science and common sense prevail in a democracy or are we forever doomed to be fleeced by wealthy “developers” and their acolytes in government?]

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Bayou Caddy, Miss. — If America learned one thing from hurricane Katrina, hydrologists argue, it should be this: Don’t fill in tideland marshes and build on them. Such human activity, they insist, diminishes the marshes’ ability to absorb some of the wallop of storms as they strike coastal communities.

Here on the westernmost reaches of Mississippi’s marshes — the very place where Katrina rushed ashore on its path to becoming one of the worst natural disasters in US history — that lesson is being tested, with broad implications for US taxpayers who pay most of the bills for storm repairs.

Bob Metz, a crab dealer who plies the tidelands of Bayou Caddy, has only to look out from his boathouse to see, in the distance, the future: the new Silver Slipper Casino, its bright sign twinkling beneath a dark cumulous cloud stack.

To Mr. Metz, plans to augment the casino with a new condo city built on top of a tidal marsh is the prototype of a boondoggle waiting for a bailout. But local and state governments so far are backing the plan, and the US Army Corps of Engineers is considering a permit application to fill the spongy ground so the development will have firm footing. If approved, the permit would, quite literally, lay the groundwork for a project that could create the fourth-largest city on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

“The big guys get what they want; that’s the lesson I take from this,” says Metz.

Another lesson might be that the dream of living on the ocean’s edge dies hard. Some $80 billion in damages from Katrina apparently have not dampened it, nor have scientists’ warnings that a $500 billion storm is possible in the US by 2020 and that the sea level may rise as much as three feet in the next century. So long as people gravitate to coastal living, political and economic pressures to allow it will rub up hard against the cautionary notes of scientists and environmentalists.

“The tough part is where the science leaves off and management and policy pick up,” says Bryan Harper, senior economist at the Army Corps’ Institute for Water Resources in Alexandria, Va. “We collectively use and enjoy the coast, but we have to understand what the balance is between what we get out of it and what is the real cost of occupying those areas. What we don’t want is to induce development to areas that are not currently developed in these high-risk areas.”

If history is any guide, developers and politicians who envision the revenue benefits of growth usually prevail — sometimes even in areas that most scientists would call “high risk.” America’s coastal counties have added 7 million people in the past five years, absorbing a little more than half the total US population growth in an area that makes up 17 percent of the US land surface, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Congress has contributed to the trend by assigning much of the risk of coastal living to the US government. The lawmaker-approved National Flood Insurance Program augments private insurance, and the Corps- administered Shore Protection Program in effect subsidizes construction of high-value structures on the beach by guaranteeing that fresh sand will be trucked in whenever storms carve into the headland.

US wetlands policy since 1988 has been to require developers who build on wetlands to mitigate the loss by creating or restoring wetlands elsewhere. But the overall goal of “no net loss” is failing, despite agencies’ creation of tens of thousands of wetland acreage each year. The National Wetlands Inventory, by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, estimates that nearly 60,000 acres of wetlands are lost annually and that up to 80 percent of developers’ mitigation projects fail. In Mississippi alone, the Army Corps is trying to restore some 3,000 acres of wetlands weakened by hurricane Katrina, to restore natural flow patterns and reduce the impact of any future storm surge.

For many, the Bayou Caddy proposal speaks to the power of market forces to erode a region’s resolve to bolster its hurricane defenses – even with Katrina fresh in memory. The $750 million project, known as The Breezes of Paradise Bay, would eventually include as many as four high-rises studded with shops, arcades, restaurants, and residences. There would be room for perhaps 10,000 people in this “condo city” on the bayou — more than in the nearby towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis combined.

Development of the scrubby marsh, now dotted with a few crab shacks and shrimp-boat docks, could be an economic boon to an area whose economy was shattered by Katrina, which is why the plan has broad political support. The developers said in a 2006 letter to the county that the project could add as much as $7.5 million annually to tax rolls.

What’s more, proponents argue, condos built of concrete and steel would be better able to withstand a hurricane and could even serve as a man-made wind barrier that might protect properties further inland.

Rising land costs and the durability of high-rise towers are why resistance is diminishing to the idea of building condos on the coast, says developer Barney Creel of Gulfport. “What’s the alternative?” asks Mr. Creel. “There’s not a good alternative. I can understand how people don’t want to see the small-town feeling go away, but it’s just no longer financially feasible for that [residential] type of development down here. I think the realization of the feasibility of condos is sinking in.”

The debate over Bayou Caddy cuts to the core of America’s fixation with coastal living, says Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University professor and author of “The Corps and the Shore.” At issue, he says, is whether the US should reduce the scale of the human profile on the coast, allowing smaller structures further inland, and off the marshes, instead of allowing large-scale construction directly on beach fronts.

“This is no time, in the context of rising sea levels and the expected increase in the rate of hurricanes, to be allowing condo development right on the shore,” says Dr. Pilkey, a geologist specializing in coastal development.

“This is crazy. It gives the community no chance to move back, to let the big buildings go and let little buildings go in.”

If the Corps grants the fill permit for the Bayou Caddy project, critics fear it will open the floodgates for other development on marshes. Some hydraulics engineers say the marshes helped to slow Katrina’s ravaging path across Mississippi. Trucking in clay dirt to fill a marsh to build such structures is like encasing a sponge in plastic wrap, they argue. Skipping over soft ground made hard, any future flood surge would travel further onto land, exacerbating property damage deeper inland.

“If we don’t nip this [project] in the bud, the pressure will be to develop more and more, and the Corps is critical to stopping that,” says Bob Davis, a former Corps engineer and an agency critic.

Not all scientists agree that Mississippi’s low-lying marshlands would do much to absorb the smack of a big storm.

“It’s a concept that’s stuck with the public, but the absorbency of the ground, when you look at the physics of how a storm surge works, has very little effect as what you might call a sponge,” says Robert Twilley, director of the oceanography department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. That doesn’t mean the condo idea is a good one, he adds. The practice of filling some wetlands and creating others as “mitigation” nibbles away at the coast and undermines what Dr. Twilley calls “landscape integrity.”

“The Army Corps still has not come to grips with that issue,” he says.

The Corps, for its part, is going to make someone unhappy when it decides what to do about the Bayou Caddy fill permit. The stakeholders are many — politicians, state marine resources divisions, environmentalists, and landowners — and their interests are not always apparent.

With national coastal policy in flux, interest groups on both sides tend to hype their positions and stretch the facts, Twilley says.

“The public-policy sector has to be open-minded about the biases of their value system, which is the dollar, and [ask whether] the dollar really provides the best accurate condition of value when it comes to natural resources,” he says. “What happens is you get forced into hyping functions of [economic development and natural resources] to build a level playing field, and that’s a shame.”

Meanwhile, the Army Corps, a military engineering agency best able to provide hard data on issues from natural surge protection to hydraulics research, is struggling to shift focus from building structural engineering projects to spearheading the debate over coastal policy. At the very least, the Corps needs to do a better job of informing the debate than it currently does, says one Corps spokesman. That aim is a major tenet of the agency’s new internal “Actions for Change” program, which calls for the Corps to take a bigger role in setting coastal policy.

“The purpose of the risk-informed approach and risk communication is to make sure that for decisions made in these areas, even those not made by the Corps, people have information to see how those decisions might affect flood risk,” says Mr. Harper, the Corps economist.

For the Breezes of Paradise Bay project, the winds may be shifting. Despite early support for the project, the Hancock County planning board recently clarified that structures higher than 12 stories will not be allowed at Bayou Caddy — a rule that may downscale the plan considerably.

The Corps, moreover, is taking a careful look at the permit application, with one spokesman saying there’s no guarantee the project will get off the ground. A decision is expected in the next few months.

“If it’s really high-quality wetlands, I don’t know that you would or would not get the permit,” says Pat Robbins, a Corps spokesman in Mobile, Ala. Bayou Caddy, he adds, “is probably pretty high-quality wetlands.”

Copyright 2008 The Christian Science Monitor

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From: ZERI …………………………………………
May 28, 2008

HOW TO GREEN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: NATURE’S 100 BEST

[Rachel’s introduction: Biomimicry is the science of designing things for humans, using nature’s way of doing things as a blueprint. And it works.]

Bonn/Geneva/Nairobi — A super-small pacemaker modeled on the wiring of the humpback whale’s heart and pigment-free color coatings from the light-splitting structures of a peacock’s feather are among a range of extraordinary new eco-breakthroughs emerging from mimicking nature.

Other commercially-promising advances, inspired by the natural world and its roughly four billion years of “research and development” include:

** Vaccines that survive without refrigeration based on Africa’s ‘resurrection’ plant.

** Friction-free surfaces suitable for modern electrical devices gleaned from the slippery skin of the Arabian Peninsula’s sandfish lizard.

** New antibacterial substances inspired by marine algae found off Australia’s coast that promise a new way of defeating health hazardous bugs without contributing to the threat of increasing bacterial resistance.

** Toxic-free fire retardants, based on waste citrus and grape crops inspired by the way animal cells turn food into energy without producing flames — the so called citric acid or Krebs cycle.

** A pioneering water harvesting system to recycle steam from cooling towers and allowing buildings to collect their own water supplies from the air inspired by the way the Namib Desert Beetle of Namibia harvests water from desert fogs.

** Biodegradable, water-tight packaging and water-repellant linings for pipes to tents that mimic the Australian water-holding frog.

These are just some of inventions, innovations and ideas at the center of a new collaborative initiative called Nature’s 100 Best.

The initiative is the brainchild of the Biomimicry Guild and the Zero Emission Research and Initiatives (ZERI) in partnership with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and IUCN-the World Conservation Union.

It is aimed at showcasing how tomorrow’s economy can be realized today by learning, copying and mimicking the way nature has already solved many of the technological and sustainability problems confronting human-kind. According to Janine Benyus and Gunter Pauli, co-creators of the Nature’s 100 Best project, “Life solves its problems with well- adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry, and smart material and energy use. What better models could there be?”

The Nature’s 100 Best List, a mixture of innovations at various stages of commercialization from the drawing board to imminent arrival in the marketplace, is set to be completed by October 2008 in time for the IUCN Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The Nature’s 100 Best book will be published in May 2009.

Today the collaborators and partners unveiled some of the preliminary projects and products being included on Nature’s 100 Best from an original list over 2,000.

It coincides with the ministerial part of the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting taking place in Bonn, Germany where up to 6,000 delegates and over 190 governments are meeting to slow the rate of loss of biodiversity.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said: “Biomimicry is a field whose time has come. Anyone doubting the economic and development value of the natural world need only sift through the extraordinary number of commercially promising inventions now emerging–inventions that are as a result of understanding and copying nature’s designs and the superior way in which living organisms successfully manage challenges from clean energy generation to re-using and recycling wastes.”

“There are countless reasons why we must accelerate the international response and the flow of funds to counter rapidly eroding biodiversity and rapidly degrading ecosystems: Nature’s 100 Best gives us 100 extra reasons to act and 100 extra reasons why better managing biodiversity is not a question of aid or an economic burden but an issue of investing in the non-polluting businesses, industries and jobs of the near future,” he said.

Janine Benyus, head of the Biomimicry Guild added, “Biomimicry is science at the cutting edge of the 21st century economy and based on 3.8 billion years of evolution. Indeed the way nature makes novel substances; generates energy and synthesizes unique structures are the secrets to how humans can survive and thrive on this planet.”

Gunter Pauli, head of the ZERI Foundation based in Geneva, added: “Steam and coal transformed the 19th Century; telecommunications and electronics, the 20th Century. We are now on the edge of a biologically-based revolution and in some of the inventions show-cased under this new initiative will undoubtedly be the business models for the new Googles, Welcomes, Unilevers, and General Electrics of the modern age. With +one billion Euros already invested in the most important technologies this is a trend in innovation for industry to follow” he said.

Humpback Heart Pacemakers

Over 350,000 people in the United States alone are fitted with new or replacement pacemakers annually. The cost of fitting a new device is up to $50,000 per patient.

Enter Jorge Reynolds, Director of the Whale Heart Satellite Tracking Program in Colombia, whose research is unraveling the mysteries of how the Humpback’s 2,000-pound heart pumps the equivalent of six bath tubs of oxygenated blood through a circulatory system 4,500 times as extensive as a human’s.

The work is also pin pointing how this is achieved even at very low rates of three to four beats a minute and how the electrical stimulation is achieved through a mass of blubber that shields the whale’s heart from the cold.

The researchers have, through listening devices called echocardiographs and via autopsies on dead whales, discovered nano- sized ‘wires’ that allow electrical signals to stimulate heart beats even through masses of non-conductive blubber.

The scientists believe the findings could be the key to allowing the human heart to work without a battery-powered pacemaker and to stimulate optimal heart beats by by-passing or ‘bridging’ dead heart muscle via special whale-like wiring.

The world-wide market for pacemakers is expected to reach $3.7 billion by 2010. The new invention could cost just a few cents to make; reduce the number of follow-up operations because it avoids the need to install new batteries and thus supplant the traditional pacemaker.

“Resurrection Plant”

Two million children die from vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, rubella and whooping cough each year. By some estimates, breakdowns in the refrigeration chain from laboratory to village, means half of all vaccines never get to patients.

Enter Myrothamnus flabellifolia — a plant found in Central and Southern Africa whose tissues can be dried to a crisp and then revived without damaged courtesy of a sugary substance produced in its cells during drought.

And enter Bruce Roser, a biomedical researcher who along with colleagues recently founded Cambridge Biostability Ltd to develop fridge-free vaccines based on the plant’s remarkable sugars called trehaloses.

The product involves spraying a vaccine with the trehalose coating to form inert spheres or sugary beads that can be packaged in an inject able form and can sit in a doctor’s bag for months of years.

Trials are underway with the Indian company Panacea Biotech and agreements have also been signed with Danish and German companies.

The development, based on mimicking nature, could lead to savings of up to $300 million a year in the developing world while cutting the need for kerosene and photovoltaic fuelled fridges.

Other possibilities include new kinds of food preservation up to the storage of animal and human tissues that by-pass storage in super cold liquid nitrogen.

Slippery Lizard

The two main ways of reducing friction in mechanical and electrical devices are ball bearings and silicon carbide or ultra nano- crystalline diamond.

One of the shortcomings of silicon carbide is that it is manufactured at temperatures of between 1,600 and 2,500 degrees F — in other words it is energy intensive involving the burning of fossil fuels.

The synthetic diamond product can be made at lower temperatures and coated at temperatures of 400 degrees F for a range of low friction applications. But it has drawbacks too.

Enter the shiny Sandfish lizard that lives in the sands and sandstorms of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and enter a team from the Technical University of Berlin.

Studies indicate that the lizard achieves its remarkable, friction- free life by making a skin of keratin stiffened by sugar molecules and sulphur.

The lizard’s skin also has nano-sized spikes. It means a grain of Sahara sand rides atop 20,000 of these spikes spreading the load and providing negligible levels of friction.

Further tests indicate that the ridges on the lizard skin may also be negatively charged, effectively repelling the sand grains so they float over the surface rather like a hovercraft over water.

The researchers have teamed up with colleagues at the Science University of Berlin and a consortium of three German companies to commercialize the lizard skin findings.

The market is potentially huge, including in micro- electronic- mechanical systems where a biodegradable film made from the relatively cheap materials of kerotene and sugar and manufactured at room temperature offers an environmentally-friendly “unique selling proposition.”

Superbugs and Bacterial Resistance — Australian Red Algae to the Rescue?

70 per cent of all human infections are a result of biofilms.

These are big congregations of bacteria that require 1,000 times more antibiotic to kill and are leading to an arms race between the bugs and the pharmaceutical companies.

It is also increasing antibiotic resistance and the rise of super bugs like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus that now kills more people than die of AIDS each year.

Enter Delisea pulchra, a feathery red alga or seaweed found off the Australian coast and a team including researchers at the University of New South Wales.

During a marine field trip, scientists noticed that the alga’s surface was free from biofilms despite living in waters laden with bacteria.

Tests pin pointed a compound — known as halogenated furanone — that blocks the way bacteria signal to each other in order to form dense biofilm groups.

A company called Biosignal has been set up to develop the idea which promises a new way of controlling bacteria like golden staph, cholera, and legionella without aggravating bacterial resistance.

Products include contact lenses, catheters, and pipes treated with alga-inspired furanones alongside mouthwashes and new therapies for vulnerable patients with diseases like cystic fibrosis and urinary tract infections.

The bacterial signal-blocking substance may also reduce pollution to the environment by reducing or ending the need for homeowners and companies to pour tons of caustic chemicals down pipes, ducts and tanks and onto kitchen surfaces to keep then bug free.

Beetle-Based Water Harvesting

By 2025, the United Nations forecasts that 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with water scarcity and two thirds of the world’s population could be under conditions of water stressed.

Climate change is expected to aggravate water problems via more extreme weather events. Many intelligent and improved management options can overcome these challenges and one may rest on the extraordinary ability of the Namib Desert beetle.

The beetle lives in a location that receives a mere half an inch of rain a year yet can harvest water from fogs that blows in gales across the land several mornings each month.

Enter a team from the University of Oxford and the UK defense research firm QinetiQ. They have designed a surface that mimics the water- attracting bumps and water-shedding valleys on the beetle’s wing scales that allows the insect to collect and funnel droplets thinner than a human hair.

The patchwork surface hinges on small, poppy-seed sized glass spheres in a layer of warm wax that tests show work like the beetle’s wing scales.

Trials have now been carried out to use the beetle film to capture water vapor from cooling towers. Initial tests have shown that the invention can return 10 per cent of lost water and lead to cuts in energy bills for nearby buildings by reducing a city’s heat sink effect.

An estimated 50,000 new water-cooling towers are erected annually and each large system evaporates and loses over 500 million litres.

Other researchers, some with funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Agency, are mimicking the beetle water collection system to develop tents that collect their own water up to surfaces that will ‘mix’ reagents for lab-on-a-chip applications.

Notes to Editors

Nature’s 100 Best is a compilation of 2,100 of the most extraordinary technologies and strategies that are being mimicked or deserve mimicking.

The 100 Best List will be launched at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona in October 2008.

At the same time the Biomimicry Institute will unveil AskNature.org, an online database of biological knowledge organized by engineering function in order to engage and inspire entrepreneurs and investors.

For more info:

ZERI — http://www.biomimicryguild.com/

Biomimicry Guild — http://www.biomimicryinstitute.com/

Biomimicry Institute — http://www.unep.org/

UNEP — http://cms.iucn.org/

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

9th Conference of the Parties to the CBD in Bonn

Case studies from today’s preliminary launch and more details on Nature’s 100 Best

Also, for more information please contact — Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and Head of Media, on Tel: 41 79 596 57 37, Fax: 254 2 623692, nick.nuttall@unep.org, go to: http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=535&ArticleID=5816&l=en or contact: info@zeri.org

or go to United Nations Environment Program. Contact ZERI: info@zeri.org

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