"Treat the earth well.
It was not given to you
by your parents. It was lent to you by
your children."
--Kenyan
proverb
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged
by the way its animals
are treated."
--Gandhi
In a historic move, the European Union has adopted a resolution
calling for a ban on all trade in harp and hooded seal products.
This is a crucial step toward achieving legislation that
will save millions of seals from a horrible fate.
Five years ago, the auto industry was issued a challenge. That
was when California passed a law requiring the industry to reduce
global-warming pollution from its cars and trucks. Since then,
10 other states have adopted that standard. Together, these 11
states represent one-third of the U.S. auto market. Instead of
rising to this challenge, the automakers filed lawsuits in California
and two other states to kill the standard -- even though they
have the technology today to surpass it.
Before joining the staff of the Union of Concerned Scientists,
I worked as a consultant for the major automakers, so I know first-hand
that they can do better. Working with other UCS vehicle experts,
I recently designed a "virtual" vehicle that combines
a number of pollution-cutting technologies under one hood. Our
blueprint, which we call the Vanguard, is not a hybrid. It doesn't
use fuel cells. It merely puts together conventional off-the-shelf
technologies that can already be found piecemeal in more than
100 vehicles on the road today. Installing these technologies
in everything from two-seaters to SUVs could cut their global-warming
pollution by as much as 40 percent. Adopting the Vanguard "package"
in California alone would be the equivalent of taking 19 million
of today's vehicles off the road.
Not only would the Vanguard package help save the planet, it
would save Americans millions of dollars annually. The minivan
package, for example, would pay for itself in less than two years
and deliver $1,333 in savings over the vehicle's lifetime. From
2009, when the standard is supposed to take effect, to 2030, California
drivers would save $2.6 billion.
OK, that all sounds almost too good to be true, but what would
it be like to drive? Not to worry. The Vanguard would be just
as fast, safe and reliable as today's vehicles. In fact, the Vanguard
package actually would give you a smoother ride than the car you're
driving today.
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Here's a look at some of the key features of this cleaner car:
Transmission: The Vanguard has a six-speed automatic-manual transmission
that delivers a smoother ride and allows the engine to operate
at top efficiency. There's no clutch: You switch gears by simply
pushing a button on your dashboard. If you don't want manual control,
the car will do the shifting for you.
Engine: Cylinder deactivation will give you muscle only when
you need it, saving you money and cutting pollution. If you're
cruising down the highway with no passengers, two of the six cylinders
will shut down seamlessly. When you lean on the gas, go up a hill,
or load your car with six kids headed to soccer practice, the
extra cylinders will kick back on.
Electrical system: Electric power steering will let you change
direction with an electric motor instead of a hydraulic pump,
providing faster, more responsive steering and consuming less
energy.
Ethanol: Building cars that can use as much as 85 percent ethanol
from plants would help cut global-warming pollution. Corn ethanol
can cut pollution 10 to 30 percent compared to gasoline, while
cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass, wood chips and other materials
would cut pollution by as much as 90 percent. As more gas stations
offer ethanol, you will be able to fill your car with homegrown,
clean, renewable fuel.
Aerodynamics: The Vanguard is streamlined to use less energy
fighting air resistance. In some models, the updated design would
provide more space for passengers and storage.
Air conditioning: The Vanguard's cooling system would keep the
planet cool, too. Tighter hoses and cleaner refrigerants would
keep global-warming pollution out of the atmosphere, while more
efficient air compressors wouldn't tax the engine as much.
Hear a real story about an artificial tail Japanese sculptor to speak in San Francisco of labor of
love
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Coming to San Francisco from Japan tonight is a touching tale
about a tail.
A bottlenose dolphin named Fuji caught a mysterious disease that
cost her 75 percent of her tailfin, a tragedy akin to a boat losing
most of its propeller.
The Okinawa aquarium where she lives cured the disease but couldn't
replace her tail. So it called upon the world's biggest rubber
and tire firm, Bridgestone, to make an artificial one.
Bridgestone's tires may be very good, but the fake tail didn't
work.
The Okinawa Chiraumi Aquarium then turned to an Osaka sculptor
who crafts acrylic dolphins. Could he help make a tail for the
dolphin named after Japan's most famous mountain?
Kazuhiko Yakushiji felt he owed his happiness to dolphins. He
said yes and worked three years. This past July, the new tail
was done.
Fuji could not only swim again, she could jump out of the water.
"Fuji couldn't swim," the artist said in an interview
Monday as he recalled meeting the dolphin for the first time.
"She seemed really depressed. I thought Fuji might die if
nothing was done."
The problem was that Bridgestone had made a generic dolphin tail,
said Yakushiji, who at age 38 is one year older than Fuji.
"Each dolphin is different," said Yakushiji, who will
give a talk with illustrations tonight in San Francisco, the first
time he's told his story outside Japan.
"I found out that Fuji and her family have a special curve
in their tail," said Yakushiji, who had studied dolphins
at Florida's Dolphin Research Center. Together, he and Bridgestone
crafted a rubber-composite prosthetic fin with the proper curve
for Fuji.
Yakushiji's devotion to dolphins began a decade ago, when he
was running a small energy firm inherited from his father.
"My heart and soul were exhausted," he said. He went
away for a swim-with-dolphins excursion at Ogasawara islands.
"I met a wild dolphin, and that changed my entire life,"
he said.
At first, he had been too tired to jump in with the other swimmers,
but he finally took the plunge alone on the other side of the
boat. The life-altering dolphin swam up and played with him.
"That dolphin completely healed me," he said. The encounter
moved him to quit his job and realize his life's wish to become
an artist.
Dolphins became a dominant theme. "I wanted to show my gratitude,"
he said.
Seven steps you can take to fight warming of planet
Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Within days of Hurricane Katrina, it erupted into a national debate.
Conservatives. Liberals. Radicals. Moderates. All of them (including
Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken) were talking about a subject that
usually ranks low in the media food chain (behind Iraq and Martha
Stewart) but that now was on everyone's minds: global warming.
Was it in any way to blame for the ferociousness of the weather
system that devastated New Orleans?
Scientists disagree about whether there was a connection (was
Katrina more intense, for example, because of Gulf of Mexico waters
heated by global warming?).
Regardless, the tragedy has forced many people to rethink the
threat -- and to ask how to combat a silent scourge that, like
a slow-motion Godzilla, threatens to destabilize everything in
its path.
Until now, global warming has been an abstraction to most Americans.
Yes, the polar ice caps are melting. Yes, ocean waters are heating
up. Yes, species of birds are altering their migration and breeding
patterns because of climate changes.
But such shifts are undetectable to the average person. In a
poll for ABC News in July, 66 percent of those responding said
global warming will not affect their lives.
A year earlier, a Gallup survey found that nearly half of Americans
worried "only a little" or "not at all" about
global warming or "the greenhouse effect."
These views have consequences. The United States accounts for
4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its energy
use.
Disproportionately, Americans are adding to the problem of global
warming, and disproportionately, Americans are blase about combating
it. While 81 percent of Britons say their country should adhere
to the Kyoto Protocol, which sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions,
only 42 percent of Americans support Kyoto, according to Gallup.
"The difference is night and day," says Camille Parmesan,
a professor of ecology, behavior and conservation at the University
of Texas at Austin.
"Talking to people (in Europe) who are labor workers, taxi
drivers, whatever, everyone knows that global warming is happening,
and it's due to humans causing changes in the atmosphere. When
I give public lectures in the United States, even when the audience
is supposedly educated -- not necessarily scientists but medical
doctors and businesspeople -- they still believe that global warming
is being debated in scientific circles and that there's no agreement
as to what's happening or why."
Residents of the Bay Area may congratulate themselves for being
more environmentally savvy than their fellow citizens.
Yet it's always been easier to sport a bumper sticker or sign
an online petition or critique the Bush administration's lackadaisical
environmental record than to make individual sacrifices that could
make a tiny but tangible difference.
Hurricane Katrina, the experts say, could be a catalyst that
changes Americans' viewpoints about the effects of environmental
degradation -- and helps change private behavior as well.
What's not in doubt: Global warming is being exacerbated by carbon
dioxide emissions spewed by cars, airplanes and factories. If
Americans want to minimize it, the biggest thing they can do is
cut back on the gas they use for transportation.
This can be difficult in an America where convenience, time pressures
and other burdens encourage wasteful habits. Still, experts say,
changing even one habit can be beneficial not just for the environment
but for the pocketbook.
What follows are seven measures that nearly any adult can use
to combat global warming. Some readers may already have made these
changes.
Two-thirds of readers who responded to a query from the paper's
Two Cents pool said they already were taking steps to neutralize
global warming. One even lambasted Al Gore as a hypocrite for
not flying on airlines that use soybean oil as fuel. Soybean fuel?
That's another measure for serious consideration.
1. Ditch the SUV. Ditch any car, in fact, that doesn't get at
least 30 miles to the gallon. "The biggest single step we
can take to cut our global warming emissions -- both nationally
and individually -- is to drive a vehicle that goes farther on
a gallon of gas," says Brendan Bell, associate Washington
representative for the Sierra Club's Global Warming & Energy
Program.
"Every gallon of gas that we burn in our cars and trucks
creates 28 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution. That's 19 pounds
directly from the tail pipe and 9 pounds from refining and transporting
the fuel around and all that.
"So, driving a Toyota Prius over the lifetime of the vehicle
is going to create 32 tons of global warming pollution. But if
you drive, say, an average sedan like a Chevy Malibu, you're going
to create 83 tons of global warming emissions. If you drive something
like a Chevy Suburban, you're creating 134 tons of carbon dioxide
pollution. Better fuel economy can make significant reductions
in how much global warming gases you're creating personally. If
you're not driving at all, you're not creating any emissions."
2. Buy local, local, local. Purchasing food and other items made
locally means buying products that have used less gas to be taken
to stores. "The major sources of emissions in this country
are transportation and electricity production," says Bell.
"If you're eating locally grown food, there's less transportation
involved in taking that food to you."
3. Use a clothesline, not a dryer, which needs gobs of electricity
to do its job correctly. "In Europe, no one has dryers,"
Parmesan says. "They wash their clothes, and they hang them
on a line. Even the wealthiest people do this. They turn to me
and they say, 'Why do you guys dry your clothes in a dryer? This
is ridiculous. What's the matter with the sun?' "
4. At home, wear sweaters during the winter, shorts in the summer.
Heating and air conditioning are unnecessary when you dress appropriately
indoors, says Parmesan. It can mean the difference between a $100
electricity bill and a $50 one. "I say (to people), 'How
about being a little more uncomfortable in your house -- having
it be a bit cool in the winter and a bit warm in the summer? And
dressing accordingly so you can adjust to that?' " Parmesan
says.
5. Install solar paneling. Although expensive at first, solar
paneling saves money (and energy) in the long term -- to the point
that consumers can actually make dollars by selling their excess
energy to the city in which they live. Consumers with solar paneling
still have their regular electricity lines that are connected
to their city's power grid, so sunless stretches don't mean being
cut off from electricity.
"My wife and I put (solar panels) on our roof and that generates
some, though not all, of our power," says William Schlesinger,
dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and
Earth Sciences. Installing a solar-panel system can cost more
than $20,000, but it can save hundreds of dollars a month, which
adds up to that same $20,000 within a short time period.
"It's not that expensive anymore to put solar panels all
over your house roof," says Parmesan. "It's not better
advertised because it's not something that's a corporate interest,
so people don't think of it as much as perhaps they should."
6. Change your lightbulbs. Switching regular bulbs with compact
fluorescent lights uses a quarter of the electricity of regular
bulbs -- and fluorescents last 10 times longer than regular bulbs,
according to the Sierra Club.
7. Be a newshound, follow the issues, vote for those who'll make
a difference, and hang out with others who feel the same way you
do. It's one thing to think about global warming, another to coordinate
with others about electing people who'll make a difference at
a local, state or national level.
The Internet has groups built around connecting people who want
to befriend other environmentally conscious people: Call them
global warming clubs. At meetup.com, for example, people from
Oakland, Petaluma and Santa Rosa have posts saying they want to
meet others who are passionate about combating global warming.
These seven suggestions aren't exhaustive. Planting a tree in
a garden (trees cut down on carbon dioxide) or buying an energy-efficient
washer could be just as important. This isn't to say that saving
the environment is a snap. Some of the experts interviewed admitted
that they struggle with keeping their own advice.
"A lot of universities in Europe don't have air conditioning,
which personally I find quite uncomfortable," says Parmesan.
"But I was really scoffed at when I complained one time
in Montpellier (France, where she worked briefly), in the middle
of the summertime, when it was 95 degrees. I was told, 'You soft
American. What's the matter with being a little hot?' Energy is
more expensive there. ...
"I do run air conditioning in the summertime in Texas, I
have to admit. I try to keep it warmer, though. I try to keep
it around 82 (degrees) rather than 65. I dress very lightly in
the summertime, and I drink a lot of iced tea. It's fine, but
I have to admit that I can't completely go without (air conditioning)."
So, there you go. It's easier said than done, even for those
who know the science of a problem that's only getting worse as
time moves on.
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1 Ditch any car that doesn't get at least 30 miles to the gallon.
2 Buy local. It reduces the amount of gas used to transport products.
3 Use a clothesline, not a dryer.
4 At home, wear sweaters during the winter, shorts in the summer.
Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf
Coast, we remain haunted by the images of hungry, homeless and
ill Americans in scenes of abandonment and helplessness. The word
that still comes to mind is "unbelievable."
Yet, both the magnitude of the damage caused by the catastrophe
and the extent to which it came as a surprise are entirely predictable.
The real failure is that we still have not learned first to think
the unthinkable and then believe it.
The catchphrase "thinking about the unthinkable" isn't
new. It originated in 1962 with a book by that title from the
pioneering futurist Herman Kahn. Kahn broke new intellectual ground
when he argued that the United States needed to systematically
imagine a future after the unthinkable -- nuclear war -- and then
prepare for survival.
Just as we learned to think the unthinkable about nuclear war,
especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we now need to face up
to the new realities of today's challenges -- whether they're
natural disasters like Katrina and the Asian tsunami or terrorist
attacks like Sept. 11 and the London bombings.
But as we've learned again and again, it is painfully difficult
for human beings to think this way. Cognitive bias distorts our
ability to prepare for and respond to events of the magnitude
that struck New Orleans. For instance, President Bush said three
days after the hurricane hit, "I don't think anyone anticipated
the breach of the levees," when planners, academics, government
officials and journalists had been predicting that exact scenario
for about four decades.
As everyone now knows, countless hours were spent developing
scenarios, writing articles and creating disaster-response plans
about what might happen in New Orleans, but it seems that not
enough people in government were able to believe the unthinkable
enough to take sufficient action to prepare.
Of course, there are always tradeoffs to manage, and it's easy
to be wise about events in hindsight, but we need to move beyond
such blind spots. This is especially critical because three mutually
reinforcing factors are significantly raising the stakes of our
continuing inability to believe the unthinkable.
Infrastructure: The nation's infrastructure has reached the breaking
point, most vividly demonstrated by the breakdown of New Orleans'
350-mile-long network of levees, canals and pumps. New Orleans
represents, in fact, an infrastructural tipping point.
All over the country, highways, airports, schools, railroads,
ports and hospitals are suffering from growing usage, inadequate
investment and natural aging. One-third of all bridges in the
United States are dilapidated or too weak to bear traffic. As
the 2003 blackout on the East Coast demonstrated, the nation's
electric grid is outdated and vulnerable.
This year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's
infrastructure a grade of D and estimated that $1.6 trillion needs
to be spent over the next five years to fix the most serious problems.
Our failure to invest in adequate infrastructure is symptomatic
of our inability to believe the unthinkable about the aftermath
of a major infrastructure collapse. The levee breaches could have
been prevented with $18 billion in repairs to the New Orleans
system before the hurricane, according to Army Corps of Engineers.
It will now cost an estimated $100 billion to rebuild a shattered
region.
Historically, Americans are much better at creating infrastructure
than maintaining it. We hate to pay higher taxes to cover maintenance
even if they are the best way to share the burden of such beneficial
public goods.
And we're finding it increasingly disruptive and expensive to
fix systems that are in use. For instance, rebuilding the eastern
span of the Bay Bridge is now $5 billion over initial estimates
and four years behind schedule.
It's critical that we be realistic about the need for adequate
funding for investments in infrastructure and maintenance -- an
essential and appropriate role for government to play -- while
also moving beyond pork-barrel politics in distributing these
scarce resources. We don't need more roads to nowhere in Alaska.
We do need public investments that will save our lives and defend
our lifestyles.
The environment: Nature is extraordinarily powerful and volatile,
and despite our technological advances, is still largely unpredictable.
But we know with great certainty that there will always be natural
disasters. If people build their houses on a 100-year flood plain,
eventually their houses will be flooded. If we live in earthquake
country, eventually the big one will hit. We know these risks,
yet we still can't seem to prepare adequately.
We also know that natural disasters will most likely grow worse
because of humans' impact on the Earth's environment and climate.
The evidence suggests we need to temper our hubris. The planet
does not belong to us; we belong to it.
Demography: Over the last century, the world's population has
nearly quadrupled to 6.5 billion people. By 2050, the number will
reach about 9 billion. More than 80 percent of Americans and more
than 50 percent of the world's population now live in cities.
Many of these cities are in coastal areas, further increasing
the risk of destruction from natural disasters like hurricanes,
tsunamis and flooding.
We know that the dangers are increasing, simply because of where
the world's growing population is settling, but still we fail
to believe the unthinkable about the consequences of our choices.
Over the centuries in New Orleans, residents increasingly settled
in historic flood-plains below sea level, which the original settlers
of the city avoided. Tragically but predictably these residents
included the very poorest, who were least able to escape when
the time came.
Because the levee system protecting these low-lying areas was
built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, planners had repeatedly
called for strengthening it to withstand even worse catastrophes.
But over the course of several decades, insufficient investment
was made to prevent a breach when the inevitable worst case occurred.
Then when disaster struck, emergency planning appears to have
been woefully inadequate. Local emergency officials and police
battled looting and managed disaster relief for days without significant
federal assistance.
There seems to have been an inability to believe in and prepare
for an unthinkable scenario in which a heavily populated coastal
city must be entirely evacuated, its residents not able to return
for months because of widespread flood damage.
We are now all aware of the need to do better. However, we must
resist the obvious temptation to centralize responsibility, for
example, by appointing a czar of natural disaster. Certainly,
we need shared plans, good communication and real co-ordination,
but we desperately need the capability to make strong, decentralized
decisions. San Francisco learned this lesson after the 1989 earthquake
when it instituted a decentralized response system for national
disasters that will be coordinated by neighborhood.
When we don't invest in believing the unthinkable, even when
these unthinkable events are inevitable, we're bound to be surprised
by the consequences. The likelihood of a large terrorist attack
from al Qaeda on established targets like the World Trade Center
was well understood, yet the Sept. 11 attack took most Americans
by surprise. The only real surprises are that it did not come
earlier and that it has not been followed up with a meaningful
second strike inside the United States.
We do not need to be as creative as sci-fi writer Michael Crichton
or films like "The Day After Tomorrow" to imagine the
future's disasters and do what is necessary to prepare for the
inevitable.
We can learn to think the unthinkable. It requires a systematic
suspension of disbelief about what's possible and a thorough examination
of worst-case scenarios. It demands we acknowledge we have cognitive
biases that tell us "it won't happen here," or that
history is a reasonable guide to the future. And it requires us
to think imaginatively about new ways to mitigate the risks we
identify.
We already know that our ability to believe the unthinkable can
produce results. Low-lying Maldives built an entirely new island
to save its other islands from rising sea levels due to global
warming. The new island largely escaped damage during last year's
tsunami.
What is the next unthinkable event we should be imagining?
Scientists know that the world is overdue for a major event like
the 1918 flu pandemic, which probably killed as many as 50 million
people. We know that it is just a matter of time before today's
widening avian flu outbreak becomes a full-blown global epidemic
that could kill as many as 50 million people, according to the
World Health Organization.
But governments, businesses and individuals are not prepared.
They are not ready for the day when all air travel comes to a
halt, when cities are quarantined, when life as we know it ceases.
What strategies should governments develop now, what contingencies
should businesses put in place and how will we all manage with
our lives? Not doing something now about the coming avian flu
epidemic is simply irresponsible.
After Hurricane Katrina, it's too easy to play the blame game
and point fingers at missed opportunities and failed policies.
What's hard is correcting the failure of imagination that led
to these outcomes.
Perhaps this latest disaster will serve as a wake-up call for
Americans to once again learn to think the unthinkable, and then
to plan for that day. It could very well be our climactic Sept.
11.
Eamonn Kelly is CEO of Global Business Network (www.gbn.com),
a consulting firm in Emeryville. He is the author of the forthcoming
book, "Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain
World." Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
Workers offer pointers on how animals' tragedy could be averted
Eileen Mitchell, Special
to The Chronicle
Saturday, August 20, 2005
It's not for the faint of heart, this book. But "One at a
Time: A Week in an American Animal Shelter" addresses a subject
that people need to know about: the harsh realities of dogs and
cats who are surrendered to shelters or wind up there as strays.
These are realities that most people either aren't aware of or
simply choose to ignore.
Until I read this book, I was among those who had no idea of
the shocking statistics: 6 million to 8 million animals enter
shelters each year. Nationally, only 20 percent of dogs and cats
in homes are adopted from animal shelters. Only 1 animal in 3
has a home that lasts their entire lifetime. Less than 2 percent
of stray cats are reunited with their guardians. Every 9 seconds
one animal is euthanized.
Count to nine. There, an animal is dead. Count again. There,
another dead. And it's all the more heartbreaking because it's
so preventable, say co- authors and former shelter workers Marilee
Geyer and Diane Leigh. They spent one week in a typical shelter
in Northern California and randomly selected 75 animals to photograph
and profile. They also documented each animal's final destiny.
In a phone interview, I asked why they had left their shelter
jobs to write such a difficult book.
"We wanted to put faces on these statistics so people understand
that these aren't just numbers, but beautiful, precious, unique
beings," Leigh said. "Each animal has a life, a history.
If we can make it more personal, it has more power and more impact."
"I worked in shelters for nearly a decade and was almost
destroyed when I left," Geyer revealed. "For me, this
book was born out of the incredible grief and sadness that shelter
workers go through. I channeled that sadness into something educational
and to pay tribute to the millions of animals that we'll never
see."
Both Geyer and Leigh believe that change begins with facing the
truth, no matter how hard that may be. Indeed, this book induced
a plethora of emotion in me, ranging from amazement to tenderness
to tears. But mostly, I felt anger. Anger at the indifference,
selfishness and lackadaisical attitudes of people who invite animals
into their homes, then relinquish them with nary a thought.
Like the woman who refused to pay a $20 reclaim fee when Kelly,
her older golden husky mix, slipped out of the yard. She figured
Kelly, whom she claimed was "a great dog," would get
out again, so she surrendered her for adoption. Was safeguarding
the yard ever a consideration? Kelly wasn't adopted, a dilemma
often faced by older pets, and was euthanized.
Then there was the person who surrendered Pearl and her newborn
kittens, citing on the release form, "unable to care for
them." Why wasn't Pearl spayed to begin with? Pearl was euthanized.
Someone else dumped Kelli, a terrified little terrier mix, on
a busy highway. Another dog euthanized.
Then there were Duke and Lady, active blue tick coon hounds who
had been tethered to their doghouses for their entire lives. A
concerned neighbor finally called the shelter, and the dogs were
confiscated after the guardian refused to correct their inadequate
conditions.
Some people give more thought to their pizza-topping selections
than they do in deciding to get a pet. Are they prepared for the
changes that will take place when they invite a pet into their
lives, such as vet bills and new feeding and exercise schedules?
Have they considered potential allergy problems? Will other household
pets be compatible with this new addition? If the prospective
guardians are renters, how stable are their living arrangements?
"Each (shelter) animal's situation could have been prevented,"
Leigh said. "It's hard for people to wrap their minds around.
They understand how adopting saves lives, but it's a little more
indirect to see how prevention helps as well." She's referring
to constant themes in the book, which address the need for spaying,
neutering and pet identification. Also cited is the sorry fact
that 96 percent of dogs surrendered to shelters were given no
training by their guardians.
"These are lifesaving acts, but it's hard for people to
understand because prevention is more intangible and indirect,"
she said. "We want to help people realize that it's not just
about saving animals once they get into the shelter, but saving
them from entering the shelter in the first place."
It was difficult to read about something I'd never heard of:
"kennel stress," a condition to which even the most
loving animals often succumb. Caused by noise, unfamiliar smells,
fear, continual confinement and lack of human contact, kennel
stress eventually results in irreversible emotional trauma. Some
animals become depressed, lethargic and lose weight. Others become
hyperactive and start exhibiting extreme behavior problems.
As Leigh and Geyer write, "Finding a new home for an animal
is always a race against time: Shelter workers know they must
get an animal out before kennel stress sets in. At the least,
a depressed, withdrawn animal is less likely to be chosen by adopters.
At worst, an animal that has become aggressive cannot be placed
at all."
Even happy endings, which the book includes, involve "an
invisible victim. " This is because a crowded shelter might
have to euthanize one animal to save another.
"When I worked in the shelter I always wanted to show people
how things play out," Leigh said.
That can be what eventually happens when they an animal they
are wholly unprepared for. Or when they let their cat have a litter
so their kids can witness "the miracle of life" while
kittens are dying in shelters. Good people don't think they're
contributing to this tragedy, but they don't understand how their
actions affect their community shelter.
So "One at a Time" may not be a favorite among book
clubs, and it's unlikely that the film rights will be purchased,
with Meg Ryan starring as the bighearted shelter director who
manages to save every Lassie and Winn-Dixie. Still, it's a book
that animal lovers should read.
Because awareness creates change. And change might mean fewer
dogs and cats dying.
No Voice Unheard is a nonprofit organization. Its Every Nine
Seconds campaign asks people to log on to www.novoiceunheard.org
and submit a photo of an animal that has touched their lives.
In honor of that animal, the authors will donate a copy of their
book, "One at a Time," to a designated shelter for use
as an educational resource.
Amid all the fanfare and smiling portraits heralding the birth
of Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, there is a dark and unsettling
side to animal cloning that even the scientists involved readily
admit, but which gets far less attention than it deserves.
Glossed over with language like "inefficiency" and
"high failure rates," scientists roundly agree that
animal cloning leaves a lot to be desired. Managing large numbers
of animals over long periods of time to yield "success rates"
of between 0.5 percent and 4 percent isn't anyone's idea of a
good investment. At the low end of this range, this means that
it can take more than 200 animals surgically impregnated to yield
a single clone birth.
Along the way, in each of these grand experiments, these 200
animals are housed in laboratories and subjected to multiple invasive
surgeries, to say nothing of the very few they actually give birth
to -- clones whose lives are often short and painful.
According to their findings published in the journal Nature last
week, the scientists involved in Snuppy's production surgically
implanted 123 surrogate dogs with embryos that resulted in only
three pregnancies, two deliveries and one puppy surviving the
first month of life. The only other viable puppy succumbed to
pneumonia at 22 days, after suffering respiratory distress throughout
his short life in the laboratory.
And while some see animal cloning as an opportunity -- albeit
grotesquely inefficient and arguably immoral -- to advance animal
or human health, others are engaged in the effort strictly as
a for-profit venture to reproduce people's pets. The wholly unregulated
company that sold the cat Little Nicky as a clone for $50,000
in December is aggressively marketing its gene-banking services
to veterinarians and to pet lovers across the country through
direct mail and ambitious public-relations strategies. Despite
having produced only a handful of cat clones and no dogs, this
company, based in Sausalito, will happily take your $1,395 (plus
$150 a year in storage fees) along with Fido's or Fluffy's DNA,
on the off chance you can one day afford to pay the remaining
$30,000 to order up your clone. All this while, millions of healthy
and adoptable cats and dogs die every year only because there
are not enough homes.
I'll admit to being especially fond of animals, but I don't know
any pet lover who would willingly comply with a process that caused
the pain and suffering of hundreds of animals to clone his or
her favorite pet. Once people really understand that the odds
are better than not that the clone will not act and possibly not
even look like the animal they hope to replace, most are turned
off. They're among more than 80 percent of the American public
who are opposed to pet cloning, according to a poll commissioned
by the American Anti- Vivisection Society. Those who fall for
cloning's false promise are being misled, blinded by the grief
of losing their beloved companion, or are more interested in vanity
and novelty than they are in what it means to be a companion in
the first place.
It is out of these concerns that we formed Californians Against
Pet Cloning last year and introduced Assembly Bill 1428 to ban
the retail sale of cloned and genetically modified pets. While
the bill got held up in committee this session, we will continue
to press policymakers to address the serious ethical, consumer
protection and animal-welfare concerns that are raised by for-profit
and trivial animal experimentation.
Don't be fooled by the cute photos. For every one of those kittens
and puppies that they bring out into the light, there are hundreds
more who suffered to make that photo op possible. The "promise"
of pet cloning isn't humane -- to either the animals or the humans
involved. It is a consumer fraud and an animal welfare atrocity.
Jennifer Fearing is president and CEO of Sacramento-based
United Animal Nations, a national animal protection organization.
More information about pet cloning can be found at www.nopetcloning.org.
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that
the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the
fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in
Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology
hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues
hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what
is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple,
their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.
And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious
to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary
of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the
ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told
the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant
in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony
he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come
back."
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he
was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots
out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible
is literally true -- one-third of the American electorate, if
a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several
million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in
the rapture index.
That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find
that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes
of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian
fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These
true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in
the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate
passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has
captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer
George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I
am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel
has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions
of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown
in the valley of Armageddon.
As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah
will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out
of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next
to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and
religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and
frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature.
I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas
to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they
tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment
of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity
with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support
with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them
was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where
four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates
will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with
Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed
-- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last
time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 -- just one
point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow,
the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and
sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment?
Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist
Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse."
Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists
may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded
but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming
apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe
lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half
the U.S. Congress before the recent election -- 231 legislators
in total and more since the election -- are backed by the religious
right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned
80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential
Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon
Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip
Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian
coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted
from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The
days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine
in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll
found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies
found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly
one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive
across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600
Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the
250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time
gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell
of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it,
"to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth,
when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological
collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why
care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued
in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar
when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and
fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a
word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the
Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history
book, "America's Providential History." You'll find
there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource
mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut
up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian
knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is
no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists
view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has
made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to
accommodate all of the people."
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that
militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned
out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who
have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American
politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with
any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself
don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident
future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring
it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think
of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you
think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then
why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because
I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian
and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people
will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance
to their health and to the health and lives of their children.
Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that
-- it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush
on the environment. This for an administration:
• That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water
Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal
species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental
Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand
whether actions might damage natural resources.
• That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate
vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for
cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and
heavy equipment.
• That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations
to keep certain information about environmental problems secret
from the public.
• That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against
polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees
reached earlier with coal companies.
• That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge
to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore,
the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world
and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental
Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million -- $2 million
of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry
Council -- to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides
in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological
damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use,
the government and the industry were going to offer the families
$970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to
serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's
friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported
by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report
that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising"
[and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an
embarrassment."
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations
bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders
attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections
from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest
in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits
on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection
for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next
to the computer -- pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future
looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father,
forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped
short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what
we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust.
Despoiling their world."
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we
are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our
ability to sustain indignation at injustice?
What has happened to our moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?"
And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that
as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story.
The news can be the truth that sets us free -- not only to feel
but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is
the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer
to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my
desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma
-- the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and
then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs
series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is
adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken
from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen
Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at
Harvard Medical School.
Rusting museum of our attempted suicide survives
in the desert
Jon Else
Sunday, August 22, 2004
An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and forgotten on
the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat, Nev. It is ugly and rusting,
a big cookie jar from hell -- yet it now exists as one of America's
greatest monuments to clear thinking.
That giant safe is a relic of an Atomic Energy Commission experiment
in 1957 ("Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading").
Filled with stocks and bonds, cash and insurance policies, it
confirmed that our official valuables, contracts and financial
instruments could survive nuclear war. The test must have seemed
like a good idea at the time, a masterpiece of steel-and- concrete
realpolitik.
Safes had tested well, quite by accident, at Hiroshima in 1945,
when four Mosler vaults in the ruined basement of the Teikoku
Bank near ground zero were discovered with their contents miraculously
intact. In fact, American troops entering Hiroshima some weeks
after the bombing reported hundreds of small safes resting in
the city's ashes.
All that remains of the vault's reinforced concrete "bank
building," specially constructed for the test, are a few
shards of blasted concrete and a tangle of rusting, arm-thick
steel reinforcing rod, swept back like so many cat's whiskers
in the wind.
Just before dawn on June 24, 1957, a 37-kiloton fission bomb,
code-named Priscilla, was suspended from a helium balloon about
half a mile from where the big safe stands. In the path of Priscilla's
shock wave, the Atomic Energy Commission had built its own tiny
city.
Priscilla rocked that mini-civilization at the Southern Nevada
test site with twice the explosive force of the bomb that leveled
Hiroshima. Its flash - - far brighter than the sun -- was reflected
back off the moon. Soldiers covering their eyes in trenches 2
miles away claim they could see the bones in their hands.
Domed shelters of 2-inch-thick aluminum alloy were flattened
like so many soda-pop cans stamped flat on a job site. The shock
wave hammered reinforced concrete shelters, industrial buildings,
cars in an underground parking garage, community shelters, a railroad
trestle, a 55-ton diesel locomotive, parked airplanes, and a manmade
pine forest rooted in concrete on the desert floor.
Anesthetized Cheshire pigs in little protective suits were roasted
alive in Priscilla's thermal pulse. We'll never know for sure,
but Priscilla's heat must have instantly incinerated unsuspecting
ravens in mid-flight. Later that morning, the fallout cloud drifted
eastward, where in the months to come, it mingled with residual
radioactive products from other atmospheric tests and eventually
dispersed around the globe. Today, anyone in the world born after
1957 carries in his or her bones at least a few atoms of Strontium-90
fallout from Priscilla.
On that June day 47 years ago, at about the moment that human
self- extinction first became a possibility, many policy-makers
already believed all- out nuclear war with the Soviets was inevitable.
In fact, some of those planning the Priscilla shot, assumedly
curious to discover whether stock and insurance certificates could
survive it, must have known that full-scale nuclear war held the
potential to end all life on Earth.
In 1957, hardly a decade after the atomic bomb had been but an
exotic laboratory device, it was already a commodity. Priscilla
was just one of 6,744 nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. The
Soviets had 660.
At Frenchman Flat, we rehearsed our failed attempt at global
suicide. It would have been a grand, charismatic gesture, spectacular
pornography -- the human species going out with a great bang,
nothing dreary and plodding like AIDS or global climate change.
It would have been visible throughout the solar system. But, as
Priscilla illustrated, our valuables, safely locked away, would
have survived us.
The Nevada Test Site, a particularly desolate thousand square
miles of the Great Basin, was chosen in 1951 for our nuclear tests
partly because it's ringed by low mountains, naturally shielded
from the prying eyes of the outside world.
Today, if you stand amid the charmless wreckage at Frenchman
Flat, another thing is clear: It is also impossible to see out
of the basin. The place is disconnected from the rest of Nevada,
from America, from civilization itself. It is a lifeless, humorless,
Planet of the Apes location. These could have been the ruins of
a future we stopped in its tracks -- the ruins of Las Vegas, Vienna,
Tokyo, your town or my town, bombed back to the Stone Age.
Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four bombs or
six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember that in 1957, only
12 years after the Trinity test -- the first nuclear explosion
in history took place at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945 --
the United States was manufacturing 10 nuclear bombs per day,
3,000 fission and fusion bombs every year. The largest deployable
weapon in our '57 arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21, powerful
enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujahs or Oaklands) at
a pop.
Filling that Mosler vault with stocks and bonds in 1957 now seems
a surreal gesture of hope. Imagine the bomb's survivors -- a hairless,
sterilized post-nuclear Adam and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive
feral dogs that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) -- crawling
toward the bank vault in their bloody rags, trying to remember
the combination, praying for their Chrysler stock, or Grandpa's
gold watch, or their Prudent
