Posts tagged Asian
Call It What It Is: Energy of Mass Extinction
Mar 11th
by JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
It’s time for the public to start calling 19th century barbaric fossil fuels what it is: Energy of Mass Extinction. Dirty energy companies, including nuclear power plants, have been owned by a few rich white families from the start, which is why production of energy has remained in the Dark Ages even though clean renewable energy could have lit up the world easily, cheaply and without pollution twenty years ago. Given the latest advances in green energy technology, there’s absolutely no excuse for not legislating rapid shifts to clean energy by 2020.
Instead, world leaders, primarily the US government, not only serve as “barriers” to the advancement of green energy, they’re the fossil fuel industry’s sleaziest salesmen on earth: Big Oil pays for their seats on the Hill for the sole purpose of selling Energy of Mass Extinction to world markets. Oil executives are given an open door invitation to the White House any time and day of the week.
By contrast, lawyers that represent the public’s welfare and our environment are not welcomed, or they are put on a long waiting list. In short, the oil oligarchs operate from the White House where the polluters meet and draw up their plans. Judges are also owned by the oil firms. For example, read Buzzflash editor at Truthout Mark Karlin’s recent commentary about a federal judge that blocked U.S. courts from being used to collect a $9 billion Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron for turning a beautiful rainforest into a putrid toxic waste dump Thanks to a thoroughly corrupt US government, another victory for Chevron’s oil tyrants who don’t have to clean up the toxic sludge they leave behind after they’ve contaminated everything in sight for Energy of Mass Extinction.
In order to understand Obama’s plans for Energy of Mass Extinction, it’s worth reading two articles that appeared in the Rolling Stone: How the U.S. Exports Global Warming by Tim Dickinson. While Obama talks about shifting to a clean, green future, behind closed doors, he and his rich oil friends are selling tar-sands oil, black gunk refined to crude known as petroleum coke, which is denser and dirtier than burning coal—to world markets, mostly to China and Asian markets because it’s cheap fuel.
Too bad China won’t tell Obama to take his filthy tar-sands and shove it you know where, and that they’ll meet their energy demands with their advanced solar and wind technologies. But unfortunately, they’re buying it. And as long as there’s a demand, we will be doomed by these horrific decisions made by world leaders. Incidentally, “Hillary Clinton is even more supportive of the dirty-energy trade than the Obama White House.”
The second piece is Matt Taibbi’s The Vampire Squid Strikes Again. Thanks to deregulation going back to the Glass-Steagall Act under President Clinton, accelerated by Republican, Phil Gramm, banks have gone beyond financing dirty fossil fuel industries: they’re buying everything associated with the production of Energy of Mass Extinction for big profits.
When you read these two pieces together, you get a clear understanding of how oil firms, Wall St and the US government are buying and selling Energy of Mass Extinction in a blinding wheel of addiction to money while the earth is going up in flames. These people wouldn’t know a Redwood from a Palm tree. They’re completely divorced from nature. They are exactly what T.S. Eliot meant by the Hollow Men.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. hundreds of students are being arrested in front of the White House to protest against the Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline. Although these kids stepped over the line deliberately to get arrested for the sake of drawing attention to tar-sands Energy of Mass Extinction, to my mind, they were arrested to protect the oil industry.
While these kids are going to jail for trying to save a beautiful planet that is doomed from man-made pollution, the oil criminals continue to poison our drinking water, oceans, rivers, lands, and our air at mass levels of destruction. Are they getting arrested? No, they’re being wined and dined at the White House. As for the oil-owned media, as Buzzflash editor, Mark Karlin, pointed out, a huge, oil-funded PR campaign has been launched to push Obama’s approval of the northern Keystone leg from Alberta, Canada to the southern Keystone pipeline for delivery to the Gulf where it will be sold to China and Asian markets.
For example, it was disconcerting to see that HuffingtonPost Green published Warren Buffet’s cheerleading article for the Keystone pipeline. It’s one thing to post it in the business section, but to promote Buffet’s big push for the worst carbon emitting pollution on earth in the environmental section seemed terribly hypocritical at HuffPost Green. There’s one significant point that Buffet failed to mention in his article: that he plans to profit from his investment in the Keystone tar-sands pipeline. That’s how PR works: convince the public that oil (tar-sands) is good for them, when in fact, it only benefits a few billionaires like Buffet at the expense of life as we know it.
In my last Buzzflash-Truthout commentary, Who’s to Blame for Recurring Chemical & Oil Disasters, I made a reference to Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, The Sixth Extinction. Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe. In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert explains how our use of fossil fuels and the effects of climate change are creating a mass extinction of the planet. “We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach,” said Kolbert on a NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross.
That’s why it’s important for the public to call dirty energy what it is: Energy of Mass Extinction; it’s a barbaric fuel that is sucking the life and light from our Planet Earth.
Dirty Energy is the real Weapon of Mass Destruction. These ruthless monsters are not going to change their ways as long as they can profit by the billions from annihilating the earth. Therefore, we must all make an effort to stop using and buying these deadly products to the best of our abilities. That’s what’s happening in Hawaii. Residents are opting out of the grid for solar and by doing so, making it impossible for the antiquated utility company (HECO) to stay alive. Read Hawaii’s top renewable energy advocate Henry Curtis’ piece U.S. Utilities Face Impending Doom with the Rise of Cheap Solar.
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Jacqueline Marcus is a contributing guest writer for Buzzflash at Truthout.org; she’s the editor ofForPoetry.com and EnvironmentalPress.com and author of Close to the Shore by Michigan State University Press. Her E-book, Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone: Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us, is available at Kindle Books.
Asian migrants stuck on land bridge for milleniums
Feb 27th
likely a long-term refuge for early Americans
A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder bolsters the theory that the first Americans, who are believed to have come over from northeast Asia during the last ice age, may have been isolated on the Bering Land Bridge for thousands of years before spreading throughout the Americas.
The theory, now known as the “Beringia Standstill,” was first proposed in 1997 by two Latin American geneticists and refined in 2007 by a team led by the University of Tartu in Estonia that sampled mitrochondrial DNA from more than 600 Native Americans. The researchers found that mutations in the DNA indicated a group of their direct ancestors from Siberia was likely isolated for at least several thousand years in the region of the Bering Land Bridge, the now-submerged plain that lies between northeast Asia and Alaska once exposed by a significantly lower sea level.
CU-Boulder researcher John Hoffecker, lead author of a short paper article appearing in the Feb. 28 issue of Science magazine, said the Beringia Standstill model gained little traction outside of the genetics community after it was proposed and has been seen by some scientists outside of the field as far-fetched. But the new paper by Hoffecker and co-authors Scott Elias of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Dennis O’Rourke of the University of Utah adds credence to the Beringia Standstill idea by further linking the genetics to the paleoecological evidence.
“A number of supporting pieces have fallen in place during the last decade, including new evidence that central Beringia supported a shrub tundra region with some trees during the last glacial maximum and was characterized by surprisingly mild temperatures, given the high latitude,” said Hoffecker of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. The last glacial maximum peaked roughly 21,000 years ago and was marked by the growth of vast ice sheets in North America and Europe.
While a debate rages on about when early humans first migrated into the New World, many archaeologists now believe it was sometime around 15,000 years ago after retreating glaciers opened access to coastal and interior routes into North America.
The relatively mild summer climate in Beringia at the time was caused by North Pacific circulation patterns that brought moist and relatively warm air to the region during the last glacial maximum. Geologists believe the Beringia gateway between Siberia and Alaska was more than 600 miles wide at the time.
Hoffecker and others are now theorizing that a population of hundreds or thousands of people parked itself in central Beringia for 5,000 years or more. One key to the extended occupation may have been the presence of wood in some places to use as a fuel to supplement bone, which burns hot and fast. Experiments have shown that at least some wood is necessary to make bone practical as a fuel.
Elias, a paleoecologist and also an INSTAAR affiliate, said research using fossil pollen, plant and insect material from sediment cores from the now submerged landscape show that the Bering Land Bridge tundra environment contained enough woody plants and trees like birch, willow and alder to provide a supplement to bone.
Work by Elias and others included the analysis of certain beetle species that live in very specific temperature zones, allowing them to be used as tiny thermometers. The insects indicated that temperatures there were relatively mild during last glacial maximum that ran from about 27,000 years to 20,000 years ago, only slightly cooler than temperatures in the region today.
“The climate on the land bridge and adjacent parts of Siberia and Alaska was a bit wetter than the interior regions like central Alaska and the Yukon, but not a lot warmer,” said Elias. “Our data show that woody shrubs were available on the land bridge, which would have facilitated the making of fires by the people there.”
Evidence from the 2007 study indicated a set of genetic mutations in mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mother to offspring, clearly accumulated after the divergence of people from their Asian parent groups in Siberia but before their dispersal throughout the Western Hemisphere, said O’Rourke. In addition, ancient DNA from human skeletal remains found at a 24,000-year-old archaeological site in southern Siberia also appears consistent with the divergence of Native American groups from their Asian forbearers by that time window, he said.
“The genetic record has been very clear for several years that the Native American genome must have arisen in an isolated population at least by 25,000 years ago, and the bulk of the migrants to the Americas really didn’t arrive south of the ice sheets until nearly 15,000 years ago,” O’Rourke said. “The paleoecological data, which I think most geneticists have not been familiar with, indicate that Beringia was not a uniform environment, and there was a shrub tundra region, or refugium, that likely provided habitats conducive to continuous human habitation.”
“From my view the genetics and paleoecology data come together nicely,” said Hoffecker, who co-authored a 2007 book with Elias titled “The Human Ecology of Beringia.” While the weakest link to the Out of Beringia theory is the lack of archaeological evidence, Hoffecker believes future research on now submerged parts of Beringia as well as lowlands in western Alaska and eastern Siberia that still remain above water may hold clues to ancient habitation by Beringia residents, who eventually moved on to be the first group to inhabit the Americas.
Hoffecker also believes that the Beringia inhabitants during the last glacial maximum could have made successful hunting forays into the uninhabited steppe-tundra region to both the east and west, where drier conditions and more grass supported a plentiful array of large grazing animals, including steppe bison, horse and mammoth.
There is now solid evidence for humans in Beringia before the last glacial maximum, as geneticists first predicted in 1997, said Hoffecker. After the maximum, there are two sets of archaeological remains dating to less than 15,000 years ago. “One represents a late migration from Asia into Alaska at that time,” he said. “The other has no obvious source outside Beringia and may represent the people who are thought to have sheltered on the land bridge during the glacial maximum.
“If we are looking for a place to put all of these people during the last glacial maximum, Beringia may be the only realistic option,” said Hoffecker.
A video news story on the research is available at http://www.colorado.edu/news.
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CU study: Some primates sleep in caves for safety
Dec 4th
The ring-tailed lemurs may be opting to sleep in caves for several reasons, said University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Associate Professor Michelle Sauther, who led the study. While the cave-sleeping behavior is likely important because it provides safety from potential predators, it also can provide the primates with access to water and nutrients, help to regulate their body temperatures during cold or hot weather and provide refuge from encroaching human activities like deforestation, she said.
“The remarkable thing about our study was that over a six-year period, the same troops of ring-tailed lemurs used the same sleeping caves on a regular, daily basis,” she said. “What we are seeing is a consistent, habitual use of caves as sleeping sites by these primates, a wonderful behavioral adaptation we had not known about before.”
A paper on the subject appeared in the November issue of the journal Madagascar Conservation and Development. Funding for the project came from Primate Conservation Inc., the International Primate Society, the American Society of Primatologists, the National Geographic Society, CU-Boulder, the University of North Dakota, Colorado College and the National Science Foundation.
Although sleeping in caves by ring-tailed lemurs — which are found only in Madagascar — has likely been going on for millennia, it is only now being recognized as a regular behavior, said Sauther. The endangered Fusui langurs, slender, long-tailed Asian monkeys roughly 2 feet tall, also have been documented sleeping in caves but as a direct result of extreme deforestation, moving from cave to cave every few days. There also have been isolated reports of South African baboons sleeping in caves.
Ring-tailed lemurs are easily identified by their characteristic, black and white ringed tails, which can be twice as long as their bodies. They weigh roughly 5 pounds with a head-body length of up to 18 inches and are highly social, congregating in groups of up to 30 individuals. Sporting fox-like snouts and slender frames, they are unusual among lemurs, spending a considerable amount of time on the ground feeding on leaves and fruit and socializing, said Sauther.
In “gallery forests” near rivers, ring-tailed lemurs regularly sleep high in the canopies of tall trees. But in “spiny forests,” most of the trees with woody stems are covered in rows of spines, making them uncomfortable as well as dangerous sleeping sites because predators can easily climb them, Sauther said. The new study documents their cave sleeping behavior in the dry spiny forest habitat adjacent to limestone cliffs.
The lemur observations were made at the 104,000-acre Tsimanampesotse National Park and the Tsinjoriake Protected Area in southwestern Madagascar between 2006 and this year. The research team used field observations and motion-detector camera traps to chart the behavior and movements of 11 different troops of ring-tailed lemurs.
One of the early clues to the cave sleeping by the lemurs was their presence on limestone cliffs adjacent to spiny forest trees or on the ground when Sauther’s research team arrived at the study sites early in the morning. “They seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was not from the trees,” she said. “We were baffled. But when we began arriving at the study sites earlier and earlier in the mornings, we observed them climbing out of the limestone caves.”
The primary predator of the lemurs is a cat-like, carnivorous mammal called a fossa native only to Madagascar that is closely related to the mongoose and may weigh up to 20 pounds. Fossil evidence shows a cougar-sized relative of the fossa that only became extinct several thousand years ago likely preyed on lemurs as well, she said.
There is evidence that some early ancestors of humans in South Africa may have used caves to protect themselves from predators, said Sauther. The remains of hominids going back several million years have been found inside or near limestone caves there, and some fossil bones have evidence of damage consistent with the bite of saber-toothed cats.
“We think cave-sleeping is something ring-tailed lemurs have been doing for a long time,” she said. “The behavior may be characteristic of a deep primate heritage that goes back millions of years.”
Co-authors of the new study included Associate Professor Frank Cuozzo of the University of North Dakota, Ibrahim Antho Youssouf Jacky, Lova Ravelohasindrazana and Jean Ravoavy of the University of Toliara in Madagascar, Krista Fish of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Marni LaFleur of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Fish and LaFleur are former CU-Boulder students of Sauther.
Sauther co-directs the Beza Mahafalay Lemur Biology Project in southwestern Madagascar with Cuozzo, a former CU-Boulder doctoral student. Centered at the roughly 1,500-acre Beza Mahafalay Special Reserve, the research focuses on how climate- and human-induced change affects lemur biology, behavior and survival.
Sauther and her team were aided by field observations made by students and faculty from the University of Toliara in Madagascar. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students from CU-Boulder regularly travel to Madagascar to conduct research under Sauther, including students from CU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which provides hands-on research and fosters student-faculty relationships.
“I never thought I would have a chance as a CU undergraduate to conduct research in an exotic place like Madagascar,” said former UROP student Anthony Massaro, who was part of a team that trapped ring-tailed lemurs, measured their physical characteristics including dentition, and released them back into the wild. “Dr. Sauther and Dr. Cuozzo mentored and guided me through the process of creating and conducting a unique research project.”
Unfortunately, habitat destruction, including deforestation, is increasing in many parts of Madagascar. In southwestern Madagascar, trees are being harvested for cattle forage, construction materials and firewood, and the mining of limestone there — used for the production of cement, fertilizer and other products — is increasing. Ring-tailed lemurs are now listed as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission.
Sauther has been conducting research on Madagascar for 25 years, beginning as a University of Washington graduate student. Today she has several CU-Boulder doctoral students working with her, including James Millette, who is studying how the tooth wear of lemurs relates to their foraging behaviors.
“Madagascar is a challenging place to conduct research,” Millette said. “Part of our job is to work with local communities, because without the support of these people there would be no lemur conservation. We consider Beza, where we have been working with the community for several decades, to be a real success story.”
A video of ring-tailed lemurs climbing into a cave is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjWF3_SmYS0&feature=youtu.be.
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