E. O. Wilson writing in 2002: The
20th century was a time of exponential scientific and technical
advance, the freeing of the arts by an exuberant modernism, and the
spread of democracy and human rights throughout the world. It was also
a dark and savage age of world wars, genocide, and totalitarian
ideologies that came dangerously close to global domination. While
preoccupied with all this tumult, humanity managed collaterally to
decimate the natural environment and draw down the nonrenewable
resources of the planet with cheerful abandon. We thereby accelerated
the erasure of entire ecosystems and the extinction of thousands of
million-year-old species. If Earth’s ability to support our growth is
finite–and it is–we were mostly too busy to notice.

As a new
century begins, we have begun to awaken from this delirium. Now,
increasingly postideological in temper, we may be ready to settle down
before we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate
what it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for
everyone into the indefinite future. The question of the century is:
How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves
and for the biosphere that sustains us?

The bottom line is
different from that generally assumed by our leading economists and
public philosophers. They have mostly ignored the numbers that count.
Consider that with the global population past six billion and on its
way to eight billion or more by midcentury, per capita freshwater and
arable land are descending to levels resource experts agree are risky.
The ecological footprint–the average amount of productive land and
shallow sea appropriated by each person in bits and pieces from around
the world for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce,
and waste absorption–is about one hectare (2.5 acres) in developing
nations but about 9.6 hectares (24 acres) in the U.S. The footprint for
the total human population is 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres). For every
person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with
existing technology would require four more planet Earths. The five
billion people of the developing countries may never wish to attain
this level of profligacy. But in trying to achieve at least a decent
standard of living, they have joined the industrial world in erasing
the last of the natural environments. At the same time, Homo sapiens
has become a geophysical force, the first species in the history of the
planet to attain that dubious distinction. We have driven atmospheric
carbon dioxide to the highest levels in at least 200,000 years,
unbalanced the nitrogen cycle, and contributed to a global warming that
will ultimately be bad news everywhere.

In short, we have
entered the Century of the Environment, in which the immediate future
is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. Science and technology, combined
with a lack of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy, brought
us to where we are today. Now science and technology, combined with
foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out. (01/01/09)
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Ellen Brown writes: Bernie Madoff showed us how it was done: you induce many
investors to invest their money, promising steady above-market returns; and you
deliver – at least on paper. When your clients check their accounts, they see
that their investments have indeed increased by the promised amount. Anyone who
opts to pull out of the game is paid promptly and in full. You can afford to
pay because most players stay in, and new players are constantly coming in to
replace those who drop out. The players who drop out are simply paid with the
money coming in from new recruits. The scheme works until the market turns and
many players want their money back at once. Then it’s game over: you have to
admit that you don’t have the funds, and you are probably looking at jail time.

A Ponzi scheme is a form of pyramid scheme in which
earlier investors are paid with the money of later investors rather than from
real profits. The perpetuation of the scheme requires an ever-increasing flow
of money from investors in order to keep it going. Charles Ponzi was an
engaging Boston ex-convict who defrauded investors out of $6 million in the
1920s by promising them a 400 percent return on redeemed postal reply coupons. When
he finally could not pay, the scam earned him ten years in jail; and Bernie
Madoff is likely to wind up there as well.

Most people are not involved in illegal Ponzi schemes, but
we do keep our money in accounts that are tallied on computer screens rather
than in stacks of coins or paper bills. How do we know that when we demand our
money from our bank or broker that the funds will be there? The fact that banks
are subject to “runs” (recall Northern Rock, Indymac and Washington Mutual)
suggests that all may not be as it seems on our online screens. Banks
themselves are involved in a sort of Ponzi scheme, one that has been
perpetuated for hundreds of years. What distinguishes the legal scheme known as
“fractional reserve” lending from the illegal schemes of Bernie Madoff and his
ilk is that the bankers’ scheme is protected by government charter and
backstopped with government funds. At last count, the Federal Reserve and the
U.S. Treasury had committed $8.5 trillion to bailing out the banks from
their follies.¹ By comparison,
M2, the largest measure of the money supply now reported by the Federal
Reserve, was just under $8 trillion in December 2008.² The sheer size of the bailout efforts
indicates that the banking scheme has reached its mathematical limits and needs
to be superseded by something more sustainable. (01/01/09)
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Christopher Cooper writes: “Somebody got murdered on New Year’s Eve; Somebody said dignity was the first to leave.” They tell you in writing classes, I think, that it’s poor policy to open an essay with a quotation. It makes your writing look weak. Your readers assume you couldn’t find much within yourself so you had to go borrow something fine and shiny from a better writer. Maybe so, and maybe no shame in knowing when to ask for help.

But maybe, too, you might consider, if the author excavated down into his own sad soul here as the murky night of the dying year congeals into the hard and bitter beginning of this desperate and dangerous dawn, he’d drag out some hurts and fears so bloody and black that none of us would want to watch them writhe or hear their screams.

So how was it for you? 2008. Did you lose your job? Your health insurance (with its high deductible, offensive co-pay, various restrictions and exclusions, and extensive paperwork and frustrating telephone contacts with incompetent and uncaring company employees)? Or did your retirement fund evaporate or just reduce by half or so? Still think you can make a profit selling your house (or perhaps even sell it at all)? Do you think 2009 will be better?

It was a good year, ‘08, if you have a sense of humor. …

Well, I never had the money to invest in some shaky Wall Street instrument designed to keep me in my luxurious lifestyle through my golden years, so I didn’t lose a nickel in the great stock market unraveling. So I could laugh all the way to the bank, so to speak, as the rest of you were redeposited in reality by your bursting bubble. They’re coming fast aren’t they-the bubbles? Dot-coms, housing, investment. And then to cap the quarter, some sleazoid running an outfit called Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (that would be Mr. Bernie Madoff his own self) indeed made off (I don’t make this up, people!) with fifty billion dollars or so of money he’d sucked up in a giant, yet simple, classic Ponzi scheme, while Federal regulators were busy not regulating.

They had, in fact, spent the last three or four presidential terms deregulating because, haven’t we been told since Ronald Reagan ran the show, “The Market knows best.” Probably so. Bill Clinton assured us “The era of big government is over.” The business of government is not to help the hurting and helpless, after all. Unless the sick and injured are giant corporations. Or investment banks. Or insurance companies.

But you were there. You saw the deals go down. You gasped in disbelief as professorial, careful Ben Bernanke and goofy, loose-canon Henry Paulson teamed up to deliver a few trillion dollars of money you and I haven’t even earned yet to the crybaby capitalists who sat sadly before them and said it just wasn’t fair that they should have to live or die according to market forces, however appropriate that might be for those of us picking hemlock boards off the green chain in the mud at N.C. Hunt’s sawmill or sweeping the aisles and stocking canned goods at the Hannaford grocery conglomerate at three a.m.

At least we aren’t fretting about the cost of our wars any more. And what a relief. Some hundreds of billions to prop up incompetent, crooked regimes, blow up wedding parties, and give the neighbors something to fight against. At least we don’t have to kill those miserable creatures in Gaza ourselves, this Christmas. Israel is gunning down those it hadn’t already starved. The score after some weeks of Hamas rocket fire and two days of Israeli bombing: about 270 to one. So much for eye-and-tooth proportionalism. Ah, but it’s the Middle East! What can you do about that mess, after all? Just keep funding it, I guess.

And who cares about any of those old problems we briefly discussed back in the Sixties? Population growth, resource depletion, chemical pollution. No, it’s gotta be death and destruction or profit and loss to get our attention now. (01/01/09)
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BBC Medical Science — People who scrimp on sleep are more likely to develop hardening of their arteries, a precursor to heart disease, research suggests. Calcified arteries were found in nearly a third of people who slept fewer than five hours a night. This dropped to around one in 10 for those who slept an extra hour, the Journal of the American Medical Association study of 495 adults found.

Experts said getting enough sleep was important for good heart health.

In the study, the volunteers underwent two CT scans, designed to assess the build-up of calcium in the heart’s arteries, five years apart. They also filled out sleep questionnaires, kept a sleep diary and wore a wrist monitor for six nights that measured movement to give an estimate of how long they were actually lying still and asleep.

At the first scan, none of the volunteers had any calcification in their arteries but five years later 61 of them did. This calcification appeared to be linked with lack of sleep. The risk was lowest for those who regularly had more than seven hours sleep each night.

Lead researcher Dr Diane Lauderdale, of the University of Chicago, said there were several possible explanations for the link that they found. Firstly, there may be some factor not yet identified that can both reduce sleep duration and increase calcification. Or it might be down to blood pressure - high blood pressure increases the likelihood of calcification and blood pressure goes down during sleep. Alternatively, stress or a stress hormone like cortisol, which has been tied to decreased sleep and increased calcification, may play a role. She said: “Although there are constant temptations to sleep less, there is a growing body of evidence that short sleep may have subtle health consequences. Although this single study does not prove that short sleep leads to coronary artery disease, it is safe to recommend at least six hours of sleep a night.” (01/01/09)
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BBC Plant Science — Plants have never been as important to the environment, the director of Kew Gardens has said, ahead of the London conservation site’s 250th anniversary. They were vital to reduce the impact of climate change and “vast numbers of humans” needed them for medicine and food, Professor Stephen Hopper added.

Several major events will be held in 2009 to celebrate Kew’s role as a world leader in plant science. The first of these sees free public entry to the gardens on New Year’s Day.

“We believe that at no other point in history have plants been so important to people,” said Professor Hopper. “They have importance as carbon sinks in a time of climate change. We have to care for what remains and address the serious business of repairing and restoring vegetation if we’re going to have the buffers to climate variation that plant life offers.” There was an urgency to protect the plants which were essential to human welfare and quality of life, he added, as well as continuing to care for “green companions”.

More than seven million preserved specimens of plants from around the world can be found in Kew’s Herbarium.

An extension to this will open in 2009 to coincide with the 250th anniversary, helping Kew to cope with the 30,000 new specimens it receives each year. (01/01/09)
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