Action Alert: Opportunity for Global Warming Activism

A message from the Carolinas Coalition for Clear Air on Jan 27, 2007: please write to the NC Utilities Commission and the Charlotte Observer to express concerns about Duke Energy's proposed new coal-fired power plants at the Cliffside site. Details below.

ACTION ALERT!! Global Warming Activists…2 quick requests

1) Public comments still being taken on the Cliffside Coal Plant

Send your comments ASAP to the NC Utilities Commission at vance@ncuc.net

* Cliffside will be a global warming machine emitting over 11 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air annually.

* Duke Energy hopes to have Cliffside exempted from any future carbon regulation by the federal government, but that is not a sure thing.

* Even though the price of Cliffside has jumped from $2 billion to close to $4 billion Duke still has not considered energy efficiency or renewable energy as a less expensive option for ratepayers.

NC Utilities Commission studies have shown that a blend of energy efficiency and renewable energy can substantially reduce the need for more power plants.

2) Send a letter to the Charlotte Observer.

We need EVERYONE to email a letter about Cliffside to opinion@charlotteobserver.com. Letters should be limited to 150 words and refer to an article in the paper. Use one of the article links below to frame your response.

* Duke Energy’s rush to build Cliffside contradicts Duke CEO Jim Rogers’ public statements about the urgent need to reduce global warming emissions.

* Cliffside is one of more than 150 coal plants in the US being fast-tracked by utility companies eager to get their plants online before carbon regulation kicks in.

* If Cliffside and all the other 150+ coal plants get built, the US Dept. of Energy predicts that CO2 emissions from coal plants will increase 50% by 2030, from 1.97 billion metric tons in 2006 to 2.93 billion metric tons.

Charlotte Observer story links:

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/16516094.htm

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/16522918.htm

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/opinion/16522874.htm

For more information, www.clean-air-coalition.org

Keywords:: CLIFFSIDE DUKE ENERGY COAL COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS GLOBAL WARMING CLIMATE CHANGE EMISSIONS NORTH CAROLINA CCAC CLEAN AIR COALITION AIR POLLUTION ACTIVISTS ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM

Weiners & Burgers Heating the Planet More than Cars

A scientist collecting waste samples from a swine manure holding pond in Iowa

Animal farming is a bigger contributor of greenhouse gases and global warming than transportation is. So says a new report from the United Nations FAO or Food and Agricultural Organization.

Raising livestock accounts for 18% of all green-house gas emissions worldwide, including 9% of all carbon dioxide produced by human activities. Most of that CO2 is from the burning of forests for livestock pastures or to grow feed for farmed animals.

In addition, 37% of all methane due to humans is from livestock. Methane is 23 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule, than CO2 is.

Farmed animals, says the FAO report, now comprise 20% of all land animals. The proliferation of animals we keep for meat, eggs, and milk is displacing and endangering wildlife species. The report says that 30% of land which is now occupied by livestock was at one time prime wildlife habitat. [It seems to me this figure should be closer to 100%.]

The FAO proposes, as a partial solution, that the true environmental costs inherent in animal agriculture should be passed along to livestock farmers. This would include the cost of attempting to restore habitats damaged by livestock, including the cleaning of rivers polluted by the liquid effluent from waste lagoons. The farmers then would be forced to pass those costs along to retailers and on to consumers. Sounds good to me.

But some costs can't be recouped. There is no technology to remove CO2 from the air, for example. I know this because my community has just had a couple of public hearings to consider our local power company's request to build more coal-fired power plants. That point was brought up again and again as I and others protested the construction: there is no technology to remove CO2 from the air. So the real solution to animal farming will have to be consuming fewer animal products. There is no other true fix.

Science News, January 13, 2007

Keywords:: GREENHOUSE GASES GLOBAL WARMING CLIMATE CHANGE ANIMAL AGRICULTURE FACTORY FARMING ANIMAL PRODUCTS FARMED ANIMALS TRANSPORTATION SUVS CARS TRUCKS EMISSIONS CARBON DIOXIDE BURNING FORESTS BURNING WOODLANDS PASTURES LIVESTOCK FEED ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS CONSUMER LIVESTOCK FARMER TRUE COSTS

Harvesting justice

1 25 07


Farm workers are vital to the production of food in the United States. Without their labor, our lives and our national economy would be very different. Yet American farm workers are often undervalued and marginalized.

Working long hard hours, for little pay, the men, women and children who make up this vital workforce are frequently exposed to toxic chemicals, like pesticides and herbicides.

On this edition, we'll hear from speakers working on behalf of farm workers in the U.S. today, and we'll hear from some of the farm workers themselves. Their message is clear: America's farming community deserves our recognition and our support.

Featuring::

Erik Nicholson, Director, United Farm Workers of America; Tirso Moreno, Executive Director, Farm Workers Association of Florida; Senor Everardo, Senor Guzman, Senor Sacramento and Senor Zenon, farm workers featured in the documentary, "Pesticides: From the Fields to Your Table"; Doctor Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band, "El Picket Sign."

This week's host/producer: Tena Rubio.Contributing producers: Justin Beck, Emily Polk.

VR News Room

Keywords:: MIGRANT WORKERS FARM LABOR COMMUNITY

For more information::

United Farm Workers of America821 Yakima Valley HighwaySunnyside, WATel: (509) 839-4903; Fax: (509) 839-3870 http://www.ufw.org/

The Farm Workers Association of Florida815 South Park AvenueApopka, Florida 32703Tel: (407) 886-5151; Fax: (407) 884-6644 http://www.farmworkers.org/

Documentary: "Pesticides: From the Fields to Your Table"The Farmworker Health and Safety InstitutePO Box 510Glassboro, NJ 08028 mailto:08028fhsinj@aol.com

Doctor Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño BandP.O. Box 410023San Francisco, CA 94141Tel: (415) 822-3209; Fax: (415) 822-3203 drloco@drloco.comwww.drloco.com/records.htm

Other helpful links::

National Center for Farm Worker Health (NCFH)1770 FM 967Buda, TX 78610(512) 312-2700; (800) 531-5120 mailto:531-5120info@ncfh.org

Farm Worker Justice Fund, Inc.1010 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 915Washington, DC 20005Tel: (202) 783-2628 http://www.fwjustice.org/

Association of Farm Worker Opportunity Programs (AFOP)1726 M Street NW, Suite 800Washington, DC 20036Tel: (202) 828-6006; Fax: (202) 828-6005 http://www.afop.org/

Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN)300 Young Street; Woodburn, OR 97071Tel: (503) 982-0243; Fax: (503) 982-1031 farmworkerunion@pcun.orghttp://www.pcun.org/

Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO1221 Broadway StreetToledo, OH 43609Tel: (419) 243-3456; Fax: (419) 243-5655 info@floc.comhttp://www.floc.com/

National Farm Worker Ministry438 N. Skinker Blvd.St. Louis, MO 63130Tel: (314) 726-6470; Fax: (314) 726-6427 http://www.nfwm.org/

Technology transfer for the poor

My father, Douglas A. Weikle, a career journalist and, until his retirement in the 1990s, Asian desk director of the Lao service, USIA/Voice of America, spent many years covering the post war plight of developing East Asian countries.

During his several tours overseas, he came to understand that the inequitable distribution of technology increasingly was to blame for the discontent and rebelliousness, called aggression. His solution, which became an ongoing State Department program, was both practical and elegant, requiring corporations to share technology as a “cost of doing business” with underdeveloped nations.

Our feature editorial this week is by David Dickson, Director of SciDev.Net Harlan Weikle

Developing countries must adopt effective policies on technology transfer that meet the needs of all social classes, including the poorest.

There is a common misconception that the single most important factor in science and development is the need for adequate funding for relevant research. This type of thinking — sometimes described as the 'science push' model of development — tends to focus on the proportion of a country's gross national product spent on research and development.

But spending on research is part of a broader picture. An arguably larger role is played by government policies affecting the practical application of scientific knowledge. This usually involves embedding such knowledge in technological products and processes, what is widely described as 'technology transfer'.

Technology transfer has in the past often been demonised in many development policy circles as a process by which multinational corporations become rich at the expense of poor countries — selling them products they cannot afford and keeping them politically subservient by refusing to license technical know-how.

But as developing countries have become increasingly integrated into a single global economy, such thinking has changed.

For regions like East Asia or Latin America, effective technology transfer, tapping into the scientific and technical knowledge of not only researchers in the North, but increasingly their own, is now recognised as essential to economic growth and social prosperity.

The importance of technology transfer, and the policy challenges it represents to governments in the developing world, is reflected in a new dossier launched by SciDev.Net this week (see Technology Transfer dossier). This complements the existing resource on research and development policy (see R&D dossier). Together, they span the spectrum of issues in the field of science, technology and innovation.

Shared responsibility

One important theme to emerge is that technology transfer has become a complex business, with many different actors. But, just as important, is the fact that society's poorest sectors are often forgotten in technology transfer debates. Debates raised by the poverty gap between rich and poor countries are being replaced by concerns about the gap within developing countries themselves.

This should come as little surprise. In practice, the private sector tends to provide the most widely used channels for technology transfer. This is largely because the most effective mechanism for promoting rapid technology innovation is the market, with incentives for entrepreneurs and rewards, through patents, for inventors.

But governments still share substantial responsibility for making technology transfer work effectively and in the national interest. They must, for example, invest in the capital and intellectual infrastructure needed for smooth technology transfer. This includes investing in university-based research and training, to ensure that a country has the knowledge and skills it needs to not only acquire but also use new technologies.

Governments also need to regulate all transferred technologies — these should not just be useful, but socially acceptable as well. Governments must develop public institutions that can make such a judgement, either by adopting international criteria (on safety levels, for example) or by developing criteria of their own.

Creative thinking needed

But perhaps the biggest challenge governments face is actively developing forms of technology transfer that will directly benefit the poor. In some relatively rare cases, the utility of a new technology will be enough to reach all levels of society; the mobile telephone is perhaps the best example. In others, however, the needs of the poor are inevitably marginalised by procedures structured around the dynamics of the marketplace.

Take employment, for instance. As Ashok Khosla, of Development Alternatives in India, has pointed out, India is likely to see its workforce increase by 40 million over the next three years (see Exporting problems: arguments against technology transfer). The growth of new industries, such as information technology (IT), during this period may hold the key to the country's economic prosperity. But IT is only expected to create about one million new jobs, leaving the rest of the workforce to find traditional employment in areas such as farming or construction.

These sectors need new technologies that can create jobs, not displace labour. Such technologies are unlikely to be sufficiently profitable to attract the investment capital that flows into IT — particularly if, as Khosla argues, they are based on a commitment to sharing intellectual capital. But they are essential if countries like India are to avoid a growing gulf between the rich and poor, with all the social tensions that can result.

Various forms of creativity are needed. Some are purely technical; Khosla describes the success of various novel brick-making techniques in creating small-scale enterprises. Others require social innovation — by combining modern science with the practical experience (and good sense) of traditional communities, filling gaps left by the private sector in fields such as niche agriculture (see Agricultural technology transfer to developing countries and the public sector), or finding new ways of attracting investment without patent fights.

These activities should not replace conventional technology transfer. But they are more likely to provide the basis for a sustained attack on poverty.

Just as developing countries need new forms of social entrepreneurship to meet the needs of the poor, so they need new types of social technology transfer for such entrepreneurship to flourish.

David Dickson
Director, SciDev.Net

Keywords:: ECONOMICS DEVELOPMENT ASIA TECHNOLOGY VOA GLOBAL ECONOMY

Sneaky shrimp wreak havoc on Great Lakes

They’ve been on experts’ Most Wanted lists since 1998. Since the 1970s, investigators have been tracking their movements, waiting for them to burst on the scene and wreak havoc at any moment.

And finally, this November, it happened.

But these outlaws are no ordinary criminals. In fact, they’re no more than half an inch long, and from a distance, could be mistaken for fish.

For more than thirty years, scientists have been keeping tabs on Hemimysis anomala, one of seventeen species of shrimp living in European waters frequented by U.S.-bound cargo ships. It was only a matter of time, experts feared, before these minute crustaceans strayed across the Atlantic and invaded North American fresh water environments.

And now, Hemimysis has been the first to do just that. The members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who first spotted this warm-water species of mysid shrimp in Lake Ontario in November were stumped at first. How had these fresh-water dwellers traversed the thousands of miles of salt water separating them from their home in Eastern Europe’s Ponto-Caspian region?

Could ballast tanks be to blame? A ship’s ballast is a large tank that can be filled with water to adjust the ship’s stability and center of gravity. Water can be added or released from the tank as needed; if water is taken in one area and released in another, it would be easy to inadvertently transport aquatic organisms.

The shipping industry’s NOBOB – “no ballast on board” – rule was designed to avoid just this problem. According to David Reid of the NOAA, more than 90% of the ships entering the Great Lakes since the mid-1980s have been NOBOBs.

However, these very NOBOBs are probably still to blame for the shrimp invasion. Closer investigation has proved that it’s impossible to expel the last few gallons from the bottom of a ship’s ballast – and even one gallon is one too many. Ships are now required to completely rinse out their tanks with salt water, thus totally displacing the fresh water.

But it is too little too late. The Hemimysis are already quite at home in the warm surface waters of Lake Ontario. McGill University researchers predict that the species will compete with native fish for the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the aquatic food chain, potentially causing serious problems in the native food web. In turn, the shrimp themselves could be a tasty new source of food for larger fish species. Unfortunately, their high fat content makes them prone to bioaccumulation of PCBS and other pollutants in the lake waters. These toxins, which accumulate in the fatty tissues of the animals that consume them, are then passed on to the fish that eat the shrimp, and the humans that eat those shrimp.

Hemimysis’ tiny bodies may be almost clear, but they are far from invisible. The introduction of this diminutive species will continue to impact the Great Lakes’ ecosystem for decades to come. The full extent of the damage remains to be seen, but scientists predict Hemimysis to be long-term problem. It looks like Louisiana isn’t the only place whose shrimping has seen better days.

by Sara Kate Kneidel


Keywords:: shrimp, Hemimysis, H. anomala, introduced species

Child-brides, Poverty, Population Growth

Photo of an 11-yr-old Afghan bride by Stephanie Sinclair, NY Times magazine 2006 and National Public Radio

Eight-year-old Enatnesh stands by the door way of her Ethiopian home contemplating the recent marriage of her 12-year-old sister with a look of profound sadness. She says she would like to be a doctor or a teacher, but she doesn't think that can happen if she marries at 12.
She says she doesn't want to get married; she'd rather get an education. But, she says, "Of course, I can't decide to marry or not. The decision is under my family, my father and mother." (Brenda Wilson, NPR)

In many developing nations, rural girls marry very early, often as children. Brenda Wilson reports for NPR that up to 40% of girls in rural Ethiopia are married before the age of 15. The girls' fathers arrange the marriages, and the girls have no voice in the matter. Many are married by the age of 12, but are allowed to remain with their parents until they are 14, when they go to live with their husband's family. The husband is generally10 years older.

Today we talked with an Ethiopian woman who lives in our hometown. She said that even in the capital city of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa), girls are commonly married in their early teens. Child-marriage is most prevalent in the two most impoverished areas of the world: sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, including India and Bangladesh. See this document by the International Center for Research on Women for more data about child-brides.

Tradition plays a role in the persistence of this practice. Because so many girls do marry young, fathers fear that their daughters will be viewed as defective if they don't marry young, then no one will want them. Or they might be raped or abducted or become sexually active if they don't marry early, then - again - no one will want to marry them. Marriage, for girls, has been seen traditionally as the only way for parents to provide for their daughter's future.

But marrying early is bad news all the way around for the girls. Girl-brides are virtually powerless, easily manipulated, and extremely vulnerable to their older husbands. The incidence of domestic violence, abuse, and abandonment is much higher for wives who are married before the age of 18.

Child-brides are also likely to experience pregnancy and childbirth while they are still children themselves, an event which is likely to damage their bodies permanently. The CDC reports that many girls who give birth too early experience tearing of internal tissues during birth, leaving them with "fistulas," or internal chambers that should be separate but are no longer so. The walls of the vagina, large intestine, and bladder may be torn so that one opens into another. The girls may "leak" urine or feces continuously for the rest of their lives. Young brides in rural Ethiopia and in other developing nations often go through pregnancy without health care and give birth attended only by female neighbors or family members.

Forcing young girls to marry older men has repercussions far beyond the suffering and lost potential of the girls themselves. Girls coerced into marriage, whether by their fathers or by the circumstances of poverty and the absence of other options, perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Girls and young women with no education, no financial resources, no opportunities to generate income or improve their circumstances, are much more likely to have large families. They have little authority or autonomy in the marital relationships, and men in developing nations often want large families, to work the farm or for spiritual and traditional reasons. Young women with limited options may want large families themselves - children can give meaning to a life that is otherwise bleak.

There is abundant research to show that in communities with programs to improve educational and occupational opportunities for women, birth rates drop dramatically. That's important not just for those women, but for all of us on planet earth.

Worldwide population growth exacerbates all of our environmental problems on the planet. Although the number of humans on the planet will swell from 6 billion to 9.5 billion people by the year 2050, our land and other resources are not growing. In fact, our resources are shrinking due to overharvesting, overgrazing, pollution, and global warming.

Most of the growth in world population will occur in developing nations. In those countries, the subjugation of women is one of the biggest factors contributing to population growth. That subjugation is locked in place when girls are betrothed as children.

For more information about what you can do to protect young girls from arranged marriages, go to the web site of the International Center for Research on Women (www.icrw.org) or email info@icrw.org.

Keywords:: CHILD BRIDE CHILD MARRIAGE FORCED MARRIAGE ARRANGED MARRIAGE POVERTY EDUCATION ETHIOPIA BRENDA WILSON OLDER MEN POPULATION GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES FISTULA HUMAN RIGHTS WOMEN'S RIGHTS OPPRESSION SUBJUGATION ABUSE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COERCION DEPRESSION

The House Was Rockin...The Night We Socked It to the Utilities Commision

As you may have read in the previous post, the NC Utilities Commision held a public hearing last night, Jan 10, for the purpose of hearing public comments on Duke Energy's $3 billion price tag for two new coal-fired power plants 55 miles west of Charlotte.

About 300 people showed up to protest construction of the plants! The hearing was preceded by a press conference outside, during which several scientists and activists and general folks spoke of their opposition to the air pollution and greenhouse gases and mountaintop destruction caused by coal. A lot of local people worked hard to organize this resistance, including the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Coalition. (Click on these orgs for more info about coal and the Duke campaign.) I am grateful for the hard work of everyone involved. It inspires me.

After the press conference, those who wanted to speak at the hearing signed up on a sheet of paper, and the utility commissioners called their names one by one. Each person had 3 minutes to speak. Soon after we got started, the police came in to force some of the attendees out of the hearing room, saying it was too crowded for safety. So 100-200 people had to hang around outside the room.

I signed up to speak, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. My comments to the Utilities Commission are below:


My Message to the Commissioners

"I understand that this hearing is about the 'cost effectiveness' of spending $3 billion on Duke Energy's new Cliffside coal plants. To my way of thinking, $10 would be too much to spend on a new coal plant.

"I don’t understand why this discussion of 'costs' is limited to rate hikes and Duke Energy’s construction costs. What about the broader costs to future generations? What about the cost in agricultural productivity lost to global warming? What about the costs of entire coastal cities flooded by rising ocean levels?

"The cost that concerns me most, as a biologist, is the loss of wildlife species.

"More than 70% of the nation’s biologists believe we are in the midst of a worldwide mass extinction of wildlife. A mass extinction is defined as a catastrophic global event in which 25 to 75% of existing species are wiped out. The main cause of this mass extinction is habitat loss and environmental damage.

"What is the single biggest threat to the environment?

"Global warming. A change of just a few degrees in temperature can completely change rainfall patterns, or soil organisms, or plankton populations – any of which can alter the dynamics of an ecosystem, or cause it to collapse altogether.

"Global warming threatens much more than wildlife. In sub-Saharan Africa, a region struggling with desperate and increasing poverty, the rainy season has been shortened by global warming. There's less snow on the mountaintops, lakes are much lower, and when the rain finally does come, it falls too hard and fast and sweeps away the precious topsoil that farmers need to plant their harvests.

"While Americans are still arguing about whether climate change is a problem, European government officials and business leaders agree with scientists worldwide that global warming is the single greatest problem facing humankind in 5,000 years of civilization.

"Europeans are busy looking for solutions and making plans while we debate. Great Britain has 30-year plans to build levees and dikes to prepare for rising waters as the polar ice caps melt. Britain may lose three-fifths of its farmland as the oceans rise.

"Meanwhile Duke Power proposes to build two new coal plants that will crank out ever more greenhouse gases. No amount of scrubbers will take CO₂ out of a coal plant’s emissions. What’s even scarier, CO₂ emissions are not even regulated here in the United States. Even though the U.S. is the world’s largest contributor to greenhouse gases.

"We don't need more coal plants. With adequate incentives for consumers to adopt more energy-efficiency measures, and with renewable green sources of energy, we could meet all of our energy needs without new power plants. In fact, we could even begin to see some of these power plants retired or taken off line.

"If we want to save the world’s habitats and wildlife species, as well as our agricultural lands, we need to say no right now to coal and yes to energy efficiency and clean power."

You Can Still Speak Your Piece

June Blotnick of the Clean Air Coalition has emailed me the following information:

For everyone else who would like to give their opinion to the NC Utilities Commission, please send your comment in writing by next Friday January 19. It doesn’t have to be long or technical—just your view on why investing $3 billion in the new Cliffside coal-fired power plants is wrong for meeting NC's energy needs. For more information, go to www.clean-air-coalition.org. Comments should be sent to: NC Utilities Commission, Re: Docket E7, Sub 790 (Cliffside), 4325 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-4325.

As several speakers referred to last night, there is an open docket on the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) study that the Utilities Commission ordered last year to determine how much of North Carolina’s energy needs can be met through renewable sources of energy and energy efficiency. Keep an eye on this blog next week for talking points for that important issue. Comments are due soon. We need folks to impress upon state officials the massive public support for these two clean air strategies.

We also need folks to write letters to the editor. This is an easy way to get coverage of the issues out to the public on a regular basis. If we’re serious about building a movement for clean energy, we need to regularly remind the public that there are lots of people in the region who support it. For the Charlotte Observer, letters should be limited to 150 words and emailed to opinion@charlotteobserver.com.

June says thanks to all the people who worked hard to organize attendance and speakers for the hearing last night, including Beth Henry, Diane Frederick, Isabella Lacki, Kelly Picarsic, Todd Glasier, Brian Staton, Chatham Olive, Bill Glass, John Autry, Alan Burns, and Ken Davies. I agree, and say thanks to June, too, the Executive Director of the Carolinas Clean Air Coalition. You all give me hope.

KEYWORDS:: COAL DUKE ENERGY NORTH CAROLINA NC UTILITIES COMMISSION PUBLIC HEARING CLIFFSIDE POWER PLANT RENEWABLE ENERGY RENEWABLES ENERGY EFFICIENCY SIERRA CLUB CAROLINAS CLEAN AIR COALITION GLOBAL WARMING GREENHOUSE GASES CARBON DIOXIDE AIR POLLUTION MERCURY EMISSIONS

Chimps and Gibbons Have Human Elements to their Language

Gibbon photo courtesy of www.uq.edu.au

Researchers studying a population of wild gibbons in Thailand have found that these great apes recombine sounds to convey different meanings to one another, exhibiting a form of simple syntax.

The researchers, psychologists Esther Clarke and Klaus Zuberbuhler of the University of St. Andrews, claim that the ability to recombine sounds for varied meanings has not previously been demonstrated in apes. Their report was published in December of 2006 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Before this study, psychologists had held that syntax developed in pre-historic people in response to a growing vocabulary. But this is not the case with gibbons, whose vocal abilities are limited. So perhaps previous theories about the development of syntax in humans will need to be reexamined.

The field studies of gibbon vocalizations, conducted in 2004 and 2005 with 13 groups of white-handed gibbons in Khao Yai National Park, focused on gibbon vocalizations for finding long-term mates and on vocalizations in response to predators. The research team recorded the two different kinds of songs. The songs provoked by predators began with soft "hoo" notes and included another repeated extra note, lasting altogether about 30 seconds. The mating songs were similar to the predator songs but lacked the "hoo" notes and the other extra note, and lasted only about 10 seconds.

Researchers played the recordings to other gibbons.

Gibbons within earshot responded vocally to the recordings, but responded differently to the two types of vocalizations, clearly distinguishing between the predator song and the mating song. Females responded to any song, but waited a full 2 minutes to respond to the predator call. All gibbons within earshot responded to the predator song by loudly repeating it.

This study demonstrates that great apes share some of our own facility for vocal communication.




My Work with Chimps

Although this gibbon research has been heralded as a new discovery of the capacity in apes for complex communication, we have known for decades that apes are capable of complex communication. Their development of language is limited by less versatile anatomy for vocalization than we have. That is, their lips and tongues and soft palates, etc., are unable to produce as many different sounds as we can produce. But researchers, since the 1960s and 1970s, have been teaching American Sign Language to chimps and orangutans and gorillas. These apes can also communicate by way of computer keyboards. As can some parrots.

For 2 years during my graduate training, I worked with Dr. Roger Fouts at the University of Oklahoma in his pioneering work teaching American Sign Language (ASL) to chimps. I was just a graduate student basically working as a research assistant - I was an additional pair of hands to help carry out his research. The object of his research was to see how much American Sign Language chimps could learn, and to see whether they would use it spontaneously with humans and with each other or even teach it to each other.

The chimps I worked with were mostly Bruno and Booee, two youngsters who were about 4 years old. My job was to work with one of them at a time, to get the chimp to go through a binder we had of photos that had been cut out of magazines. Each page had a picture of some object, like food, a ball, water, a bird, a hug, etc. The chimp was supposed to do the hand sign for the object and if he did it correctly, he got a sip of Kool-Aid or some other little tasty treat. Maybe an M&M. Of course, the chimps did not much want to look at the binder of pictures. This act of looking a book did not resemble any normal behavior in their repertoire, and they did not particularly want my approval, so getting them to sit still with the binder was not easy. Imagine a young child with full blown ADD, but 10 times magnified.

In fact, unless the instructor such as myself was very stern with the chimp during the lesson, the language lesson often devolved into the chimp jumping up and running around. On a bad day, the chimp would sometimes run back and forth past me, "accidently" bumping into me as he passed me, to see what I would do. This was a standard sort of bluff that was really a challenge. The chimps did it to everyone on the premises, to test their boundaries. But I was afraid of the little guys, who were by no means full grown, but weren't all that little. More than one of the senior graduate students had missing finger tips from being bitten by chimps during lessons. The chimps had collars and a chain, and I was supposed to grab that and make the chimp sit down. But the collar was within range of their sharp teeth.

The chimps knew I was a wimp and so I seldom made much progress in the language lessons. After a year and a half of trying to work with the chimps, and then with the orangutans in the nearby Oklahoma City Zoo, I decided I wasn't that interested in the language abilities of captive apes. That is, I wasn't very interested in getting them to behave like humans. I was much more interested in the natural behaviors of wildlife. So I transferred to the University of North Carolina to study the field biology of woodland salamanders.

But at any rate, there was merit to Dr. Fouts' studies, and to the continuing studies of one of those senior graduate students, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh who went on to study chimps' acquisition of language for 23 years at Georgia State University. (She's now with the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.) Both Fouts and Savage-Rumbaugh, as well as many other researchers by now, have shown that many apes can learn more than 300 different signs. It may be up to 600 by now, I don't know. Not only that, but when I was in Oklahoma, the chimps that we were working with used the signs to communicate with us and with each other. They regularly asked us for food or drink or to play with the ball, or for a tickle. One of the mother chimps taught some of the signs to her youngster. And - here's the best part - one of the chimps we worked with combined words in a unique way to apply to new objects. It was a new word for "duck." Bruno and Booee and a few other chimps lived on a small island surrounded by a moat to keep them from escaping. There were ducks on the moat on occasion. The chimps did not have a sign for duck, but one of them put together the sign for water and the sign for bird to make "water bird," for the ducks! That convinced me that chimps do have a profound capacity for understanding and using language - they just don't have the vocal apparatus. Gorillas too have been demonstrated to have extensive sign language capacity. Koko was the first gorilla to show this; her researcher was Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, who has written at least a couple of great children's books about Koko.

I have to say that I don't particularly approve of coercing chimps or any primates to participate in behavioral studies. And I vehemently object to taking any primates at all for any reason out of the wild. But chimps born in captivity probably have few good options. Learning sign language is preferrable to being subjected to medical research. But far better than either would be a reintroduction program to return them to the wild, or life in a primate sanctuary where they would be protected and have all of their physical, social and mental needs met, and be free to exercise their normal behaviors 24 hours a day.

Chimps are smart. They are much smarter than we think they are, and the language programs have gone a long way to show that. For that reason, the language research has been valuable. But it's only valuable if we pay attention to it. We should protect chimps and all other primates from the wildlife trade, from poaching, and from all other human activities that threaten their safety and their future existence. Their survival hangs in the balance as we continue to destroy their remaining habitat and remove animals from nature. I hope we can stop before we've eliminated our only close relatives on this planet.

KEYWORDS:: CHIMP CHIMPS APES GIBBONS GIBBON PRIMATES PRIMATE RESEARCH AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE VOCALIZATIONS SYNTAX PREDATOR SONG MATING SONG WILDLIFE TRADE POACHING HABITAT PRIMATE SANCTUARY

Opportunity to Speak Out Against Coal, In Favor of Clean Energy

Dear Readers

Carolinas Clean Air Coalition and the Sierra Club are trying to get 200 folks to the Main Library in Charlotte tonight (Weds Jan 10) for a press conference at 6:00 and a public hearing at 7:00 sponsored by the NC Utilities Commission.

Duke Energy has increased the price tag, which we will pay for through increased rates, from $2 billion to $3 billion to expand its Cliffside coal plant 55 miles west of Charlotte.

Coal is an environmental disaster that begins with blowing up 6 tons of mountaintop to extract every single ton of coal. Coal-fired power plants spew tons of greenhouse gases, ozone-producing pollution, and highly toxic mercury into the air. Recent studies have shown that NC can provide adequate energy through renewables (solar, wind, methane from hog waste, landfills, timber waste, etc.) AND by maximizing energy efficiency.

We invite you to TAKE ACTION for a few hours at this pivotal point in NC's energy policty debate. We need BODIES to show up at the library tonight. If there's any way you can make it, a large audience will show the Utilities Commissioners that ordinary people want to move away from old polluting power plants to clean energy sources.

The room downstairs at the library holds 114 chairs and we want to overflow the room. We will have speakers lined up, so we mainly need lots of folks to show their support.

The press conference will be at 6:00 outside the library and we encourage folks to come then so they can get into the hearing room early.

The US is the major contributor to global-warming greenhouse gases and Duke is the 3rd largest producer of electricity through coal in the US. WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IF WE SPEAK OUT NOW!

KEYWORDS:: COAL DUKE ENERGY NORTH CAROLINA NC UTILITIES COMMISSION PUBLIC HEARING CLIFFSIDE POWER PLANT RENEWABLE ENERGY RENEWABLES ENERGY EFFICIENCY SIERRA CLUB CAROLINAS CLEAN AIR COALITION GLOBAL WARMING GREENHOUSE GASES CARBON DIOXIDE AIR POLLUTION MERCURY EMISSIONS

Lockdown on life: stories from women behind bars

On this edition, we take you to two U.S. prisons (California Medical Facility - CMF and The Washington Correctional Center for Women) ­ and go behind the bars and into the lives of incarcerated women. We'll share the personal stories of transgendered-women forced to live among hundreds of men in a California prison. You'll also hear from imprisoned mothers and incarcerated expectant mothers who are being helped by a group of doulas.

Featuring::

Dr. Lori Kohler, prison doctor; Alex Lee, Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project; Juana, Donna, Shante, Diamond, Kim, five transgender Women at California Medical Facility whose names have been changed; Taska Harand, mom at Washington Correctional Center for Women; Christy Hall, the Birth Attendants, co-founder; Genesis, mom at Washington Correctional Center for Women; Katrina Eva, Residential Parenting Program
correctional unit supervisor; Jade Souza, works with The Birth Attendants; Julie Montie, works with The Birth Attendants; Teresa Corel, mom at Washington Correctional Center for Women;

Senior Producer/Host: Tena Rubio
Contributing Freelance Producers: Sandra Lupien and Sarah Olson

Additional resource:: Medical Advocates/Prisoners

For more information::

Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project
1322 Webster St., Suite 210
Oakland, CA 94612
510-677-5500; info@tgijp.org
www.tgijp.org

Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee
California Prison Focus
2940 16th Street #B-5
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-252-9211; tip@riseup.net

The Birth Attendants
P.O. Box 12258
Olympia, WA 98508
info@birthattendants.org
www.birthattendants.org

Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
1540 Market St., Suite 490
San Francisco, CA 94102
415-255-7036; info@prisonerswithchildren.org
www.prisonerswithchildren.org

California Coalition for Women Prisoners
1540 Market St., Suite 490
San Francisco, CA 94102
415-255-7036 ext. 4; info@womenprisoners.org
www.womenprisoners.org

Justice Now
1322 Webster Street, Suite 210
Oakland, CA 94612
510-839-7654
www.jnow.org

Free Battered Women
1540 Market St., Suite 490
San Francisco, CA 94102
415-255-7036 x320; info@freebatteredwomen.org
www.freebatteredwomen.org

Project Avary
1018 Grand Ave.
San Rafael, CA 94901
415-460-1184; info@projectavary.org
www.projectavary.org

The Osbourne Association
Administrative Office
36-31 38th Street
Long Island City, NY 11101
718-707-2600
www.osborneny.org

Top 6 Ways to Protect Wildlife from Commercial Trade

Over 650 million animals - from lemurs to zebras to tropical birds - were imported legally into the United States in the last 3 years.

More than that were smuggled into the country illegally. The illegal wildlife trade is a $10-billion-a-year business, second only to drugs as a worldwide black market, reports INTERPOL, the international police agency.

Animals smuggled into the U.S. are not quarantined or screened for disease. Even those arriving legally are largely unscreened, since the government employs only 120 full-time inspectors. The imports do bring diseases, such as hantavirus, tularemia, salmonella, meningitis. That's a concern. But it doesn't concern me nearly as much as the impact of the wildlife trade on the animals themselves.

Many of the animals traded legally and illegally are parrots, among the smartest of birds. And many are primates.

According to the Aesop Project, more than 32,000 wild-caught primates are sold on the international market every year, and more than one-quarter of this trade is illegal.

I was dismayed, but not too surprised, to discover that the biggest importer of primates worldwide is the United States. According to an American University document, we import more than 20,000 primates per year into the United States, in spite of the substantial breeding capacity of our research facilities. We import four times more primates than any other single country.

The Convention on Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) prohibits all trade of primates except those born in captivity. I called the International Primate Protection League to ask about CITES. Over the phone, Shirley with IPPL told me that CITES is only a treaty, not a law. A country that agrees to abide by the CITES treaty can then establish laws to support it. Many prosperous countries such as the United States support CITES – in theory if not in reality. But many tropical countries whose people make a living in wildlife trafficking make no pretense of supporting it. Or even if they do support it on paper, the laws restricting wildlife trade are not enforced. In developing nations, which tend to be tropical, wildlife poachers often operate freely because governments lack funds to enforce wildlife protection laws, or because officials in charge of protection are getting a cut of the profits from wildlife trade. In impoverished nations, wages for wildlife officials are often below the minimum living wage. So animals are trapped and sold illegally - for food, for use in laboratory research, for exhibition, and for keeping by private individuals as companions.

I asked Shirley at IPPL to guess how many of the primates brought into the U.S. are wild-caught rather than bred in captivity. She didn’t know, but confirmed what I have heard from various other sources. Regardless of laws, regardless of endangered status, poachers and smugglers illegally transport thousands of wild animals into the United States the same way smugglers transport drugs – in cigar boats from the Caribbean, in cars, in false compartments, across the Mexican border. The sale of smuggled birds, primates, and other wild-caught animals in the United States is rampant.

Where do our imported primates come from? The countries exporting the most are Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, Thailand, and China. The first three, I know, are countries with several native species of primates that are threatened by deforestation and habitat loss.


By far the biggest consumers of imported primates in the United States are medical research facilities. Do we know they are using wild-caught rather than captive-bred primates? Consider this excerpt from an article in “Animal Issues”:

“On a late summer day in 1998, a China Airlines flight carrying American and Asian vacationers touched down on the runway at San Francisco International Airport. Below the passengers in the plane's cargo hold sat 40 monkeys in small wooden crates. When an official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention peered inside the individual compartments, he saw that 11 of the animals had died, apparently from dehydration and heat during the lengthy flight. The monkeys were pig-tailed macaques, a species classified as ‘vulnerable’ by the World Conservation Union. Captured in traps set in the forests of Indonesia, the animals were on their way to the Regional Primate Center at the University of Washington to be subjects in a laboratory experiment.”

The World Wildlife Fund reports that the majority of primates used in research facilities are bred in captivity. But wild-caught primates are still used. Why? Most primates are imported, not by the research facilities, but by companies who sell animals to these research labs. By far the biggest suppliers in the United States are Charles River, Inc. and Covance Research Products, Inc. The incentive for buying wild-caught animals is clear: they cost one-third as much as raising primates from birth. Many primates that are bred in captivity here in the United States are exported for profit. The United States is third in the world in the number of primates exported annually, just behind the Philippines and Indonesia. It’s all about money. The suppliers who breed primates and import wild-caught primates are competing with one another for research facilities’ business – cheaper primates means more business and more profits. The researchers who buy from these suppliers feel pressure to shave pennies from expenses, in order to stretch their grant funding as far as possible.

How can you protect animals from the wildlife trade?

1) Don't buy exotic animals as pets. If you must have something other than a cat or a dog for a pet, be positive that it was bred in captivity. Insist on documentation.

2) Don't eat exotic animals in restaurants.

3) Don't buy clothes, furs, jewelry, shoes, trinkets, traditional medicines, carvings or any other consumer products made with body parts of wild animals. Ask for documentation if you're not sure.

4) Write your representatives in Congress to demand that humane alternatives to animal experiments be used.

5) Contact medical schools that use animals for education and ask them to eliminate live-animal labs from their curricula. Many of our most respected medical schools have already done this.

6) Purchase only cruelty-free products and donate only to health charities that never fund animal experiments.




KEYWORDS::INTERPOL BLACK MARKET WILDLIFE TRADE RESEARCH ANIMALS CHIMPANZEES CHIMPS PARROTS PET TRADE PETS EXOTIC PETS TRADITIONAL MEDICINE FURS MEDICAL RESEARCH LABS LABORATORIES COVANCE CHARLES RIVER IPPL INTERNATIONAL PRIMATE PROTECTION LEAGUE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND CITES PROTECT WILDLIFE TOP SIX WAYS COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION

New book about how overfishing is changing the world

Red grouper photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

Mercury is not the only reason to select fish in your diet very carefully.

Charles Clover, environment editor of London's Daily Telegraph, presents convincing evidence that 75% of the world's fish populations are overfished. His new book, The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat, predicts that fish stocks will collapse, irreversibly, within 50 years.

Our current rate of depletion of fish populations is due in part to more efficient fish-locating technologies such as global positioning systems, sonar, and 3-dimensional underwater mapping. In addition, modern fish harvesting methods such as blast fishing, gill nets and long-lines bring in bigger and bigger catches including nontargeted species. According to one study Clover cites, 90% of large oceanic fish have disappeared since 1950.

Clover writes that the responsibility lies, in part, with countries that continue to permit illegal fishing, such as Japan and Spain. Also to blame are the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization and the European Union. The responsibility is shared by chefs and restaurants that continue to feature endangered species on their menus, "the marine equivalent of the panda, the rhino, and the Great Apes." This includes high-end restaurants in the United States.

Also, of course, we as consumers are to blame. If we stopped eating fish whose populations are in danger, then trawlers, chefs, groceries, and restaurants would have no incentive to provide them. This includes canned tuna and wild salmon.

What can we do? Read Charles Clover's book and pass it on. Or, before buying fish, check for recent updates on the Oceans Alive website or on Environmental Defense's online guide to fish consumption. The online guides offer species-specific info on fish contamination with heavy metals such as mercury (44 or 45 states in the U.S. have issued mercury warnings for fish consumers) and current info on which fish populations are overfished.

We can also support the creation of fish preserves - huge areas of ocean that are off-limits to fishing so that fish populations can recover. Not only are fish populations at stake, but also the countless marine birds and mammals, such as whales, sea lions, sea otters etc, whose food webs depend upon oceanic fish.

KEYWORDS :: FISH OVERFISHING CHARLES CLOVER THE END OF THE LINE MERCURY OCEANS ALIVE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FISHERIES FISH PRESERVES DEPLETION OF FISHERIES FISH STOCKS COLLAPSE BLAST FISHING LONG LINES GILL NETS SONAR 3 DIMENSIONAL MAPPING GPS CONTAMINATION OF OCEANS

It's getting hot in here

How about an avocado tree for Christmas?

Your gardening loved ones are in luck this holiday season. New data from the National Climactic Data Center indicates that hardiness zones – climate regions determined by lowest annual temperature – have shifted significantly in all fifty states since 1990.

While the USDA has yet to comment on the new data or offer updated zone maps, just this week the National Arbor Foundation has released maps delineating the redefined hardiness zones. The Foundation’s news release affirms that the new data “is consistent with the consensus of climate scientists that global warming is underway.”

The new data reflect the lowest annual temperatures as recorded at 5000 research stations for the past fifteen years. Nationwide, the changes are dramatic. Entire states have changed zones since 1990. Iowa, for instance, was once more than half Zone 4, with an average annual low of -30 to -20 degrees. Now, the entire state is reclassified Zone 5, with a low of just -10 to -20. Much of the Northeast is now Zone 6 (-10 to 0 degrees), while Zone 7 spreads across the South.

Agricultural extension agents affirm that adventurous gardeners now stand a chance at growing palms and other tropical plants. Warm-weather plants previously restricted to the South, such as the lovely winter-blooming camellia, are now creeping across the Mason-Dixon line.

Meanwhile, however, cold-weather plants are struggling to keep their cool. North Carolina cooperative extension agent Karen Neill notes that white pines in her area have struggled recent years; not surprising when the ten hottest days on record have all occurred since 1990, as Arbor Day spokesman Woody Nelson notes.

Changes in plant distribution may have serious affects across the food chain. As plant species change in abundance, the animals that depend on them for food and shelter will also be forced to adapt. Humans, too, may feel unexpected impacts. Scientists expect that continued climate change may seriously impact farming and crop distribution.

To see the maps for yourself, check out the Arbor Day Foundation’s website. The Foundation recommends planting trees as a means of combating this change. Trees remove carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, from the atmosphere, and provide shade that keeps the ground cool and reduces energy use.

By Sara Kate Kneidel

Keywords: hardiness zones, climate change, global warming

Research shows older females preferred as mates

photo of Flo the chimp courtesy of www.janegoodall.org

Male Chimps Prefer Older Females

"Wrinkled skin, ragged ears, irregular bald patches, broken teeth, and elongated nipples. For these guys, nothing beats the sex appeal of an old female," writes Bruce Bower in Science News*.

That is, if the guys and the gals are chimpanzees.

Anthropologist Martin Muller of Boston University and his team of researchers in Uganda's Kibale National Park have found that male chimpanzees prefer female chimps over the age of 30, perhaps because of their demonstrated success at surviving and at raising offspring.

Chimps are promiscuous - both sexes mate with many partners. The scientists measured male interest in females of different ages by tracking the chimps' copulation and other sexual behavior. Male chimps mated significantly more often with females age 30 or older than with younger females. Even the oldest female, at 55, attracted much more interest than did young females of 15 to 20 years of age.

In addition, females over 30 attracted more attention from groups of males during their fertile periods and were more often the objects of fights between males than were younger females.

Why? The mating game has evolved differently in humans and chimps, says Dr. Muller. Because humans form long-term sexual relationships, "men tend to look for women's physical signs of youth, which signal childbearing potential for years to come."

Since chimps don't form long-term sexual partnerships, male chimps may father more offspring if they seek females most likely to have immediate reproductive success.

Although humans may not be conscious of these underlying motivations when choosing a mate, the preferences have become imbedded in our culture, and may be innate to some degree, some anthropologists speculate.

Anne E. Pusey of the University of Minnesota directs ongoing research into chimpanzee behavior at Tanzania's Gombe National Park. She corroborates Dr. Muller's observations. "Once Gombe females give birth to infants, they become more attractive to males," Pusey says.

Interesting to think that the human obsession with young females and youthful sex characteristics has its evolutionary basis in our long-term relationships. What if our mating patterns were more similar to those of chimps?

Perhaps our fixation on smooth taut skin is much more artibrary than it seems.

*Source:
Bruce Bower. "Age becomes her." Science News 170: 341. November 25, 2006.

Keywords:: CHIMPANZEE CHIMPANZEES CHIMPS RESEARCH MALES MATING AGING WRINKLES MALE PREFERENCE UGANDA PROMISCUOUS LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS YOUTHFUL SEX CHARACTERISTICS YOUNG FEMALES ATTRACTIVE TO MALES EVOLUTION MATING PATTERNS

Commodity promotion programs: What’s the beef?

Government-sanctioned promotion programs, known as checkoff programs, aim to increase consumption of commodities such as dairy, beef, and pork but, according to one food economist, the messages are inconsistent with the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Checkoff programs; even if you don’t know what they are, you’ve probably felt their impact in recent years. Does “Got Milk?” sound familiar? How about “Pork. The other white meat?” These advertising campaigns are the result of government-sanctioned promotion programs, known as checkoff programs. The campaigns aim to increase consumption of commodities such as dairy, beef, and pork. But, according to an opinion piece, (Wilde, PE. Obesity. June 2006; 14 (6): 967-973. “Federal Communication about Obesity in the Dietary Guidelines and Checkoff Programs.”) authored by Parke Wilde, PhD, a food economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, the messages sent out by these advertising campaigns are inconsistent with the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

“The [checkoff] programs are established by Congress, approved by a majority of the commodity’s producers, managed jointly by a producer board and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and funded through a tax on the producers,” Wilde writes. “The largest food commodity checkoff programs are for meat and dairy products,” he continues.

The 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, recommend that most people consume more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, fish, and low-fat dairy products and, overall, moderately reduce the total number of calories consumed. Checkoff programs, on the other hand, promote consumption of beef, pork, and dairy products. Particular checkoff programs, Wilde points out, have promoted such calorie-heavy foods as bacon cheeseburgers, barbecue pork ribs and butter.

“The most striking feature of the revised Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released in January 2005, is the publication’s increased emphasis on obesity prevention,” Wilde writes. “At the same time,” he says, “federal support for promoting fruits and vegetables is small compared to federal support for pork and dairy.”

“One must ask whether it is possible to eat more beef, more pork, more cheese, and more eggs, in answer to checkoff advertising, while simultaneously consuming more fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy, in answer to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and still reduce caloric intake to reach or maintain a healthy body weight,” observes Wilde.

“The government’s stand in this matter is important,” says Wilde, “because federal communication about nutrition is supposed to be consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”

“The federal government enforces the collection of more than $600 million annually in mandatory assessments, approves the advertising and marketing programs, and defends checkoff communication in court as the federal government’s own message—in legal jargon, as its own ‘government speech,’” writes Wilde.

The ‘government speech’ issue arose when some farmers objected to the checkoff programs on First Amendment grounds, claiming that the programs forced the farmers to support a particular commercial message. However, in May 2005, the United States Supreme Court declared checkoff advertising “government speech,” thereby absolving it of constitutional objection. In the Supreme Court’s decision, Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that the checkoff messages are “from beginning to end” the message of the federal government.

“Now that checkoff programs are clearly identified as federal government programs, calls for consistency with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans may get louder,” says Wilde. “One solution would be for Congress to pass a resolution simply declaring that the federal government’s ‘speech’ about good guidance and nutrition must in its entirety be consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” proposes Wilde. “After the Supreme Court’s recent endorsement of this government speech doctrine, the current inconsistencies between the government’s message in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and in the checkoff promotions deserve renewed attention.”

Keywords:: CHECKOFF PROGRAMS DIETARY GUIDELINES FOR AMERICANS ADVERTISING GOVERNMENT SPEECH

High IQ children more likely to become vegetarian

Intelligent children may be more likely to be vegetarian as adults, suggests a study published online by the BMJ Friday 12/15.

Recent evidence suggests that vegetarianism may be linked to lower cholesterol levels and a reduced risk of obesity and heart disease. This might help to explain why children who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have a lower risk of coronary heart disease in later life.

The study involved 8179 men and women aged 30 years whose IQ was tested at age 10 years.

Twenty years later, 366 (4.5%) of participants said they were vegetarian. Of these, 9 (2.5%) were vegan and 123 (33.6%) stated they were vegetarian but reported eating fish or chicken.

Vegetarians were more likely to be female, to be of higher occupational social class and to have higher academic or vocational qualifications than non-vegetarians, although these differences were not reflected in their annual income, which was similar to that of non-vegetarians.

Higher IQ at the age of 10 years was associated with an increased likelihood of being vegetarian at the age of 30. This relation was partly accounted for by better education and higher occupational social class, but it remained statistically significant after adjusting for these factors.

There was no difference in IQ score between strict vegetarians and those who said they were vegetarian but who reported eating fish or chicken.

The finding that children with greater intelligence are more likely to report being vegetarian as adults, together with the evidence on the potential benefits of a vegetarian diet on heart health, may help to explain why higher IQ in childhood or adolescence is linked with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease in adult life, write the authors.

Alternatively, the link may be merely an example of many other lifestyle preferences that might be expected to vary with intelligence, but which may or may not have implications for health, they conclude.

Click here to view paper: http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/december/vegetarian.pdf

Click here to view full contents for this week's print journal: http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/december/contents1612.pdf

Rice harvests threatened by pollution, global warming

A new report appearing in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNS) suggests that air pollution may be responsible for the decline of rice crops in some of the world’s most impoverished regions.

Rice harvests increased dramatically in India and parts of Asia during the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 70s. However, harvest growth has slowed since the mid-1980s, raising concerns that food shortages might once again return to plague these densely populated regions.

Maximilian Auffhammer at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources along with V. “Ram” Ramanathan and Jeffery Vincent, researchers at UC San Diego compared historical data on rice harvests in India to the presence of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs), which form soot and other fine particles in the air (collectively termed aerosols), and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography had previously led a team of international scientists in a study of the effect of increased “brown cloud” pollution on the Indian subcontinent. The conclusion from that study was that, while aerosols made the climate drier and cooler, conditions, which threaten rice production, greenhouse gases were warming the climate, potentially good for rice growing.

“Greenhouse gases and aerosols in brown clouds are known to be competing factors in global warming,” said Ramanathan. “The major finding of this interdisciplinary study is that their effects on rice production are additive, which is clearly an unwelcome surprise.”

Auffhammer, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics, added, “While this study focuses on India's rain-fed states, ABCs exist throughout Asia’s main rice-producing countries, many of which, have experienced decreasing growth rates in harvests, too. Furthering our understanding of how air pollution affects agricultural output is very important to ensure food security in the world’s most populous region.”

by Harlan Weikle

Keywords:: V. RAMANATHAN ABC ASIA INDIA GLOBAL WARMING CAS CLIMATE CHANGE GREEN HOUSE GASES

The research paper is the result of a three-year collaboration between Auffhammer, Ramanathan and Vincent. Their work was supported in part by the Giannini Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and IGCC.

Boycott of Smithfield meats

God, things are looking up!

This past Thursday, workers from the world's largest hog slaughterhouse picketed a major supermarket in Charlotte, pressuring the food store (Harris Teeter) to stop carrying Smithfield meats.

Yay! What a wonderful piece of news!

Workers at the Smithfield processing plant in Tar Heel, NC, slaughter 32,000 hogs every single day. The plant is notorious for labor abuses. Just a couple of weeks ago the plant fired about 40 immigrant laborers. The alleged reason was that the workers had bogus social security numbers. But it has been well-documented that Smithfield fires immigrant workers for complaining about safety issues, such as when the production line speeds up. Smithfield also has a well-documented history of firing laborers seen talking to union representatives. The United Food and Commercial Workers union has been trying to unionize the Smithfield workers for decades. In 1997, the workers voted not to unionize, but the results were thrown out by the US Circuit Court of Appeals, noting "intense and widespread coercion prevalent" at the slaughterhouse. The company, and the Tar Heel plant in particular, have been criticized by the National Labor Relations Board for intimidation, firing and spying on workers.

One worker, quoted in the Charlotte Observer, said that laborers at the plant work in freezing temperatures with knives, frequently cutting each other. Workers who stay out too long with injuries are fired.

See the Human Rights Watch document, Blood Sweat and Fear, for more info about Smithfield's labor abuses.

Smithfield is also notorious for environmental and animal abuses associated with the factory farms where their hogs are raised. Massive spills from hog waste lagoons have been tracked by NC State scientists for dozens of miles, as the waste oozes into rivers. The brown plume from a spill can be followed for days as it's carried downriver to coastal estuaries. For more details about the environmental offenses of North Carolina's hog industry, see Veggie Revolution. NC is a good place to make a stand. Our state is second in the nation (after Iowa) in the number of hogs; we have more hogs than people. In fact, just the coastal plain of NC has twice as many hogs as there are people in NYC. And even though each hog makes 4 times the waste of an adult human, the hog waste receives no treatment at all. It's stored in lagoons until it can be sprayed onto crop fields. That is the only legal recourse for getting rid of it.

Smithfield is now building factory hog farms in Poland, because the country lacks environmental and labor protection to stifle the industry. In fact, Smithfield's president referred to Poland as "the Iowa of Europe." The next vulnerable frontier for the meatpacker's market expansion.

If you want to help, go to www.smithfieldjustice.com and attend one of the upcoming protests in 11 N.C. cities.

If you want to help more, eat less meat, eat less ham and pork and bacon. If you do buy these products, seek pastured or organic meat products instead of Smithfield's.

Some of the info in this post came from the following article:
Kerry Hall. "Labor shops for an ally." The Charlotte Observer. December 1, 2006.

International changemakers - honoring elder women activists

Women are gaining influence as leaders throughout the world fighting for peace, justice, the environment and civil society. In this program we profile three courageous women elders honoring their lives of dedication to far reaching social movements. We¹ll hear their personal stories and hear about their current work.

Australia's Dr. Helen Caldicott is the premier spokesperson for the worldwide anti-nuclear movement. The Smithsonian Institute named her one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers of America and is a tireless advocate for social justice; Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the Nobel Peace Prize for organizing a grassroots non-violence movement in Northern Ireland.

Featuring:

Dr. Helen Caldicott, founder, Nuclear Policy Research Institute; Dolores Huerta, co-founder, United Farm Workers of America; Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder, Community of the Peace People.

Senior Producer/Host: Tena Rubio
Contributing Freelance Producer: Lynn Feinerman
Guest Host: Sandina Robbins

For more information:

The Peace People
224 Lisburn Road
Belfast, BT9 6GE, Northern Ireland
44-0-2890-663465; info@peacepeople.com
www.peacepeople.com

Dolores Huerta Foundation
Post Office Box 9189
Bakersfield, California 93309
661-322-3033
www.doloreshuerta.org

Nuclear Policy Research Institute
4423 Lehigh Rd #337
College Park, MD 20740
202-822-9800; info@helencaldicott.com
www.nuclearpolicy.org

United Farm Workers
National Headquarters
PO Box 62
29700 Woodford-Tehachapi Road
Keene, CA 93531
661-823-6250
www.ufw.org

Other helpful links:

Radio Campesina Network
www.campesina.com

Nobel Laureates Decade for Culture of Peace and Nonviolence
www.nobelweb.org

United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization
U.N.E.S.C.O.
www.unesco.org

United Nations
www.un.org

Amnesty International
www.amnesty.org.uk

Peace Council, USA.
www.peacecouncil.org

Greener News Room

Keywords:: NUCLEAR LABOR FARM WORKERS ENVIRONMENT AMNESTY IRELAND NOBEL PEACE

Eco-Friendly Feminine Hygiene Products

Reusing and recycling just don’t work when it comes to feminine hygiene products. Have you ever thought about how much waste pads and tampons create? The average American woman throws away 15,000 sanitary pads and tampons in her lifetime, adding up to 250-300 pounds of waste.1 Multiplied by the 85 million menstruating women in North America, that’s about 12 billion pads and 7 million tampons, plus their packaging, added to US landfills per year!2 And some don’t even make it that far. The Center for Marine Conservations conservation collected over 170,000 tampon applicators alone in just one year from U.S. coastal areas.3

Women who are concerned about this waste, not to mention the health risks of lodging wads of non-organic, dioxin-laden cotton close to their reproductive organs, have turned to one of the best kept secrets in women’s health care: the menstrual cup.

Under brand names such as The Keeper or The Moon Cup, the rubber or silicone cup looks something like a tiny plunger. Upside down, it is tucked inside the vagina just like a tampon, where it collects blood until the user removes it to empty it. A cup, which costs $35, lasts about ten years. In that time, a woman spends more than $400 on pads and tampons!

I’ve used the Keeper for four years, and would never, ever go back. It’s so simple that I often forget I’m using it after I put it in. It never leaks; it only needs changing twice a day; it’s simple and hygienic. It’s been a life-saver when I don’t want to deal with my period in a Porta-John at work, when traveling in countries where tampons weren’t available, when backpacking in places with nowhere to dispose of trash. And best of all, I’m not generating heaps of nasty garbage.

If you’re intrigued, check out http://www.keeper.com/. Reviews posted by other users are so enthusiastic you’d find them ridiculous – if you haven’t tried it for yourself. Personally, I agree with my friend Rachel who puts it simply: “Quite possibly the most useful device ever invented.”



1 “Interesting Facts.” The Keeper, Inc. 2006. www.keeper.com/facts.html. (Accessed 24 November 2006.)

2 Ibid.

3 “Inner Sanctum: The Hidden Price of Feminine Hygiene Products.” E Magazine, Vol. XII No 2. March-April 2001.

by Sara Kate Kneidel

keywords: keeper, environmentally friendly menstrual products, feminine hygiene alternatives