With the 2013 flu season peaking from now until April, a question at the top of the debate pile is whether or not to receive a flu shot. Some argue that by not getting yourself vaccinated, you are putting another at risk of exposure to the disease. Others argue that if vaccinations work, then why worry over if others around you have had their flu shot or not? The media and Internet are abuzz with information about the flu, how you catch the flu, what to do to prevent the flu, what you can take to help treat the flu, but you have to dig deeper to find a list of the ingredients in the actual flu shot.

So what’s the big deal with the components that make up the flu shot if it helps to prevent the aches, pains and overall discomfort of the disease? According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control), here is the generalized short-list of ingredients and their purpose for being in a flu shot:

The controversial ingredient that most anti-vaccine advocates fight against is the use of Thiomersal — commonly called Thimerosal in the United States — which is a heavy-metal (mercury) based preservative that is believed by some in the medical field to bring the onset of Autism in otherwise healthy children. Thimerosal is highly toxic if inhaled, ingested or in contact with the skin and is extremely detrimental in aquatic environments and causes long term effects in aquatic organisms. The CDC states “Today, except for some flu vaccines, none of the childhood vaccines used routinely in the United States contain mercury (thimerosal) as a preservative. Although no evidence suggests that there are safety concerns with Thimerosal, vaccine manufacturers stopped using it as a precautionary measure. Now it is contained in very tiny amounts only in multi-dose vials of flu vaccine. Thimerosal is necessary in vaccines that come in multi-dose vials because they require that each individual vaccine dose be drawn from the vial with a new needle and syringe. With each needle inserted, there is the potential for introducing microbes into the vial.”

But what the CDC is not reporting is that each pharmaceutical company uses a different chemical cocktail, so unless the consumer knows exactly what manufacturer prepared the administered vaccine shot, one cannot be guaranteed to be receiving a Thimerosal-free vaccine. And even if one did know the exact details of the origin of the vaccine, the other preservatives might not be mercury but still be toxic to the body nonetheless.

Take for instance the Begrivac Influenza vaccine (split virion, inactivated) from Wyeth that comes with this fact sheet. It is recommended for children 6 months and older, one i.m. injection, size of dose smaller for 6-36 months, booster dose recommended for children who have not previously been vaccinated. The listed ingredients include chemicals that are harmless such as sucrose, potassium dihydrogen phosphate, sodium phosphate dehydrate, and magnesium chloride hexahydrate; chemicals that are harmful in high concentrations but harmless in low levels, such as low concentrations of potassium chloride and traces of diethylether and formaldehyde; and the chemicals/proteins below that, even in low amounts, can potentially cause adverse reactions from some of the people inoculated:

Polymyxin B. “Polymyxin B is a mixture of polymyxins B1 and B2, obtained from Bacillus polymyxa strains. They are basic polypeptides of about eight amino acids and have cationic detergent action on cell membranes. Polymyxin B is used for infections with gram-negative organisms, but may be neurotoxic and nephrotoxic.”

Polysorbate 80. “Polysorbate 80 is a skin or sense organ toxicant and has been known to cause cancer in animals.”

Egg protein. In many cases, eggs are used in vaccine production. “At 5-6 days of incubation, the microorganism is inoculated into the yolk sac of the embryonated eggs, which are harvested after death of the embryo at 12-15 days. Egg-related allergy is common, particularly in children with asthma or general allergies, and may be as high as 40% in children with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis. The risk of egg-related allergy after vaccination depends on the presence of egg protein in the final product. For example, influenza vaccine is manufactured using the extra-embryonic fluids of chick embryos and contains measurable quantities of egg proteins.”

Virus: Influenza virus antigens. Proteins from the influenza virus.

The above influenza vaccine is just one of many pharmaceutical CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved vaccines for children. True, it contains no Thimerosal, but it does contain potentially unsafe compounds even though it is ruled to be safe. And what about the doses for adults and the elderly?

In the cases of vaccines that contain aluminum or mercury compounds, it is important to keep in mind that such heavy metals can lead to future health problems, especially if you receive the flu shot annually. According to FAQ Heavy Metal Detox, some effects of exposure to heavy metals are:

“The Brain – calcium levels in the brain affect cognitive development.”

“The Central Nervous System – neurotransmitters are chemicals released by neurons for communication within the CNS. Impaired release of calcium-dependent neurotransmitters result in depressed levels of hormones norepinephrine, serotonin, and acetylcholine. The release of neurotransmitters is related to: mood, sexuality, emotion, motivation, digestion, and muscle control. There is a correlation between calcium levels and degenerative CNS diseases.”

“The Skeletal System – Skeletal Osteodystery due to disruption of calcium levels in bones.”

“The Cellular System – Impaired cellular nutrition and energy production as related to the disruption of cellular calcium-sodium ATP pump processes.”

“The Endocrine System – The thyroid, hypothalamus, and the pituary glands are organs that can be negatively impacted by mercury and other heavy metals. Developmental delays, behavioural and learning disabilities, decreased IQ and attention span, mental retardation, and autism can be the results.”

So choose wisely when deciding how to prepare for the flu season ahead. Research shows that the shots are only up to 65 percent effective and could be the wrong strain for your area. Some great alternatives to injecting a flu shot would be to boost up your or your child’s immune system ahead of time with probiotics, organic teas and spices and foods rich with anti-oxidants.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one and six by Eneas de Troya.

The End Age for humanity will not be a date known to man, but a point of no return from climate change, about which we shall be as oblivious as if we had sleepwalked out of an airplane without a parachute. Scientists will describe their shock at the free fall, estimate the time of impact and ask for more funds to refine their estimates. World agencies will organize meetings to exotic places, to which people will fly long distances at great costs in emissions, to discuss how to mitigate the effects of climate change and promote a capitalist notion of buying and selling carbon credits. All will be helpless against our catastrophic crash once we pass the turning point. Are we there now, as the Hopi and Mayans have predicted? Is there time left and, if so, how long?

By five different estimates of global warming from measurements of the temperatures of the lower atmosphere as well as Earth’s surface, during the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, human activities raised the entire globe’s surface temperature by one degree Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit). Regardless of what scientists might say to prevent a panic or protect their careers, they generally agree that another one-degree rise in temperature is too horrible to countenance and will be catastrophic for humanity.

Some climate reports say that we might reach this two-degree warming around 2050 to 2070 if we do nothing to “mitigate” climate change, but these projections are disingenuous. Based on the “Albedo Effect” alone, which predicts that the decreased reflectivity of the Earth, due to melting of glaciers, will cause warming to accelerate, anyone can reasonably calculate that, if we do nothing at all, the next one-degree increase in temperature will happen faster than the last. In other words, if we stop all emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) today, we have less than 30 years.

The time left to us might be very much less than 30 years because global warming itself is expected to trigger a series of events that will release massive quantities of greenhouse gases to trap yet more heat in the atmosphere. One of these is the release of methane from the Arctic permafrost. This has already started, with methane emissions increasing over 30 percent  from 2003 to 2007.  Another is the expected conversion of the Amazon from a carbon fixer to a net carbon emitter due to warming of the rivers and their release of CO2.

How might we prevent a catastrophe? For sure, it cannot be averted without acquainting the public with the seriousness of the problem, which is as follows. Our cumulative emissions of CO2 are the main source of the greenhouse effect that is warming the planet’s surface. Furthermore, CO2 stays in the atmosphere, on average, for about 200 to 300 years, and possibly longer. Therefore, at this juncture, the notion of emitting additional CO2  should be understood by all as being complete lunacy. We should, instead, be turning our attention to the task of removing much of the accumulated CO2.

Those scientists who do not communicate the urgency of the situation and participate in lulling the public into inaction have much to answer for. This is no time for inoffensive names like “thermal inertia” to describe the continued warming if we do nothing, or for obtuse terms like “negative emission,” to communicate the urgent need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. All scientific jargon must be thrown away. Not only our species is at risk, but also much of the ensemble of life that makes our existence possible. It is time for straight talk.

How excessive is the human contribution to global warming? Think how much heat one needs to warm a small pot of water by one degree centigrade. Imagine the heat needed for a container of water 10 times larger, a 100-liter drum and, finally, the surface of, not only the Earth’s oceans, but also the entire lower atmosphere! Consider the energies involved. They are now stored as heat over the planet’s surface and can transform at any time into massive storms. The epicenter of these events is the tropics.

It is a simple matter of thermodynamics that we are returning to the conditions that prevailed during the Permian Era, before green plants fixed the carbon that we are now burning as fossil fuels. Back then, the seas were vaster, and the Earth’s landmass was smaller than it is today. At two degrees of warming, civilization, as we know it, will end. Port cities will become submerged. Islands will disappear or shrink to their highest peaks. Simultaneously with the violent cyclones and massive floods, there will be fires in currently dry regions because they will become yet drier. The salinity of the oceans has already changed to the extent that many aquatic species are greatly stressed and might soon disappear.  The overall process is underway, and it will intensify even if we stop all carbon emission right now. We need to do more. Much more. At the least, we must set out to reforest the planet as rapidly as we can. We must also gradually decrease the human population to a sustainable level, if only to prevent the achievement of this depopulation by disease and other calamities. The world simply cannot accommodate more humans, nor can it tolerate the religion of capitalism, which calls for infinite growth and consumption on a finite planet.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one, four and five by NASA Goddard Photo stream. Photographs seven and eight by Lynn D. Rosentrater.

Honeybee populations have plummeted in recent years. Simultaneously, government and industry funds to study whether pesticides, mites, or viruses are the root cause of this problem have been granted to American and European researchers. These scientists call the disappearance of the bees “colony collapse disorder”, or CCD, though a more appropriate name would be CCC, for colony collapse catastrophe. After all, this disorder entails the disappearance of a hive’s 5,000 to 100,000 or so individuals in a few days without leaving even a trace of their bodies. CCD was first reported in Pennsylvania in 2006. The speed of the devastation in the continental United States has been astounding, with small private apiaries already becoming a thing of the past, and the honeybee (Apis mellifera) numbers dropping on average by more than 30 percent: a total of about 3 million hives. The phenomenon has spread to Canada, Central America, South America and most of Europe.

Honeybee society

As a species, humans are about three million years old: a blink of an eye compared to the honeybees’ more than 100 million years of living in a highly egalitarian society. Honeybee hives consist mostly of sister workers who live together in wax cities of their own making. During the seasons when flowers bloom, many of these insects go out daily to forage for their foods. Typically, they collect nectar and pollen from a broad variety of flowers within a one- to seven-mile radius of their hive. When honeybees discover a good food source, they direct their sisters to it by performing a dance for their hive on their return. The discovery of this “waggle dance,” which describes the quality of the food and gives distance information as well as the angle to the food’s location with respect to the sun, was a milestone in the demonstration of intelligence in non-human animals. Even more amazing than the dance: the final decision about the best food source for the group turned out to be based on facts, discussion and consensus building.

A honeybee hive represents a tight-knit society of individuals devoted to the greater good. The workers feed a special secretion – royal jelly – to a queen who is usually the mother of the entire hive; her job is to mate with a few drones (males), lay all the eggs, and care for the larvae. In addition, the sisters prepare honey from nectar as a common store of food for leaner seasons. In places were winters are cold, bees, who cannot fly when the temperature drops below 17 C (54 F), assemble the hive into a football-shaped structure around the queen that vibrates in unison to stay at 29 C (85 F). During attacks on the hive by predators, the sisters defend their home without hesitation, although they perish if they administer a sting. In cases of illness, to prevent the spread of disease, individual bees exile themselves from the hive to die.

Have humans been good friends to the bees?

Entomologist E. O. Wilson has noted that bees are “humanity’s greatest friend among the insects.” Honeybees originated in Africa and then migrated to Europe. According to the historical record, the ancient Egyptians learned to harvest honey at least 6,000 years ago. The practice reached Europe probably through the ancient Greeks. European settlers became so fond of honey that they introduced honeybees and non-native fruit trees to the New World and other places in the early 17th century. Contrary to prejudices about non-natives, honeybees have been exemplary citizens everywhere. They are the Earth’s best pollinators by far. Without them about 90% percent of our fruits, nuts, seeds, and vegetables would disappear, leaving a bland choice of wind-pollinated grasses like rice, wheat, or corn for our plates. Fibers such as cotton and flax would also go the way of the apples, carrots, and blueberries.

The decline in honeybees is alternately blamed on the unpredictability of flowering by many plants due to climate change, the ravages of the neonicotinoid pesticides introduced in the 1990s, parasitic mites and, more recently, the viruses harbored by these mites. Were it not for several spectacular traffic accidents in 2010 and 2011, we might not have learned about the lucrative business — also started in the 1990’s — of trucking bees in the Spring by the tens of millions, to vast monocultures of fruit trees or plants such as almonds or blueberries grown by agribusiness, from a series of massive industrial hives. Nor would we have considered that the overcrowded industrialized hives represent ideal breeding grounds for parasites.

Currently one industrial hive costs about $100, but its price in bee misery is inestimable. Examinations of CCD hives have shown most of the insects to be afflicted with multiple infections, as if the parasites are behaving opportunistically on a depressed immune system in the honeybees. Often single insects have been discovered to be simultaneously infected by mites, bacteria, fungi and viruses. This wealth of possible causes for illness has created a real boon for researchers, whose mission is to maintain the bees’ health under the unnatural industrial conditions that are killing them. Indeed, the only solutions being seriously considered for CCD are those that involve the continued industrialization of honeybees, such as the replenishment of the populations with hives imported from Australia or the development of bees that are more robust.

A new ecological consciousness

One need not be an entomologist to understand that it is unethical to treat a group of social and intelligent animals as a disposable commodity to be trucked thousands of miles to pollinate nuts and berries for our pleasure and then thrown away. Although the reasons for the decline of honeybee populations are probably many, all of them relate to the scale up of farms and the industrialization of bee hives, which are hardly ever discussed. Even for those bees that dodge the infections from overcrowding, disease is bound to follow the extreme stresses of homelessness and alienation, and possibly the deficiencies that result from foraging on an industrial monoculture. It was inevitable that infections would spread from the industrialized bees to the insects from smaller apiaries – even organic ones –  since it is impossible to isolate the trucked bees from the other populations.

Again and again, articles about the plight of the bees remind us that their services to the world are worth many tens of billions of dollars. But isn’t the focus on money the origin of our problems? There is no substitute for bee pollination. None. In parts of China where honeybees disappeared some 30 years ago, and humans have tried to assume the pollination of fruit blossoms, this process has been laughably inefficient. While a beehive can pollinate millions of flowers per day, a small village can pollinate a few dozens trees at best. In response to demonstrations that honeybees are indeed injured by neonicotinoids, these pesticides have become restricted in parts of Europe. The future of honeybees, however, is hardly the sort of agricultural problem that can be patched up by legislation. A new ecological consciousness is needed, and fast. If the honeybee decline continues at its current rate, by 2035 honeybees will disappear permanently from our world, along with much of its color and fragrance.

Editor’s Note: Photographs two and four by Danny Perez.

By Sutapa Chattopadhyay

Today, our democratically elected governments are grounded in the conviction that markets should be the sole organizing force of political, social, and economic decisions: an ideology that entirely dislodges welfarist, democratic and uncommodified values from the state. Over the last four to five years, for example, ordinary people throughout Europe have protested under the financial crisis but received no recognition from the International Institute for Finance (IIF), a lobby group of the 450 biggest banks in the world. Representatives of IIF include Charles Dallara (who served in the treasury of Ronald Reagan) and Josef Ackerman (chief executive of Deutsche Bank) who were prime players in deciding Greece’s future. Both were present throughout the Euro summits and enjoyed access to policy decisions with European heads of state and other policy makers. The austerity measures that followed their so-called success led to an economic depression in Greece. Unemployment continued to rise, rendering ordinary people destitute and desperate but favoring a small percentage of global capitalist elites. Further, the dismantlement of the welfare state destroyed the notions that individuals can rely on the community in times of need or have rights to resources as public goods, or even have rights to basic needs, or a right to live.

Looking back on colonial times, the forest, for example, became a resource and source of wealth after its use value was discovered following the establishment of regimes of extraction and technologies of rule, and the construction of new knowledge under the name of scientific forestry. Scientific forestry allowed a systematic exploitation of forests by censuring, as wasteful and unsustainable, the practices of the people who had generational rights to the resources. Why? Because resources had to be appropriated for capital accrual.

The economy of extraction is best understood today by analyzing the imperial regimes of rule, technologies of rule, and the western hegemonic construct that all third world resource-rich nations support terrorism. Thus the notion of stewardship can be applied because the more civilized world presumably knows how to improve poor lives. In fact, it is doubtful that there would have been any wars, conquests, or occupations if west Asia had been devoid of oil or if Africa had not been so richly endowed with resources. Improvement of the lives of thousands of Iraqis or, more recently, the liberation of Libya from Gaddafi, echo Mill’s declaration that “despotism is the legitimate mode of government dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement”. Michael Klare argues that the global energy giants puncture holes in the oil fields of West Asia, Africa, Latin America – the so-called third world – because the governments there are compliant, corrupt, easily manipulated and environmental regulations can be effortlessly fiddled. Consequently, if resource conflicts are analyzed under unitary, singular explanations, then the study fails to capture the intricacies of power-knowledge and the politics of extraction and accumulation. The web of power is complex, distributed and functional.

Claudia von Werlhof rightly claims that the colonial South is not becoming the North through any western, masculine and classical development prescriptions; rather the North is transforming into the South. The latest form of development is a world system of underdevelopment, which further establishes that development, underdevelopment and unequal development go in tandem. If the path of over-consumption, exploitation and waste by the west is filtered, what we get is an unequal distribution of resources, benefits and wealth because those who sacrifice for development and those who benefit are not the same.

Genetic mutilations, patent rights, and TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual rights) have reduced access and availability of resources, medicines and food to the poor and to poorer countries. The situation is all the more grim and painful because neglected diseases — simplistically, poor people’s diseases — have no vaccines or treatments because there is supposedly no market. With the expansionist policies of the superpowers who were the former colonial settlers, one sees that colonialization of the south has not stopped with decolonization efforts but has instead been more aggressively installed and violently continued through free-market fundamentalism and globalization. Various writers perceive this phenomenon as settler colonialism or internal colonialism or even a continuation of the cold war. Although globalization has brought us together with enhanced technologies and telecommunication, it has devastated third-world economies and the environment. Environmental destruction has such a domino effect on the entire world that we are already experiencing climate change in the form of appalling tropical storms, floods, droughts and sudden weather fluctuations that bring a huge toll to the livelihood mechanisms and health of poor people. Despite indications that the Earth is warming, the production of abstract wealth, forest clearings, grabbing of wastelands, displacement of subsistence farmlands with plantation crops and biofuels are on rise, and this will probably continue until it annihilates the poor.

Paradoxically, these discussions are not new, nor is the capitalist exploitation of nature and humans. Walter Benjamin was one of the first Marxists to denounce “the notion of dominating nature as an imperialist idea.” Five years after “ecology” appeared as a popular term, Boochin and College explicitly elaborated the anthropogenic sources of massive environmental destruction; thereafter, liberal and Marxist writers parasitized these concepts. The second half of the nineteenth century marked the critical consciousness around capitalism and ecology from Marx’s writings and anarchist politics of struggle and social uprisings. Radical environmental theorists had still not aligned with Marxist theories of class consciousness, articulation of modes of production and the relation between forces of production and social relations of production, but they accused Marx and Engels of being obsessed with capitalist production. This led to many faulty and unjustified analyses, because no one more than Marx condemned the logic of production for the sake of capital accumulation.

Further, there are other illusions, such as those of clean capitalism and the possibility of controlling the excesses of capitalism through eco-taxes, whereby ecologists shy away from correlating environmental crises with issues of class exploitation/exclusion. Consequently they abandon all possibility of joining the reds (social and workers movements) to the greens (environmental movements) for a combined approach to eco-social justice. No eco-social change will be possible until the fundamental ecological problems are recognized as being those of over-consumption and over-accumulation by the bourgeoisie and rich nations, arms trade and militaristic and imperialistic interventions of powerful nations, inegalitarianism, and the transplantation of western essentialist conservation agendas and policies to the south. The resolutions of the COP17 Durban conference that consumption of nonrenewable energy resources would be curbed only after 2020 make it blatantly obvious that ecological destruction would proceed unabatedly as a furtive class war.

It is important to know our ecological footprint. This would help us to make more responsible usage of resources, argue for a switch to a sustainable use of most resources; understand why waste recycling has to be a generous practice and not a taboo; appreciate how resource squandering in one part of the world causes larger problems for people living in precarious climatic zones, and most importantly recognize how all this is linked to capital accrual, exploitation of free labor and enclosure of resources. Joel Kovel wrote that: “humanity is not just a perpetrator of the crisis; it is its victim as well. And among the signs of our victimization is the incapacity to contend with the crisis, or even to become conscious of it”. Eco-socialism points to the need for formation of autonomous organizational structures, recognition of the complexities of power, subversion of authority and direct collaborative action to better equip us with strategic tools to combat the oppressive capitalist practices that continue to exploit the health of our society and environment.

Editor’s Note: Sutapa Chattopadhyay is an academic researcher whose work focuses broadly on social exclusion and in particular on indigenous populations, development-induced migration, development politics and policies, irregular immigrants, and academic corporatization. Photograph one by Fadzy Mubin, photographs two and four by Vincent Raal, photographs three and five by Adrian Kenyon and photographs six and seven by Ikhlasul Amal.

The first thing Haitian children learn about the geography of their country is that it is at “the center of the greater Antilles, with Cuba to the west, Jamaica to the southwest, and Puerto Rico to the east.” Would one expect less of a people who had the temerity to fight the only successful slave revolution and claim a territory, not because they were born to it, but because they had mixed their sweat and blood with it?

The Haitian impression of being in the center of a world vortex could not be truer when it comes to climate change. As a result of carbon (mostly carbon dioxide and methane) emissions due burning of fossil fuels by industrialized countries, global sea levels have risen one inch over the last decade alone. The world’s poor who huddle on the riverbanks and coasts of the tropics are first in the crosshairs of the deadly combination of climate change and poverty.

Tropical cyclones are intensifying, not only in the Caribbean, but also in countries including the Philippines,Vietnam, Japan, South China, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Madagascar, and Northern Australia. The main reasons for this are because the surface temperatures over all the Earth (ocean surfaces, lower atmosphere, etc.) have risen one degree centigrade between 1980 and 2010 and, along with this, the amount of water vapor over the oceans — another driving force of cyclones – has also increased. The reason cyclones form in tropical oceans in the first place is because these regions of the ocean are warm and have more water vapor. The “hurricanes”of the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific are the “typhoons” of the western Pacific and “cyclones” of the Indian Ocean. The geopolitics are the same; so are the physics.

Briefly, here is how hurricanes form. Water vapor rises and then cools and condenses into liquid water , releasing the heat into the atmosphere. The heat makes the air around it lighter, which causes the air to rise and get replaced by a new inflow of air. This inflowing air then begins to rotate under the influence of the Coriolis Force of the Earth, which is weak right at the equator but gets stronger beyond a five-degree latitude North and South of the equator. As the pressure drops in the center of the storm, the pressure gradient gets bigger and the winds stronger.

Scientists predicted over 15 years ago that hurricanes would become more destructive with global warming because they would pack more water and travel farther inland. Even so, there is still no measure for the destructive power of a hurricane based on its water contents, although it is evident that massive volumes of water dumped over short periods over the world’s crumbling infrastructure are probably more destructive than fast wind speeds over the same periods. As the world’s oceans warm up, instead of losing strength when they move over cold waters, the storms continue to build while they travel farther and push inland toward the more industrialized and previously temperate regions.

As dramatic as cyclones are, they might not be the most serious consequence of warming the tropics. Warm tropical waters also act like a heart that pumps long pulses of warm water across the planet. These water currents turn north and south to the poles, after they collide into the continental shelves. Such massive pulses of warm water have been found to coincide with major melting events in Arctic and Antarctic glaciers. Currently the pulses are approximately one-year long and spaced by about 10 years, but they appear to be accelerating. A conclusion from these observations is that global temperature increases and glacier-melting events will likely not be gradual but occur in “sudden jumps.”

Already, changes such as melting of glaciers have caused evaporation and precipitation over the Earth to intensify to such a degree that the surface salinity of the oceans, which greatly influences ecological habitats – and therefore food for the great mass of humanity – has dramatically changed over the last 50-60 years. Severe consequences are predicted for living beings, including famines, floods, and droughts.

Once again, we find ourselves in the middle of a lethal hurricane season. Typhoon Son-Tinh marches to Vietnam after leaving over 24 dead in the Philippines. Simultaneously hurricane Sandy, after leaving over 60 dead in the Caribbean – mostly Haitians — is about to hit the eastern United States as a terrifying combination of storms called Frankenstorm.

Perhaps this time, the world will see that it is quite helpless against the global disequilibration it has unleashed and stop blaming the tropical victims of climate change for failing to reforest their mountains or improve the drainage in their cities in anticipation of the havoc. Rather than offer advice to those who are grieving, maybe this time, the world will call on China, the United States, Russia, India, Japan, the European Union, Canada and South Korea to cut back their emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As ever, it is the poor who pay for the excesses of the rich. To blame Haitians and Filipinos for failing to prepare for these man-made disasters merely because they are in their paths is like suggesting someone should reinforce his ceiling and keep a mop handy because the rich upstairs neighbor likes to let his bath overflow.

Dady Chery is a journalist, playwright, essayist and poet, who writes in English, French and her native Creole. She is the Editor of Haiti Chery.

An unprecedented study of global biological and cultural diversity paints a dire picture of the state of our species.

Like the amphibians that climb to ever tinier areas at higher altitudes to avoid being extinguished by global warming, most of the world’s species currently huddle in a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface, and most human cultural diversity — as measured by the number of languages — occupies essentially the same tiny fraction of the planet.

We are dying.

A scientist would never say it quite this way. Instead, he would tell you that the world’s animal and plant species are disappearing 1,000 times faster than ever in recorded history. He might add that some areas of the world have lost 60% of their languages since the mid-1970’s, and 90% of the world’s languages are expected to vanish by the year 2099.

In Haitian Creole, we would yell “Amwe!” (Help!), and this would be right and proper.

As ever, the best scientific studies merely quantify what everybody has known all along. Life, in general, has suffered horribly from the runaway spread of European values and the notions of progress that began with the Industrial Revolution. A sharp bit of mathematics finally brings forth the maps that expose the poverty of the world’s major carbon emitters and the little wealth that remains in those parts of the world where the indigenous are making their final stand.

High-biodiversity wilderness areas

There currently exist very few places on Earth that could be considered intact. The researchers found only five such areas, which are numbered 36-40 on the biodiversity map and colored in shades of green.

These are, by number: 36: Amazonia; 37: Congo Forests; 38: Miombo-Mopane Woodlands and Savannas; 39: New Guinea; 40: North American Deserts.

Global biodiversity map.

Together these intact spots amounted to only about six percent of the terrestrial surface but were home to 17 percent of vascular plants and eight percent of vertebrates that could not be found anywhere else. The same areas were the refuge for 1,622 of the world’s 6,900 languages, with little New Guinea topping the chart at 976 tongues.

The only glimmer of hope from the study was the discovery that, contrary to what conservationists might presume, a place does not have to be untouched by humans to serve as a refuge for the world’s plants and animals. Instead, habitats must be handled in the right way, and more than anything, they must be protected from the kinds of blows dealt by industrialization.

Biodiversity hotspots

The researchers additionally identified 35 “biodiversity hotspots” (numbered 1-35 and colored in shades of yellow to red on the biodiversity map), defined as places with a high density of endemic species despite having lost over 70% of natural habitat.

These were, by number: 1: Atlantic Forest; 2: California Floristic Province; 3: Cape Floristic Region; 4: Caribbean Islands; 5: Caucasus; 6: Cerrado; 7: Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests; 8: Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa; 9: East Melanesian Islands; 10: Eastern Afromontane; 11: Forests of East Australia; 12: Guinean Forests of West Africa; 13: Himalaya; 14: Horn of Africa; 15: Indo-Burma; 16: Irano-Anatolian; 17: Japan; 18: Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands; 19: Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands; 20: Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany; 21: Mediterranean Basin; 22: Mesoamerica; 23: Mountains of Central Asia; 24: Mountains of Southwest China; 25: New Caledonia; 26: New Zealand; 27: Philippines; 28: Polynesia-Micronesia; 29: Southwest Australia; 30: Succulent Karoo; 31: Sundaland; 32: Tropical Andes; 33: Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena; 34: Wallacea; 35: Western Ghats and Sri Lanka.

The biodiversity hotspots amounted only to about two percent of the Earth’s surface, but they were home to a whopping 50% of plant species and 43% of vertebrates that could be found nowhere else. Again, there was a stunning correlation of biodiversity with culture, with the hotspots being home to 3,202 of the world’s languages.

Global language diversity map.

Biodiversity is being lost, but what’s far worse is that the ability to express this loss is vanishing. For example, 1,553 of the languages in hotspots were spoken by only 10,000 or fewer people, and 544 were spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Ironically, the American researchers who did this study are now regarded as experts on biodiversity, although the only real experts on how to maintain biodiversity in places occupied by humans are the world’s indigenous.

The logical conclusion to take from this study is that modern science, with all its sophisticated technology, is completely trumped by the thousands of years of experimentation by the world’s indigenous, although their findings have been transmitted by oral tradition and other simple means. To be fair, it isn’t so much the fault of modern science as the fault of the industrialized world, which worships power, greed, and the absurdity of exponential growth.

One cannot disdain all other living beings, grind mountains to extract minerals, build roads without a thought for habitat fragmentation, design gardens to please only human aesthetics, or harvest monocultures that serve solely human needs, and expect one’s world to continue for long. There is room for humans at Earth’s banquet, but only those who have lived in place long enough to have learned the contours of their terrain, the language of their plant and animal neighbors and, more than anything, the needs of non humans.

When a shaman leaves a lock of his hair where he has uprooted a medicinal cactus, it is not a bit of imbecility, but a humble acknowledgement that, for each living thing taken, one must give a bit of oneself, however small. For centuries humans have spilled their most beloved animals’ blood to the earth to acknowledge the cyclical aspects of life in preparation for battle and celebration of life’s milestones. These are not concepts that a pharmaceutical corporation could ever understand.

As for every other scientific report, this one concludes that yet more study will be needed, but what is needed, and urgently so, is more humility, because as the world’s indigenous cultures go, so does all humanity.

Editor’s notes. The original article discussed here and images 3 and 5 are in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Images 1 and 6 are of San medicine man Jan van der Westhuizen, by Jan Stuermann. Image 2 is of Haiti’s Solenodon paradoxus, the world’s only venomous mammal, from Arboresciences. Image 4 is of a man in traditional dress in Papua New Guinea, by Bruce Beehler.

Dady Chery is a journalist, playwright, essayist and poet, who writes in English, French and her native Creole. She is the Editor of Haiti Chery.

The recent swarm of earthquakes that occurred near Yorba Linda, California this week didn’t originate on the Whittier Fault, but on a little known fault called the “Yorba Linda Trend.” This small fault was discovered in the 1990s and it runs perpendicular to the Whittier Fault, according to Doug Given of the U.S. Geological Survey. This fault however doesn’t appear in the USGS’s map of California-Nevada Faults.

For the public and the media who relies on the USGS for seismic information, to not have all the known faults mapped on its website is a bit frustrating. People in Southern California were left asking were the quakes originated from, and many originally thought that they may have come from the Whittier Fault when in fact they didn’t.

Faults are serious business — they are what cause earthquakes and wouldn’t you want to know where they are to help you prepare better? I do. So, to not provide key information available to the public and the media is disconcerting.

I have never criticized the USGS before, but I feel like I have to today. If this fault, as small, as it is was discovered in the 1990s by the USGS, they have had plenty of time to add it to the fault map. It’s not an insignificant fault either since it is blamed for causing the 2008 Chino Hills earthquake which was 5.5 in magnitude.

Knowing and learning about earthquakes shouldn’t be just something left for the experts at the USGS when it leaves the rest of us wondering what’s going on. The public also has an interest in knowing what’s beneath their feet. I want to be aware if my house is sitting on a fault so that I can take the initiative to reinforce walls, for example.

Of course, not everyone in the public is checking the California-Nevada Fault Map everyday like I do, but a large portion of the population in Los Angeles is indeed concerned with the earthquakes that this area is prone to and they should be provided with the most up-to-date information by the USGS — this includes fault maps we can rely on.

Interestingly enough, the USGS website provides only one map with fault names for California-Nevada, and one map without fault names. There is a “Tips” section that tells readers how to interpret the maps, and of the tips reads: “Earthquakes can appear near a fault without having occurred on that fault. To associate an earthquake with a fault requires viewing both of them in three-dimensions.” Understood. Now, where is the link to the three-dimension map so that I can educate myself? Nowhere on the page.

Check out this link, where the USGS says that the last time the fault data was updated was on November 2010. That’s not a very good job for keeping the public informed if you ask me.

On the other hand, the USGS does indeed do a lot of great work and they should be commended for it, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t dropping the ball on something and in this case it’s their website. There should be a priority to constantly provide the public and the media with up-to-date information and data through a website that is updated daily.

Perhaps a lot of people aren’t expecting the USGS to provide them with jargon and technical talk no one understands but only geophysicists, but we do expect information that can be helpful specially if we need to plan for the unexpected. The more the USGS can do to keep us informed, the better we’ll do in preparing.

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This question is not at all far fetched, in fact technology experts have been arguing that intelligent robots should be given the same “rights” as living people for years and it’s even on Wikipedia. They are calling it “Robot Rights.”

Despite a sluggish economy worldwide, technology is evolving at a frantic speed: from BMW’s intelligent car “GINA” which can contour its outer shape into anything you want, to the  contact lenses that are being developed at the University of Washington which will allow you to surf the web wirelessly right on your eyeballs. The money is there to continue moving on to a future filled with artificial intelligence.

A couple of years ago, in a documentary called “NextWorld: Future Intelligence” experts from the multi-million dollar company Cisco Systems, stated that industrialized nations like the U.S. in 1o to 20 years will be surrounded by computers and artificial intelligence. Humanoid robots will be in full force either by 2020 or 2029, some experts suggest.

One of those Cisco’s talking heads was Guido Jouret, the company’s chief officer of emerging technologies. Mr. Jouret stated that if robotic beings can develop  intelligence on their own, then they should get rights. Here is a direct quote from the documentary:

“A key question we should ask ourselves is — is it intelligent? Is it capable of learning? And if the answer is yes then we should extend the same privileges and rights to those non-carbon based forms of intelligence that we extend to other fellow human beings.”

There are of course people that are very excited about a future where robots can help humans in every facet of life. Robots already perform dangerous jobs such as in the case of the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclean Plant in Japan where robots were sent in instead of people to bring the radiation-contaminated plant under control after it was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami there last March. Any human who would have ventured into the contaminated plant would have died within minutes.

Scientist are already working on ways to get robots and computers to think for themselves and acquire knowledge of their own. But should these intelligent robots be really granted rights as humans do? It sounds like a question you would ask after watching the 2001 movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” but the reality is that those days do loom ahead, in a sooner than you think future.

Many companies and corporations are really looking into the next generation of computers, gadgets, and robots that would “make our lives better.” But are they getting ahead of themselves by already imagining that robots should be treated equally as humans? One may guess so since corporations already are treated like people so what’s next?

Currently members of own our society, real people, don’t even get the right to get married, so how can robots already be in line for getting rights as well? Will gay robots at least have the right to get married? And let’s not forget that corporations that will develop such technology will without a doubt, lobby our government for equal treatment.

The paranoia that robots with artificial intelligence will take over our civilization has already some scientists looking for ways to protect humans. Take for example Professor Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading in England. Mr. Warwick is trying to find ways to make us into cyborgs — yes, cyborgs. In the NextWorld documentary, he said that as far  as having a world dominated by machines: “the train already left the station” — meaning it’s going to happen.

Seems like the only way to survive the future will be for people to become cyborgs and fight the machines (sounds like the plot from the “Terminator” movies). But, unfortunately it’s a possible reality one must ponder upon. The race to make everything be controlled by computers so that we can have “more free time” is taking place. It’s not fiction and it may not end up been what we want in the end.

So, if you thought that computer companies like Cisco Systems were just concentrating on switches, computer servers, and storage solutions, well you were wrong. It and many others are on their way to creating a better world for us because, you know, they know better.

Photo Credit: Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

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Imageby Ben Gunn

Editor’s Note – As my readers may remember, I wrote an article titled, “40,000 Year Old Australian Archaeology Site Reignites Debate On Origins” 2 months ago. Now, there is a new development on this story.

An archaeological team recently visited a site containing a pictograph (not to be confused with a petroglyph) at Arnhem Land plateau in north Australia. They were investigating a large, flightless bird depicted here, which was originally thought to be an Emu. Upon closer examination, it was not an Emu at all, but rather a species of bird extinct for 40,000 years.

Emu

Anthropologist/paleontologist Peter Murray, formerly of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Australia proclaimed, “Goodness, do we have a Genyornis?”

Archaeologist Ben Gunn, of the Australian Rock Art Research Association who was documenting the Niwarla Gabarnmung site for the Jawoyn Association stated, “The animal wasn’t an emu; it looked like the megafauna bird Genyornis, with thick, huge toes and short legs.”

Extinct Genyornis

Inspection of the beak area in the pictograph confirmed that the large flightless bird was indeed a Genyornis.

Here is the problem: Genyornis (Genyornis newtoni) went extinct 40,000 years ago, one of many species that fell prey to a new invasive species: homo sapiens sapiens.

In my previous article, I discussed some of the different dating techniques for rock art sites:

When certain materials are last heated or exposed to sunlight, the lattice structure traps some radioactivity. Since there is a known and constant decay rate for this radioactivity, it can consequently be measured giving an accurate time frame. ThermoLuminescence (TL) fills an important gap between the accuracy range of radiocarbon (C14) dating which generally is accurate only to around 40-60,000 years BP (Before Present) and Potassium Argon (K-Ar) dating which does not begin to be accurate until at least 100,000 BP. TL is also a valuable tool for measuring sediments and ceramics where carbon samples cannot be taken.

If Genyornis vanished from the face of the world 40k BP, that means a new measure of dating has been introduced, and that the rock art must have been created at least this far back, making it one of the oldest such sites on the planet.

An analysis of the skeletal structure needed to make 3.5 million year old footprints has revealed that our ancient, partially tree-dwelling ancestors walked on two legs. Called bipedalism, this analysis pushes back the date of our hominid ancestors.

[footprint subtext] Images show aerial and lateral images of (top to bottom) (A) a human footprint made walking normally with an extended knee and hip gait; (B) a human footprint made walking with bent-knees and hips to mimic a chimpanzee; and (C) a scan of a cast from the Laetoli fossil trackway. Notice that the toe is much deeper than the heel in the middle print and that the Laetoli scan looks more like the human print. (Credit: Randy Haas, University of Arizona)

Photo courtesy of Physorg.com http://www.physorg.com/news188289229.html

Two years after the stunning discovery of Lucy in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression, a find that revolutionized our understanding of early human ancestry, footprints were discovered in Laetoli, Tanzania by paleoanthropologist Andrew Hill.

The footprints were left in a fresh layer of volcanic ash, which is very easily dateable. They were left by a member of Australopithecus Afarensis, a hominid with gracile morphology (in essence, thinner boned) who, despite not being as avid of brachiators and chimpanzees, spent much of their time in the trees. It is believed that our early ancestors did not abandon their arboreal habitat until around 2 million years ago.

According to Physorg.com:

This morphology differs distinctly from our own genus, Homo, who abandoned arboreal life around 2 million years ago and irrevocably committed to human-like bipedalism. Since the Laetoli tracks were discovered, scientists have debated whether they indicate a modern human-like mode of striding bipedalism, or a less-efficient type of crouched bipedalism more characteristic of chimpanzees whose knees and hips are bent when walking on two legs.

David Raichlen, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology and other researchers from the University at Albany and City University of New York’s Lehman College recreated the footprints, then examined their 3 dimension structure in comparison to those left by modern Homo Sapien Sapiens and chimpanzees, who walk with a bent gait.

Raichlen says, “Based on previous analyses of the skeletons of Australopithecus afarensis, we expected that the Laetoli footprints would resemble those of someone walking with a bent knee, bent hip gait typical of chimpanzees, and not the striding gait normally used by modern humans, but to our surprise, the Laetoli footprints fall completely within the range of normal human footprints.”