Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Good morning wildclickers. All clicked and ready to go outside.

Good morning sue

I cannot believe it's been 50 years since Jane Goodall began her work with chimps. On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika. It was her first arrival at what was then called the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, a small protected area that had been established by the British colonial government back in 1943.

Wow...I was born in SF on 7/14/43!!!!!!!!!! trippy

Anyhooo, NG has put together a wonderful article w/pics of Jane Goodall's life studying, educating, and protecting chimps. Enjoy

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/gombe-hub?source=email_inside

You may not connect with the link, and if not, go to NG.com and type Jane Goodall's name in 'search'.

October 5, 2010
For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.

“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.”

Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.

They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power — a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels — is not without emissions of its own.

Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families have sued to have 100 turbines removed from a wind farm there. A judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case in June.

Like the Lindgrens, many of the people complaining the loudest are reluctant converts to the antiwind movement.

“The quality of life that we came here for was quiet,” Mrs. Lindgren said. “You don’t live in a place where you have to take an hour-and-15-minute ferry ride to live next to an industrial park. And that’s where we are right now.”

The wind industry has long been dogged by a vocal minority bearing all manner of complaints about turbines, from routine claims that they ruin the look of pastoral landscapes to more elaborate allegations that they have direct physiological impacts like rapid heart beat, nausea and blurred vision caused by the machines’ ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations.

For the most extreme claims, there is little independent backing.

Last year, the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, along with its Canadian counterpart, assembled a panel of doctors and acoustical professionals to examine the potential health impacts of wind turbine noise. In a paper published in December, the panel concluded that “there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.”

A separate study financed by the Energy Department concluded late last year that, in aggregate, property values were unaffected by nearby wind turbines.

Numerous studies also suggest that not everyone will be bothered by turbine noise, and that much depends on the context into which the noise is introduced. A previously quiet setting like Vinalhaven is more likely to produce irritated neighbors than, say, a mixed-use suburban setting where ambient noise is already the norm.

Of the 250 new wind farms that have come online in the United States over the last two years, about dozen or so have generated significant noise complaints, according to Jim Cummings, the founder of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, an online clearinghouse for information on sound-related environmental issues.

In the Vinalhaven case, an audio consultant hired by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection determined last month that the 4.5-megawatt facility was, at least on one evening in mid-July when Mr. Lindgren collected sound data, in excess of the state’s nighttime sound limits. The developer of the project, Fox Island Wind, has contested that finding, and negotiations with state regulators are continuing.

In the moonlit woods behind a neighbor’s property on a recent evening, Mr. Lindgren, a retired software engineer, clenched a small flashlight between his teeth and wrestled with a tangle of cables and audio recording equipment he uses to collect sound samples for filing complaints.

At times, the rustle of leaves was all that could be heard. But when the surface wind settled, a throbbing, vaguely jetlike sound cut through the nighttime air. “Right there,” Mr. Lindgren declared. “That would probably be out of compliance.”

Maine, along with many other states, puts a general limit on nighttime noise at 45 decibels — roughly equivalent to the sound of a humming refrigerator. A normal conversation is in the range of 50 to 60 decibels.

In almost all cases, it is not mechanical noise arising from the central gear box or nacelle of a turbine that residents react to, but rather the sound of the blades, which in modern turbines are mammoth steel appendages well over 100 feet long, as they slice through the air.

Turbine noise can be controlled by reducing the rotational speed of the blades. But the turbines on Vinalhaven already operate that way after 7 p.m., and George Baker, the chief executive of Fox Island Wind — a for-profit arm of the island’s electricity co-operative — said that turning the turbines down came at an economic cost.

“The more we do that, the higher goes the price of electricity on the island,” he said.

A common refrain among homeowners grappling with sound issues, however, is that they were not accurately informed about the noise ahead of time. “They told us we wouldn’t hear it, or that it would be masked by the sound of the wind blowing through the trees,” said Sally Wylie, a former schoolteacher down the road from the Lindgrens. “I feel duped.”

Similar conflicts are arising in Canada, Britain and other countries . An appeals court in Rennes, France, recently ordered an eight-turbine wind farm to shut down between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. so residents could get some sleep.

Richard R. James, an acoustic expert hired by residents of Vinalhaven to help them quantify the noise problem, said there was a simpler solution: do not put the turbines so close to where people live.

“It would seem to be time for the wind utility developers to rethink their plans for duplicating these errors and to focus on locating wind turbines in areas where there is a large buffer zone of about a mile and one-quarter between the turbines and people’s homes,” said Mr. James, the principal consultant with E-Coustic Solutions, based in Michigan.

Vinalhaven’s wind farm enjoys support among most residents, from ardent supporters of all clean energy to those who simply say the turbines have reduced their power bills. Deckhands running the ferry sport turbine pins on their hats, and bumper stickers seen on the island declare “Spin, Baby, Spin.”

“The majority of us like them,” said Jeannie Conway, who works at the island’s ferry office.

But that is cold comfort for Mrs. Lindgren and her neighbors, who say their corner of the island will never be the same.

“I remember the sound of silence so palpable, so merciless in its depths, that you could almost feel your heart stop in sympathy,” she said. “Now we are prisoners of sonic effluence. I grieve for the past.”

That's gotta be horrible for those poor people. who knew it would be so loud........

Yeah, Stradee - I cannot believe how fast time is moving -- that is scary.

clicked

sitting here in a down vest and wool cap

I am NOT turning that furnace on til Turkey Day.

Thank goodness that's only another 4 / 5 days.

Turkey Day - the anniversary of the WildClicking clothesline here in Toronto!

Turbine noise, and birds flying into blades. Not good

Cell phone towers are another detriment...poor birds get all turned around.

Then there's the golf course management deciding to shoot Canadian Snow Geese for hanging out at the pond, and not migrating soon enough. Just to much doodoo on the lawns for golfer sensibilities.

Turned the furnace on yesterday morning...very cold w/frozen face. owie

Then this afternoon, temps high 70's...sat in the sunshine and read.

Tomorrow? Who knows what the weather will bring.

Happy Turkey Day

Turned the furnace on this morning to take the chill out of the air. Outside tempt was 45. It will warm up to around 70 and by Friday it will be pushing 80.

Read the Jane Goodall article - long - but endlessly fascinating.

Read it - saw the movie - heard about it for years - love it.

Thanks all who clicked to save a tree today.

I so admire those who work with wildlife and accomplish so much for the species. Amazing skills...

Have a good evening all ~

fINALLY, A THEORY AS TO WHAT CAUSED THE BEE DISAPPEARANCE.


October 6, 2010

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER — It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past — developing, for example, a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines.

But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own.

“Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at,” said Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” team.

Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis — a skill not taught at West Point — became a factor.

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic.

Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.

“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.

The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for.

But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.

Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.

The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. “I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”

The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste.

Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role.

They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected.

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

In any event, the university’s bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.

October 6, 2010

Bear Hunt Training, Minus the Bear

By ROBBIE BROWN

TRAVELERS REST, S.C. — Later this month, camouflage-clad hunters and packs of dogs will set off across the densely forested foothills and rushing creeks here in western South Carolina for an age-old rite of fall: bear-hunting season.

“It’s one of the toughest, most exhausting sports there is,” said Roy Stiles, 64, of Travelers Rest, a longtime hunter and retired college professor. “You can track a bear for 15 miles before you tree it and shoot it — and then you still have to drag it out of the woods.”

But this may be the last year that hunters anywhere in the country can prepare their dogs for these grueling outings by using an obscure practice called bear baying that dates back at least to the 1800s. Under criticism from animal rights groups, South Carolina is debating a legal ban on the practice of restraining a captive black bear while hunting dogs surround it and bark feverishly. The training, still popular in rural areas of this state, is designed to replicate the conditions of a wild bear encounter and to familiarize dogs with the animal’s behavior.

“This is uncivilized and barbaric to a totally defenseless bear,” said Joel Lourie, a Democratic state senator who said he planned to introduce a ban on the activity when the State Legislature reconvenes in January.

Baying — so called because of the dogs’ howling at the bear — is protected by a loophole in South Carolina law. No other states allow it, according to animal rights experts.

The practice, which does not involve shooting bears, came under widespread public criticism in recent weeks after the Humane Society of the United States released hidden-camera footage of four events at which dogs appear to have bitten bears. The videos show grainy images of dogs snarling and lunging at bears tethered on short leashes in metal cages, as dozens of people watch.

In South Carolina, there are 21 bears kept privately in captivity, usually in backyard cages, as pets or tourist spectacles, the state Department of Natural Resources says. But only a few of those are believed to be involved in bear baying.

More than 20 states allow bear hunting, but all the others and most industrialized countries have outlawed baying, animal rights groups say. England banned the practice in 1835, and New York became the first state to ban it, in 1856.

“It’s one of those awful micro-cultures of animal cruelty,” said Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society. “There are some people who think this is useful in training their bear-hunting dogs. But it’s basically blood-sport entertainment.”

In recent years, animal rights groups have increasingly gone after niche sports and some hunting-training practices. Under pressure from the Humane Society, Florida recently banned “fox penning” (trapping foxes for dog-training exercises), Alabama outlawed “canned hunts” (keeping animals confined to make hunting them easier), and Pennsylvania is debating a ban on “pigeon shooting” (propelling the birds from mechanical launchers for target practice).

But in South Carolina, which had a record bear hunting season last year, with 92 bears killed, baying has supporters among some lawmakers and among bear owners who say they are vilified and misunderstood.

Robbie Grumbles, 62, a carpenter from Travelers Rest, a mountainous town of 4,000 people, owns three black bears as pets, one of which was used in a baying session this year that the Humane Society filmed. He said that baying was an infrequent part of his bears’ lives — they are used in three or four events a year — and that the training ensures that dogs are able to avoid being mauled by bears.

Mr. Grumbles, whom friends call the Bear Man, keeps his bears in cages on his 14-acre property. He nursed them as cubs on baby bottles in his living room. He feeds them dog food and powdered-sugar donuts — and, as dessert, hard candy dispensed directly from his own lips. The notion that he would ever allow his bears to be physically or emotionally harmed, he said, is absurd.

“This has all gotten political,” he said. “The Humane Society has got millions of dollars, and I’ve got maybe 35 cents.”

Perhaps the greatest disagreement about baying involves its rules. The Humane Society says bears are declawed and defanged, which owners deny. The animal rights group says the goal of the activity is to force a bear onto its hind legs, making it easier to shoot in the stomach, but hunters say that stance would actually make a bear harder to kill. Opponents say dogs regularly bite the bears, but hunters say the videos show only the most aggressive dogs, many of which were banned from future baying events.

Cruel or not, bear baying is going to be phased out, even without a ban, said State Representative David R. Hiott, a Republican from Pickens County, one of three counties that allow bear hunting each October. In 2005, the state stopped allowing residents to capture or breed new bears in captivity. So when these 20 bears die off, in perhaps 30 years, no more baying will be possible, he said.

But the public has been outraged. In newspaper editorials and radio call-in shows, residents across South Carolina have argued that baying reinforces a negative perception about a state that should be praised for its natural resources and abundant wildlife.

South Carolina has grappled with other controversial animal practices. In 2006, after the state’s agriculture commissioner pleaded guilty to taking a bribe to protect a cockfighting ring, Gov. Mark Sanford approved legislation increasing penalties for animal blood sports. The state also recently banned “hog dogging,” the practice of releasing a pack of dogs on a wild boar.

The backlash against baying has been unnerving for Mr. Grumbles, the bear owner, who has received phone calls from people “who say I should get five years in prison” or compare him to Michael Vick, the football player convicted of running a dog-fighting ring. The problem is more than political, he said, it is cultural.

“People raised on the concrete don’t understand people raised on the dirt,” he said. “I just don’t know how to explain it to them.”

October 6, 2010

Clean Living in the Henhouse

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

NORTH MANCHESTER, Ind. — The stuff doesn’t even smell that bad.

In Henhouse No. 1 at the Hi-Grade Egg Farm here, the droppings from 381,000 chickens are carried off along a zig-zagging system of stacked conveyor belts with powerful fans blowing across them.

The excrement takes three days to travel more than a mile back and forth, and when it is finally deposited on a gray, 20-foot high mountain of manure, it has been thoroughly dried out, making it of little interest to the flies and rodents that can spread diseases like salmonella poisoning.

Standing by the manure pile on a recent afternoon, Robert L. Krouse, the president of Midwest Poultry Services, the company that owns the Hi-Grade farm, took a deep breath. The droppings, he declared, smelled sweet, like chocolate.

“This is the kind of thing that gets egg farmers excited,” Mr. Krouse said.

Controlling manure and keeping henhouses clean is essential to combating the toxic strain of salmonella that sickened thousands of people this year and prompted the recall of more than half a billion eggs produced by two companies in Iowa.

Chocolaty smells or not, the Hi-Grade facility appeared very different from the descriptions released by federal investigators of the Iowa farms that produced the recalled eggs. Those farms, most of them owned by Austin J. DeCoster, one of the country’s largest egg producers, were portrayed as filthy and badly maintained, with manure piles teeming with maggots and overflowing from pits beneath henhouses.

Those are not the images the egg industry wants consumers to have. Nor are they necessarily representative of most egg farms, federal regulators and industry officials agree.

Mr. Krouse’s farms were not associated with the recall, and a tour of one of them here in northern Indiana shows that much is being done in the egg industry to fight salmonella.

“We’ve had to completely change the way we look at things,” said Mr. Krouse, who is also chairman of the United Egg Producers, an industry association. “Thirty years ago, farms had flies and farms had mice, everything was exposed to everything else. They just all happily lived together. You can’t work that way anymore.”

Today the hens on Mr. Krouse’s farms come from hatcheries certified to provide chicks free of salmonella. The young birds are vaccinated to create resistance to the bacteria. And then steps are taken to keep them from being exposed to it, primarily by controlling mice and flies that may carry salmonella or spread it around.

That is where the manure drying comes in, although it has other benefits, like preventing bad smells that can bother neighbors.

Many of the henhouses have been built or refurbished in recent years. Henhouse No. 1 is three years old. On the newer henhouses, the bottom two feet of the outer walls are concrete, to make it harder for mice to get inside. The buildings are surrounded by a perimeter of stone and gravel, and the grass between buildings is cut short, to eliminate rodent habitats.

The doors seal tightly, like doors in a modern home rather than old-style barn doors. Bait containers and traps are placed along the walls, and the number of trapped mice is tracked closely to spot any increase in activity.

Visitors are made to dress in head-to-toe white coveralls made of a disposable material — evoking images of workers on the sterile floor of a semiconductor factory, only here there are downy feathers in the air and the racket made by hundreds of thousands of birds in cages stacked to the ceiling.

The suits are meant to keep out germs that visitors may track in from off the farm. They may protect against salmonella, but they are mostly aimed at pathogens that can ravage flocks with diseases like avian influenza and could be tracked in from other farms or places like golf courses that are home to wild geese.

The long, gray, tin-sided henhouses, about two football fields long, have no windows. Surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans, they hum softly with the sound of giant fans.

But everything here is not as modern as the manure drying contraption in Henhouse No. 1.

Nearby is a 12-year-old building, Henhouse No. 6.

Here more than 200,000 birds live on the house’s second floor, in cages stacked in an A-frame configuration, with an opening at the center that allows the droppings to fall into a cavernous ground floor space below.

Mr. Krouse said that just a few years ago this design was considered the most advanced, and it is still prevalent throughout the egg industry, including the henhouses at the Iowa farms involved in the recall.

At the farms in Iowa, inspectors found manure piles eight feet deep in some barns, with the manure overflowing and bursting through doors. Escaped chickens were seen loose in the manure and there were flies and maggots, according to the Food and Drug Administration inspection reports.

Once again, the picture was very different here. At the Hi-Grade barn, the manure was only about six inches deep, lying in five mounds, about four feet wide and 600 feet long, on the floor beneath the long arrays of cages. Mr. Krouse said the houses were cleaned out in early August.

Here, there was no suggestion of chocolate smells. The air had an ammonia bite, although it was far from overpowering. And there were flies, though not in large numbers (in part because of plenty of fly traps).

Gary E. Casper, a farm manager, said the key to controlling flies and rodents in this type of barn was to keep the manure dry. Large fans around the room kept the air moving. And he said it was crucial to watch for problems in the system that carries water to the birds in the cages above, and to stop leaks before they can soak the manure piles.

Many egg producers have been working for years to keep salmonella out of their flocks. Midwest Poultry began testing barns for salmonella in the late 1990s and has never found the toxic strain that can infect eggs.

In July, the F.D.A. put in place a set of egg safety rules that all producers must follow, with an emphasis on testing and rodent control. For companies like Midwest, that has meant only minor adjustments. The company, which has a total of six million laying hens in three states, spent about $200,000 upgrading refrigeration equipment to meet stricter rules for cooling eggs to prevent the growth of bacteria.

Mr. Krouse sells eggs to the large supermarket chains Kroger and Wal-Mart, and he says that those stores now scrutinize their farm suppliers much as they would a food manufacturing company.

“They’re looking at us as just another part of their food production system,” he said.

Gads I love the article................

Don't believe anything the military says about it -- they serve approx three to four years and almost 99% really don't give a **** in between..................

Been there - seen it - done that ---------------------!

(((There are that ONE Percent that DO care))) So, YOU have to think about it and Google all the crap you can and then decide............

It's the ONE Percent that counts....................................

We used to refer to them as the "Silent Majority"-------

Gotta Find Them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(((( Back in the 50's and early 60's we (older people used to refer to them as - "People younger then 30 years old" The YOUNGER generation used to refer to US (((OLDER PEOPLE as - "The older than 30 generation can't be trusted."))))

That sure changed in an age of ONE Generation...................

Well, WE BABY BOOMERS can now say --- (((at least the one's who are still alive))) We changed the world ---- (((at least for a second in time)))

Holy ****!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



My GOD.

sue, they'll never convince me it isn't food.

Not a bee disappeared until frankenseed/food began growing everywhere, including wildlands (soldierseeds)...and corporate bees are transported/fed whatever is cheapest for the company. Not a wonder the animals are dieing.


CAFO's...frigging amazing


The bear guy? no words

All clicked, and good morning.

Here is an easy and fast to read article:


OCTOBER 8, 2010, 8:32 AM

An ‘Every Village,’ Awash in Misery

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Greenpeace, via European Pressphoto Agency An aerial view of the toxic sludge that inundated Kolontar and other villages in southern Hungary.
Often the damaging environmental effects of industry don’t feel real to faraway consumers. The carbon dioxide that spews into the air from power plants is invisible even to those who are close at hand. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster began last spring, few could see the impact a mile underwater, conveyed only belatedly by cameras when BP decided to release the footage.

But in an otherwise obscure corner of southern Hungary, polluting caustic red mud literally flooded into people’s homes and into their living rooms this week, and onto television screens in the United States and Europe. `The wall of a huge sludge waste reservoir from a nearby alumina processing plant broke, sending the goo downhill into nearby villages. The story led newscasts featuring some of CNN’s and the BBC’s high-ranking correspondents.

And yet, as dangerous waste goes, red mud, the caustic byproduct of alumina processing, is not particularly toxic; there are far worse actors. And while the advancing slime devastated hundreds if not thousands of lives in villages like Kolontar, its impact on the larger ecosystems of the Danube area is so far looking relatively limited.

The local stream, which still is clogged red with muck, emptied into progressively larger rivers that emptied into the mighty Danube. The authorities added acid upstream to counteract the red mud, a substance that is as alkaline as lye.

By the time the pollutants made it into the Danube near a city called Gyor, their presence was detectable mostly as a trace of white foam, some people said. By the time it reached Budapest hours later, its diluted presence could be measured only by a pH meter.

What made this disaster so frightening for many was not its geographical scope, but that the pollution was, well, so viscerally stunning. And it flowed through people’s front doors! And the village of Kolontar seemed like an Every Village many of us could easily identify with, with daily lives driven by routines like driving to work, taking the the kids to school, mowing the lawn, uncorking a bottle of wine over dinner with friends.

The photographs are vivid, yet it’s hard to adequately describe the scenes and smells there now.

Residents’ skin, clothes, homes and pets were stained red. A few people died, and those who had prolonged contact with the muck were hospitalized with severe burns. But most were just homeless, dirty and angry, and struggling to figure out how to rebuild their lives.

Yellow stucco houses with tiled roofs and carefully tended flowerboxes of geraniums now sit abandoned. Living rooms are covered in thick red muck even though they have been washed by fire hoses. Peek in front doors, and you see meals that were left on carefully set tables when tragedy arrived at lunchtime on Monday.

One man who was at work when the accident happened at lunch on Monday described to me how his wife and toddler clung to a fence with the dark red muck rushing by them, waiting to be rescued. The child is fine (physically at least); the mother is recovering from burns in the hospital.

As a reporter, it is sometimes easy to leave stories behind. But it was hard leaving Kolontar the other night. The women with young children had retreated to the homes of friends and relatives. The local pub was filled with men who were were living in the part of the village that was higher up and hadn’t been flooded. Outside, emergency cleanup crews continued their work.

At the edge of the village, we gingerly removed our slime-covered boots and placed them in a plastic bag by a rubbish bin; it was not wise to take them home so contaminated. We coughed on the three-hour drive to Budapest, our lungs and throats stinging from the residue of acrid red mud. We took long hot showers to rinse it all off for good.

The villagers of Kolontar cannot. In the long term, it is unclear who will pay to relocate them or decontaminate their homes or restore their sense of well-being. George Soros is said to be sending them $1 million in emergency aid. Yet the Hungarian government is saying that one part of the village may simply be bulldozed.

I hope the residents of Kolontar will find a way to recover from this unthinkable disaster. For the rest of us, their anguishing story lends a human face to environmental problems that are too often out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

Been clicking. Seventy percent I would say.

Hello to all.

Happy October.

Click and crunch this month.

Need waxed paper.

Happy Friday to all.

Not only has human activity screwed around with carbon, but we have been overdoing it with nitrogen as well. The following is from the National Science Foundation.


ress Release 10-183
Too Much of a Good Thing: Human Activities Overload Ecosystems with Nitrogen


Resulting ecological damage is serious, but could be reduced by wider use of more sustainable, time-honored practices


At Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, excess nitrogen promotes algae growth, which leads to eutrophication.
Credit and Larger Version

October 7, 2010
Humans are overloading ecosystems with nitrogen through the burning of fossil fuels and an increase in nitrogen-producing industrial and agricultural activities, according to a new study. While nitrogen is an element that is essential to life, it is an environmental scourge at high levels.

According to the study, excess nitrogen that is contributed by human activities pollutes fresh waters and coastal zones, and may contribute to climate change. Nevertheless, such ecological damage could be reduced by the adoption of time-honored sustainable practices.

Appearing in the October 8, 2010 edition of Science and conducted by an international team of researchers, the study was partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Nitrogen Cycle

The nitrogen cycle--which has existed for billions of years--transforms non-biologically useful forms of nitrogen found in the atmosphere into various biologically useful forms of nitrogen that are needed by living things to create proteins, DNA and RNA, and by plants to grow and photosynthesize. The transformation of biologically useful forms of nitrogen to useful forms of nitrogen is known as nitrogen fixation.

Mostly mediated by bacteria that live in legume plant roots and soils, nitrogen fixation and other components of the nitrogen cycle weave and wind through the atmosphere, plants, subsurface plant roots, and soils; the nitrogen cycle involves many natural feedback relationships between plants and microorganisms.

According to the Science paper, since pre-biotic times, the nitrogen cycle has gone through several major phases. The cycle was initially controlled by slow volcanic processes and lightning and then by anaerobic organisms as biological activity started. By about 2.5 billion years ago, as molecular oxygen appeared on Earth, a linked suite of microbial processes evolved to form the modern nitrogen cycle.

Human Impacts on the Nitrogen Cycle

But the start of the 20th century, human contributions to the nitrogen cycle began skyrocketing. "In fact, no phenomenon has probably impacted the nitrogen cycle more than human inputs of nitrogen into the cycle in the last 2.5 billion years," says Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University, a member of the research team.

"Altogether, human activities currently contribute twice as much terrestrial nitrogen fixation as natural sources, and provide around 45 percent of the total biological useful nitrogen produced annually on Earth," says Falkowski. Much of the human contributions of nitrogen into ecosystems come from an 800 percent increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers from 1960 to 2000.

Another problem: Much of nitrogen fertilizer that is used worldwide is applied inefficiently. As a result, about 60 percent of the nitrogen contained in applied fertilizer is never incorporated into plants and so is free to wash out of root zones, and then pollute rivers, lakes, aquifers and coastal areas through eutrophication. (Eutrophication is a process caused by excess nutrients that depletes oxygen in water bodies and ultimately leads to the death of animal life.)

In addition, some reactions involving nitrogen release nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxide is a greenhouse gas that has 300 times (per molecule) the warming potential of carbon dioxide. In addition, nitrogen oxide destroys stratospheric ozone, which protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation.

Methods to Reduce Nitrogen Overloading

"Natural feedbacks driven by microorganisms will likely produce a new steady-state over time scales of many decades," says Falkowski. "Through this steady state, excess nitrogen added from human sources will be removed at rates equivalent to rates of addition, without accumulating."

But meanwhile, the Earth's population is approaching 7 billion people, and so ongoing pressures for food production are continuing to increase. "There is no way to feed people without fixing huge amounts of nitrogen from the atmosphere, and that nitrogen is presently applied to crop plants very ineffectively." says Falkowski.

So unless promising interventions are taken, the damage done by humans to the Earth's nitrogen cycle will persist for decades or centuries. These promising interventions, which would be designed to reduce the need to use fertilizers that add nitrogen to ecological systems, could include:

Using systematic crop rotations that would supply nitrogen that would otherwise be provided by fertilizers;
Optimizing the timing and amounts of fertilizer applications, adopting selected breeding techniques or developing genetically engineered varieties of plants that would increase the efficiency of nitrogen use;
Using traditional breeding techniques to boost the ability of economically important varieties of wheat, barley and rye to interact favorably with the microbial communities associated with plant root systems and do so in ways that enhance the efficiency of nitrogen use.
"While the processes of eutrophication have been recognized for many years, only recently have scientists been able to begin placing the anthropogenic processes in the context of an understanding of the broader biogeochemical cycles of the planet," says Robert Burnap, an NSF program director. This is an important article because it concisely develops this understanding and also provides reasonable predictions regarding the economic and policy dimensions of the problem."

-NSF-

I read that and saw the photos of the muck everywhere. Horrific

After a few days of rain, weathers warming again.

Outside again

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HIGHT SEAS...HOPE YOU HAVE A SUPER DAY!!