Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Hi Stradee, I was watching the Nat'l news and began to worry about your dear - Oops, deer....... Grin
Oh, well, both you and your dEEr are included in my thoughts.

It appears ehBeth is having some higher than normal temps also. And, sumac must have gotten some rain - but, also has higher than normal temps. Looks like HS is headed into a tempest. Vietnam is being soundly battered by a tremendous storm. Japan isn't that far away.

Good luck everyone - our weather down here in NE TX is great - mid to low 90's during the day and low 70's at night.

Come on down!!! You can all click on my compy..........

Wait. I'll have to clear that with the boss - otherwise she'll shoot me, she does have her own gun ya know - we are in Texas.

Big grin!!!

HOT HOT HOT... and humid (good grief) and i haven't seen my deer buds for many days! Some crossing Applegate road with toddlers , plus many new Grouce babies (they are such a trip!) though. The dad sits in the middle of the road till mom and babies are safely on the other side. (just to cute) The male-all-grow-up-with-antlers-the-size-of-a-VW also absent since last year. Unusual. He usually travels with the new herd of baby's and moms. Unless he's just hiding (and that's a good possibility). Nature's sure giving us a what for this year.

Haven't heard from HS...will send an email today. Canada 90's and higher for other areas. Pond weather Sue, did you all get rain? (chanting)

Here's an article from NPR...(whatta mess)

What's Next In The Gulf Cleanup
by NPR Staff and Wires

text size A A A July 16, 2010 After months of fruitless effort, BP has finally put a stopper on the Deepwater Horizon well, halting the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The company says the cap is a temporary fix and offers no guarantees of success. As engineers continue watching the well for any changes deep underground, here's a look at possible next steps in the Gulf.

The Cap

BP engineers are monitoring the cap around the clock, looking for telltale pressure changes that might indicate problems in the concrete casing that lines the well. High pressure readings would indicate that the well walls are holding. Low pressure, below 6,000 pounds per square inch or so, could mean more leaks farther down in the well.

— If the test is declared a success, one possible next step would be to permanently kill the oil flow with a mud-and-cement plug injected from a relief well still being drilled. But engineers could opt to reopen some or all of the valves and bring the oil to the surface as an extra precaution against damaging the well.

— If pressure readings signal further instability, engineers would be forced to reopen valves on the cap stack and allow at least some of the oil to begin flowing again. If that happens, they hope the new tightly fitting cap will divert more of the crude so that it can be collected by ships.

In the weeks since the April 20 disaster, an estimated 92 million to 182 million gallons of oil have flowed into the Gulf. Before the well was sealed Thursday, the government estimated a daily flow of 1.5 million to 2.5 million gallons. At best, BP ships on the surface have been able to collect about 15,000 barrels a day — 25 percent to 40 percent of the total.

The Relief Well

Regardless of the final outcome of the cap testing, BP will go ahead with what it has said all along is the only proven, permanent way to shut off the undersea gusher — relief wells. For weeks, the company has been drilling two such wells.

A relief well intercepts the main well and is meant as a conduit through which to force a mud-and-cement plug that will permanently close off the flow of oil.

The first relief well was begun on May 2, and work on a second one — drilled on the opposite side of the main well as a precaution in case the first one failed to reach its target — was started two weeks later. BP expects the first to reach its target by the end of the month. The company thinks it could proceed with injecting the plug material sometime in August.

That procedure would effectively end the spill, leaving the enormous task of cleaning up.

The Cleanup

No one knows yet how exactly to scour hundreds of miles of fouled Gulf coast shoreline or how much it will cost.

Last month, Louisiana Treasurer John Kennedy estimated the total Gulf cleanup cost at $40 billion to $100 billion. The state has been hardest-hit by the spill, and Gov. Bobby Jindal unveiled a plan Wednesday to restore the coast, asking the federal government for $9 billion.

A number of skimmer ships, including a giant Taiwanese vessel capable of collecting 21 million gallons a day of oily water, are already in operation or are en route to the Gulf.

The economic fallout from the spill is likely to be felt for a very long time. About one-third of the region's fisheries have been shut down, and it's uncertain when they could be reopened.

Last week, BP said it had already spent $3.1 billion on the cleanup, which is likely to take years or possibly decades. On Friday, the company said 114,000 claims for damages from fishermen and other businesses have been filed. A total of $201 million worth of claims have been settled so far.

Where are my email notices from a2k?

Are the Hamsters on strike?

Hope this comes through to you.

WoW!

A not so good transmision this evening.

Your stuff is spectatular - everything that you send.

Keep it up!!!!!

We all love ya!!

the dan

Loud and clear

You all might not want to read the following...or maybe you hadn't heard...damn it! Cattle can be raised without utilizing wildlands!

Twelve wild horses die in Nevada roundup - take action!

Source: ALDF

Despite the public's outcry against young foals being run long distances in high temperatures during the height of summer, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) blazed forward with a plan to roundup 1,400 federally protected wild mustangs from Nevada's Tuscarora region in Elko County earlier this month. Tragically, the first day of the roundup resulted in the death of at least 12 horses and several others being treated for painful colic and brain swelling due to dehydration and exhaustion.

Help stop this massacre of America's wild horses! Contact your Representatives and Senators and urge them to call on the Interior Department and President Obama to immediately halt the BLM's summer roundups. In the next three months, 6,000 additional wild horses and burros are slated for removal, paid for with your tax dollars.

Violating their own protocol of waiting until mid-August (after the foaling season) to begin helicopter roundups, the BLM started the Nevada roundup on July 10. Adults and foals, some only days or weeks old, were chased up to eight miles over dangerously rocky and rugged terrain during the hottest part of the summer. Last winter, after being run over similar terrain, two foals suffered horrible deaths when their hooves separated from their leg bones.

While there is some debate around the reason for the gather - the BLM claims it's to protect the horses; wild horse advocates say it's driven by helicopter availability, using taxpayer money before the end of the fiscal year and making public lands available for cattle ranchers - there is no question that the horses' best interests should dictate the schedule and size of the roundup. Chasing mothers and their newborn foals across the desert during the hottest months of the year is clearly not protecting these majestic animals.

The BLM's mismanagement must be stopped before another horse suffers and dies at the agency's hands. Send a letter to your Representatives and Senators through ALDF's website, demanding a moratorium on all summer roundups. TAKE ACTION AT: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5154/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3686
###

Another huge problem: Horse 'owners' that can no longer care for the animals are turning them out in the Sierras, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, anywhere where the animals can't be identified back to the 'owner'. One beautiful horse found in Nevada had had the brand sliced off of his rump, then abandoned to his fate. Luckily, someone (not the BLM) found the animal and adopted him before he died from heat exhaustion and hunger.

An aquaintance had trailered she and another friends horses in a four horse rig. When they returned from their ride, there were two horses tied to the trailer with a note. "Please take...we can't care for them any longer." They loaded the animals and the horses are safe.

The economy is not only destroying many people's life styles, the animals in their care are also suffering. Dogs, cats, horses, livestock...all abandoned when people lose their jobs and homes.

If i hear one friggin' republican (except for HS and she wouldn't) deny unemployment extensions for the millions of people still out of work, i swear, i'll go ballistic! Keep the damned politics out of the equation until people can work again and take care of their families and companion animals!

In the meantime, if any good wildlclickers can afford to adopt a horse, dog or cat, please visit your local animal shelter. Thank you.

Just a note to cattle ranchers:

IF YOU MUST RUN YOUR CATTLE ON THOUSANDS OF ACRES OF FEDERAL LANDS OWNED BY TAXPAYERS...THEN FEED THE HORSES!

WILDLIFE HAS MORE OF A RIGHT TO FEED ON THE LAND THAN YOUR CATTLE OR SHEEP.

rant over till i win the lottery and hit washington in person!

Stradee, I totally agree - the wild horses are on taxpayers property and should have first choice on grazing grounds.

You also brought back some OLD memories for me. I trained horses during High School and would catch some of them using my personal horse and a rope. Most would stop when I had the rope around their necks - but, one day on a dead fast run I threw the loop around the horses neck, stopped my horse and the pony I roped fought so hard he finally just fell over from lack of air. After that I would rope the animal - jerk the slack in the loop and then I would with a twist of my hand throw a loop around the horses nose. Then stop my horse..... That worked really well. Never had another one fall over from lack of air.

Ah the younger days! Another time my riding buddy and I were going home after dark - we were riding along and passing an older man's home next to the roadway. We knew the man and had done some training work for him. In total darkness the man's dog started barking and raising cain - I flipped my rope in the direction of the dog's barking and of all things roped him. Then I couldn't get the rope off the dog because he was really mad. So, I went up to the man's house and by that time he was up and on the porch. I explained what happened - the man got the rope off his dog and after a bunch of sorry's we went on home. That old man talked about that until the day he died. It was sort of funny.

Yes, Danon, we are getting hammered by the heat and our rain amounted to a thimble-full, enough to get the grass growing again.

An Invader, Near the Great Lakes
By MONICA DAVEY
CHICAGO — After months of worrying over hints and signs and DNA traces suggesting that Asian carp, a voracious, nonnative fish, might be moving perilously close to the Great Lakes, the authorities here have uncovered the proof they did not want. They caught a fish.

One bighead carp — a 19.6-pound, 34.6-inch male — became entangled Tuesday in a fishing net about six miles from Lake Michigan, in part of a waterway that connects the Mississippi River system to the Great Lakes.

The authorities have searched for nearly a half-year with nets, chemicals and electrofishing equipment, but the fish was the first actual Asian carp to be found beyond an elaborate electric fence system officials spent years devising to avoid this very outcome.

The question state and federal authorities here are now racing to answer is whether the fish was somehow traveling alone — a prospect some environmental advocates consider absurd.

“Asian carp are like cockroaches; when you see one, you know it’s accompanied by many more you don’t see,” said Henry Henderson, of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The fish, which died after it was netted, has been rushed to Springfield, Illinois officials said. Scientists are expected to conduct tests on its scales and otolith (a structure in the inner ear) to determine its age and how long it may have lived in the waters that lead to Lake Michigan.

Around the Great Lakes, where scientists fear that the arrival of Asian carp could upend the ecosystem, the discovery reopened a simmering fight. Some leaders, particularly outside Chicago, want to cut off the waterway connection between the Mississippi River system, where Asian carp are already abundant, and Lake Michigan.

But federal authorities and Illinois leaders have pressed for measures that stop short of closing down commerce that runs along that route. On Wednesday, after the fish discovery was made public, an official from the Army Corp of Engineers said he saw no new reason to close the locks permanently.




More in U.S. (1 of 28 articles)
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My last reply disappeared into the ether. Will try again.

Stradee - I agree with you, sent my letter to my people about stopping the roundup, and I too am not getting email updates.

Dan - good stories about your roping days.

I have a lot of horse stories. Then, I worked in the oil fields on a drilling rig - many stories there. Worked as a maintenance person (millwright) for International Paper for one yr. (That's what I told the old bear of a foreman when he interviewed me and asked what I would like to do for the company - the correct response would have been "Like to make this my lifes work" - but, I said, "I want to work here for one year then move on to another job." - The old man just looked at me and said, "Son, that ain't the right answer." he hired me anyway and I worked there for one year then put on a suit and worked for a small loan company. Then, sold life insurance for about four months - hated that job. Worked in Dallas, TX in a stock brokerage for almost three yrs - interesting time. During the interview for that job the manager asked me if I thought I was honest - I said, "Relatively." He almost turned purple and asked what I meant - I said, "If I am in the middle of the block and need to cross the street quickly then I would 'J' walk, knowing that it wouldn't be honest." He hired me. Then, received my Greetings letter from Uncle Sam - drafting me in the U.S. Army. That's were I spent the next twenty-two years.

I have been noticing the little discrepencies in system lately. Hope it all works itself out and is ok.

Thanks sue, and all your buddies as well. Sorry bout the rain ...still ommmmmmmmmmm ing

It's a damned shame what humans do to animals thought weaker then man. They are not weaker....just can't compete with guns, helicopters, and whatever else humans toss at them.

Dan, luv your stories. Thanks for the smile.

July 19, 2010
Adventures in Very Recent EvolutionBy NICHOLAS WADE
Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.

The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.

Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution.

Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.

“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.

One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.

About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes — 23 percent of the human total — were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection — probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.

Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is “sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.

From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.

A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.

She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold. Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. “One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.

One of the most visible human adaptations is that of skin color. Primates have unpigmented skin beneath their fur. But when humans lost their fur, perhaps because they needed bare skin to sweat efficiently, they developed dark skin to protect against ultraviolet light.

Coloring the skin may sound simple, but nature requires at least 25 different genes to synthesize, package and distribute the melanin pigment that darkens the skin and hair. The system then had to be put into reverse when people penetrated the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia and acquired lighter skin, probably to admit more of the sunlight required to synthesize vitamin D.

Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them.

East Asians have several genetic variants that are rare or absent in Europeans and Africans. Their hair has a thicker shaft. A version of a gene called EDAR is a major determinant of thicker hair, which may have evolved as protection against cold, say a team of geneticists led by Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan.

Most East Asians also have a special form of a gene known as ABCC11, which makes the cells of the ear produce dry earwax. Most Africans and Europeans, on the other hand, possess the ancestral form of the gene, which makes wet earwax. It is hard to see why dry earwax would confer a big survival advantage, so the Asian version of the gene may have been selected for some other property, like making people sweat less, says a team led by Koh-ichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University.

Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.

One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.

The cases of natural selection that have been tracked so far take the form of substantial sweeps, with a new version of a gene being present in a large percentage of the population. These hard sweeps are often assumed to start from a novel mutation. But it can take a long time for the right mutation to occur, especially if there is a very small target, like the region of DNA that controls a gene. In the worst case, the waiting time would be 300,000 generations, according to a calculation by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. And indeed, there are not many hard sweeps in the human genome.

But the new evidence that humans have adapted rapidly and extensively suggests that natural selection must have other options for changing a trait besides waiting for the right mutation to show up. In an article in Current Biology in February, Dr. Pritchard suggested that a lot of natural selection may take place through what he called soft sweeps.

Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.

Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.

July 19, 2010
Birds Chose Different Path to Manage Their SexesBy NICHOLAS WADE
Some 300 million years ago, the living ancestor of humans was a reptile. Like turtles and alligators today, it let the temperature at which its eggs were incubated decide their sex.

Birds and mammals, two groups that descended from the reptiles, put sex under the more reliable control of genes, not of temperature. But sex-determining genes pose a severe problem for the organization of a genome. In a series of experiments over the past 15 years, David Page of the Whitehead Institute has reconstructed many of the steps in the evolution of the human sex chromosomes, which he calls “an infinitely rich experiment of nature.” He has now started to analyze a parallel experiment, the sex chromosomes of birds.

In humans, men have an X and a Y chromosome, and women two X’s. In reptilian times, the X and the Y were an ordinary pair of chromosomes until the male-determining gene landed on the Y. Thereupon the Y started shedding the genes it held in common with the X and shriveled to a fraction of its former size.

Birds have evolved a similar system with a twist — it’s the male that has two of the same chromosomes. Their sex chromosomes are called the Z and W, with males having two Z’s and females a Z and a W. The Z and W are derived from a different pair of ancestral chromosomes than the X and Y, a team led by Daniel W. Bellott and Dr. Page report in the current issue of Nature. The Z’s evolution has in several ways paralleled that of the X, even though each is associated with a different sex.

Both chromosomes have acquired genes related to the function of the testicles. With the help of the Washington University School of Medicine’s Genome Center, Dr. Page’s team has analyzed the DNA of the chicken’s Z and found that 15 percent of it consists of an array of sperm-related genes, many of them present in multiple copies.

Genes that benefit only males are likely to lead a safer life on the Y chromosome, which never enters a woman’s body, and indeed the Y chromosome is a sanctuary for sperm-making genes. More surprising is that the X chromosome, too, has added sperm-related genes, which of course are activated only in the cells of the testicles. “This flies in the face of common wisdom about the X, that it must be a female-biased chromosome,” Dr. Page said.

The Z and the X share another evolutionary feature: both, Dr. Page’s team has found, are padded with repetitive DNA sequences of no obvious function. The Z has picked up some 40 million units of this kind of DNA and X twice that amount. The padding seems to be a consequence of their withdrawal from the major ritual of chromosomal life, the swapping of chunks of DNA prior to making eggs and sperm.

These swaps generate new combinations of genes and hence individuals that differ from their parents. But the sex chromosomes, paradoxically, cannot engage in this central purpose of sex lest the sex-determining gene pass into the genome of the opposite sex.

Because the X and Y do not recombine for most of their length, the Y chromosome cannot repair damaged genes with backup copies from the X and has shed these damaged genes through evolutionary history. Its partner the X can refresh damaged genes through recombination with another X when next it finds itself in a woman’s body.

Most of the genes that the Y has retained maintain their genetic health by an unusual procedure. The genes are arranged in head-to-head copies so that when the DNA bends like a hairpin, a bad unit on one copy can be corrected from the good unit on the other.

These pairs of genes form giant palindromes of DNA, a distinctive feature of the Y chromosome’s structure discovered by Dr. Page and colleagues in 2003. The W chromosome in birds is in the same predicament as the Y and may have hit on the same solution, but so far has defied decoding. “It could be there are palindromes in there but they are not yet visible,” Dr. Page said.

Masculinity in people is attained with a single Y, so why do male birds need two Z’s? The solution was found last year by a group led by Craig A. Smith and Andrew H. Sinclair of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. In humans, the default condition is female and the reproductive organs develop as male in the presence of the male-determining gene’s protein.

In birds, sex is determined by the dose of the sex gene, which the Melbourne team identified as one called DMRT1. Bird embryos exposed to a single dose develop as female; two copies of the gene make a male.

“I see an endless chain of revelations in the future that will come from comparing the human X and Y to other sex chromosomes of species at different evolutionary distances,” Dr. Page said.

July 19, 2010
Conserving a Conservation FundIn 1964, Congress approved a quiet little environmental program to provide a steady revenue stream to save America’s disappearing open spaces from development. Conceived under Dwight Eisenhower, proposed by John F. Kennedy and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, the Land and Water Conservation Fund would be underwritten by royalties from offshore oil and gas leases. This gave it a fitting symmetry: dollars raised from depleting one natural resource would protect another.

The program has added millions of acres to the nation’s inventory of parks, wildlife refuges, forests and state recreational areas. It also has provided timely emergency funds. In 1996, President Bill Clinton tapped the fund to buy out a Canadian company whose proposed gold mine threatened Yellowstone National Park; last month, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land tapped it to complete the deal by purchasing the remaining mining claims.

The revenue stream, however, has been anything but reliable. Though the annual authorized spending level is $900 million, Congress has usually appropriated far less (dipping below $150 million during the mid-1990s), and using the unappropriated funds for other purposes, like deficit reduction.

Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat, would change that. He can’t reach back and retrieve the $16 billion Congress has shortchanged the program. But last week, at his urging, the House Natural Resources Committee reauthorized the customary $900 million. Most important, it set up a dedicated account to receive the money — a trust fund insulated from the appropriations process and readily available year after year. (Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Max Baucus of Montana, both Democrats, are promoting a similar idea in the Senate.)

The new dedicated account is part of a broader bill written in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and aimed at strengthening federal oversight of drilling on federal lands. Three other House committees are also considering spill-related measures. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, will eventually try to combine them in one bill.

That could be a messy process, and Ms. Pelosi must make sure the fund survives it. A program designed to protect America’s landscapes itself needs protection.

July 19, 2010
A Universe of UsWe think of ourselves as individuals — perhaps, in philosophical moments, as the merger of body and soul. Most of us are barely aware of the estimated 10 trillion individual cells that make up the human body or of the 100 trillion or more bacteria that live collaboratively and benignly within and upon us. Whatever else we are, we are also a complex ecosystem, a habitat.

Scientists now have discovered another realm within our habitat — the virome, a large community of viruses. These are not the viruses that make us sick. These are an integral part of the microbiotic universe that makes us healthy.

In a recent paper in Nature, a team led by Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University, reports that each of us has, so to speak, a viral identity — a pattern of viral DNA that is highly stable and highly distinct, even among closely related humans. This is unlike bacterial communities, which tend to evolve over time and to be similar among family members.

This discovery is part of a rapidly growing interest in the microbiome — an effort to understand the diversity and complexity of the trillions of organisms living within each of us. The basic exploratory technique is broad-scale DNA sequencing of the genetic contents of the human gut. The result is a significantly different view of who we are.

We are not just the expression of an individual human genome. We are, as Dr. Gordon writes, “a genetic landscape,” a collective of genomes of hundreds of different species all working together — in ways that leave our minds mysteriously free to focus on getting our bodies to the office and wondering what’s for lunch.

I know you all are tired of reading, but the following is an important article.

July 20, 2010, 10:22 am

A Worried View of the Amazon From Within its Forest
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Lou Gold, a longtime commenter who lives in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon basin, is an invaluable member of the worldwide Dot Earth community (people from more than 200 countries have visited the blog). He reacted strongly to my recent cautiously upbeat statement — made while conducting an onstage interview with a Brazilian ecologist — about prospects that the rain forests there could persist through this century even as human numbers and appetites crest. Gold posted a series of comments following the Amazon piece, and has consolidated them with a post on his blog, Visionshare. You can read the full post below.

After many interviews with biologists and climate scientists focused on the Amazon, as well as people like Bruce Babbitt, the former United States secretary of the interior who has spent a lot of time crisscrossing the Amazon, I remain convinced that there is a path to development for Brazil — even with the growing global appetite for soy and biofuels and roads to the Pacific — that can preserve a large fraction of the vast forest region. But it won’t happen without sustained focus on focusing agriculture where it makes sense and finding policies that avoid the fishbone pattern of settlement and tree cutting that has historically followed big roads.

I’m way overdue to return to Amazonia to get a look at the prime issues on the ground. In the meantime, I’m meeting later this week with Marina Silva, the former Brazilian secretary of the environment who’s now running for president, and will report her views.

Here’s Lou Gold’s post:

Andy, you ask that I chime in from my perch in Acre, Brazil. I’m not a scientist or an expert. I’m just a guy who loves forests and tries to speak for the trees. Here’s how I used to perform my mission in the States. Here’s what I see now:

The drama of the future of the Amazon basin is indeed playing out here in western Amazônia, in the tri-national region called by the acronym MAP — Madre de Dios in Peru, Acre in Brazil and Pando in Bolivia — where the biodiversity of nature’s garden is connecting with human aspirations for economic development and a better life. This region used to be considered as the “end of the road” because it literally was. But with modernization and infrastructure development — bridges, roads, rural electrification, Internet and more — contact and globalization have set human and wild nature on an ugly collision course. While Acre has been able to make many initiatives toward sustainable development, across the border in much poorer Madre de Dios (Mother of God) it’s an often violent confrontation over illegal logging of mahogany and/or “informal mining” in an out-of-control race to grab valuable resources that I covered in my post focusing on the gold rush in Peru.

The post doesn’t mention the new road to the Pacific or the ethanol plant and sugarcane plantations; or the planned road from Cruzeiro do Sul, Brazil to Pulcallpa, Peru and the multiple big hydro-energy dam constructions it will support; or the new Peruvian oil leases in indigenous reserves; or the BR$35 million worth of oil exploration in the Juruá watershed in Acre; or the Madeira River complex of big hydroelectric projects in Rondonia near Bolivia. Basically, wherever I look I see that development — including both its promises and problems — is in the driver seat.

Apparently, much the same is happening across the Amazon basin in a rushed effort to provide an energy and transportation infrastructure that can keep pace with Brazil’s spectacular economic growth. In brief, just as in other places such as China, economic growth is triggering an energy crisis. In Brazil, the immediate remedies for this very real need are seen in the massive number of unharnessed rivers of the Amazon basin and in oil deposits in the jungles of Western Amazônia (not to mention the vast deposits of deep-drilled oil located off-shore along the coast of Rio de Janeiro which is another story).

In the Aspen presentation Fabio Scarano appropriately mentioned the horribly misdirected intention of the Lula Administration to rush the much resisted Belo Monte Dam online. But he didn’t mention that Brazil is also accelerating an investment of several hundred billions in the interior development plan PAC2 that includes the intention to complete 50 new hydroelectric projects in the next 4 years and, of course, more and better roads. Yes, there is the emerging Amazon Fund to stall deforestation AND there also are ten times that investment in infrastructure development. Read the rest…

keeping me viromes happy

The last paragraph brought a smile. Yep, and hope nobody sneezes on your neck during the elevator ride. yikes

From the Hill: The Senate will approve an extension of unemployment benefits Tuesday after voting to end debate on the measure. wuuhuu!!!


dan, ya might find the following PBS show interesting...

8:00PM-9:00PM
NOVA: B-29 Frozen in Time

NOVA follows an adventure to try to retrieve an almost intact B-29 from the Arctic Circle. The airplane crash-landed nearly 50 years earlier during a secret mission for the U.S. The pilots survived the crash and were rescued, but the B-29 was left in the harsh and unforgiving climate 250 miles north of Thule, Greenland. Battling unpredictable weather, an unforgiving landscape, limited equipment, illness, and fatigue, pilot Darryl Greenamyer and his team rush to refurbish the plane before the harsh winter sets in.

sue, still reading...

then tons of outdoor/indoor work to accomplish today

I seem to recall them digging the airplane up many years ago. I don't think they got it all up - maybe so by now.. Interesting, and I'm sure with the ice melting all over there will be more stuff - er, uniced.

Thanks, sumac - will read it all later.

Good moorning all the wonderful wildclickers. Clicked and off to work outside while it is bearable.

Good afternoon all ~

to hot for dancin' and the grounds to dry to plow...

indoors for the duration

Dan, i haven't seen the PBS piece yet...but i'm guessing they will have gathered all the information from whenever it was they began the recovery of the plane, till now. Should be interesting.

nap time...