1. America's Cup Environmental Council press conference at City Hall TOMORROW - be there/Planning Commission acts on DEIR immediately after
2. Help SaveNature.org by voting daily
3. Fish & Game Commission Stakeholder Advisory Group - you can help it to be more responsive
4. Register early and save - Cal-IPC's 20th Annual Symposium
5. Facilitation for Group Decision Maker - in Occidental Aug 12-14
6. Exciting and stressful week highlighted, along with relief: the orgasmatron
7. Cybercrime: black hats, grey hairs - shakeup in the hacker underground
8. Feedback: No escape from hackers?
9. Raw materials--the revenge of Malthus. A famous bet recalculated
10. Clever rat anoints itself with toxins
11. Man's best friend: Scientific research throws new light on a very old partnership
12. All life is being lived/Who is living it then? Rainer Maria Rilke
1. America's Cup Environmental Council (ACEC) members (an ad hoc group of about 20 environmental organizations**) have read the America's Cup 1600-page DEIR and found it to be lacking in substantive detail. Therefore, we will a be holding a press conference on the steps of City Hall on the Polk Street side on Thursday, August 11th at 10 AM. Concerned people are strongly urged to attend to have more bodies. We are up against it, as there is power behind this event. Read on.
1. AC Event Authority will have huge support and turnout from City management responsible for bringing this event to SF, small businesses, labor, maritime services providers, boaters, marina operators and others salivating over the prospect of having about 1.6 million visitors to provide them some kind of potential for work and making money from the events, plus the races will be fun. This group will make heartfelt appeals to the Commission to accept, on faith, the DEIR because of the billions of dollar projected to be made and the excitement the Races will bring to the City.
2. The Event Authority has huge money and huge power; they can reach out to the very highest levels of our government and apply gentle pressure to make this thing happen, and make any stumbling blocks go away. They have mega-millions at stake and have pledged at least $270 million for promotion and hospitality!
3. Ellison himself, a billionaire hyper-competitive individual, has face at stake by bringing racing into an urban area for the first time and changing the races from a gentleman's sport into a sort of Monster Boat event with broad appeal; X-treme racing complete with hard hatted crew members being catapulted into the water on capsizes.
4. ACEC definitely wants the races to happen too, but not at the cost of sacrificing our environment in, on and next to the water. We want it done right in the most sustainable way, as promised by the Event Authority.
While the DEIR is out, impacts and mitigations are still being developed for Parks Event Operations Plan, Public Safety Plan, Sustainability Plan, Workforce Development Plan, Water and Air Traffic plan, Team Base Operation Plan. The only supporting document that has been published in draft form is the so called People Plan which is essentially the draft transportation plan. The DEIR is an empty suit.
** ARC Ecology, SF Baykeeper, CNPS, Clean Water Action, GGAS, GG Cetacean Research, Livable City, Nature in the City, NRDC, Planning & Conservation League, Save SF Bay, Sierra Club, SF Tomorrow, South End Rowing Club, Telegraph Hill Dwellers Assn, Turtle Island Research Network, Sea Scavengers, Sustainable Watershed Alliance, Walk SF
That same day, a hearing on the America's Cup DEIR will be held at the the Planning Commission. While the meeting itself starts at 12:30, the DEIR is #3 on the agenda so it is expected it will be heard maybe at 1:30. Maybe sooner, maybe later. Talking points are being drafted and will be distributed to all participants. ACEC needs a hefty turnout to 1) have a show of force and 2) to take a talking point (which will be made available) and speak at the hearing for only 1 minute.
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2.
SaveNature.Org was named a finalist in Tom’s of Maine’s 50 States for Good program! And, we have a chance to win $50,000.
Five nonprofits will be selected to receive $20k and one will receive $50, 000!! .
The favor is to ask you to vote at www.50statesforgood.com once every day, until September 13th (really, every day) Just scroll down the page to find SaveNature.Org! j
Bookmark this page http://www.tomsofmaine.com/community-involvement/living-well/finalists-overview/poll and vote when you open your email in the morning.
Also, in order for us to win, please send this link in an email to all y our friends as well as to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We need this to go viral, help us make that happen. Vote and vote often. Thanks for all your support.
(I'm not from Chicago, but I'm learning to feel comfortable voting often. JS)
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3. Staff Recommendations for Fish & Game Commission Stakeholder Advisory Group and Proposed Additions to Blue Ribbon Citizen Commission Announced
From Eric Mills, Action for Animals:
I'd suggest you get on their mailing list, if you're not already. This effort could have major impact upon California wildlife and policies.
A few changes I'd like to see:
1. Expansion of Fish & Game Commission to 7 or 9 members
2. Specific qualifications for the job (currently there are none). Currently, all Commissioners are hunters and/or fishers. That ain't enough! And in the Commission's 130 years, there have been only TWO women appointed (Cindy Gustafson the latest, and lamented). And no minorities, to my knowledge. (Unless you count Mike Flores.)
3. Commission members elected, or appointed by a non-partisan committee (currently all are appointed by the Governor, as is the Director--a major conflict of interest, in the eyes of many)
4. Commission to have the power to hire and/or fire the Director of the Department (as in Nevada and some other states). Currently, the Commission is only an advisory committee.
Thoughts?
Staff Recommendations for Stakeholder Advisory Group and Proposed Additions to Blue Ribbon Citizen Commission Announced
First Stakeholder Advisory Group meeting to be held Aug. 19
SACRAMENTO, Calif – The California Fish and Wildlife Strategic Vision staff made Stakeholder Advisory Group appointment recommendations to the Executive Committee today. The 52 staff-recommended members were selected from more than 130 applicants. The proposed members were selected using the criteria and interest areas mandated by AB 2376 (Huffman). The Executive Committee will hold a public meeting Wednesday, Aug. 10 where they will act on the staff recommendations. Following the Executive Committee’s action, the Stakeholder Advisory Group will later be broken out into smaller working groups in order to concentrate their efforts on specific issue areas. The staff recommendations are listed below and on the strategic vision website.
The first meeting of the Stakeholder Advisory Group will be held Friday, Aug. 19 at 9:30 a.m. in the Resources Building Auditorium, 1416 Ninth Street, Sacramento, California 95814. Members are welcome to participate via WebEx. The meeting agenda can be found here.
For more information regarding the Fish and Wildlife Strategic Vision, please visit www.vision.ca.gov
Public comments are always welcome and can be sent via email to: strategicvision@resources.ca.gov
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4. Cal-IPC's 20th Annual Symposium - Tahoe City
"Invasive Plants and Ecological Change"
Wednesday - Friday, October 5 - 7, 2011
Registration is now open! Save Money by registering before Sept. 2
Tuesday, October 4 - Pre-Symposium Field Course- Field Techniques for Recording and Reporting Invasive Plants
Wednesday - Thursday, October 5 & 6 - Symposium at Granlibakken Resort
Friday, October 7 - Field Trips around and over Lake Tahoe
The symposium promises a great line-up of talks, posters, and activities. Discounted room prices Granlibakken Resort if reserved by Friday Sept. 2.
Sessions address ecological change, statewide prevention progams, science, management, and policy interactions, climate change in the Sierra Nevada, laws and regulations related to herbicide application, and engaging discussion groups. The Symposium program is listed on our website.
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5. Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
Facilitation for Group Decision Making
Friday-Sunday August 12-14, 2011
This weekend workshop will give you practical tools to enjoy more effective and participatory meetings in your non-profit, your business or your community.
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=98qez7bab&v=001wqUa7FwuvM5CYZRTL3_yl5S-1zWq8ZR07x1EiUbItRNKIYRB-Bawcb_4b1UJT5Cr_VNh-czS3lNvibowGF_sODNxDnXxEMQhdoAGZ2leWCYU0C-Tdcpv5Q%3D%3D
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6. Guardian Weekly Fact of the week: More than 1 million hectares of Russian forest have been destroyed by fire this year, outstripping the disastrous record of 2010.
The news was coming from three hardhitting directions this week: from Washington and the global fallout from the downgrading by one credit agency of the US's rating; from all around us here in the UK, which has been hit by civil unrest; and from the Arab world, particularly Syria, where the death toll from security forces cracking down on pro-democracy protesters was thought to have passed 2,000.
Beyond that, there was also the momentous events in Egypt, with the formerly all-powerful Hosni Mubarak going on trial; the US suffering its worst-ever single-incident death toll in the Afghan war, with 30 troops after their helicopter was shot down; the continuing news of the African famine; and, the significant events - a UN report and an admission of liability from Shell - relating to oil spills in Ogoniland.
There aren't often news weeks like this.
Away from the news agenda, there's a reminder however that people have been seeking to find a way out of trouble for many years. We've a fascinating account of Wilhelm Reich, who claimed that better orgasms could cure society's ills, and invented a machine, the orgasmatron, to help the process, and we explore a new theory about how the geology of the moon reached its current state. We all need to get away from the everyday some of the time.
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7. Cybercrime
Black hats, grey hairs
A shake-up in the hacker underground and fresh attacks suggest change is coming to computer security
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
AN 18-YEAR-OLD with 16 computers in a small house in the Shetland Islands: that is where a police hunt ended for the global nerve centre of LulzSec, a group of hackers whose exploits include defacing or disabling the websites of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the CIA, a bunch of gay-bashing American Baptists, and Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. Active from May to late June, when it claims to have disbanded, LulzSec’s hallmark was prankish attacks accompanied by public mockery. As well as officialdom, its targets included computer-security and online-gaming companies regarded as pompous, complacent or hypocritical....
(Awww. Did they have to arrest them? Sounds like they were helping the world while having fun.)
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8. Feedback
On Aug 6, 2011, at 1:01 PM, Michael Alexander wrote:
Nevertheless, I have a streak of that in me, too. I am distrustful of this technology, with seemingly good reason. I got a letter in the mail yesterday from Health Net that their records had been hacked, and that other parties now have my SS #, my telephone, address, "financial information" (what does Health Net know about that?) &c. I dropped Health Net two or three years ago, btw.
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9. Raw materials
The revenge of Malthus
A famous bet recalculated
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
THE surge in commodity prices over the past decade has revived an old debate. Will mankind’s insatiable demands exhaust the planet’s finite resources? Or will human ingenuity lead to the more efficient use of existing raw materials and the discovery of new sources of supply?
The last, big commodity boom occurred in the 1970s. That coincided with the rise of the ecological movement, many of whose members saw the rise in prices as a sign that growth in the developed world was unsustainable. This led in 1980 to a bet between a prominent ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”, and Julian Simon, an economist at the Cato Institute, a free market think-tank. The two camps were dubbed the Malthusians (after a British economist who forecast that population would outstrip food supply) and the Cornucopians, thanks to their belief in endless abundance.
Faced with a challenge from Mr Simon, Mr Ehrlich selected five metals—copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten—whose prices he thought would rise in real terms over the following ten years. Mr Simon bet that prices would fall. It is clear in retrospect that Mr Ehrlich showed bad timing, since the late 1970s saw a cyclical zenith for commodity prices. But Mr Simon also had history on his side: real commodity prices fell steadily throughout the 20th century.
Mr Simon duly won the bet. The economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s also contradicted Mr Ehrlich’s wilder claims—that a billion people would starve to death and that, by 1985, America would be trapped in an “age of scarcity”.
But what if Mr Ehrlich had taken up Mr Simon’s 1990 offer to go “double or quits” for any future date? All five have risen in price since the rematch was proposed. Furthermore, Jeremy Grantham of GMO, a fund-management group, points out that Mr Ehrlich would have won the original bet were it recalculated today (he is still alive; Mr Simon died in 1998). An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart).
The Cornucopians might argue that today’s metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man’s famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets.
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10. Hair of the rat
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
VENOMOUS mammals are comparatively rare. The duck-billed platypus has poisonous spines. Some shrews and other insectivores have toxic saliva. And that’s about it. But work by Fritz Vollrath of Oxford University and his colleagues, just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, suggests that a species of rodent, the African crested rat, can make itself venomous by anointing itself with toxins from Acokanthera trees. Special porous hairs (see photograph), located on the animal’s flank, take up the poison, which is also used by some Kenyan hunters to tip their arrows. Woe betide any predator that gets a mouthful of such hairs when attacking a crested rat.
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11. Human beings and dogs
Man’s best friend
Scientific research throws new light on a very old partnership
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behaviour Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, by John Bradshaw.
The relationship between people and dogs is unique. Among domesticated animals, only dogs are capable of performing such a wide variety of roles for humans: herding sheep, sniffing out drugs or explosives and being our beloved companions. It is hard to be precise about when the friendship began, but a reasonable guess is that it has been going strong for more than 20,000 years. In the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche region of France, which contains the earliest known cave paintings, there is a 50-metre trail of footprints made by a boy of about ten alongside those of a large canid that appears to be part-wolf, part-dog. The footprints, which have been dated by soot deposited from the torch the child was carrying, are estimated to be about 26,000 years old.
The first proto-dogs probably remained fairly isolated from each other for several thousand years. As they became progressively more domesticated they moved with people on large-scale migrations, mixing their genes with other similarly domesticated creatures and becoming increasingly dog-like (and less wolf-like) in the process. For John Bradshaw, a biologist who founded the anthrozoology department at the University of Bristol, having some idea about how dogs got to be dogs is the first stage towards gaining a better understanding of what dogs and people mean to each other. Part of his agenda is to explode the many myths about the closeness of dogs to wolves and the mistakes that this has led to, especially in the training of dogs over the past century or so.
One idea has governed dog training for far too long, Mr Bradshaw says. Wolf packs are supposedly despotic hierarchies dominated by alpha wolves. Dogs are believed to behave in the same way in their dealings with humans. Thus training a dog effectively becomes a contest for dominance in which there can be only one winner. To achieve this the trainer must use a variety of punishment techniques to gain the dog’s submission to his mastery. Just letting a dog pass through a door before you or stand on the stairs above you is to risk encouraging it to believe that it is getting the upper hand over you and the rest of the household. Mr Bradshaw argues that the theory behind this approach is based on bad and outdated science.
Dogs share 99.6% of the same DNA as wolves. That makes dogs closer to wolves than we are to chimps (with which we have about 96% of our DNA in common), but it does not mean that their brains work like those of wolves. Indeed, the outgoing affability of most dogs towards humans and other dogs is in sharp contrast to the mix of fear and aggression with which wolves react to animals from other packs. “Domestication has been a long and complex process,” Mr Bradshaw writes. “Every dog alive today is a product of this transition. What was once another one of the wild social canids, the grey wolf, has been altered radically, to the point that it has become its own unique animal.” If anything, dogs resemble juvenile rather than fully adult canids, a sort of arrested development which accounts for the way they remain dependent on their human owners throughout their lives.
But what makes the dog-wolf paradigm especially misleading, Mr Bradshaw argues, is that until recently, the studies of wolves were of the wrong wolves in extremely artificial conditions. In the wild, wolf packs tend to be made up of close family members representing up to three generations. The father and mother of the first lot of cubs are the natural leaders of the pack, but the behavioural norm is one of co-operation rather than domination and submission. However, the wolves on which biologists founded their conclusions about dominance hierarchies were animals living in unnaturally constituted groups in captivity. Mr Bradshaw says that feral or “village” dogs, which are much closer to the ancestors of pet dogs than they are to wolves, are highly tolerant of one another and organise themselves entirely differently from either wild or captive wolves.
Dogs are not like nicely brought-up wolves, says the author, nor are they much like people despite their extraordinary ability to enter our lives and our hearts. This is not to deny that some dogs are very clever or that they are capable of feeling emotion deeply. But their intelligence is different from ours. The idea that some dogs can understand as many words as a two-year-old child is simply wrong and an inappropriate way of trying to measure canine intellect. Rather, their emotional range is more limited than ours, partly because, with little sense of time, they are trapped almost entirely in the present. Dogs can experience joy, anxiety and anger. But emotions that demand a capacity for self-reflection, such as guilt or jealousy, are almost certainly beyond them, contrary to the convictions of many dog owners.
Mr Bradshaw believes that it is difficult for people to empathise with the way in which dogs experience and respond to the world through their extraordinary sense of smell: their sensitivity to odours is between 10,000 and 100,000 times greater than ours. A newly painted room might be torture for a dog; on the other hand, their olfactory ability and their trainability allow dogs to perform almost unimaginable feats, such as smelling the early stages of a cancer long before a normal medical diagnosis would detect it.
The latest scientific research can help dogs and their owners have happier, healthier relationships by encouraging people to understand dogs better. But Mr Bradshaw is also fearful. In particular, he deplores the incestuous narrowing of the gene pool that modern pedigree breeders have brought about. Dogs today are rarely bred for their working abilities (herding, hunting, guarding), but for a very particular type of appearance, which inevitably risks the spread of physical and temperamental abnormalities. Instead, he suggests that dogs be bred for the ideal behavioural traits associated with the role they will actually play. He also worries that the increasing urbanisation of society and the pressures on couples to work long hours are putting dogs under huge strain. He estimates that about 20% of Britain’s 8m dogs and America’s 70m suffer from “separation distress” when their owners leave the house, but argues that sensible training can teach them how to cope.
“Dog Sense” is neither a manual nor a sentimental account of the joys of dog-ownership. At times its rigorously research-led approach can be slightly heavy going. A few more jolly anecdotes might have leavened the mix. But this is a wonderfully informative, quietly passionate book that will benefit every dog whose owner reads it.
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12.
2. Help SaveNature.org by voting daily
3. Fish & Game Commission Stakeholder Advisory Group - you can help it to be more responsive
4. Register early and save - Cal-IPC's 20th Annual Symposium
5. Facilitation for Group Decision Maker - in Occidental Aug 12-14
6. Exciting and stressful week highlighted, along with relief: the orgasmatron
7. Cybercrime: black hats, grey hairs - shakeup in the hacker underground
8. Feedback: No escape from hackers?
9. Raw materials--the revenge of Malthus. A famous bet recalculated
10. Clever rat anoints itself with toxins
11. Man's best friend: Scientific research throws new light on a very old partnership
12. All life is being lived/Who is living it then? Rainer Maria Rilke
1. America's Cup Environmental Council (ACEC) members (an ad hoc group of about 20 environmental organizations**) have read the America's Cup 1600-page DEIR and found it to be lacking in substantive detail. Therefore, we will a be holding a press conference on the steps of City Hall on the Polk Street side on Thursday, August 11th at 10 AM. Concerned people are strongly urged to attend to have more bodies. We are up against it, as there is power behind this event. Read on.
1. AC Event Authority will have huge support and turnout from City management responsible for bringing this event to SF, small businesses, labor, maritime services providers, boaters, marina operators and others salivating over the prospect of having about 1.6 million visitors to provide them some kind of potential for work and making money from the events, plus the races will be fun. This group will make heartfelt appeals to the Commission to accept, on faith, the DEIR because of the billions of dollar projected to be made and the excitement the Races will bring to the City.
2. The Event Authority has huge money and huge power; they can reach out to the very highest levels of our government and apply gentle pressure to make this thing happen, and make any stumbling blocks go away. They have mega-millions at stake and have pledged at least $270 million for promotion and hospitality!
3. Ellison himself, a billionaire hyper-competitive individual, has face at stake by bringing racing into an urban area for the first time and changing the races from a gentleman's sport into a sort of Monster Boat event with broad appeal; X-treme racing complete with hard hatted crew members being catapulted into the water on capsizes.
4. ACEC definitely wants the races to happen too, but not at the cost of sacrificing our environment in, on and next to the water. We want it done right in the most sustainable way, as promised by the Event Authority.
While the DEIR is out, impacts and mitigations are still being developed for Parks Event Operations Plan, Public Safety Plan, Sustainability Plan, Workforce Development Plan, Water and Air Traffic plan, Team Base Operation Plan. The only supporting document that has been published in draft form is the so called People Plan which is essentially the draft transportation plan. The DEIR is an empty suit.
** ARC Ecology, SF Baykeeper, CNPS, Clean Water Action, GGAS, GG Cetacean Research, Livable City, Nature in the City, NRDC, Planning & Conservation League, Save SF Bay, Sierra Club, SF Tomorrow, South End Rowing Club, Telegraph Hill Dwellers Assn, Turtle Island Research Network, Sea Scavengers, Sustainable Watershed Alliance, Walk SF
That same day, a hearing on the America's Cup DEIR will be held at the the Planning Commission. While the meeting itself starts at 12:30, the DEIR is #3 on the agenda so it is expected it will be heard maybe at 1:30. Maybe sooner, maybe later. Talking points are being drafted and will be distributed to all participants. ACEC needs a hefty turnout to 1) have a show of force and 2) to take a talking point (which will be made available) and speak at the hearing for only 1 minute.
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2.
SaveNature.Org was named a finalist in Tom’s of Maine’s 50 States for Good program! And, we have a chance to win $50,000.
Five nonprofits will be selected to receive $20k and one will receive $50, 000!! .
The favor is to ask you to vote at www.50statesforgood.com once every day, until September 13th (really, every day) Just scroll down the page to find SaveNature.Org! j
Bookmark this page http://www.tomsofmaine.com/community-involvement/living-well/finalists-overview/poll and vote when you open your email in the morning.
Also, in order for us to win, please send this link in an email to all y our friends as well as to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We need this to go viral, help us make that happen. Vote and vote often. Thanks for all your support.
(I'm not from Chicago, but I'm learning to feel comfortable voting often. JS)
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3. Staff Recommendations for Fish & Game Commission Stakeholder Advisory Group and Proposed Additions to Blue Ribbon Citizen Commission Announced
From Eric Mills, Action for Animals:
I'd suggest you get on their mailing list, if you're not already. This effort could have major impact upon California wildlife and policies.
A few changes I'd like to see:
1. Expansion of Fish & Game Commission to 7 or 9 members
2. Specific qualifications for the job (currently there are none). Currently, all Commissioners are hunters and/or fishers. That ain't enough! And in the Commission's 130 years, there have been only TWO women appointed (Cindy Gustafson the latest, and lamented). And no minorities, to my knowledge. (Unless you count Mike Flores.)
3. Commission members elected, or appointed by a non-partisan committee (currently all are appointed by the Governor, as is the Director--a major conflict of interest, in the eyes of many)
4. Commission to have the power to hire and/or fire the Director of the Department (as in Nevada and some other states). Currently, the Commission is only an advisory committee.
Thoughts?
Staff Recommendations for Stakeholder Advisory Group and Proposed Additions to Blue Ribbon Citizen Commission Announced
First Stakeholder Advisory Group meeting to be held Aug. 19
SACRAMENTO, Calif – The California Fish and Wildlife Strategic Vision staff made Stakeholder Advisory Group appointment recommendations to the Executive Committee today. The 52 staff-recommended members were selected from more than 130 applicants. The proposed members were selected using the criteria and interest areas mandated by AB 2376 (Huffman). The Executive Committee will hold a public meeting Wednesday, Aug. 10 where they will act on the staff recommendations. Following the Executive Committee’s action, the Stakeholder Advisory Group will later be broken out into smaller working groups in order to concentrate their efforts on specific issue areas. The staff recommendations are listed below and on the strategic vision website.
The first meeting of the Stakeholder Advisory Group will be held Friday, Aug. 19 at 9:30 a.m. in the Resources Building Auditorium, 1416 Ninth Street, Sacramento, California 95814. Members are welcome to participate via WebEx. The meeting agenda can be found here.
For more information regarding the Fish and Wildlife Strategic Vision, please visit www.vision.ca.gov
Public comments are always welcome and can be sent via email to: strategicvision@resources.ca.gov
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4. Cal-IPC's 20th Annual Symposium - Tahoe City
"Invasive Plants and Ecological Change"
Wednesday - Friday, October 5 - 7, 2011
Registration is now open! Save Money by registering before Sept. 2
Tuesday, October 4 - Pre-Symposium Field Course- Field Techniques for Recording and Reporting Invasive Plants
Wednesday - Thursday, October 5 & 6 - Symposium at Granlibakken Resort
Friday, October 7 - Field Trips around and over Lake Tahoe
The symposium promises a great line-up of talks, posters, and activities. Discounted room prices Granlibakken Resort if reserved by Friday Sept. 2.
Sessions address ecological change, statewide prevention progams, science, management, and policy interactions, climate change in the Sierra Nevada, laws and regulations related to herbicide application, and engaging discussion groups. The Symposium program is listed on our website.
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5. Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
Facilitation for Group Decision Making
Friday-Sunday August 12-14, 2011
This weekend workshop will give you practical tools to enjoy more effective and participatory meetings in your non-profit, your business or your community.
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=98qez7bab&v=001wqUa7FwuvM5CYZRTL3_yl5S-1zWq8ZR07x1EiUbItRNKIYRB-Bawcb_4b1UJT5Cr_VNh-czS3lNvibowGF_sODNxDnXxEMQhdoAGZ2leWCYU0C-Tdcpv5Q%3D%3D
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6. Guardian Weekly Fact of the week: More than 1 million hectares of Russian forest have been destroyed by fire this year, outstripping the disastrous record of 2010.
The news was coming from three hardhitting directions this week: from Washington and the global fallout from the downgrading by one credit agency of the US's rating; from all around us here in the UK, which has been hit by civil unrest; and from the Arab world, particularly Syria, where the death toll from security forces cracking down on pro-democracy protesters was thought to have passed 2,000.
Beyond that, there was also the momentous events in Egypt, with the formerly all-powerful Hosni Mubarak going on trial; the US suffering its worst-ever single-incident death toll in the Afghan war, with 30 troops after their helicopter was shot down; the continuing news of the African famine; and, the significant events - a UN report and an admission of liability from Shell - relating to oil spills in Ogoniland.
There aren't often news weeks like this.
Away from the news agenda, there's a reminder however that people have been seeking to find a way out of trouble for many years. We've a fascinating account of Wilhelm Reich, who claimed that better orgasms could cure society's ills, and invented a machine, the orgasmatron, to help the process, and we explore a new theory about how the geology of the moon reached its current state. We all need to get away from the everyday some of the time.
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7. Cybercrime
Black hats, grey hairs
A shake-up in the hacker underground and fresh attacks suggest change is coming to computer security
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
AN 18-YEAR-OLD with 16 computers in a small house in the Shetland Islands: that is where a police hunt ended for the global nerve centre of LulzSec, a group of hackers whose exploits include defacing or disabling the websites of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the CIA, a bunch of gay-bashing American Baptists, and Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. Active from May to late June, when it claims to have disbanded, LulzSec’s hallmark was prankish attacks accompanied by public mockery. As well as officialdom, its targets included computer-security and online-gaming companies regarded as pompous, complacent or hypocritical....
(Awww. Did they have to arrest them? Sounds like they were helping the world while having fun.)
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8. Feedback
On Aug 6, 2011, at 1:01 PM, Michael Alexander wrote:
Anything that has potential to invade his privacy? He better be a hermit on a mountaintop.
On Aug 6, 2011, at 11:31 AM, Jake Sigg wrote:
(I have a nephew in Montana who refuses to have a computer, cell phone, credit card, or anything that has potential to invade his privacy. JS)
D'accord. He and his now-deceased father were both so paranoid that I wondered how they got through their day. Uptight and suspicious.Nevertheless, I have a streak of that in me, too. I am distrustful of this technology, with seemingly good reason. I got a letter in the mail yesterday from Health Net that their records had been hacked, and that other parties now have my SS #, my telephone, address, "financial information" (what does Health Net know about that?) &c. I dropped Health Net two or three years ago, btw.
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9. Raw materials
The revenge of Malthus
A famous bet recalculated
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
THE surge in commodity prices over the past decade has revived an old debate. Will mankind’s insatiable demands exhaust the planet’s finite resources? Or will human ingenuity lead to the more efficient use of existing raw materials and the discovery of new sources of supply?
The last, big commodity boom occurred in the 1970s. That coincided with the rise of the ecological movement, many of whose members saw the rise in prices as a sign that growth in the developed world was unsustainable. This led in 1980 to a bet between a prominent ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”, and Julian Simon, an economist at the Cato Institute, a free market think-tank. The two camps were dubbed the Malthusians (after a British economist who forecast that population would outstrip food supply) and the Cornucopians, thanks to their belief in endless abundance.
Faced with a challenge from Mr Simon, Mr Ehrlich selected five metals—copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten—whose prices he thought would rise in real terms over the following ten years. Mr Simon bet that prices would fall. It is clear in retrospect that Mr Ehrlich showed bad timing, since the late 1970s saw a cyclical zenith for commodity prices. But Mr Simon also had history on his side: real commodity prices fell steadily throughout the 20th century.
Mr Simon duly won the bet. The economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s also contradicted Mr Ehrlich’s wilder claims—that a billion people would starve to death and that, by 1985, America would be trapped in an “age of scarcity”.
But what if Mr Ehrlich had taken up Mr Simon’s 1990 offer to go “double or quits” for any future date? All five have risen in price since the rematch was proposed. Furthermore, Jeremy Grantham of GMO, a fund-management group, points out that Mr Ehrlich would have won the original bet were it recalculated today (he is still alive; Mr Simon died in 1998). An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart).
The Cornucopians might argue that today’s metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man’s famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets.
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10. Hair of the rat
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
VENOMOUS mammals are comparatively rare. The duck-billed platypus has poisonous spines. Some shrews and other insectivores have toxic saliva. And that’s about it. But work by Fritz Vollrath of Oxford University and his colleagues, just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, suggests that a species of rodent, the African crested rat, can make itself venomous by anointing itself with toxins from Acokanthera trees. Special porous hairs (see photograph), located on the animal’s flank, take up the poison, which is also used by some Kenyan hunters to tip their arrows. Woe betide any predator that gets a mouthful of such hairs when attacking a crested rat.
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11. Human beings and dogs
Man’s best friend
Scientific research throws new light on a very old partnership
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behaviour Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, by John Bradshaw.
The relationship between people and dogs is unique. Among domesticated animals, only dogs are capable of performing such a wide variety of roles for humans: herding sheep, sniffing out drugs or explosives and being our beloved companions. It is hard to be precise about when the friendship began, but a reasonable guess is that it has been going strong for more than 20,000 years. In the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche region of France, which contains the earliest known cave paintings, there is a 50-metre trail of footprints made by a boy of about ten alongside those of a large canid that appears to be part-wolf, part-dog. The footprints, which have been dated by soot deposited from the torch the child was carrying, are estimated to be about 26,000 years old.
The first proto-dogs probably remained fairly isolated from each other for several thousand years. As they became progressively more domesticated they moved with people on large-scale migrations, mixing their genes with other similarly domesticated creatures and becoming increasingly dog-like (and less wolf-like) in the process. For John Bradshaw, a biologist who founded the anthrozoology department at the University of Bristol, having some idea about how dogs got to be dogs is the first stage towards gaining a better understanding of what dogs and people mean to each other. Part of his agenda is to explode the many myths about the closeness of dogs to wolves and the mistakes that this has led to, especially in the training of dogs over the past century or so.
One idea has governed dog training for far too long, Mr Bradshaw says. Wolf packs are supposedly despotic hierarchies dominated by alpha wolves. Dogs are believed to behave in the same way in their dealings with humans. Thus training a dog effectively becomes a contest for dominance in which there can be only one winner. To achieve this the trainer must use a variety of punishment techniques to gain the dog’s submission to his mastery. Just letting a dog pass through a door before you or stand on the stairs above you is to risk encouraging it to believe that it is getting the upper hand over you and the rest of the household. Mr Bradshaw argues that the theory behind this approach is based on bad and outdated science.
Dogs share 99.6% of the same DNA as wolves. That makes dogs closer to wolves than we are to chimps (with which we have about 96% of our DNA in common), but it does not mean that their brains work like those of wolves. Indeed, the outgoing affability of most dogs towards humans and other dogs is in sharp contrast to the mix of fear and aggression with which wolves react to animals from other packs. “Domestication has been a long and complex process,” Mr Bradshaw writes. “Every dog alive today is a product of this transition. What was once another one of the wild social canids, the grey wolf, has been altered radically, to the point that it has become its own unique animal.” If anything, dogs resemble juvenile rather than fully adult canids, a sort of arrested development which accounts for the way they remain dependent on their human owners throughout their lives.
But what makes the dog-wolf paradigm especially misleading, Mr Bradshaw argues, is that until recently, the studies of wolves were of the wrong wolves in extremely artificial conditions. In the wild, wolf packs tend to be made up of close family members representing up to three generations. The father and mother of the first lot of cubs are the natural leaders of the pack, but the behavioural norm is one of co-operation rather than domination and submission. However, the wolves on which biologists founded their conclusions about dominance hierarchies were animals living in unnaturally constituted groups in captivity. Mr Bradshaw says that feral or “village” dogs, which are much closer to the ancestors of pet dogs than they are to wolves, are highly tolerant of one another and organise themselves entirely differently from either wild or captive wolves.
Dogs are not like nicely brought-up wolves, says the author, nor are they much like people despite their extraordinary ability to enter our lives and our hearts. This is not to deny that some dogs are very clever or that they are capable of feeling emotion deeply. But their intelligence is different from ours. The idea that some dogs can understand as many words as a two-year-old child is simply wrong and an inappropriate way of trying to measure canine intellect. Rather, their emotional range is more limited than ours, partly because, with little sense of time, they are trapped almost entirely in the present. Dogs can experience joy, anxiety and anger. But emotions that demand a capacity for self-reflection, such as guilt or jealousy, are almost certainly beyond them, contrary to the convictions of many dog owners.
Mr Bradshaw believes that it is difficult for people to empathise with the way in which dogs experience and respond to the world through their extraordinary sense of smell: their sensitivity to odours is between 10,000 and 100,000 times greater than ours. A newly painted room might be torture for a dog; on the other hand, their olfactory ability and their trainability allow dogs to perform almost unimaginable feats, such as smelling the early stages of a cancer long before a normal medical diagnosis would detect it.
The latest scientific research can help dogs and their owners have happier, healthier relationships by encouraging people to understand dogs better. But Mr Bradshaw is also fearful. In particular, he deplores the incestuous narrowing of the gene pool that modern pedigree breeders have brought about. Dogs today are rarely bred for their working abilities (herding, hunting, guarding), but for a very particular type of appearance, which inevitably risks the spread of physical and temperamental abnormalities. Instead, he suggests that dogs be bred for the ideal behavioural traits associated with the role they will actually play. He also worries that the increasing urbanisation of society and the pressures on couples to work long hours are putting dogs under huge strain. He estimates that about 20% of Britain’s 8m dogs and America’s 70m suffer from “separation distress” when their owners leave the house, but argues that sensible training can teach them how to cope.
“Dog Sense” is neither a manual nor a sentimental account of the joys of dog-ownership. At times its rigorously research-led approach can be slightly heavy going. A few more jolly anecdotes might have leavened the mix. But this is a wonderfully informative, quietly passionate book that will benefit every dog whose owner reads it.
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12.
And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.
Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
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