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Human-made Crises ‘Outrunning Our Ability To Deal With Them,’ Scientists Warn
Science News
The world faces a compounding series of crises driven by human activity, which existing governments and institutions are increasingly powerless to cope with, a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists has warned.
Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say that nations alone are unable to resolve the sorts of planet-wide challenges now arising.
Pointing to global action on ozone depletion (the Montreal Protocol), high seas fisheries and antibiotic drug resistance as examples, they call for a new order of cooperative international institutions capable of dealing with issues like climate change – and enforcing compliance where necessary…
(17 Sept 2009)
City life is a honey trap from Frances’ beleaguered bees
Alexandra Mauviel, The Independent
In Aesop’s fable, the country mouse scurried home from the city with his tail between his legs. But in Paris, French bee-keepers are finding their charges have better luck in the buzz of the big smoke than they do in rural climes – living longer and producing more honey.
While bee colonies across rural France are dying in swarms, two beehives that have been on the roof of a giant exhibition hall beside the Champs-Elysées since last spring are thriving.
The experiment in urban living for bees is intended as a warning signal to the French government, which has been accused of ignoring the plight of rural bees and bee-keepers.
In May, the Grand Palais exhibition hall decided to place two beehives on the edge of its huge glass and steel dome. Each beehive contains over 80,000 “buckfast bees”, a British species described by experts as “gentle, prolific and resistant”. Four months later, more than 100lb of honey has been gathered from the two hives.
…Henri Clement, president of France’s main apiarist union, Unaf, says changes in French agriculture have damaged the bees’ habitat. “Both monoculture and the intensive use of pesticides, fungicides and fertilisers kill massive numbers of bees,” he explained.
(14 Sept 2009)
A New Way to Turn Plastic Into Fuel?
Matthew Wald, New York Times
Entrepreneurs have been trying for years to turn low-value wastes into high-value products. Waste plastic is among the lowest in value, and gasoline or diesel fuel the highest, but machines that carry out that conversion usually consume a lot of energy and get gummed-up by leftover materialthat they cannot convert.
Now a company in Washington, D.C., is trying out a new way — heating the plastic to a very carefully controlled temperature range, with infrared energy.
The company, Envion, is expected to cut the ribbon on Wednesday morning on a $5 million plant that it says will annually convert 6,000 tons of plastic into nearly a million barrels of something resembling oil. The product can be blended with other components and sold as gasoline or diesel.
“We are the world’s largest oil consumer and the world’s biggest producer of waste,’’ said Michael Han, chairman and chief executive of the company.
This process will convert one to the other for about $10 a barrel, he said…
(16 Sept 2009)
Don’t despair — get out there and do something
Silver Donald Cameron, The Nova Scotian
DESPAIR is a useless emotion. And there is no such thing as false hope.
I learned these things years ago, when someone I loved lay dying. A medical moron — a celebrated specialist, with an entourage of students — came to her bedside and told her she would be dead in a few weeks and she’d better get used to the idea. When he left, I went scuttling after him, demanding to know just how the hell he thought he was helping.
…By its nature, hope occurs in conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes it’s fulfilled, sometimes not. It may be faint. But it’s never false.
I remembered all this when I read Chris Turner’s article The Age of Breathing Underwater in The Walrus magazine. Turner is the author of an admirable book called The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need. His obsession is the need to maintain hope and optimism in a world that human beings have sent spinning towards environmental catastrophe. Action depends on hope. You can’t rouse people to strenuous effort and sweeping change if they believe that their efforts will be pointless.
(20 Sept 2009)
Conservation for a New Era (report)
IUCN
IUCN has just published Conservation for a New Era, which is the latest analysis of the state of conservation today. The book outlines the critical issues facing us in the 21st century, developed from the results of last year’s World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. IUCN’s Senior Science Advisor Jeff McNeely takes us through this landmark publication.
(16 Sept 2009)
The report is available here.
